I remember when Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country came out. It was so much better than the previous film, and it looked and sounded so great. Nicholas Meyer, who had done such a great job on Wrath of Khan, was back! And that Cliff Eidelman soundtrack was so cool! These things convinced us at the time that STVI was a great send-off of the original crew. But in retrospect, I think we were misled. It's actually a pretty lousy movie.For one thing, there's so much that makes no sense. We're expected to believe that Spock and McCoy invent the very first homing torpedo, capable of penetrating a cloaking device—and do so in the midst of a battle to the death? The audience has a hard time with this sequence because the whole point of the cloaking device is that it's not penetrable through such ordinary means. If it were—if cloaked ships emitted detectable mass or energy—a little torpedo with a sniffer would surely be less effective than the Enterprise's more sophisticated shipboard sensors at detecting cloaked ships and just shooting phasers at them, without all the manufactured “suspense” of watching the torpedo fly back and forth. The whole sequence violates the logic of the story in order to counterfeit a moment of triumph, which is a signature device of bad writing.
Sadly, it’s also the signature of STVI. So much of this movie is manufactured solely for purposes of these two hours. We’ve never seen “burning phasers” before, and we never will again. Valeris is invented solely for this movie. Klingon pepto-bismol blood is actually made into canon for this film, even though it’s always been red before, and goes back to being red forever after. The bridge crew has to get out antique hard-cover books to speak to the Klingons on the radio? Even if the “universal translator would be recognized,” as Chekov so helpfully tells us, this scene makes no sense—they should still be able to look up the words on the library computer and then say the words through the microphone. This whole set-up is created for a lame joke about bad translation? Say what you will about Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, but its feel-good buddy scenes were at least genuine and believable, not a series of arbitrary façades like this.
But all of this is insignificant next to the great moral failing of Star Trek VI—by which I mean the continuous portrayal of the Klingons as misunderstood victims of human meanness. Throughout Star Trek, we’ve seen that the Klingons aren’t just an aggressive race; they are a brutal warrior culture hellbent on galactic domination and dictatorship. Kor’s attempted enslavement of the Organians is a crime against decency far worse than, say, the 1931 invasion of Manchuria. The Klingons’ sabotage of quadrotriticale is little short of attempted genocide. The Rura Penthe gulag is cruel beyond description. The roster of Klingon offenses is long and frightening, when you think about it. But instead of thinking about it, we’re shown that Gorkon’s efforts toward peace are hampered by Federation prejudice and fear of change. The Klingons are victims of a “homo sapiens-only club” and a conspiracy of the military that profits by the perpetuation of tensions.
These charges are morally insane. I know of no instance in canonical Star Trek of a single unjustified aggression against the Klingon Empire by the Federation. The Klingons, on the other hand, have been a constant threat to galactic peace. They have enslaved, pillaged, and murdered in the name of a warrior culture that Kirk rightly likens to the fascist madness of the Twentieth Century. To dismiss his distrust as the grumblings of a stodgy old man with a grudge is both corrupt and impractical. Everyone would like peace with the Klingons. But as is always true, for peace to be real it must depend on justice—and that requires the Klingon Empire to acknowledge and atone for its past evils. As we soon learned from The Next Generation, the Empire never did this—and the peace at Khitomer collapsed accordingly. Ubi solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.
True, one of the bad guys in Star Trek VI is a Klingon. But the moral lesson of the story is that Kirk must learn to let go of his grievances and accept that they will never be redressed. By the time of the Khitomer conference, remember, Kirk has lost everything of value to him, mostly to Klingon aggression—his son; his ship—but it is he who must learn to forgive and not fear change so much. Azetbur, who regards the Klingons as the victims of the Federation and scoffs at the concept of inalienable human rights, learns no comparable lesson. Instead, it is she who absolves Kirk in the end. Neither she nor any other Klingon at Khitomer makes any effort whatsoever to acknowledge even a single instance of the Empire’s infringements of justice. Quite the contrary, Azetbur tells the conference “We are a proud race. We are here because we want to go on being proud.” We have seen what “being proud” means to the Klingon Empire.
This from the franchise that brought us “The Conscience of the King”? Where is the Kirk who demanded that Kodos the Executioner be brought to justice? Apparently he learns to rise above principle, and just in time to receive Azetbur’s blessing.
In the context of the late Cold War, Star Trek VI’s weary moral obtuseness is perhaps understandable. But it’s also a harbinger of the perversity to which Star Trek would fall in the Next Generation era: the captaincy of Jean-Luc Picard would regularly feature this sort of false moral equivalency on a grand scale, coupled with a cowardly hands-off attitude that in the end only perpetuates evil. By the end of Next Generation, the writers were glorifying Worf’s inane bushido ranting about honor and bloodlust, and equivocating about terrorism—accomplishing the very opposite of Gene Roddenberry’s vision. Whatever his other failings, Roddenberry and those who helped him create Star Trek knew that without a clear eye for justice and human rights—an idea that Star Trek VI actually calls “racist”!—you can never have real peace.
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