So much more could have been added to Star Trek VI if not for budget cuts
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country earned rave reviews from critics even though it didn’t break the box office bank. Still, many fans love this one of the movies, but there were ten minutes of footage missing that could have made them love it even more.
When the movie opens, the Enterprise crew has already been assembled for their next mission—to take Klingon General Gorkon to the peace conference. We didn’t get the chance to see what the crew had been up to since we had last seen them in Star Trek V. And according to Star Trek Movie Memories by William Shatner, if we could’ve seen their lives, we would have known why the crew needed the Enterprise as much as Starfleet needed them.
The prologue started the film with Sulu aboard the Excelsior, Kirk unsurprisingly in bed with a woman, but not just anyone, Carol Marcus, and Scotty so bored he was taking apart the Klingon bird of prey used in Star Trek IV as he wanted to find out how the cloaking device worked. Moving on, we would have seen Uhura unhappy in her job as a host of a call-in advice program at a Federation radio station while Chekov passed the time at a chess club. And Bones? Well, Kirk would have found him drunk and cantankerous as ever at a high-society medical dinner in his honor. Unsurprisingly, the good doctor jumped at the chance to return to the Enterprise to be of some use.
Because of budget cuts, the prologue was scratched, an unfortunate choice considering how this information, while not absolutely crucial, would have shown us more of the characters we’d come to love and how they were absolutely miserable without the excitement of space.
As Star Trek VI was the final movie to include every member of the original series, it would have been interesting to see how the crew reacted to being recalled from their less-than-exciting existences. These characters made the Enterprise the greatest ship in the galaxy, and personally, I would have liked to have seen them returning to their posts like conquering soldiers.