Star Trek: Insurrection/Wall Banger

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Wall Bangers from Star Trek: Insurrection include:

  • The central conflict. The planet in question is a Fountain of Youth with a pristine ecology and beautiful people. The youth-restoring radiation is wanted by a race of ugly Designated Villains; it is strongly suspected that providing it will wreck the planet. Problems:
    1. There are more of them.
    2. They will die and go extinct without it.
    3. The Federation normally aims for the "greater good" when the Prime Directive isn't involved, and Picard normally aims for those ideals.
    4. The Federation ideals do not include Beauty Equals Goodness.
    • It's even worse than this, because at the time the film is going on, the Federation is fighting an increasingly bloody war. A war that is, in fact, so dire that it authorizes fabricating evidence of a Dominion plot and passing bioweapons material to a potential terrorist just to draw the Romulans into the war. Yet they flinch at collecting a resource that could allow them to win the war without a single further soldier dying? Obviously, whoever made the film didn't bother doing even fifteen minutes worth of research on Deep Space Nine.
  • No one in the Federation respects the Prime Directive in this film. In the end, it doesn't matter, but until then...
  • There is a romantic subplot between Will Riker and Deanna Troi. Troi kisses him and expresses distaste for his beard. She says she's never kissed him with a beard before...but she already had at least four times in TNG!
  • The Ba'Ku were supposed to be the good guys. They hoard a whole planet full of this miraculous material for themselves, and when some of their number suggest that they should share it with other races (and there's certainly enough as there's only a few hundred Ba'Ku on the whole planet) their response is to banish them and doom them to slow degradation of their bodies until their faces have to be held in place by staples.
    • They're not "hoarding" it, and it's not like they're trying to keep other races from colonising the same planet. Picard says that the Son'a could establish their own colony, but Dougherty says that most of them won't have time. Actually, this is a wall-banger considering how fast they seem to work on Picard and the others.
      • Also, how did a race of Space Amish pacifists manage to put down and drive out a sect of militant, armed, and technologically advanced people? And even if they could somehow do that, how did they prevent the Son'a from just turning right around and landing somewhere else on the planet? The Ba'ku don't have any technology to stop or even detect another settlement within EYESIGHT of their town, much less on the other side of the planet!
  • The scene with Geordi seeing his first sunrise was brilliant, but given that he was born blind the planet wouldn't have regenerated his optic nerve. It doesn't make sense that this would only be a temporary effect.
    • It's well-known among the fandom that production was against giving Geordi natural eyesight because they thought it would be a slap in the face to do in fiction what can't be done in real-life for real people. But there-in lies the problem. If they knew they couldn't permanently give Geordi natural eyesight, then they shouldn't have bothered sticking fans with another example of Status Quo Is God.
  • Oh, here's one: Picard balks at the idea of moving a non-indigenous race to another planet for their protection, due to another "species" claiming it for their own. In the Next Generation episode "The Ensigns of Command", he gleefully and obediently does the very thing he balked at in the movie. In fact, the only protest he makes is to the species who claim the planet for themselves, and that's only to give him more time to get the people already there off. Did no one actually watch that episode before making this movie?
    • Except that, unlike the Son'a and arguably the Federation, the Shelliak had a legal right to the planet, and unlike the Ba'ku, the colonists were Federation citizens, plus Picard did not resort to any kind of deception to remove the colonists.
      • Except that the "legal" right is granted entirely by the Federation; the people on the planet had no say at all in the treaty signed with the Shelliak. Likewise, the Ba'ku planet is "legally" in Federation space, because that's what Federation law says. Either way, it's legal because the Federation says it is.
  • Yet another one. At the beginning, Dougherty says, "The planet is ours (The Federation's), the technology is their's (The Son'a)". Wait... If the Ba'Ku are living inside Federation space, why don't they have any representation or legal rights? Also, we learn that the Son'a manufactured Ketracel White, the substance used to feed and control the Dominion's Jem'Hadar soldiers, the Federation's enemies! Why would they be doing business with the Son'a in the first place?
  • How about the Ba'ku fear of technology? There is two reasons why it doesn't add up.
    1. The Ba'ku themselves use technology. Sure it's primitive technology, but it still counts as technology. That makes them a bunch of uptight hypocrites who hates modern machines when they used their machines for their work.
    2. The movie seems to use the "Technology is bad" Aesop yet it's broken because they are saved multiple times thanks to technology. The woman who was crushed by rocks? Saved by modern medicine. If it wasn't for the phasers, they could have being killed by the Son'a. Hell, like I said before, they use technology to harvest the crops and open a hole in the lake to help the heroes. It's like the writer can't come up with arguments as to why it's bad to have technology when technology itself have made more help then problems.
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