The one thing Leonard Nimoy liked about Star Trek: Generations

Star Trek: Generations isn’t a fan favorite film, and Leonard Nimoy didn’t like it, either.

Star Trek: Generations hasn’t gone down in history as a beloved movie in the franchise. Not only did we get a fake Captain Kirk death within the first act, but we get an actual Captain Kirk death later on in the movie that is seen as less than heroic by most of the fans. (Fortunately, William Shatner wrote “The Return,” a novel in 1996 that resurrected the captain, but fans still want to see it onscreen.) And fans aren’t the only ones who disliked the film.

According to conversations reported in The Fifty-Year Missoin—The Next 25 Years by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross, Rick Berman asked Leonard Nimoy to direct Generations as the request of Sherry Lansing, who was then the head of Paramount Studios. Nimoy read the script and immediated said it needed a page-one rewrite. Brannon Braga said the only thing Nimoy found interesting was Data’s emotion chip story. Nimoy even admitted that his feelings about the film were negative.

Leonard Nimoy parted ways with Rick Berman over Star Trek: Generations

Though Data’s emotion chip arc was special in the movie, it wasn’t enough to save it. Nimoy recognized the movie needed more. And Berman, who was inexperienced in the sci-fi genre, at the time, told Nimoy that a page-one rewrite wouldn’t be done. Years later, Berman admitted that Nimoy should have had a pass at the script, but he wasn’t experienced enough to know that. He and Nimoy didn’t speak again afterwards.

There was so much more that could have been done with Generations had Nimoy been given the opportunity to rework the script. In Nimoy’s own words:

"“But Generations bothered me. My God, what were they doing? Why that scene? What’s this scene about? Where are they going with this? That was the reason I wasn’t involved in making it, though it was offered to me to direct.”"

Given that he’d directed the second most successful movie, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, in the franchise, he knew what fans wanted and what would leave them wanting more. While an emotion chip for Data was something fans wanted, in Nimoy’s hands, Generations could have been the first successful movie of the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast and crew.