Hah! I bet you'd thought I'd forgotten this, didn't you? What do you mean, what is it? You've never seen it before? You've never been in my journal before? Of all the .... all right then, this is where I pick holes in movies, and occasionally TV series episodes, but only ones which really annoy me because without being addressed they ruin the film or episode, and call into question the creative skills of the writer(s). They are, in short,
Everyone is aware that I am planning to review all of the
Star Trek movies later on, when the
USS Nerdtopia sets sail across the stars, and I would have to say that generally the series, and the films, are basically very well written. But there are plot holes in at least two of the movies that I know of, and this is the one that stands out the most to me, so it's the one I'm going to deal with first.
Movie title: Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Year: 1991
Genre: Science-Fiction
Stars: William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley
Directed by: Nicholas Meyer
Written by: Nicholas Meyer, Denny Martin Flinn
Basic storyline: As the traditional enemies, humans and Klingons, sue for peace and try to come to an agreement, the
USS Enterprise appears to fire at the ship bearing their chancellor, and though Kirk and McCoy try to save him he dies. The two are then accused of murder and stand trial. Found guilty by the Klingons they are sentenced to life imprisonment on a penal asteroid. I'll be going into this in much more detail of course when I get to reviewing the film, but for now this sets the basic scene.
When I started this section I was not, I believe, unkind to “Flightplan” (the only thing unkind about that movie was letting it be released!) but I was perhaps a little overambitious in the amount of plot holes I saw in it. Well, that's not even correct: there are that many plotholes in the movie. But to expect that such would be the case with other films would be stretching it, and so, like most films, the ones that follow will all probably have just the one plothole, but it will be a major one.
Thus it is, with “Star Trek VI”, that the plot hole really unhinges the whole concept and causes me to call into question the means by which the
Enterprise saves the day. Oddly, I see nobody else marking it, as
Star Trek nuts are usually very finickedy when it comes to plot holes, but I've just now rewatched the relevant part of the movie and I can't see any reason to change my mind. There is a plot hole, and it is so big you could comfortably navigate a Constitution-Class starship through it.
To make it easier for those of you who are not interested in
Trek, basically the
Enterprise is trying to locate a Klingon Bird of Prey, a cloaked ship that is about to launch an attack on the peace conference, hopefully scuppering all chance of reconciliation between the two races. A cloaked ship is one which uses a force field that bends light around it, basically rendering it invisible. Normally, this consumes so much of the power of the ship (in the
Trek universe anyway) that all power has to be diverted to the cloaking device, leaving the ship unable to fire its weapons while cloaked. However this ship appears to be a prototype that has managed to get around that problem.
The upshot is that it is cloaked and can fire while remaining so, and therefore is a hard target not only to locate, but to defend against, as it's the only ship that enjoys the advantage of being invisible while still able to fight. Uhura comes up with the idea of targeting the ship's ionic gas emissions (like the fumes from the exhaust of a car) and they modify a photon torpedo to home in on those traces, enabling it to track the ship and blow it to kingdom come.
So there you have it. Simple idea, nothing wrong with that. Old-world tech, to a degree, beats new-fangled super tech. Only one problem, and it's this: the emissions can only be traced with specialised equipment, originally intended to catalogue gaseous anomalies --- this is mentioned in the first scenes BUT not by Kirk, commanding the
Enterprise. The equipment that they now intend to use is on board another ship, the
USS Excelsior, speeding at the moment to rendezvous with the Enterprise.
So the
Enterprise does not
have the requisite equipment to catalogue the gaseous anomalies, and so
cannot in effect locate the Bird of Prey, thus the whole plan has a huge, major, undeniable flaw. It simply would not work.
But my plotholes are always open to challenge. I'll challenge this one myself. Let's look at the various explanations, workarounds or reasons why this could perhaps not be a plothole.
Answer 1: The Excelsior moved its equipment on to the Enterprise.
Challenge 1: Why? And how? (Well, how is probably not at issue: starships transport material and personnel between them all the time, but they need to be in range of each other to do so.) But the first question remains. The
Excelsior is, when we meet it, engaged in scientific research, and there is no, at the time, crisis. Later it becomes involved in the search for the Bird of Prey, and indeed in its destruction alongside the
Enterprise. But the
Enterprise is not, and was not in this movie ever, a scientific vessel. First, it was a diplomatic one, to ensure the safe passage of the Klingon chancellor to Federation space. Secondly, it is a battleship. Though its stated main mission is to explore, it doesn't generally carry out scientific missions, and indeed is due for decommissioning soon. So why, what reason can anyone give, why this equipment would be transferred to the
Enterprise, which neither at the time needs it or can use it?
Not to mention that Sulu, in command of the
Excelsior, has been in the Beta Quadrant and is only on the way home when this incident occurs. He races to rendezvous with the
Enterprise but by the time they meet battle is already joined. Transporation cannot be carried out with shields up, as would be needed in a battle situtation, especially one where your enemy is invisible, so the transfer --- had it taken place at all --- could not have occurred at this time. Add to that the very real possibility that such equipment is likely not just “plug-and-play”, and would have to be integrated into the
Enterprise's computers, and it just seems so unlikely that such a thing could be engineered, given the high-risk, red alert situation both ships are in, as to make it next to impossible to conceive.
Answer 2: The Enterprise also carries such equipment as standard.
Challenge 2: No it doesn't, not to my knowledge. And it is never alluded to in the movie. I have known the
Enterprise to carry out stellar cartography, (although we are talking
NextGen here to be fair) and while it is, I concede, possible that it also has that equipment, this point, which would be a very important one to the plot were it the case, is not mentioned, so it can't simply be assumed that they “must have had the equipment too”. That's lazy thinking.
Answer 3: At some point prior to this, the Enterprise had been fitted with that equipment.
Challenge 3: We're back to why? But more importantly this time, how? To our knowledge, the
Enterprise has not been home since Kirk and McCoy were found guilty, and Spock has been heading towards the penal colony, hoping to clear his captain's name. He has been specifically avoiding returning to spacedock, pretending that their engines are malfunctioning, in order to give them time to hunt down the assassins and prove their crewmates' innocence. And again, why would he be interested in such a thing? He has much more important matters on his mind.
If anyone can come up with an explanation for this, or has any credible reasons why it should not be seen as a plothole --- and cares --- let me know. As I said, I find it odd that I seem to be the only one who has caught this, and I'm not so arrogant as to think that's because I'm smarter (or more of a nitpicker) than everyone else. Maybe I'm wrong, and there's a reasonable explanation for how this could happen, but I can't see any. When I went to see this movie the first time in the cinema, it jumped out at me like a big red flag, and when we left the movie complex I said to the girl I had gone to see it with --- what? I used to go see movies with girls, occasionally! Why are you so surprised? ---- I blabbed on about it for some minutes, trying to get her to see what I was talking about, but she wasn't as hardcore as me and didn't really care.
Probably why I didn't get laid that night...
But it annoys me. Meyer was the one who got it right the second time with “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”, and for him to miss such a huge hole in the plot is to me just unbelievable. Surely someone proofread this and, at the very least, thought of a way to make it work? I mean, the
Excelsior was coming to join the
Enterprise: couldn't
it have detected the Klingon ship instead of the
Enterprise? That would have made sense, even if it meant taking some of the limelight away from Kirk. Surely the cohesion of the story is more important than the egos of actors?
Hmm. I guess not. Still a great movie, and I'll be reviewing it in full later in the coming year. But for now, it remains a huge plothole that, while it doesn't ruin the movie for me, certainly makes it that little bit less enjoyable.