David Carson’s Star Trek: Generations 1994 film. the most useless movie in the seriesfeatures a colossal negative space wedge called the Nexus, a free-floating energy ribbon of unknown origin that has been tearing apart the galaxy at regular intervals. The Nexus destroys ships, but also manages to suck up victims and deposit them in a sky-like pocket dimension where time has no meaning.
At the beginning of Generations, in the year 2293, Admiral Kirk (William Shatner) is sucked into the Nexus. Later in the film, in the year 2371, Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) also appears. At the time, Picard was busy fighting a Nexus-obsessed scientist named Dr. Soran (Malcolm McDowell), who was willing to destroy a star system in order to “direct” the Nexus to him. Picard failed and the star system was destroyed.
Since there is no time in the Nexus, Picard and Kirk are able to come face to face inside, essentially arriving at the same moment despite the 78 year difference. Picard convinces Kirk to leave the Nexus because he needs help to stop Dr. Soran’s plot. The pair exit the Nexus alongside Soran, giving themselves only about 10 minutes to stop him.
Keep in mind that time doesn’t matter in the Nexus, so Kirk and Picard could have left at any time in the story. Given that power, why did Picard decide to get out just ten minutes before Soran destroyed the star system instead of a full hour? Or 12 hours? Or a year for that matter? It’s a plot hole that has plagued Trekkies for years.
So it turned out, a 1996 interview with “Generations” screenwriter Brennan Braga, printed in Sci-Fi Universe Magazineexplains why this plot hole exists. Generations had a deleted scene that explained everything.
This is the prime directive.
Brennan Braga wrote a scene in Star Trek: Generations that explains the Nexus plot hole
The nexus, to elaborate a bit more, must have some kind of psychic quality because when Picard arrives at it, he imagines a peaceful alternate life where he has a large family and a loving wife. Picard realizes that this can’t be real and Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg) appears to him and says that no, it is not so. She was also captured by the Nexus years ago and is capable of leaving something like a psychic message for Picard. She tells him that he can exit the Nexus anywhere, anytime.
At this point, Picard’s imagination must have run wild. Why not go back in time and prevent a host of military atrocities to ruin Soran and his petty plot? I know Picard is following the temporary Prime Directive and wouldn’t want to mess with history, but surely he could think of something better than going back in time for ten minutes to fight Dr. Soran, right?
When Brannon Braga immediately asked about Picard’s non-fictional decision, he was ready to answer. Braga admitted only that his film “was full of plot holes.” Regarding the Picard-Exit conundrum, Braga said:
“Unfortunately, this is one of the plot holes. There was a speech in the film that explained all this (…), but we cut it short. You know, it’s the Prime Directive. You can’t screw up the timeline. He cannot go back to when Soran was born; the further he goes back, the more he risks. We cut the speech because it was too expositional and a little boring.”
Ok, I guess that makes sense. But I like the exposure.
Picard couldn’t go too far back in time or he would spoil the story
Indeed, the exposition would have gone a long way in making Star Trek: Generations more compelling. The film has themes of time and the passing of time. “Time is the fire in which we burn,” Dr. Soran even says once. Talking about the immutability of history would be thematically appropriate and plot-necessary.
Generations, however, is a mush, not just a Nexus-Exit plot hole. Nerds dissected this 1994 film with a scalpel, the most famous dissection – an extended 30-minute video essay from the staff of Red Letter Mediafrom the trivial to the outrageous. Like, why did Dr. Soran kidnap Geordie La Forge (LeVar Burton)? Or, if preserving the timeline was so important, why were Kirk’s remains left on the surface of Veridian III? Why was the Enterprise B the only ship in range of the crisis point when it was so close to Earth, home of the Federation? Such things.
But there are other problems. Generations was a “passing of the torch” from one generation of Star Trek to the next and was clearly created for casual moviegoers who may not be familiar with Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987 – 1994). It was an order from higher authorities. The problem was that “Next Generation” had already been on the air for seven years before “Generations” came out, and the original team had left the scene in 1991’s “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” so the torch had already been passed. The idea that we needed another movie to bring Kirk and Picard together was a rough idea from the start.
This is not one of the best Star Trek movies.
