Star Trek Sundays: "The Undiscovered Country" is a rousing send-off

They don’t make ‘em like this anymore

It’s Sunday, and we’re going through all 13 theatrical STAR TREK films, a series that includes a number of pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). We continue today with the final Original Series film, STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. Enjoy…

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

1991, Dir. Nicholas Meyer

Originally published in 200 Reviews, based on notes from 2022

“In space, all warriors are cold warriors.”

The Undiscovered Country is a wickedly smart, soulfully written movie that represents what makes Star Trek at its best so great: Offering pulpy sci-fi on a big pop canvas, but with real, well-articulated ideas expressed through amazing characters who stand the test of time.

Many popular franchises forged in the fires of the Cold War went into the 1990s facing the challenge of how to adapt themselves to its thawing, but Star Trek handled it better than most, in part because the in-universe future established through The Next Generation, which had run several years at this point (a fun game to play with this movie is ‘spot the TNG set,’ since they reused many sets from the series to save costs, most obviously the conference room) gave them a perfect starting point: How did the Starfleet go from constant conflicts with the Klingons to having them as allies? In effect, the film gets to kill two birds with one stone, filling in a crucial piece of diegetic history, while also gesturing to the politics of the day, and the major questions that were on the audience’s mind in 1991. And because Wrath of Khan director and voracious reader Nicholas Meyer was on board, they did it with a whole lot of Shakespeare quotes and a wonderful flair for the dramatic.