After nearly two decades, Patrick Stewart is returning to the role that made him famous. The latest Star Trek TV series, Picard, starts streaming on CBS All Access today. The last time audiences saw the character, he was starring in a big screen adventure that was meant to reinvigorate the Star Trek franchise. Instead, Nemesis ended the adventures of the Next Generation cast and plunged the entire franchise into uncertainty.

A Not So Brief History of Star Trek in Film

If you’re reading this, odds are pretty good you’re familiar with the history of Gene Roddenberry’s creation. The original series starring William Shatner as Captain Kirk ran from 1966-1969. It was always on the edge of cancellation, but once it was gone it was missed dearly by a small but rabid fanbase.

Even after its cancellation, Star Trek never really went away. As a child of the seventies, I grew up watching the original series in reruns. In 1973, most of the Enterprise crew reprised their roles for Star Trek: The Animated Series. It was good, but fans wanted more.

For much of the seventies, there was talk about relaunching Star Trek. During development, Paramount bounced back in forth between making a movie and a TV show. Just weeks before a TV show titled Star Trek: Phase II was supposed to start production, Paramount pulled the plug and decided to launch a film franchise instead.

Ten years after the cancellation of Star Trek, the original cast was reunited on the big screen. Nostalgic fans eagerly flocked to Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I think most would agree that the movie was not a satisfying experience, but a big screen reunion was an event all the same.

Creatively, the Star Trek movies peaked with the second effort. The sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, succeeded by focusing on the beloved cast of characters while acknowledging the reality that the actors were aging. Wrath of Khan became the benchmark the Star Trek series would chase for decades.

The original film series was unusual. Paramount was happy to keep making Star Trek movies as long as they continued to provide a tidy return on investment. A Star Trek movie could typically be counted on to sell around $70 million dollars worth of tickets. These movies weren’t blockbusters, but that wasn’t chump change either at the time.

As the series went on, Star Trek movies stopped being events. They could no longer rely on the appeal of getting the gang back together. As early as the third movie, marketing materials began selling the idea that this might be the last time you would ever get to see these characters.

By the time the fourth movie rolled around, Paramount was getting nervous about the future of the franchise. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (who directed the third and fourth movies) were demanding bigger salaries. Looking for a way to continue Star Trek without having to meet rising demands from their actors, Paramount decided to bring Star Trek back to where it started, television.

Star Trek: The Next Generation launched in 1987 as a syndicated show since none of the existing networks would commit to a full season up front. This was an unconventional approach at the time, but it proved highly profitable for Paramount. After a shaky first season, The Next Generation ran for seven seasons on television ending its run in 1993.

The TV show’s success lead to spin-offs. Deep Space Nine rand from 1993-1998 followed by Voyager which was on the air from 1995-2001. Star Trek fans had gone from watching reruns in the seventies to being able to choose from multiple Star Trek movies and TV shows to get their fix.

When Star Trek V: The Final Frontier became the first box office disappointment in the series, director and star William Shatner complained that the movie had to compete with a TV show fans could watch for free. While Final Frontier had bigger problems, Shatner wasn’t entirely wrong. Going forward, the Star Trek movies would have to justify their existence. Fans had options. They needed to be lured into the multiplexes.

Out With the Old, In With the Less Old

As the final appearance of the original crew, The Undiscovered Country qualified as an event, albeit a small one. Just one year the end of their TV show, the Next Generation cast made the jump to the big screen with Generations. For added appeal, William Shatner returned as Captain Kirk for what will almost certainly be the last time.

For years, fans had been demanding a meeting between captains Kirk and Picard. Generations delivered on that premise in one of the least satisfying ways imaginable. Despite being prominently featured on the movie’s marketing material, Shatner is barely in the movie. Generations exists primarily to clear the way for the new guys. Kirk’s perfunctory death scene feels rushed.

Conventional wisdom is that even-numbered Star Trek movies are the ones that are worth watching. That held true with Star Trek: First Contact. The second outing of the Next Gen crew brought out their most popular enemies, the Borg. By delivering more action that the typical Star Trek movie and giving Captain Picard a personal nemesis with roots from the TV show, First Contact set its sites on being The Wrath of Khan for The Next Generation.

First Contact became the second highest-grossing movie in the franchise (behind Star Trek IV, the only movie pre-reboot to gross more than $100 million thanks to a premise that appealed to non-fans as well as fans). Going into the next movie, Insurrection, Paramount was bullish on the future of Star Trek.

For the next installment, the studio requested a lighter-tone. Star Trek IV had been a comedic episode, so Paramount reasoned that they could appeal to a wider audience with a Star Trek that didn’t take itself so seriously. Insurrection was intended to be a fun romp.

By this point, the cast was becoming more involved creatively. Jonathan Frakes followed in Leonard Nimoy’s footsteps by directing both First Contact and Insurrection. Patrick Stewart leveraged his leading man status to shape the story and earn a producer’s credit. He felt that First Contact established his character as an action hero and he did not want to give that up.

At the end of the day, Insurrection felt like an episode of the TV show and not an especially memorable one. With two Star Trek TV shows available to watch for free, some Trekkies started staying home. Paramount didn’t want to admit it, but the market was over-saturated.

Nemesis

The lesson Paramount took away from Insurrection was that audiences didn’t like the (studio mandated) lighter-tone. So for Nemesis, they tried to go darker. First Contact was the most successful of the Next Gen films and it was comparatively dark, so Nemesis would be the bleakest Star Trek yet.

Jonathan Frakes was no longer welcome in the director’s chair. Instead, Stuart Baird was hired to take the realms. Baird worked primarily as an editor before directing action movies like Executive Decision and U.S. Marshals. He was unfamiliar with Star Trek when he was hired and he declined to research the source material. The idea was to get a fresh perspective on the material.

Reportedly the cast wasn’t overly impressed with their director-for-hire. By this point, the actors had a lot of opinions about their characters and they were used to their input being heard. But Baird wasn’t interested in their feedback. After the movie flopped, actress Marina Sirtis called the director “an idiot”. Nemesis ended Baird’s career as a movie director.

Brent Spiner received a story credit on Nemesis. He had previously requested that his beloved android, Data, should be killed off in Insurrection. The actor was concerned that he was getting too old to play an ageless character. In Nemesis, Spiner got his wish.

Data’s death is one of several elements that feels like watered-down Khan. The villain, Shinzon, was conceived as a clone of Captain Picard. The idea here was clearly to create an adversary – or nemesis if you will – with a personal connection to the heroic captain. The character was played by a then-unknown Tom Hardy wearing prosthetics to make him look more like Patrick Stewart.

As a result, the movie has to jump through all kinds of hoops to explain why a clone would exist. The convoluted plot involves the Romulans, an alien race from the TV show who had yet to make their movie debut, and a never-before-mentioned sister race called the Remans. Romulans have always been similar to Vulcans but the Remans looked like vampires for some reason.

All of that backstory on the bad guys meant less screen-time for crew of the Enterprise. There was a lot of additional footage left on the cutting room floor. Baird estimated that there was almost an hour’s worth of deleted scenes. Several of the cut scenes have been added to home video releases of Nemesis. Mostly, they are character moments meant to tie up lose ends on the Next Gen crew.

The cast was no longer under contract, but Paramount planned to continue making Star Trek movies anyway. Jeri Ryan, who played the popular Borg Seven of Nine on Star Trek: Voyager, said she turned down a part in Nemesis. The idea was to continue the series with a mixture of characters from the various TV shows.

The obvious dangling plotline was the death and resurrection of Data. At Spiner’s insistence, Data had been killed off. But before he died, he downloaded his neural net into the very conveniently introduced Data duplicate, B-4. The movie ends with the implication that Data lives on through B-4 which pretty much neutralizes any impact his death might have had.

Death of a Franchise… For Now

Nemesis was released during a crowded holiday season. It opened in second place behind the romantic comedy Maid in Manhattan. The following week, The Two Towers and Two Weeks Notice took the top spots. Nemesis plunged all the way to 8th place below The Hot Chick. It was barely beating Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Die Another Day which had both been released over a month prior.

Any consideration of a sequel quickly evaporated despite attempts from the cast to procure a proper send-off. Star Trek: Enterprise limped along on TV for a couple of years before Paramount let the franchise go dark. Of course they are never going to let something as valuable as Star Trek remain dormant longer than necessary. Seven years after Nemesis killed the franchise, it got rebooted under director J.J. Abrams.

For years, it seemed like Nemesis would serve as the final word on the Next Generation crew. But we live in an era of streaming platforms and Star Trek was called upon to serve as the backbone of CBS: All Access. The service launched in 2014 with not much in the way of content beyond sports and Big Brother. Three years later, Star Trek: Discovery became All Access’ first original scripted show.

Currently, the movie franchise is in limbo again (that’s a story for another time). Once again, Star Trek stories are being told on TV. If the trailers are any indication, Picard will pick up on some of the loose ends left by Nemesis. Hopefully the Next Gen cast and fans will finally get the send-off they have been waiting for.

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