Ah yes, the seventh Star Trek movie … what many thought would be the last movie for any of the original crew.  Who could have ever foreseen Leonard Nimoy coming back to the big screen in the eleventh movie this summer?  Awesome!

But I digress.

I’m continuing in my trip through all the movies in preparation for this summer’s new Star Trek movie.  This was the big handing the torch movie, passing the movie franchise from the original crew to the next generation crew.  Except they didn’t really.  Yes, it had Kirk, Scotty and Chekov (Scotty and Chekov really had little more than cameos), but it should have been much more.  Rather than pay the salaries for two different crews, Paramount blew an opportunity to have both worlds truly converge.  Originally they wanted Kirk, McCoy and Spock to be in the opening scenes, but the actor who plays Bones had health issues that prevented him from coming back, and Leonard Nimoy said no way.  He didn’t want Spock’s last movie to basically be a cameo – and I can’t say that I blame him.

Having said all that, I do enjoy the movie.  I love seeing Kirk and Picard working together.  And it was a great move to crash the Enterprise.  Another bit of trivia; the writers had wanted that crash to be the season five finale and introduce a new ship in season six, but it was way too expensive to fit into the budget so they had to sit on the idea until they had a movie budget to play with.

In a lot of ways, this was an origins story; the purpose of this movie was to pave the way for new movies.  They needed to pass the torch, they needed to destroy the ship, and they needed to give Data emotions.  All good stuff, but it wasn’t a GREAT movie.  Just good.