This was only the second Star Trek film I had the privilege of watching in a theater. The first, Undiscovered Country was a bittersweet rush to the end, a final summation of the original series. I knew there’d be no more Captain Kirk or Enterprise-A for me (or anybody). And that was…okay. The original crew was visibly getting on in years, a fact made all the more obvious by the original series re-runs my ABC affiliate aired on Sunday mornings.

(And now you all know what I did instead of going to church.)

It was not a definitive loss. There were the six movies gathering dust on my shelf, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and (for a while) Voyager. It was all good…until Next Gen bowed out in a two-hour movie-of-the-week series finale that rocked beyond human comprehension.

I realize now you can’t just leave James Kirk on the Enterprise bridge, no matter what sun he’s sailing into. Nor can you leave Jean-Luc and his crew cruising through space. All of these characters are hot property, and will be so long after the actors who created them have turned to dust and ash. To have a proper ending, their stories must first, finally, and definitively end. Genrations is about such endings.

We begin in 2294*. No stardate is given and I’m too lazy to do the appropriate math. A new starship Enterprise (the B) is christened in high Earth orbit, with Captains James Kirk (ret) (Bill Shatner), Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) and Commander Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) in attendance for her maiden voyage. As the pushy Starfeelt News Service report says, “This is the first starship Enterprise in thirty years without James T. Kirk in command. How do you feel about that, sir?”

[*According to The Star Trek Encyclopedia. All dates are drawn from there, so don’t get nickpicky with me, ‘kay?]

”Oh, just fine,” the old salt says, with just a bitter hint of disingenuousness. Here we see Shatner’s Kirk as the bemused veteran, chafing at retirement, idolized by the masses for merely doing a job. His job, true…and the only thing that’s ever given his life any semblance meaning…and God knows he wants nothing but to do it again….

Chance intervenes to make it happen as an “energy ribbon” (okay, why not?) crosses the solar system, catching two refugee transports in its wake. The Enterprise is, naturally, the only ship capable of giving aid, and is (again, naturally) sucked in as well for its trouble. Captain Kirk (natural as birth) assumes command. Through quick thinking and the legendary transporter work of Captain Scott, Kirk manages to rescue “forty-seven…out of one hundred fifty,” and free the Enterprise to boot. All it costs is his life. And really, once you’ve sat in “that chair” what kind of life can you really live?

None, apparently. Star Trek captains don’t get lives. Or, rather, the lives they live are so influential, so essential to the heart and health of the universe, that whenever alternatives they encounter inevitably fall short and lead to apocalyptic outcomes. Later on in the film, Kirk will implore another Captain of the Enterprise to not “let them do anything that takes you away from that chair because while you’re there…you can make a difference.”

As if there can’t make any kind of difference anywhere else. Now I know what they meant when they conceived Kirk as the Horatio Hornblower of the stars. It is now, and has always been, Kirk’s drive to command that defines him. He is the Batman of Starfleet, fixated on command of a starship to the point of obsession. Possibly madness. Which is just one of the many reasons that this film’s ending is much more a let down that it has any right to be.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Our story picks up seventy-eight years later, aboard the Enterprise-D (making The Next Generation, in fact, closer to a third- or, hell, forth-generation than anything…and making me as nitpicky as any fan with too much time on his hands). As the crew celebrates Lt. Worf’s (Michael Dorn) promotion, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) receives a message from Earth that puts him in a state. Outside the ship, the Enterprise recieves a distress from a nearby Starfleet observatory and dutifully moves to investigate. Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes)’s away team arrives to find charred bodies, smashed equipment and Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Tolian Soren.

Those of us outside the Forth Wall will recognize Soren as one of the forty-seven Scotty beamed out of the “energy ribbon” and onto the Enterprise-B. He looks none the worse for his eighty years of slumming around the cosmos, despite his outwardly human appearance. We soon learn he is one of Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg)’s people, the seemingly immortal Listeners, and that he is (naturally) Up To No Good End.

That ribbon is, in point of fact, a temporal Nexus. It travels through our galaxy on a set and (apparently) stable orbit, offering any who can reach it without being vaporized the chance to enter another world. Another universe where time is meaningless, where eternity is the only constant and everything inside bends to each person’s individual will. The Nexus is an infinite amount of Heavens, a final reward, and eternity…and Soren has spent eighty years dreaming of nothing but a way to get back inside.

Like any good villain, Soren’s thought Big about all of this. His master plan involves the death of whole solar systems, so you know he’ll have no compunctions about destroying the Enterprise. Will its crew thwart his master plan in time? Or will Malcolm McDowell triumph at last and laugh an oh-so English laugh over the bones of his Starfleet opponents?

In structure, Generations slavishly follows the outline of a Next Generation episode…albeit, on that’s an hour and fifty-seven minutes long. The movie is divided into parallel stories. Story A is a mystery the crew must solve in order to advance to the next level…or, is that video games? Whatever. Story B revolves around the personal trial of one crewmember, Data in this case, as he explores an aspect of himself. If you guessed, “The line between what it means to be an android and what it means to be human,” then you’re either a dirty rotten cheater, or you’ve honestly never seen this movie before and are wasting your time reading this.

Either way, know that both stories are strong by the series standards while making absolutely no sense to anyone unfamiliar with this universe. Star Trek: Generations is the worst possible starting point for the uninitiated. Best to get ‘em when they’re young, anyway, and start them on the Original Series. That way, not only will their returns increase as the show’s overall quality improves (stop snickering, of course it improves), but you’ll actually be surprised by the end. I know all of us were when we watched this thing in the theater.

As usual, discussion of the movie’s key elements will necessitate spoilers. You’ve been warned.

Now that that’s out of the way…For me, the surprise was no pleasant, and Captain Kirk’s acrimonious final bow proved even more bittersweet than his ship’s. Ironically, I felt more closure at then end of Undiscovered Country, where Kirk and his crew not only survived intact but ushered in a new order of galactic peace before they sailed off into the sunset. Here, Kirk dies. (Told you: spoilers.) And while he dies saving hundreds of millions of lives (including the thousand-plus aboard Picard’s Enterprise) the event suffers a critical loss of dramatic weight. Which isn’t just odd—like, you-think-of-your-mother-the-phone-right-its-your-mother odd—its ri-goddamn-diculous. Especially in light of what Kirk must give up in order to make that sacrifice.

When Picard enters the Nexus he comes to inside his future home at some distant, future Christmas time. His future wife (good on you, Jean-Luc) and future kids (Cap’n finally got biz-zay) cluster around him leveling, along with his dead nephew. At once he knows this isn’t real, that he’s in the Nexus, and by-God he’s got to go back and Do What’s Right. All very much in character for Jean-Luc, no problem. Thankfully, the ghost of Guinan Past directs him to another wayward captain of the Enterprise whom he might persuade to follow him back to the twenty-fourth century.

Kirk’s vision of the Nexus is a whole other bag of dope. The man Gary Mitchell called “Jimmy” comes to chopping wood outside a home he sold over a decade ago. Going inside, he finds his dog, breakfast and girlfriend of a decade past all waiting for him, as if the pervious six movies were not but a holographic stress syndrome, like what Barkley had, but oh-so worse. Naturally, Jim is dismissive of this jumped-up little bald dude who comes strolling into his past with some wild story about being, “Captain of the Federation Starship Enterprise.”

Picard’s Nexus Point (make up your own term if you don’t like it) is in the future; a future he knows on sight is not real. Yet, like Jesse Jackson, Jean-Luc keeps alive the hope that his Nexus future could be manifest in the real world…especially once he gets his head out of his ass and makes that move on Beverly. This, finally, is what allows him to break the Nexus’ hold and return to the his “real” world.

Kirk’s trip takes him to the past, giving the Luckiest Man in the Galaxy a second chance at life. Yet his turn around is remarkably quick for a man of James T. Kirk’s…ahem…questionable character. I could see it going either way, personally, and would’ve definitely stretched it out a bit more. Dramatic tension, if nothing else. Kirk’s predecessor, Captain Christopher Pike, saw no problem living out his salad days inside a perfect fantasy world. Yet Jim Kirk, who’s stubborn pigheadedness is the stuff of galactic legend, goes from “I think the galaxy owes me one,” to “Who am I to argue with the Captain of the Enterprise?” in under ten minutes. The more I think about it, the less it seems to compute.

Apparently, an early version of the script had Kirk take control of the Enterprise-D battle bridge and go down in a blaze of glory defeating the Klingons. Too over the top? Too Hollywood? Maybe. But very James T. Kirk. A warrior’s death in defense of life. Makes more dramatic sense than falling off a cliff.

I won’t bother to tell you that’s just my personal opinion. Or that the movie itself was cooked up under a tight schedule, fraught with production problems and lost at least one director because the producers insisted there was no time to change the things he felt needed changing. Or that I respect and admire all the hard work that goes into making any movie make it onto the silver screen. I can only say that Generations is a decent movie; well made and well acted (even by William Shatner standards), and a decent Star Trek movie, temporarily derailing the Odd Numbered Curse that so plagues these pictures.

Nowadays the Curse is back on track and collecting interest thanks to Insurrect and Nemesis. But those are other voyages of the Starship Enterprise and I leave them to another day. In the mean time, all you newbies should go pick up some of Next Generation’s DVDs—or steal them off the internet. They’re as good a place to start as any, and a much better place than this.