Star Trek Generations (1994)

Patrick Stewart spent seven seasons making Jean-Luc Picard the definitive Starfleet captain, so how does Paramount launch him onto the big screen? By handing him William Shatner for the opening fifteen minutes and hoping nobody asks whose film this actually is. You've had thirty years to make your mind up on that one, but stick around anyway, because we've got thoughts.

Generations lands in November 1994, shot roughly four days after the TNG cast wrapped the final episode of the television show, with David Carson stepping up from directing episodes to directing his first feature and Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga writing their first screenplay. Star Trek has never been bigger. Three series, six films, an unbroken run since 1987. And into that, Paramount hands the writers a shopping list: open with the original crew, bring Kirk back at the end, give Data some comedy scenes, destroy the Enterprise. Now go and find a story that joins those dots.

So the question we keep circling back to on this one is a film history question rather than a Star Trek one. Handing a franchise over to a new cast is one of the hardest manoeuvres in cinema, and there are only really three ways to do it. You recast and say nothing, the Bond approach. You reboot and start again. Or you put the old guard and the new guard in the same frame and stage the handover on screen. Generations goes for door number three and, in doing so, more or less writes the template that Marvel would industrialise two decades later. The trouble with staging your own passing of the torch is that you have to spend a chunk of your new crew's debut looking backwards.

In this episode we get into whether this is a film at all or just the most expensive episode of The Next Generation ever made, why the half-and-half uniforms are quietly maddening, the Nexus and its wobbly internal logic, Malcolm McDowell doing tremendous work as a villain the film never quite scales up to match, Data's emotion chip landing one movie too early, why Kirk gets two heroic deaths and one very Shatner line reading, and how a film nominated for both a Hugo and a Razzie ends up being genuinely moving about ageing, legacy and knowing when to let go.

Pour a glass of Chateau Picard, mind the falling bridge, and settle in.

Listen now on Patreon.

Journey Through Sci-Fi is a sci-fi film history podcast hosted by James Payne and Matt Willcock, taking one big science fiction idea through the decades, two films at a time.

For more like this, dig into the back catalogue here at JourneyThroughSciFi.com or sign up to the JTSF Logbook newsletter