Star Trek V: The Final Frontier/Fridge

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Fridge Brilliance: It is usually the worst cop-out a writer could pull on an audience but think about it: Star Trek V is All Just a Dream. Specifically, it's one of Captain Kirk's dreams. As such, it reveals a lot about his inner psyche:
    • Kirk is, as pointed out on the YMMV page, a Canon Sue. Wouldn't Captain Kirk like to think of himself this way and dream of himself in this way?
    • Spock and Sybok: is there a deep-seated pyschological fear of someone, even a (gasp) strange relative that Kirk has never even met coming and taking Spock away from him?
    • With the ease at which Sybok "converts" the Enterprise crew members, is Kirk worried about someone taking them away? Or does he have a deep-seated fear of loss of control ("I'm LOSING COMMAND!")
    • Uhura dancing naked: Kirk Fantasy #546. 'Nuff said.
    • Scotty is shown as pretty bumbling in this movie. Could it be that Captain Jimbo doesn't have an entirely positive view of his Chief Engineer?
    • For that matter, does he not have entirely positive feelings for the Enterprise? It is shown as being constantly breaking down in this movie. Or is it just the "new" Enterprise? Maybe Kirk is pitching an unconscious hissy fit: "Starfleet gives me a replacement Enterprise, but it's not my Enterprise! I want my old Enterprise back!"
    • The Crack Pairing of Scotty and Uhura: again, is Kirk afraid the Uhura might not devote all her attention to him, or does this show that he is just a closet Shipper?
    • The Special Effects Failure: Things in a dream would seem this way.
    • The Klingons destroying a poor, helpless, little Pioneer 10 spaceprobe (complete with pathetic scream!) deep in Federation space! Those bastards! They killed my son!
    • On that note, of course they want to track me down and engage me in battle ("if I could defeat Kirk..." "...you'd be the greatest warrior in the galaxy!")! I'm James ****ing Kirk the Magnificent! ...Okay, killing Kirk may have been a dream of a lot of Klingons at this point, but remember from Star Trek IV that Kirk is more infamous than revered by Klingons at this time. The "Kirk is a great legendary warrior" thing doesn't seem to stick until well after he's dead... or at least Star Trek VI.
    • More than once, Spock talks about whether life is a dream, as he deals with the image in the bookending song "row, row, row your boat".
  • Or, alternately, he's just telling this as a camp-fire story to Spock and McCoy (note how they are sitting around the fire at both the beginning and end of the movie) who probably, because of all of the examples above call him out on his crappy story telling and tell him to just shut up already so they can drunkenly sing "Row, row, row your boat."