Star Trek V: The Final Frontier – Great concept, Poor Execution
Star trek V: The Final Frontier – Ambassadors on the Bridge
The Search for Story: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier Redux
It’s been a while since we’ve done an edition of The Search for Story, where we take character, group, species, timeline, or event and look at what that might look like as a standalone series, miniseries or movie.
For this pitch we will borrow all the inspirational elements of the first movie, but won’t be held to the studio requirements for a comedy, or any of the poor elements and decisions (a one-day trip to the centre of the galaxy? Can someone show Voyager this trick?) from the original movie.
Title: Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
Inspiration: Star Trek V, The Ninja, Strange televangelist seeking god.
Setting: Post Star Trek IV, Alpha Quadrant
Picking up a year after the events of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, the crew of the Enterprise have been out in space on the Enterprise A for some time now, everything is smooth sailing, that is except from Scotty’s perspective who still thinks the ship was put together wrong. Kirk is preparing for shore leave rotations as they will be putting in for a resupply at some nondescript Starbase. Spock has returned to form, acting much more like the Spock we came to know over the years.
As we are now filming in parallel with the then unpopular Star Trek The Next Generation, we are also able to share in some of their technological advancement, so we still have a chance to have a climbing and camping sequence on the new and experimental holodeck aboard the Starbase. This isn’t really important to the story, outside of getting a good marsh-melon reference and take a moment to look into our three main characters mental states.
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Meanwhile, in the neutral zone a delegation of ambassadors from three major powers are meeting in the planet Kazis IV, home to a rather advanced city where the three are meeting. Why not Nimbus III? For one it’s in the Federation, Romulan Neutral Zone, not exactly a place a Klingon would want to go, Kazis is at the centre point of all three empires. Also have you ever seen people traveling for business or politics go to a backwater western village and hang out in a dive?
Me neither.
Their top ambassadors have gathered, along with a group of their aides and representatives from various branches of their society. In the Federation’s case this includes Ambassador Sarek.
From there the group is approached and taken hostage by a group of interested, but uninvited third parties, a Tholian, a Breen, a Gorn, an Orion, and their leader, a Vulcan separatist and religious zealot known as Sybok. Sarek recognizes Sybok immediately, as you would expect, but as we saw in Star Trek V, Sybok is a master of personal trauma and exploits his own troubled past with his father to subdue him, then quickly converts the remainder of the delegates.
When word of the situation on Khazis reaches the three major powers each dispatch a ship to resolve the hostage taking, the USS Enterprise with Captain Kirk from the Federation, the IKS Klothos with Captain Kor from the Klingons and the Romulan Bird of Prey ‘Keras’ with Commander Tal. Now we have three of the top Captains from each headed for what could turn into a war-zone.
When the three flagships arrive at Kazis each has its own plan to rescue the hostages, but the followers of Sybok are able to handle the situation, their away teams are captured. Obviously everyone is on edge, none of the ships want to fire on the surface and kill their teams or the other delegates and risk a war, but what else can they do?
Fortunately for Sybok he has a plan, you see he has learned during his travels a planet not far from Kazis, and it’s called Iconia.