And then there were three!
Some interesting stories in that wiki entry.
And so our journey continues through the movies based on the Original Series. Please watch the movie this weekend or this week, and come back and discuss it here.
For discussion of the first movie, go here.
For discussion of the second movie, go here.
I always admired the foresight to have Spock do that ‘remember’ thing to Bones in STII. That said, I’m never really a fan of killing beloved characters and then bringing them back to life again. (See also: Angel, Gandalf, etc.)
Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon commander is an interesting casting choice. At the time my older brother acted out Reverend Jim screaming “You gonna give me Genesis!?”
This feels like one of those in-between stories. Like, having killed Spock, they now need to do timeline maintenance in order to bring the gang back together. There’s a feeling of obligation about the whole thing. I think it’s definitely a lesser film than either II or IV.
The bit where Kirk blows up the Enterprise is moving. We’re reminded again (as we’ve known at least since ‘The Naked Time’) that this is his true love. “What have I done?” At the time my Mom was pissed about it, though, saying that Kirk should have found a better way to outwit the Klingons. I think she even called back to ‘Let That Be Your Last Battlefield’ with its use of the destruct sequence as a fake-out/bluff.
Killing David almost feels like a ‘trade’ for bringing Spock back.
I want to say that there was a comedian who did that as a “bit” in one of his acts around that time. I know that my friends and I did the same routine.
Lloyd is a decent actor, but he was so typecast as a comedic actor by that point, and was so generally goofy-looking, that I’ve always felt he was a REALLY odd choice.
I didn’t think that was well-handled. Seemed like we hadn’t really gotten enough time to know the character to really feel his death.
“Klingon bastard killed my son. Klingon bastard killed my SON!”
I’ll rewatch this for sure just to see if it comes across as cheap looking as I recall. Khan looked and felt well produced. As did the followup film, Voyage Home. But SfS felt small and cheap to me. Wonder if that is still the case.
I’ll admit it. I loved Lloyd as a Klingon. It didn’t hurt the movie for me. It improved it.
Agree with that. The movie has issues, but Lloyd is not one of them for me.
If only they’d had a scene where he sits down at the Enterprise bridge and tries to figure out the console.
“What does this button mean?”
“Slow down!”
“Okay. Whaaaaat dooooeeeess tthiiiiiiss buuuutttooooon meeeannnn…”
I always think of 3 as “the best of the bad ones” which is to say, the best of the odd ones. It’s a fun little adventure story (especially the Enterprise heist stuff) but far weaker than 2, 4, and 6 overall. And yes, I enjoyed Lloyd’s Klingon captain quite a bit.
Also worth noting McCoy’s reply to that: ‘What you had to do. What you always do. Turn dying into a fighting chance to live.’ This movie gets a bad rap, or at least a ‘meh’ rap, and I get it. It’s definitely a step down from the high tension and tight storytelling of Khan. But I’ve always liked the movie, especially the middle section where they’re stealing the Enterprise and sabotaging the Excelsior (it always amused me a little that Sulu ends up commanding the Excelsior in VI). It’s all fairly low stakes but I don’t mind. And I like that they didn’t totally punk out on Spock - yeah, they brought him back, but he’s not exactly the Spock we knew before. This movie is a nice bridge from II to IV (which I’ve also always liked, but we can talk about that later).
I do like that they committed to something of a ‘resurrected Spock’ arc, leading to his saying ‘I feel fine’ at the end of Star Trek IV (also, he laughs when they are all in the water with the whales, which is out of character for pre-death Spock unless he was being controlled by alien spores or something). You might argue that the arc in fact begins with the Kolinahr in TMP, and concludes with Spock finally at peace with his hybrid self, even if it took dying to get there.
Of course, his complete inability to relate to Sybok in V kinda makes a hash of that, but V makes a hash of a lot of things.
I believe Star Trek III is my least watched of the Original Cast movies (yes, I think I’ve seen ST:V more times). Should be interesting re-watching this as I don’t recall liking this one at all. All set for Saturday evening: Popcorn. Beer. Spock.
Just know it’s mostly Little Boy Spock and Horny Teenager Spock.
Me too. With the Klingon look you really only knew it was Lloyd from his distinctive voice, which is a great voice.
Yeah I didn’t really want to derail things but if I had to pick one thing that bugs me about Vulcans in general and ST3 by extension, it’s this whole pon farr business. It just seems so dumb to me. But then without it we probably would never have gotten the excellent Futurama episode ‘Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?’ which would be a crime.
You, sir, bring up an excellent point.
For the admirers of Lloyd’s performance against type in this, have you seen I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016) - IMDb
The arc of all four films is dwindling budgets, and so where the costs were cut in 3 just stick out far more than in the previous films, all of which had excellent to completely serviceable sets. The Genesis sets were so obviously studio sets, which arts and crafts materials and set lighting, that it must have convinced the executives to just make 4 a live action version with real life sets. After all the best thing about making movies is that if you make them in the real world, the set had already been made.
I felt that in fact 3 was very well crafted, it moves at a very steady pace, there’s little wasted time for fluff, the scenes all carry meaning and move the narrative forward. Lloyd’s performance was great, and was the initiation (as far as i can remember?) to “modern” Klingons, instead of the chain mail wearing blackface fellows from TOS and their in-between counterparts in ST1 (who looked a bit like a very professional, very weird LARPing prog rock band). I especially liked the nods to science and evolution and reminded me of the “Waldenbook” level of understanding of evolution that was popularized by After Man, that great speculative fiction book of the early 1980s with so many iconic / quasi-realistic creatures, and Genesis contained within it that disturbing meta-narrative of geological and evolutionary processes that gave it a kind of metaphysical weight (which include the semi-serious teenage scenes).
But ST3 was unsure of the tone it wanted to take, which didn’t help with the general feeling that it was a bit of a knock-down film. The Excelsior sabotage with its “car motor sputtering” sound effect just felt like they kind of stopped trying in post production, and the strange arc with David, killed off for little reason other than for both sweeping and silly melodrama and on whom both the blame and solution to Spock’s death could be pinned (by every logical path, the person sacrificed in that scene, if it had to be someone, should have been Saavik). Replacing Kirstie Alley for Robin Curtis seemed to foreshadow both actresses’ futures - the part was a thankless one but Curtis nails it in that TV show way - but Lloyd’s embracing the ham worked well as a foil for Shatner, who had long since become a ham sandwich himself, and i think he did well here. There was just little for him to do other than growl, but he made for a convincing if two dimensional villain. Sacrificing the Enterprise is a bit of a Death Star 2 moment - as if the producers, looking to recreate the success of 2, felt that something “big” had to be sacrificed like Spock had been in a dramatic set piece moment. The convoluted logic worked as a kid, and the “self destruct” sequence is pretty famous now, but in retrospect it was (again) just more melodrama.
The only disappointing thing about 3 was only just its entire conception. Unwillingness to own the death of a major character mean viewers quickly realized that nothing really mattered anymore. The lack of stakes going forward would be a real narrative problem for the petering out franchise.
I got to hang with Robin Curtis, Spice Williams (Vixis from ST:V), Todd Bryan (Klaa, ST:V), Michelle Forbes, and very briefly, John DeLancie, back in the mid-90s. I’d brought a laptop to a con in Winston-Salem so they could do a live chat on GEnie. (That was a thing that existed before the Internet went public, kids.)
Robin told this story that was hilariously delivered about when they were filming the scenes on Vulcan where Spock is reunited with his Katra. She said it was a full day of filming the procession into the caves, and she was bored to death, until she figured out a way to pass the time. She was standing behind Shatner, and decided to try to figure out where the toupee ended and the real hair began.
She said it took her a good hour because it was an excellent hairpiece.
As for the movie, definitely not one of my favorites, but it did inspire a great Kevin Pollack routine where he does Reverend Jim as Kruge. Hated to see David die, though, particulary as a Square Pegs fan. And DeForest Kelley did a really fun job of being irritated as having Spock in his head.
