In 'Generations' Tolian Soran really wants to get back to the nexus, Guinan has been there... But why did they leave there if it was so great place to be...?
As I understand it, the Enterprise B "rips" them away during the fateful SS Lakul rescue mission. Guinan leaves "an echo" of herself behind.
It has some genuinely nice moments. But the plot is a mess, likely because Moore and Braga were writing the film at the same time as serving on the TNG writing staff and writing "All Good Things..." I think things would've turned out so much better if they had waited an additional year to launch the TNG movies.
When I was listening to the Generations DVD commentary between Moore and Braga, they do joke about regularly confusing themselves as they were writing both scripts at the same time. Having two scripts involving time-traveling starship captains and space anomalies being written by the same two guys was probably not the best idea by Paramount. I agree, they should have waited a year before trying the first TNG film.
That's the thing though, we don't know if every "visitor" leaves an echo, only Guinan for whatever reason, only if you get there on a Tuesday etc.
So much about the Nexus is never explained. How do Kirk and Picard get "out" of it when they leave to stop Soran? Or do they even get out of it at all? What if the rest of Generations and the movies that follow are all part of Picard's Nexus fantasy, and in reality Soran was successful and the crew of Enterprise-D were killed when the planet was destroyed?
Easy: they ride off on horseback into the sunset! I still can't understand how they got in. This nexus could tear a starship to pieces, utterly destroy a planet on contact, but people just pass into it harmlessly? That 'echo' thing was unexplained and vague. It sounded more like something that would be acceptable in a different type of movie, like, say, The Neverending Story, or something.
The Nexus is just one big, unfocused, messy fudge of a idea. Still, GEN remains my favourite TNG movie - and I love Dennis McCarthy's Nexus theme.
The Nexus doesn't make much sense when you stop and think about it. But the music is amazing. In fact I think Generations is a relatively good film up until all the nonsense in the Nexus bogs everything down. The big meeting between Kirk and Picard is a damp squib too.
Two of the greatest starship captains in history meet for the first time...and cook some eggs. Hm. Then they ride horses. Zzzz.
The Nexus didn't actually destroy the planet. The shockwave from the sun going supernova thanks to Soran's torpedo destroyed it. So the gimmick was that if ships tried flying into the Nexus, they'd get destroyed, but apparently it's perfectly safe if you're standing on a planet's surface while the Nexus passes through it. Except of course, there's one small problem with this: In not one, not two, but three instances in the film, characters got into the Nexus from being on a ship: Guinan and Soran (from the El-Aurian transports) and Kirk (from the Enterprise-B).
Oh yeah...I forgot about the sun... Just amazing, how all those kinds of details got by them. There's just something weird about this whole movie.
More important, where did the horses come from? The Enterprise-B isn't getting its tractor beams until Tuesday but its livery stables are at 100 percent? And if you were a horse, would your Nexus fantasy be ``getting ridden by Kirk''?
I think the whole reason Soran didn't just fly into the Nexus with a ship is that may have been more of a crap-shoot, with no guarantee that the ship would not have been destroyed before the Nexus took the occupants. Kirk may even have been blown out into space through the hole in the Enterprise-B before taken into the Nexus rather than just plucked out of the ship. My take on it was when Soran said it was the only way, he meant it was the only way that didn't risk his being killed before the Nexus took him - he did after all build a high platform in order to get grabbed, and not just sit on the surface to wait, and it was pure luck that Picard was close enough to get pulled in too. That being said, I also agree that the Nexus itself was a poorly thought-through plot device.