Throughout the other sequels, audiences witnessed everything from resurrection to time travel to possibly meeting God to the destruction of the Enterprise. When the original cast’s signatures appeared against a star field in the end credits of the sixth film, The Undiscovered Country, the original actors, moved on. Do you think that was a fitting end to the original cast?
John Trimble: Well, it wasn’t the end to several of them. Was it? Spock shows up again and again, Scotty appears again in “Relics.” Kirk dies at the hand of a whiny pipsqueak, instead of a real villain like Khan. Star Trek V: The Final Frontier is a better film than it is popularly held to be, but it suffers from being a very dark film following The Voyage Home.
Star Trek IV had plot holes you could fly a shuttlecraft through, but it sure was fun.
Jeff Bond: As I’ve said, all the original cast movies seemed like high school reunions that you felt lucky to have attended, knowing some of your classmates might not be around for much longer. What I loved about The Undiscovered Country was that they went back to what I loved about “Errand of Mercy”–Kirk finds out he’s wrong, specifically about the Klingons.
Rich Handley: In a word, yes. The Undiscovered Country was such a fitting sendoff for Kirk’s crew and handoff to Picard’s. From the classic crew retiring to Kirk realizing his long-held anti-Klingon prejudices needed to be discarded, to Spock becoming a diplomat and the Khitomer peace treaty being signed, Star Trek VI set up the updated Star Trek world introduced in “Encounter at Farpoint.” Having the seven original officers sign off on it was the icing on the cake.
Image courtesy CBS/Paramount
Carol Pinchefsky: Yes and no. Of course it was a heartwarming move, to see the actors sign off on the characters that they had embodied for over two decades. But as a fan of the books, I can say that these characters are alive and well and continuing their adventures. I haven’t read them all, but I’m happy just knowing my heroes exist in some form.
Peter Briggs: Yes. It’s a terrific film. The characters behave as if they’re actually real in this one (I love all the Enterprise crew unfastening their uniforms to complain the instant the Klingons beam back to their ship – how many dinner parties have we all done that after!) in an extension of how they behaved in Wrath Of Khan and I guess we again have Nick Meyer to thank. (I was working for Paramount when the movie went into production, and spoke briefly to Nick just before he began writing it.) But…did the actors really move on? We saw most of them reprise their roles again in one form or another in subsequent incarnations of the franchise.
Steven Thompson: My wife has always referred to The Undiscovered Country as “Star Trek VI: The Apology“, coming as it did after the poorly realized Star Trek V. I think VI was a lovely and optimistic film for the original crew to go out on.
Bob Greenberger: It was as fitting as we were going to get with The Next Generation on the drawing board, the cast aging out, and the box office returns drooping. It was nice to have Nicholas Meyer back and have Nimoy involved in the story. It was good and fun and fitting, but it could also have been so much stronger a send off.
Ian Spelling: Loved, loved, loved the signatures at the end. It was literally signing off. The movie itself was very Star Trek-y. Shatner vs. Shatner? Classic. Michael Dorn’s appearance? Very cool. Scotty with that timely phaser fire? Yes, please. Uhura’s idea saves the day? YES. Then very state of the art morphing FX? They still hold up. All the Shakespeare and Christopher Plummer chewing the scenery. More yes. The very timely Cold War storyline? Fascinating. Now, the fuschia globs of blood floating in the air? I still pretend that never happened.
Larry Young: I will always love The Motion Picture and Khan, but I didn’t really need more movies. The stuff I like about Star Trek is thematically what happens when the human adventure is just beginning… out there. It sounds so manufactured and cheesy, looking at it with a postmodern, jaundiced eye, but it’s true. The juxtaposition of a guy and his friends teaming up to learn things in the cosmos is a simultaneously big/small, historic/personal, scale of storytelling I just find endlessly rewarding. But Star Trek-the-show can burn whole episodes on tiny things that resonate within the characters; gives the audience an insight into why puny humans would imperfectly joust with gods at an epic scale in the vastness of space, and, unbelievably, come out on top.
That’s a level of narrative that the 120 minute theatrical release only addresses at the art house level. I’m not alone in thinking Star Trek is better served on television than in the movie theater.
John Kirk: They had to finish in a way that properly expressed the finality of the event.
The fanboy in me wants nothing to end, but somehow, I’ve become a fanadult and become subject to the limitations of my own aging. In your mind, your heroes never change.
However, it became so apparent how much they had aged in this film. While getting older isn’t a bad thing, when you are aging alongside your heroes, there’s a sense of diminishment in that awareness that reminds you that they aren’t invulnerable, no matter how much you want them to be. Then you are reminded of your own mortality and that’s a sobering realization that can detract from the enjoyment of a story.
Everything has its time and sadly, this was it. But, it ended in a classic battle with a Klingon battle cruiser and I think was a perfect way for them to end their run. That Sulu had a hand in the battle, commanding his own ship, added a level of elevation to the farewell and opened my mind to the possibility of stories about the Excelsior and Captain Sulu. But, that was a short-lived teasing indulgence I allowed myself to have.
The appearance of the signatures was a poignant way of literally signing off. When one affixes his or her signature to something, that’s a very recognizable way of finalizing it. To see their autographs on the big screen, though extremely public, felt very personal to me.
John E. Price: The Undiscovered Country is by far my personal favorite of the films and I cry when the credits roll and the signatures start appearing. It’s not subtle in its messaging – literally signing off – and it’s the deliberate end of an era. There’s two ways to end the original crew’s story: one, looking to the future, or two, celebrating the past. The genius of The Undiscovered Country is that it starts with two and ends with one. Everyone knows the story’s over… but maybe it’s not. As long as Kirk’s in the captain’s chair, the future remains out there. The real world problem, of course, is that The Next Generation had already taken up the story of the future, so the original crew was now superfluous, not a fun place to be, I’d imagine. As long as we all agree Generations isn’t canon.
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