Speaking of stupid...my latest bit for WhatCulture is all about The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (
link).
Great list, as always!
Wanted to make a couple fun-time comments:
#14 - great points!
#13 - after STVI, they always had to throw in some humor at the expense of characters.
If the writers wanted to give Rand and co something to do, a little more substance would have been nicer...
#12 - in case Neelix time traveled and tried to commandeer 1701-A by starting in the galley - no, that's pretty bad too.
#11 - Allegedly, a scene was cut discussing how
Enterprise also had a stash of equipment to track gaseous anomalies with. That would have improved the movie quite a bit as it's jarring that, all of a sudden,
Enterprise is now doing the assignment that
Excelsior had been doing at the movie's start. Headcanon smooths it out, but it's a big enough issue that the movie should have addressed it. Not to mention, the usual convenience of no other ships being around - even if the location is a secret, they had to haul people there. Don't tell me that all the ships were rigged to completely disintegrate once the delegates all beamed down?
As for Sulu, he probably had the adrenaline rush and forgot about the main reason why they're there and opted to defend Kirk instead? (Yours is still the best point, they should have split up and get to the planet. Amazingly there weren't more ships awaiting, not just the Klingon's prototype.
#10 --WIN-- (though, if anything, when Kirk insults Spock with "everybody's human", Martia stayed in-role because she knew somehow she wouldn't get pardoned and tried to fake it instead? For Martia, it was a no-win scenario...)
#9 - Another sign of Kirk being so set in his rule-breaking ways (for which Sulu was an acolyte, which ties into #11), a recurring theme started in TWOK? either which way, there's no way around it: Kirk was a nit, and whether it was Valeris or Saavik, entertaining the use of booze for such a critical event is dumb.
#8 Yeah, even in 1991, that line always stuck out as being hammy. Even Nimoy is sleep-speaking it, like a poorly made infomercial where the announcer is clearly speaking from a placard off-screen. Maybe Spock was doing a run-on sentence and mixed up two paragraphs... and Spock is still too young to have the middle age stereotype thing that Kirk was going through.
#7 - Ditto with #8. So many issues with it and, if being hauled to prison but they don't run the joint, they usually swap normal clothes for distinctive attire. The velcro patch would have been useless. The movie glosses over this so glaringly...
#6 - Thank you for killing my childhood/adolescence with that one.
Still, the scene looked cool.. until they resorted on peptol bismol, or whatever that thick pink liquid was that must have required quite the heart muscle(s) to keep flowing... let's see, they have three brain stems so logically they must have six hearts too...
(as with most sci-fi, in perilous scenes such as this, there is either a magic switch at just the most convenient place, or the most inconvenient one. It stuck out at it at the time, just not as badly as with #8 and 7.
#5 Sweet, thanks for covering the deleted bit! Wasn't sure if it was a real thing... and I agree, it didn't feel entirely earned - the suspense of the overall situation buoyed the scene, but it still felt like denouement-by-numbers.
#4 - Valeris and co probably rigged it so Chang could do his odd way of gloating? Ultimately, it's Plummer who nails this; on paper, it doesn't hold up.
#3 - Great point in headcanoning Valeris to sabotage it. Also, relegating Uhura as the butt of a joke engendered huge laughs at the theater (thrice), and this harks back to #13: After IV started this damn trend, and V slathering it on thick (but without the luxury of the "fish out of water" trope where it actually makes sense!), VI did not need to continue it yet again. Also, are the Klingons on duty at the outpost really that apathetic? Are they drunk as well? Apparently they have 50 years' of life left and for all fans knew at the time, a Klingon could live 4x as long as a human (why not?) so to them nothing mattered? I suppose the goal would be to look at one of the commoner's side from the Klingon empire as well, but it doesn't quite work.
#2 - maybe those ships went back to Nimbus III as STV had the same dumb problem of "We have delegates here!"/"Where are their ships?"/"Durh, I dunno. At a blue light special sale at K-Mart?" Definitely surprising that there would be a total of zero ships in the area, other than Chang's. Reminds me a bit ofg #11, too...
#1 - awesome title.
TNG had the same problem with their
cast reunion parties movies, but at least TOS made more than a token attempt by saying they were doing things else where but, phew, these current events brought people back and feels almost authentic. Great last paragraph, too.
