Star Trek Movie Ideas

Star Trek: Nemesis was a transparent attempt to create a Khan character out of whole cloth to set against the Star Trek heroes.  And therein lies one of the big problems with that movie.  Khan was an existing character who was already developed who was then driven mad by circumstances and in that madness was motivated to seek revenge against the heroes, specifically Kirk. 

Although adversaries, Kirk and Khan respected one another and Kirk showed exceeding leniency in allowing them to found a colony, instead of putting them in a penal one.  Had the neighbouring planet not exploded and his wife died as a result of it, Khan would never have expected anyone to check on his progress.  But because those things did happen, in his subsequent grief and insanity, in Khan's mind what was once an act of charity was now an act of betrayal.

But what did Picard and company, or the Federation for that matter, ever do to Shinzon?  If a movie had to made with this character in it, how about the Enterprise crew assists Shinzon in seeking his righteous revenge against the Romulans?  But this is a bizarro-Picard created by persons unknown at some unspecified time and location for a barely explained purpose that never came to fruition.  I'm sorry, but that just sucks.  All the credit in the world goes to Tom Hardy for turning this character into something half-decent, but nothing can overcome that stink pile of writing. 

So now this dilithium mining slave becomes the leader of a race of dilithium mining slaves, because I guess they don't know how to lead themselves or because the Viceroy was disqualified from being leader for failing to have a name, so he grabbed the first alien that passed his way and used him as a puppet leader.  And the natural career progression from dilithium miner is undoubtedly secret builder of super-weapons and fleets of massive starships.  Hello?  These people are slave labour.  They don't have time and resources to build starships and doomsday devices.  Hey, you over there, are you digging for dilithium like you are supposed to?  Because it sure looks to me like you are secretly building a starship.  Get back to work.

And then Shinzon wipes out the Romulan leadership.  Do the Romulans attack them and drive them off?  Nope.  I guess if Shinzon wants to be leader so bad that he'll kill our chosen leadership, I guess will just have to hand the keys to the Empire over to him.  These are the same guys that joined forces with sworn enemies against people they had a non-aggression pact with because of the threat of being attacked.  They are not going to just lay down and let some slave race take over.

Of course that leads to shoe-horning in the genesis device buildup to final detonation disguised as the super-weapon so that they could shoe-horn in the Spock's sacrifice to save the ship as Data's sacrifice to save the ship.  And the possibility of his resurrection by planting his Katra in McCoy's mind as the download of Data's neural paths into B4's.  Then there's this thing where Shinzon can somehow lay his hands on a Soong-type android prototype, modify it, and plant it in Federation space.  Fuck off.  But not only that, but plant it in exactly the spot that the Enterprise would find it, because apparently you can detect partially assembled Soong-type androids from sectors away, while on the way to the Riker/Troi wedding redux, and just in time for the Enterprise to be invited to Romulus for peace overtures.  Screw you.  Did Troi send Spock a wedding invitation on Romulus that Shinzon intercepted for him to conveniently set this trap on the logical route from Earth to Betazed?  

Berman and Braga couldn't figure out why this movie didn't do well.  Just because the movie is set in the vacuum of space doesn't mean it needs to suck like one.  Now John Logan has written some good stuff, but this was not among them.  How did no one at Paramount not realize what crap this was?  The very first online script review that I read ripped it to shreds, and for good reason.  In fact there were several other dumbass things pointed out there that still made it into the movie (as well as many other huge problems that I just don't feel like getting into).  No one sets out to make a bad movie, but most people would probably at least try to stop and fix a galactically stupid one before it gets made.

Anyway, if you really wanted to recapture the feel of the Wrath of Khan without just cobbling together plot elements, then do what was done to create it.  Scan through the archive of episodes and find that perfect character to revisit.  But then you have to create that perfect twist that explains why the character is mad at whoever they are mad at, and you have to be able to quickly explain it on screen.  I attacked you, you gave me a planet instead of putting me in jail, a planet blew up, my wife died, you didn't check on me, and so I'm here to get revenge.  Contrast that with Kes in Voyager:  You were nice enough to let me stay on your ship when I asked you to, I had to leave because I became a danger to you, mysterious bad things happened to me while I was away, so now I'm back to waste you.  Same thing with Insurrection:  We started living on an idyllic world, some of us wanted to leave, you said we couldn't come back (even though there's only a small settlement and no way to enforce that ban), bad things happened that warped out genes, so now we're going to trick the Federation into helping us steal your planet and ruin it in an effort to fix our problem (instead of merely founding an alternate settlement and enjoying the planet's benefits).  You might as well be yatta, yatta, yattaing over sex.  If you don't care enough to tell us what happened that made the characters so angry, why should we care when they come back to get even?

So, here are some ideas for possible Star Trek movies set in the TNG era based on one shot characters from the series that could be developed as villains.  Instead of reuniting the cast from Nemesis, each idea is based on Picard's USS Enterprise with new characters replacing the departed ones, or Riker's USS Titan.  It would just depend on whether the key character had the strongest relationship with Riker or Troi, and therefore would be in a Titan movie, or with Picard or one of the remaining officers, making it an Enterprise movie.  I will freely admit that many, or all, of the following ideas would make better follow up episodes than feature films.  But at least the villains will be well motivated.

USS Enterprise

Kareen Briannon from The Schizoid Man: Picard needs Data's expertise to solve a problem, but unfortunately, that expertise is locked inside the head of the childlike B4.  Picard calls upon the skills of Kareen Briannon, former assistant to Ira Graves (with access to his research), and a skilled cyberneticist in her own right.  But when she arrives it is not the young, able bodied woman that he remembers but an older Kareen whose body has been wracked with disease and is not confined to a form of wheelchair.  Where once she claimed she'd never let herself be imprisoned in an android body, can she now resist the urge to suppress the very personality she's trying to restore by stealing B4's body for herself?

Kamala from The Perfect Mate: Though bonded to Picard, Kamala thought she could serve her role in securing peace.  But despite Alrik's only passing interest in his bride, the obvious way in which she pined away for another man made it clear that the peace was bought with damaged goods.  Instead of ensuring that peace, Kamala became a symbol of betrayal to Alrik and his people that eventually leads to all out war.  Years of regret and sorrow turn to resentment of not only her own role affairs, but that of Picard.  The perfect mate becomes the perfect adversary as she knows Picard as well as he knows himself.

USS Titan

Wyatt Miller from Haven: A disease outbreak reunites Wyatt Miller with his former fiance.  Wyatt is fresh from finally curing the Tarellian plague and Starfleet Medical believes his assistance would be invaluable.  But Troi can immediately tell that this is not the same man she was on the verge of marrying.  Soon after sacrificing his life with Troi to be with his true beloved aboard the plague ship, Wyatt's new wife succumbed to the effects of the plague.  His sacrifice had been for nothing.  In the intervening years, he was slowly driven mad with grief and regret and his attempts to free himself of his self-imposed prison, by curing the plague, became more and more desperate and extreme.  Only by the most brutal of methods was he able to put an end to the disease.  Now that he's finally free of his fateful choice, his next assignment puts him in direct contrast with what his life could have been and he must endure the presence of both his former fiance and her new husband.  But is this new disease a chance to save himself from his own madness, or to sentence others to share in it?