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thefirstfleet — What if Generations were good
Published: 2014-07-23 20:33:48 +0000 UTC; Views: 8935; Favourites: 183; Downloads: 285
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Have you evenr wondered, what movie we'd have gotten if Generations did not suck? Here's my treatment:We start out with the Enterprise-A returning to Earth. All of the classic crew are aboard, except, of course, Sulu. The Enterprise is being welcomed by Starfleet Command via subspace radio, and we see a saddened Kirk finally accepting that his carreer as a satship captain is over.
But, lo and behold, a wild energy beam suddenly appears! It's what we'll learn to be the Nexus wave, threatening the El-Aurian refugee ships. Kirk recieves the call and orders the Enterprise to the rescue. The Enterprise is caugh in the enrgy ribbon. Spock calculates that a photon torpedo detonation would cause the energy to dissipate enough for the Enterprise and the El-Aurians to break free. The only problem is that there are no torpedoes left aboard after the Enterprise' battle with Chang's BoP.
Scotty comes to the rescue, modifying the deflector to emit the necessary energy. However, the deflector, like other systems of the Enterprise, are not functioning perfectly, after all the damage they recieved from Chang's attack. The deflector fires up, cutting a path for the El-Aurians to escape. The whole system then shorts out, and we see the path being engulfed in the energy of the Nexus again.
Pandemonum reigns on the bridge of the Enterprise, as Kirk, Spock, Bones and the others try to find back-ups that are still working. The Nexus ribbon reaches out toward the Enterprise, energy threads lick the marred hull of the starship. Bridge consoles flare up, a buzzing noise gets louder and louder. Close-up on Kirk's face as everything suddenly falls silent and still: the moment he realizes that all is lost. We see the Nexus ribbon overfloying the Enterprise and the mighty starship vanishes in a flash of light.
A ceremony is held in rememberance of the Enterprise and her noble crew, presided by Sulu. We learn that the Enterprise-B is scheduled to launch in a year to commemorate the heroic sacrifice of its predeccessor. Thousands are present to ourn Starfleet's greatest heroes. We can see some familiar faces: Rand is there, as well as Carol Marcus, but also Guinan and Soran.
***
Eighty years pass, and we see the Enterprise-D as it investigates the Amargosa station mystety. From this point on, the movie goes on as it does originally, except for one thing: Soran is revealed to be a supreme computer genius, basically the second Daystrom. This is how he manages to hack the Enterprise's defence systems.
Also, the ship that the Duras sisters usse is not an old BoP: it's a Negh'var or at least a Vor'cha. It pummels the Enterprise, which is defenceless without shields. Although the D has the firepower, she can't keep up the fight with most of her defences gone. Picard is already on the planet, Soran detonates the sun, and the D's saucer crashes, as it was supposed to happen.
Picard aqwakens in the Nexus, where he finds an echo of Guinan. Asking for help, Guinan tells him that there are people who can help him and guides him to the Enterprise-A. Picard convinces Kirk and the others to help him saving the world. The Enterprise-A returns to Picard's time, just as the Duras's ship opens up its barrage. The two Enterprises manage to defeat it, although both ships are critically damaged in the process. Picard and Kirk beam down to the planet to confront Soran.
The two Captains fight the El-Aurian in a classic fistfight. While Kirk is old, he's still a fighter, and while Picard is a pacifist, he's not the man who lets himself being bullied around. They defeat Soran and disable the trilithium torpedo just before its countdown reaches zero.
Both Captains return to their respective Enterprises. Picard hails Kirk, asking them what he will do. Kirk says Scotty'll repair the Enterprise-A enough to make her do a slighshot tiem travel to the past. Picard tells Kirk that doing so would change the timeline, as the Enterprise-A is known to have perished on her final voyage home. Spock says logic dictates they remain in Picard's time, and even Bones agrees. Kirk smiles at the camera, saying: Who are we to argue with history?
The two Enterprises limp back to Earth. The world celebarates their victory and the return of the legendary Enterprise-A. Starfleet Command assures Kirk and his crew that they can stay inservice if they like to. Kirk, of course, agrees. The final scenes show the Enterprise-D in drydock, as she is repaired and refitted. We can see some elements that are reminescent of her AGT configuration. Picard walk up to the bridge, sits down into his good old chair, looking all cheerful about the future. After all, with both him and Kirk around, Starfleet's new golden age has begun.
Models by me
Planet rendered in Genetica
Nexus effect by Paramount Pictures
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Comments: 173
Star Trek Generations does have a lot of flaws but overall it was an "OK" film. One of my big problems does have to do with the Klingon Bird of Prey pummeling the Enterprise-D. Even with the added advantage to the Duras Sisters using Geordi's visor to see the shield and weapon modulations of the ship, the E-D should have destroyed the smaller Klingon vessel with ease via a spread of photon torpedoes. If Lursa and B'Etor used a Vorcha class cruiser or better yet, a bird of prey that could fire while cloaked without any flaws like on Chang's ship, the damage to the Enterprise would be easier to accept than what actually happened in the film.
Personally, I would have liked the Romulans to have been the villains featured instead of the Duras sisters. Imagine Picard and the Enterprise-D going up against Commander Sela and a D'Deridex class warbird or a new, even deadlier ship? I like Lursa and B'Etor but I do not think they were worthy of being the villains to destroy the Enterprise D. I would hate to see Sela get killed but the films nor the television series didn't do anything with her after the Unification two-parter. Well, except maybe for Star Trek Online but that game is not technically canon.
P.S. What about Leonard McCoy, Spock and Montgomery Scott showing up in The Next Generation? Then again there is so much time travel/quantum reality craziness in Star Trek that almost anything is possible. 
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Well, it's infinite diversity in infinite combinations!
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Yes indeed! There has gotta be a quantum reality where the OG crew takes a trip to the 24th century.
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I have to admit with all its flaws I really enjoyed Star Trek Generations; though it still bothers me that Riker was a complete tool and was defeated by the Duras Sisters in an older model Bird-of-Prey. That being said I would of loved to have seen this version in the movie theaters or at the very least even as a fanfiction. My question is in some novels Captain Morgan Bateson of the USS Bozeman were given a Sovereign-class starship after the original was retired when they arrived in the future. Would we expect the same for Captain Kirk and the Enterprise -A crew or would you give the crew time to get a acclimated to the future.
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Yes that would be awesome and I also found a perfect crew photo for them.
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Generations is weird. I like it, but not as much as i thought i would. I knew there was no way to get everyone from TOS back on to do this, & i know that this was intended to be a TNG movie first......But....
Here's the thing. Even though TNG had just ended, & they wanted to keep their TOS fans by putting Kirk Scotty & Checkov in the film. They had to introduce TNG to the larger audience & the larger Trek audience who jumped shark when TNG came out. Instead they started it off on the Holodeck with Worf getting a promotion. WAIT WHAT?! The way the TNG crew was introduced was good to the fans who watched TNG, but not to those just new to TNG things. Funny how in the first 15 minutes it's already a better TOS movie than it is a TNG movie...
Not helping was the destruction of the Enterprise-D. I do believe that destroying the Enterprise-D was always part of the plan, &............i'm sorry but i like how it was destroyed. With everyone being hauled on to the Saucer section & just barely getting out of there to crash into the planet & waste the rest of the films budget if you look up how it was made online. I know people are all "BLASPHEMY" because an old ship like the Bird of Prey was the one to destroy the Enterprise-D? Sure.....Okay......why not.......at least it was a ship we were already familiar with & had seen plenty of times in the TOS films. I like to see it as if it was the last Bird of Prey out there & the ships legacy continued on by destroying the Enterprise-D. Bad for us, but good for the Klingon's who refused to change.
Good stuff. But there wasn't enough of that to justify the movie, plus we all want different needs & wants from the first TNG film, & while i believe not everyone was going to be pleased anyway, at least don't waste the audiences time right? No let's just give Data his emotion chip from Season 7 & have him have his big emotion breakdown which should've been done in a sequel...Again, no one unfamiliar with TNG is going to know this.
Killing Kirk i believe was also always the plan, but i do like how it was done. Of course instead of dying on the Bridge, he died.......on a bridge............close enough. I mean it's much better than the original ending they were going to use...
My 13 year old self would've wanted the TOS & TNG crew fighting it out, but now of days i see why that wasn't going to happen. Still though, as a Star-Trek film coming off of Star-Trek VI & TNG, it's OK. As the first TNG film, not so much.
As for your fix. Well that defiantly would've been a way to keep the TOS fans coming back for sure. Good stuff.
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While I love you art, I personally have to disagree about the 'fix'. Personally, I liked Generations for what it is, and especially since I found out how much of the budget had been slashed that resulted in a refit for the outside of the D being undone because they no longer had the budget for all of the shots and had to reuse footage from TNG along with all of the other recycled footage.
Hell, we lost out on a new uniform design because of the budget being slashed.
66.media.tumblr.com/87135db5d1…
www.trekbbs.com/threads/star-t…
It's funny, I'm positive that almost every issue with the film would have been either lessened or eliminated if they had gotten their original budget.
Of course, the D was slated for destruction anyway. They were going to have to make new sets for future movies anyway since the ones they used were mostly the old TV sets and the model was actually a nightmare to film because the design was mostly finalized before the team that would actually build the model was brought on board which resulted in a massive amount of issues with putting places to mount the model which was only compounded by the saucer separation feature.
Although in another interesting 'what could have been', right after the filming of Generations the production team changed the registry on her saucer to NCC-1701-E.
Mind you if there were to be a 'fix' for Generations, I'd probably would have given the B a larger role and made it a story that truly spanned the decades like the trailer implied.
Still, I love the art from there timelines where the D lives.
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Thank you, and I understand your points.
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Sounds a lot better that what we got with Generations. Only thing is Kirk's crew being in Picard's century. Not far fetched because Scotty and Bones are known to have survived into TNG. My only thing is...how will Kirk feel about someone other than himself captaining the Enterprise ? Yes...the USS Enterprise-A does survive. But then again, maybe Kirk's Enterprise can explore a different region of Space. Can they be two Enterprises be in service at the same time ?
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Well, you know: Infinite diversity in infinite combinations
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Nice concept. But there is one plot hole: Bones is alive during the first Episode of TNG. He is visiting the Enterprise-D as an old man. Another idea would be like that: The Kirk-Enterprise is encountering something very dangerous and defeating it. But the defeat is not total and Kirk knows that this danger will rise again. He sets some kind of clue or trigger for future generations to deal with this danger. Clues the TNG-Crew has to follow. The story of the movie could have been told simutaneously with cuts between scenes. For example a scene were Picard is going down a dark hallway and finds some stuff on the ground. Cut. The next scene shows Kirk going down that hallway hundred years before and laying down the stuff.
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Nice concept. But there is one plot hole: Bones is alive during the first Episode of TNG. He is visiting the Enterprise-D as an old man. Another idea would be like that: The Kirk-Enterprise is encountering something very dangerous and defeating it. But the defeat is not total and Kirk knows that this danger will rise again. He sets some kind of clue or trigger for future generations to deal with this danger. Clues the TNG-Crew has to follow. The story of the movie could have been told simutaneously with cuts between scenes. For example a scene were Picard is going down a dark hallway and finds some stuff on the ground. Cut. The next scene shows Kirk going down that hallway hundred years before and laying down the stuff.
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I love it! I love this story! It would've been a great send-off for Kirk, and it does feel very Star Trek. I love the way you handle Kirk's final decision, less is more! Overall, I'm very impressed. You should be writing for Star Trek these days.
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There is a hole in your plot: there is no way in hell that the torpedoes that the Enterprise used on Chang's warbird, or even those sneakily shot at Kronos One, was her entire complement. You'd have to make her battle with Section 31 afterwards canon to even approach using this as a plot point.
Otherwise, it all clicks rather well with me! Then again, there would be nothing wrong with the Enterprise taking so much damage, that she is destroyed as planned... But I just like the Sovereign class way too much! No Enterprise-D destruction means that the Sovereign class wouldn't have existed! But seeing her being refitted to Entente specs would be pretty cool!
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Not defending Star Trek Generations, because it was bad... but your idea is just as ridiculous as 90% of Star Trek fanfiction. I'd rather that the TOS crew just finished their careers in Starfleet and/or moved on to other things. As for TNG, they should have stayed out of film. Entirely.
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Thank you very much
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I like the generations movie, the only bad part to the film was the bird of prey taking down a galaxy class starship, personally I think that's a huge continuity error. I mean In Ds9 those ships gets destroyed in one shot.. Good picture however
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I like you artwork, Dave, and I have nothing against you personally, but this rewrite of yours doesn't represent you very well. It makes you come off as a whiny, immature fanboy who thinks he's smarter than the creators. That sort of thing can rub people up the wrong way. It's not even all that good of a rewrite anyway, as it suffers from contrived melodrama, endless cliché, and most of all, outright ignoring certain parts of the continuity itself just to force sympathies out of the viewers.
As to the issue of Kirk's death and the destruction of the Enterprise-D, two things. First, where is it written that people get the deaths we think they deserve? That doesn't happen in real life, so why should it happen in fiction? Second, is the manner of his death more important than what it accomplishes? I mean, think about it - Kirk sacrificed himself to save an entire planetary system and with it millions of lives, including the Enterprise crew, from destruction at the hands of a madman. Would we have been more satisfied if he died fighting a rogue Klingon hit squad over Angel Falls while achieving absolutely nothing just because we get a nice fight scene? No, we would've felt cheated, as Kirk would've died for nothing. The manner of his death in the film may have seemed undignified if presented at face value, but if we consider what the character achieved, then it becomes actually quite the opposite. Are you really going to ignore all that just to satisfy your own bias on the topic?
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The key word is fiction. It's enough to see all the bad things in real life. When I experience fiction, I want my heroes to do the impossible. Even if it's a fitting death.
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True, but fiction still needs to have some founding in reality, even if it's just a very small amount, otherwise it's no longer believable. The point is, there is no rule stating that characters, fictional or otherwise, must get the deaths we think they deserve. That sort of thing is way too subjective anyway. Ultimately, as I have said before, whining about Kirk's death while ignoring what he achieved in the process doesn't represent you well. It makes you come off as being little better than the fanboys who enabled J.J. Abrams' butchery of the franchise. Speaking of which, I'm starting to become convinced that the whole "bring back Kirk" mindset was partially the reason for that laughable scene in Into Darkness (which, by the way, Generations is 1,000 times better than) where Kirk dies and is revived immediately afterwards. That and it being a failed attempt at an homage to The Wrath of Khan that instead came off as a parody.
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I friggin love this idea! Not only does it give a better ending to the TOS crew, but it allows the Enterprise D to survive. While i absolutely love the Enterprise E, the Sovereign class just seems far too combat-oriented to be an Enterprise. Maybe this is a symbolic choice, that the Federation has sobered up as a result of the Borg and isn't as wide-eyed as before, but now I'm getting sidetracked. I think the main reason this speaks to me is that I've always had a thing for people of the past being introduced to the trek future (Moriarty and Scotty just to name a few). Speaking of which, there is just one thing I wanted to say; if you could manage to explain Scotty somehow not being on board the A when it went into the nexus (since he appeared in TNG: Relics), you'd even pass the Test Of Ultimate Trekkie Nit-Picking!
Oh and the render is awesome too, as per usual
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One of the many things I disliked about that movie was Kirk's fantasy life in the nexus. The danger of phenomena was supposed to be that it granted you a tailor-made fantasy; one that would be painful to part from. (This pain of separation was what drove Soran insane.)
In the movie, the fantasy intended to tempt Kirk into staying was the arms of some random chick, whom we only see in silhouette. I think it would have been more resonant to have them man tempted by the illusion of a lost love from an actual episode. Imagine your reaction if Picard were to come upon Kirk walking arm in arm with Edith Keeler. Joan Collins is still alive after all.
I think your idea of simply having Soran be smart enough to hack the Enterprise D's computer is far better than having Geordi captured and tortured (Once again. 
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The E-D crew always look like fools. This is the thing that makes most of TNG unwatchable: the characters are weak, papier-mache clichés.
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I wish you could have written Generations. The end result we got isn't the worst thing I've ever seen, it just feels so limited
Your version is more of what the first TNG film outing should have been, thrilling, bold, and absolutely exciting. But we did get First Contact, so I guess I shouldn't complain too much.
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One of these days, we'll be able to CGI us up a movie just like that!
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I need to learn to animate...
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Generations was a good movie it's my favorite from the next generation movie series.
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I prefer the TOS movies.
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This... would have been grand! I agree... I hate that a damned BoP was able to thrash the Galaxy Class so soundly... even WITHOUT shields, the armor of the 1701-D should have held up better than it did!
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Indeed. Unfortunately, BnB wanted to kill off the 1701-D...
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Yeah... I mean, don't get me wrong, I like the Sovereign over the Galaxy myself (I see the Galaxy as more explorer/diplomatic/scientific... basically a generalist, where as the Sovereign strikes me as a straight up Battlecruiser) but man... they didn't do her justice going out like this!
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Ohh...should I criticize or shouldn't I?...
Personally, I thought Generations was a good enough movie as is. Not perfect, but it got the job done well enough that I don't think you could improve upon it that much without making it worse.
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The biggest problem is how they handled Kirk's death. Totally disrespectful of Trek's greatest hero.
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Oh, but let's be honest, shall we? What this is about is not at all how the scene was done, but the fact Kirk died at all. No one wanted Kirk dead.
...which leaves something of a paradox, because eventually he was going to have to. He's not immortal, and by then, the franchise had already moved on well past him and his era, and that's just the simple truth. The franchise probably had delayed it longer than needed by then anyway.
Yet his character is such that he seems so much larger than life, that no matter what version of death scene you do for him, it was always going to seem a little lackluster and not quite enough. Generations gives it it's best shot, tweaked it considerably when its first version was deemed too insufficient (seriously, their original idea for Kirk's demise was considerably poorer), and made the best of it despite that situation. Personally, I think it's fitting Kirk dies doing what he did best; trying to make a difference. And the fact that it happens without much bravado seems almost poetic to me, honestly, but to each their own.
The same can be said about the Enterprise-D, which it did not escape my notice that you insured it remained (mostly) intact in this version. I make the same argument for it as I did with Kirk, except with the D, she DID go out with a lot of bravado, in what is in all honesty still one of the most dramatic and epic sequences of the franchise. Yes, it was forced...kind of obviously too...but then so was the demise of the original Enterprise in Search for Spock, and indeed, I always found THAT scene the weaker of the two for reasons I won't go into now. But it could've had a heck of a more cheap death than this, and at least she, too, goes down fighting (and still won, at the end of the day).
The problem I find with your version is a criticism I have for a lot of trekkies these days; it's not moving or really looking forward. It's trying to stay stuck in the past, refusing to let it go when it's no longer that practical to. This is a problem for many storytelling reasons, but it's especially problematic for Star Trek, because it's never been about getting stuck in the past, it's been about looking ahead and seeing what the future might bring. Trying to paint that picture of the yet to come. That was largely why Next-Gen even exists; Roddenbury had the foresight to see that what worked for the sixties and even the seventies with the movies was looking ahead enough anymore, so he wisely opted to jump ahead a decade and reinvent that picture of the yet to come once more, to fit with what he knew then that he didn't know before.
The point being is that, you can't really be looking forward when you're continually trying to hang onto the past like what you're doing here.
That, and speaking from a writing perspective, it's quite obviously shoe-horned to fit your way, and that's not good writing, to put it bluntly.
Again, this isn't to state that Generations is entirely good because it did have faults. Pacing is a big one. But when it's all said and done, it does it much better than other movies in it's own franchise (the Motion Picture and Final Frontier readily come to mind as good examples), so I like to think it did well enough. Could've been better, but at the end of the day, I'm satisfied with the end result, nonetheless.
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I know I'm a bit of a retrograde, but I still cannot get over the way they've dealt with Kirk. Of all the Trek captians, Kirk was the most larger-than-life. His trademark move was cheating death. Falling down from a rickety bridge was something his character, not a mere mortal Human but JTK himself, could brush off with a shrug and a joke. Spock got a meaningful death in TWOK. The original Enterprise also, in TSFS. Kirk's death, on the other hand, was too forced and too out of character. I can understand that he needed to die, but not this way. He deserved better.
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So out of curiosity, how would you kill him off?
Personally, I would've done it where the no-win scenario he was always running away from finally caught up with him, and at long last, there was no way out except through death. I think Generations was actually trying to shoot for that, but fell way short. But like I said before, they actually had filmed a very different death scene for him then opted to scrap it and shoot something different last minute. As such, I'm sure what they could do was limited, due to time and available resources, and we should probably consider ourselves lucky we got the just-okay scene we did.
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Well, if he must die, he should die with a bang. I can imagine him taking command of the damaged Enterprise-D, while the ship is evacuated, to ram it into the Klingon ship (not this laughable BOP but a Vor'cha or Negh'var), throwing a punchline and going out in a blaze of glory.
Duras sisters: Who is this pathetic Human?
Kirk: I am Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise. And I hate Klingons.
BOOM!
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