What They Did for Love by Denny Martin Flinn

The Director’s Cut may add some extra tidbits, some extra character beats, and a little extra silly Scooby-Doo reveal at the end, but all in all, this film was a fitting send-off. I remember being so excited to see this in theaters and unlike V, it still holds up very well. The film’s themes may be clunky, but I love this one.

So this film more or less fills in that plot gap while expounding on the nature of age and deep societal change. The Klingons have always been the intergalactic bad guys, but somewhere in the timeline, the Federation had patched things up well enough for dear old Worf to be a crewmember of the Enterprise for The Next Generation. While the original series never really stood in for a politically allegorical “us-vs-them” surrogate, it does fit well for this film. If there’s a failing to be leveled at Undiscovered Country it’s how on-the-nose everything is. With those geopolitical happenings still fresh in the news, it was impossible to miss this film’s themes and ambitions. The Berlin Wall had come down, and the global threat of communism was essentially vanquished. I was nine years old when this movie hit theaters. With Christopher Plummer as the Shakespear-spewing Klingon General Chang, we get a genuinely lethal bad guy for a story wrapped within a classic whodunnit structure letting Spock play detective while Kirk and McCoy get to wax philosophical about aging out of their universe. For all intents and purposes, this film is a rousing success helping bring a fitting close for the original crew with a bittersweet send-off that gives every member a true fan moment to shine. After the abject failure that was the fifth film, this final voyage brought in franchise heavy hitter Nicholas Meyer from Wrath of Khan to right the ship and deliver a politically-charged and highly entertaining film.

To properly close out a generation of adventures, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Countrybrings back our original crew (with Sulu getting his own ship) for one last mission.

What They Did for Love by Denny Martin Flinn