Star Trek V: The Final Frontier – Great concept, Poor Execution

Star Trek The Next Generation Contagion Iconian Portal

Now that he has a high ranking hostage from each major power nobody will dare to fire on him, so using his hostages he gains passage on the Enterprise and heads for Iconia where he can finally open a portal to the Final Frontier and meet the one true God.

Now before anyone says anything, yes, Star Trek V and Contagion were shot and premiered in the same year. So we have a little tie in between the somewhat disliked Star Trek The Next Generation and Star Trek The Original Series to help the new show out a little. We just need to make sure that once Sybok finds God and questions him there’s a way to leave Iconia in good shape for Picard to find nearly a century later… But that’s not a problem for a movie that introduces the first of two additional children of Sarek that were somehow not mentioned for the past twenty years.

So how does it end?

Sybok and company play a little trick on the pursuing Klingon and Romulan ships, beaming a few people down to Iconia on the way past thanks to Scotty’s transwarp beaming technology, then lead them in the wrong direction entirely.

The meeting with God plays out in a similar manner, why doesn’t God know how they got there? why does God ned a starship? But we add in that this God is in some ways the opposite of Sybok, while he can help with pain, this god seems only to cause it. We get a glimpse into the pain of each character, in particular of Spock being bullied by the younger Sybok, and of Sarek having to push his full blooded Vulcan son out to protect Spock, a sort of foreshadowing of the love we know Sarek will share in his mind meld with Captain Picard years later.

In the end the group escapes through the portal to a place like Nimbus III, perhaps they lose their memory of this passage through this encounter with God, or Sybok, perhaps they don’t actually know exactly where they were taken, save for the crew of the Enterprise who has no wish to go this deep into Klingon space again, either way Iconia is. left for the Enterprise D to encounter a century later. Also as the Next Generation Episode was filmed at the same time they could have thrown in a little ‘we found it mentioned in an old log from the Enterprise A’ or something to complete the tie in.

A better way to the Final Frontier…

Is it a perfect story? no.  Its broad strokes, it glosses over the more personal Spock story that needs to be told along the way, but you can see the potential in the original vision.

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier could have been among the best, it’s just too bad that the execution was off.