Star Trek Generations - Question about the Nexus

[Jon1701]

He mentions every single thing in that list?

A big old universe life and death type story?

Time travel?

IGNFF: Backing up just a bit, the Next Gen movie franchise has a troubled past, starting with Generations – which seemed to be neither fish nor fowl…

MOORE: It was hard. That was a very hard thing. Brannon and I were both just ecstatic when Rick asked us to do it. It was our first feature, it was a big thing, I was getting a chance to write for the original series characters – because at that point we thought they all were going to be in it. It was just like, "Wow." But try to do that and do a TV series at the same time, and never having done it before – and then we were essentially handed a list of things that had to be in the first movie. It was like, "The original cast must be in the first one, but they can only be in the first 15 minutes of the film. Kirk can come back at the end. The story has to be about Next Generation. There must be a Data runner, which must have humor." It was just on and on and on. "There must be a big villain. There must also be Klingons. There must be a philosophical thing at stake. There must be a Picard…" It was just a laundry list of items that you then tried to construct a plot and story around. And we wanted to do something big and important, and do something about mortality, and Picard – our hero – facing his own mortality, and Kirk dealing with his mortality and dying, and the destruction of the Enterprise. We were reaching for really grand themes, but I think the truth is that we just weren't ready to write that movie. We were too young, too inexperienced… Our reach definitely exceeded our grasp.

IGNFF: Was the conception of what the crux of the story would be pretty much there from the start?

MOORE: No. We sat in Rick's office and we bandied around various ideas, but whatever idea came up was always held up against this list – "Well, but then we couldn't do that." "Well, that's a good story, but how do you work the original series characters in." "Well, that's a good one, but it doesn't have the Klingons." You were always struggling to find a way to weave all these disparate elements in.

IGNFF: What was the biggest roadblock to pulling it together?

MOORE: The hardest thing?

IGNFF: Yeah…

MOORE: The Guinan aspect of it. Guinan and dealing with her, and having her have a big role in it. That was really hard, to figure out what she would do… And ultimately the whole concept of a Nexus was just problematic, because we were desperate. We just outfoxed ourselves. It was like, "We're going to do something with a crossover between the two casts – the old cast and the new cast…" "Oh, let's not do time travel! That's so old! They did that in Star Trek IV! No Time Travel!" Well, they're still separated by, like, 70 years, so what do you do? We could start the movie in one period and then just forget about them, and then just pick it up 70 years later – something happens. And then that's sort of making two different films. But everyone wants Kirk and Picard to share some scenes, and Kirk's got to meet Picard and they've got to fight together, da da da da. So then it's like, "We're not doing time travel!" "Okay, what if there's this Nexus thing – this sort of amorphous concept that is just timeless…" And you sort of get lost in these sort of vague semantic ideas.

Maybe I got the time travel thing slightly wrong, but is that not essentially what I said?

 

[JarodRussell]

It's sad to hear that Paramount made it so difficult for them and demanded an insane load of stuff.

 

[Bones2]

I think it came together very very well. I still love Generations. Could have been a damn sight worse.

 

[The Wormhole]

Trying to make sense of the Nexus is impossible. Ron Moore and Braga had no idea what the hell it was supposed to be, they say as much in the DVD commentary.

 

[JoeFromEarth]

The Nexxus is not really a physical place, so much as it is in another state of reality or another dimension, that can be controlled by the individual's mind. So, if you want to leave the Nexus you end up wherever it was that the Nexxus passed through you.
This would mean that Picard and Kirk could leave the Nexxus and "go back" to the planet....of course, Kirk would be joining Picard into "his reality"...on the planet.

Or perhaps anywhere the Nexus has been/will be.

IGNFF: The biggest problem with the Nexus is if time is fluid there, why can't Kirk and Picard simply exit out of it when Soran is easy to take down? Heck, why is Kirk needed at all?

MOORE: Yeah… Yeah… Exactly. And there is no good answer to that question.

If Picard could've jumped wherever, then perhaps this link would've been more sensible...

 

[Bones2]

I like the idea that it can only be somewhere the Nexus has been or will be. That tidies a few bits up.

 

[Timo]

...the Nexus has no magical powers.

This is a rather bold statement. Can you justify it somehow?

I like the idea that it can only be somewhere the Nexus has been or will be. That tidies a few bits up.

But the Nexus is moving in and out of our galaxy, and obviously visiting different parts of it on different rounds. Essentially, it will have been everywhere eventually. Not much of a limitation, then.

The behavior of the Nexus makes good sense IMHO. All we need to do is stop thinking of it as some sort of a "space storm" or other natural phenomenon. It isn't. It's a starship.

More exactly, it's an alien starship on automatic. It beams up people, directs them to their comfortable cabins that are fully provided with the latest in entertainment systems, and then takes them to places. When they wish so, they will be beamed down to a destination of their choosing.

It's just that primitive hillbillies like Kirk or Picard can't figure it out. They can't see past the "magic" of the inflight entertainment, they don't know how to call the flight attendant, and they haven't read the safety instructions or even the company's own magazine provided for free on nice, glossy brainwaves. They have barely figured out how to get to the salted peanuts. And they keep hurting their knuckles and nails on the safety belt buckles in rather futile attempts to learn the proper operating procedure.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[zero-g]

If Picard could've jumped wherever, then perhaps this link would've been more sensible...

 

[Ronald Held]

Timo, quite entertaining.

 

[Alrik]

If Picard could've jumped wherever, then perhaps this link would've been more sensible...

Unfortunately, this would have made the most sense.

 

[JarodRussell]

Picard did not know that the Enterprise was destroyed in battle, so he went to the place and time where he exactly knew how to stop Soran. Had he gone back like in the video, who knows what would have happened next? Soran escapes, makes everything worse.

Not saying that Picard actually thought about that, but I have no problem with Picard going back just 15 minutes.

 

[Myasishchev]

No the real BIG plot hole is the fact that later in the movie it is said that Soran cannot fly a ship into it because it will be destroyed but then how did he get there in the first place? On a ship. Plus why didn't he don a suit and jump out an airlock?

My guess is that flying into it with a ship is trouble shoot at best.

Why standing on a planet would be any better didn't make sense, though. If it blows up ships, why wouldn't it smash rocks or rend flesh? Duranium > stone > meat.

Also, the Nexus had some weird properties (besides the obvious ones) like being affected by gravity at a FTL speed, and being FTL itself... until the story decided it would be better if Soran could see it, so it slowed down to ultimately about 200 meters a second.

Then again, even light goes faster than light in Generations. This is a symptom of the disease, the disease being that Generations, despite having good parts, is rather stupid.

The behavior of the Nexus makes good sense IMHO. All we need to do is stop thinking of it as some sort of a "space storm" or other natural phenomenon. It isn't. It's a starship.

More exactly, it's an alien starship on automatic. It beams up people, directs them to their comfortable cabins that are fully provided with the latest in entertainment systems, and then takes them to places. When they wish so, they will be beamed down to a destination of their choosing.

It's just that primitive hillbillies like Kirk or Picard can't figure it out. They can't see past the "magic" of the inflight entertainment, they don't know how to call the flight attendant, and they haven't read the safety instructions or even the company's own magazine provided for free on nice, glossy brainwaves. They have barely figured out how to get to the salted peanuts. And they keep hurting their knuckles and nails on the safety belt buckles in rather futile attempts to learn the proper operating procedure.

 

[drychlick]

or go back to earth and save his brother and nephew

 

[Nardpuncher]

Didi anyone mention yet that this movie just turned 15 years old!!!! Wow...time flies.