3 things that worked and 3 things that didn’t work in Star Trek Generations
By Chad Porto
What We Should’ve Gotten
Q Brings The Crews Together
Sometimes the obvious answer is the best answer. Having Q just snap his fingers and putting Kirk’s Enterprise against Picard’s Enterprise for his own amusement would’ve been the best way to do things. Maybe you throw in a rival Q who despises Q (John de Lancie’s version) who brings in a third ship (Maybe Ricardo Montabluan back as Khan?) and which forces the two Enterprises to work together. This would also set up Kirk’s death, where the captain opens up some sort of rift or wormhole by blowing up his Enterprise, sending his crew along with the TNG crew. That or you could have him blow up anything else, to do the same thing, sending both Enterprise’s back to their respective times. With Q, all things are possible.
The crews interacting with one another
Having the crews interact with one another would’ve been nice to see. While Bones, Scotty, and Spock would all do cameos on TNG, they never did a full ship-to-ship interaction. This was certainly a lost opportunity, especially considering William Shatner, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koening were the only TOS series actors to never get a chance to appear in a TNG episode. Koening and Shatner would finally get to do something with the TNG crew in Generations but Koening never shared screens with anyone from TNG.
A better villain
Maybe Q and Khan aren’t the best choices for the film’s villain, maybe they are. What can’t be argued is that Soran and the Duras Sisters are not great villains. Malcolm McDowell wasn’t a bad choice for the role, and even though he didn’t like Star Trek much, he did do a great job bringing his character to life. The problem is, his character was pretty weak. His sole identity was trying to get back to the Nexus, and it made him a really unremarkable character. That’s on the film for not giving enough time with him, and allowing him to be more layered, but the point still stands.