Star Trek V: The Final Frontier/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Awesome Music: The score by Jerry Goldsmith. He returned after 10 years and gave it his full orchestra treatment. Star Trek V Theme
  • Canon Sue: What Shatner turns Kirk into. He freeclimbs El Capitan, personally leads a squadron of space marines who don't do anything, gets Uhura to strip naked to provide a distraction, charges into a hostage rescue operation on horseback, is the only character who flat-out refuses Sybok's Epiphany Therapy, and is the first person to think of asking God what he needs with a starship.
    • Still, it could have been a lot worse - it actually ends up being Spock and the drunken Klingon general that save the day.
    • Don't think Uhura needed much persuading to prance about nekkid. If I remember some episodes of the original series correct, she liked being the centre of attention.
    • The original script was actually worse, featuring Spock and McCoy also succumbing to the Epiphany Therapy, thus leaving Kirk as the only heroic character for a good portion of the movie.
  • Crack Pairing: Uhura and Scotty? Seriously? Granted, it probably wouldn't have been out of place in TOS or one of the earlier films, but the attraction between the two comes out of absolutely nowhere, and is never referenced again.
    • It's actually very low-key hinted at in the previous film. Observe the crew when they're approaching the Enterprise-A... Uhura practically cuddles up to Scotty when they see the ship's name.
  • Crowning Moment of Funny: In a movie full of painful humor, Spock says this after saving Kirk:

Spock: (when Kirk tries to hug him) Please, Captain. Not in front of the Klingons.

    • When Klaa blasts the Pioneer 10 probe, it emits a cartoonish shriek (?!).
  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: Kirk: "I thought I was dead." Spock: "Impossible. You were never alone."
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Jerry Goldsmith, Academy Award nominee for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, returns. Highlights include "The Mountain" and "A Busy Man".
  • Did Not Do the Research: Sybok, Leif Eriksson was the one who proved the earth was round!
    • You're both wrong. The idea of a spherical Earth dates all the way back to Pythagoras, Herodotus, Plato, and Aristotle. By the time of Columbus' voyage, only the most conservative religious groups still took the idea of a flat Earth from the Bible literally. The premise of the entire voyage was that the Earth was round! Columbus' only problem was that he underestimated the size of the Earth. All that the Vikings proved was that there was a landmass beyond the sea (which, according to Norse Mythology was supposedly the giants' homeworld of Jotunheim). If you want to get technical, the first person to "prove" the Earth was round was Juan Sebastian Elanco, Ferdinand Magellan's second-in-command who took over the expedition to circumnagivate the globe after Magellan was killed in the Phillipines.
  • Fan Disservice: 57 year old Nichelle Nichols doing a nude fan dance. And bizarrely, all evidence is that Shatner genuinely thought this would be plain old Fan Service.
  • Fridge Brilliance: A possible reason for the numerous problems the almost mint-condition Enterprise-A is having in this movie? It was in Spacedock during the Probe's sojourn to Earth.
    • It's never outright stated, but as noted below and elsewhere, it's a safe bet that Kirk's greatest pain is the death of his son.
    • SF Debris has pointed out that the movie becomes a lot better if you view it as a satire of Roddenberry's ideal "Communist sex utopia" future.
  • Fridge Logic: Why can't you use the brig toilet while in spacedock? See the sign for yourself!
    • Obviously, for whatever reason, once it's flushed and resealed the waste is vented right into space. Which, when in spacedock, would mean probably splattering some poor maintenance worker's windshield.
    • The same reason you can't use train toilets in the station. Anywhere else on the Enterprise they probably just use the transporter...
  • Funny Aneurysm Moment: It's a bit uncomfortable in retrospect watching the scene in which Scotty hits his head on the bulkhead (after saying "I know this ship like the back of me head!") knowing that James Doohan developed Alzheimer's disease towards the end of his life.
  • Ho Yay: "Please, Captain. Not in front of the Klingons."

Q: Who hates Klingons with a fiery passion?
A: Every Yaoi Fangirl ever.

  • Idiot Plot: Most of the movie, see Plot Induced Stupidity.
  • Memetic Mutation: "What does God need with a starship?"
  • Misblamed: Granted Shatner is the cause of a lot of the mess that is this movie, but he tends to get all of the blame even though there were several other factors such as Executive Meddling and the WGA strike.
  • So Bad It's Good
  • Special Effect Failure: Every damn special effect in the movie. Apart from a few good shots of the Klingon ship, which were pilfered from the previous two films.
    • As mentioned, ILM was busy (this was the summer of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Ghostbusters II and the pseudopod in The Abyss). Shatner sought out another special effects creator who showed a few amazing demonstrations in person, and then delivered complete and utter crap, to the point that it necessitated further emergency script rewrites to accommodate how completely unusable the shots were.
    • Ironically, the Rock Monsters that were originally going to be chasing Kirk rather than the disembodied head of not-God were tossed out because the one suit they made looked "like crap," according to many. Seen here, we can see that they actually looked far better than the effects in the damned movie.
      • They look pretty decent standing posed for still photography, but that's still different than looking good in motion and intended to be watched on the big screen. Also there were apparently worries about the wearers' safety, since the suits were designed to emit smoke but the device to do so kept malfunctioning.
    • Most of the effects problems were apparently to do with the motion control photography being done at 16fps instead of the usual 24fps, as a cost-saving measure. Notably, the static shots of the Enterprise and the Klingon ship generally don't look too bad, but whenever they move they do it in a stuttery, jerky fashion that looks like something out of an old Ray Harryhausen flick.
      • Basically, the fact that Bran Ferren (the man behind the effects) has never been allowed near another movie to this day says it all.
  • Tear Jerker: The scene with McCoy's dying father. DeForest Kelley gets to act.

McCoy: Not soon after, they found a cure! A GODDAMN CURE!

  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Kirk meets a villain who draws out his subjects' greatest pain, but when the time comes he won't let the guy near him, thus blowing a perfectly good opportunity to deal with the loss of his son.
    • Except that was the point of the scene. That Kirk doesn't want the pain drawn out, and he doesn't want to deal with it. He wants to hold onto it, keep it. It's not the emotional response that's considered healthy in modern Western society, but it's still an entirely human and understandable one.
      • That decision came back to bite him on the ass in the next film. If he'd dealt with the loss of his son in this film, he'd have had seven years between letting go of that pain and meeting Chancellor Gorkon (and the entire plot of The Undiscovered Country would have been different, yeah, I know).
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: Lawrence Luckinbill as Sybok.
  • Vindicated by History: To a very slight degree. For about a decade or so after its release it tended to be up there with things like Howard the Duck and Batman and Robin on "Worst Films of All-Time" lists, and wasn't much better regarded among Star Trek fans. Nowadays it tends to be regarded as just a mediocre sci-fi flick, with the likes of Battlefield Earth attracting more Bile Fascination from casual viewers, and Trek fans turning their ire toward Star Trek: Nemesis (and to a lesser extent Star Trek: Insurrection).
    • And with Into Darkness easily trumping both of those in fan distaste, it's probably not looking too bad these days.
  • What Could Have Been: According to Shatner and several others in on the original creation process of the movie, the plot would have followed the current form of the film much the same... until they met God. Instead of being a random alien, this would turn out to be Satan and McCoy would sacrifice himself to spare Spock and Kirk -- who would simply dive into Hell after their friend and drag him out of Hell with Satan nipping at their heels.
    • This was nixed by various other people working on the film as just being too polarizing and not fitting for Star Trek. Or something equally bizarre -- which resulted in a string of compromises that resulted in a script far worse for the wear. Combined with the Special Effects Failure that would later fly up...
    • It should be noted that in one episode of TAS, they did go to the center of the galaxy and find Satan -- though that story actually had the opposite denouement to Shatner's idea, and revealed that "Satan" was actually the sole nice guy in a world full of jerks.
    • The "rock monsters" mentioned above under Special Effects Failure certainly also apply, at least in that they looked far better than the rest of the feature's effects.
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