Trivia / Star Trek: Generations

• Actor-Shared Background: Kirk is also an equestrian, as is William Shatner. Those horses were rented from Shatner himself.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Malcolm McDowell only took the role of Dr. Soran after seeing he would get to kill Kirk (though it also helped that his nephew Alexander Siddig was a main cast member on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).
• Blooper: From the commentary, Moore and Braga marvel that no one on set or in the editing room caught Jonathan Frakes' flub about a "pretty big margin of error." ^*Said in response to Worf calculating the time it would take a rocket launched from the planet surface to reach the star against the time it would take him to find and destroy said rocket should it launch, the difference of which ends up being a matter of seconds. What Riker meant was a pretty small margin.
• B-Team Sequel: This is the first Trek film created without any input whatsoever from the dearly departed Gene Roddenberry, albeit he'd had very little input in any of the TOS films after Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
• The Cast Showoff: This is the entire reason for the horseback riding scene. William Shatner is an expert at horseback riding, and having his horse walk sideways to join Stewart is pure showing off. He even taught Patrick Stewart how to ride properly, Stewart having spent very little time on a horse (despite Capt. Picard's love of it), including teaching Stewart to wear pantyhose under his uniform (they prevent chafing). The fact that Shatner owned the horses featured in the film^note Shatner is a renowned breeder and shower of quarter horses and Paramount had to pay Shatner union-mandated rates to rent them was also certainly a plus.
• Christmas Rushed: Filming for the movie began less than a week after wrapping the TNG finale "All Good Things," with a release date about 9 months away. Writers Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore have said they worked on both scripts at the same and felt Generations came up short. They were hoping to introduce new uniforms, but the time crunch prevented quality control and they were deemed unsatisfactory. Kirk was also intended to die after being shot by Soran, but quick reshoots just months before release changed it to the collapsing bridge.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The writers were never satisfied with the film, and note that Ron Moore ended up writing the death of a childhood hero. One problem came down to that they worked on both the film script and the TNG Grand Finale "All Good Things..." at the same time, and they felt "All Good Things" turned out the better script.
  • Even Malcolm McDowell thought that Kirk's death could have been handled better.
  • Moore and Braga had a hard time talking William Shatner into signing on, as he felt the early drafts didn't neccessarily need Kirk as a character, and he also disliked that Kirk, who had always been depicted as someone that needed to be active, not only 'retired' to a peaceful life in The Nexus but almost had to be press-ganged into coming back (a rewrite where Kirk realizes on his own that The Nexus is an illusion solved that particular problem). And while Shatner liked Kirk's death at the time, he later came to believe it flew in the face of what Kirk had said in Star Trek V, that Kirk had always felt he would die alone.
• Creator's Apathy: Picard crawling through a hole in the rock to get past the force field. On the DVD Commentary, Ron Moore and Brannon Braga reveal that they struggled mightily to come up with a better way for him to do it within their deadline, then finally gave up.
• Deleted Scene:
  • The film was supposed to open with Kirk doing an orbital skydiving act, further implicating that he was not taking retirement well. It was filmed, but cut for time constraints. The suit was reused in in Voyager where Torres was doing such in a holodeck simulation.
  • After Harriman, Scotty and Chekov discover that deflector control has been destroyed aboard the USS Enterprise-B where Ensign Sulu tries to use the ship's sensors to locate Kirk and Chekov laments that he never thought Kirk's life would end the way it appears to. Scott reminds Chekov that "all things end, laddie" while Harriman orders the ship home.
  • A short trim on the holodeck scene where Dr. Crusher asks Geordi if the holodeck safety protocols are on-line just before Worf attempts to jump for the hat.
  • An alternate take of Data pushing Beverly Crusher into the water, where Worf shoots Riker a dirty look after climbing back aboard and Dr. Crusher refuses Data's help.
  • A short trim on the Ten Forward scene where after asking for more of the disgusting drink from Frocas III, Data takes another sip and is again revolted, effectively ruining the joke.
  • An alternate take of Data's emotional seizure aboard the Amargosa observatory where he experiences many more emotions, including one with an obvious sexual overtone.
  • After Soran orders the Klingon ship to the Veridian system, a Klingon officer brings Geordi's unconscious body to the bridge where Soran has him brought with him for interrogation. The scene then shifts to the Enterprise where Worf and Riker discover that the Bird-of-Prey belongs to Lursa and B'Etor and find Data being examined in sick-bay by Dr. Crusher who tells them that the emotion chip has been fused into his neural net and cannot be removed. Data expresses concern for Geordi's safety while Dr. Crusher briefs Riker and Worf on Soran. This scene was later referenced by Captain Picard in a log entry in the final cut.
  • The "La Forge Torture" scene where Soran uses a Borg nanoprobe to stop Geordi's heart, causing him agony. Soran interrogates him for information on how much the Enterprise crew have figured out of his plans and if Guinan has told the crew about him. Soran's line about Geordi's "heart just wasn't in it" is a reference to this scene. Later, Dr. Crusher mentions that she removed the nanoprobe.
  • A short scene where Lursa and B'Etor spy on La Forge taking a bath. This scene was referenced later in the final cut where B'Etor complains that La Forge is the only Starfleet engineer who doesn't go to engineering.
  • A short scene where Dr. Crusher leads her patients and staff out of sickbay in preparation for the saucer separation.
  • Various shots of Dr. Crusher and Geordi leading their parties to safe locations while crewmembers remove all breakables from high altitudes in preparation for the crash.
  • An alternate take of the crash sequence where Picard's family album is knocked off his desk in the ready room as the crash begins. As the ship skids along the surface of the planet, Worf breaks open the equipment locker on the bridge and tosses Data a palm beacon as he tries to protect Counselor Troi at the helm. Meanwhile, Worf props another injured crewmember into Riker's chair.
  • An alternate take of the Picard family Christmas where the children present him with a sextant (which Thomas Picard refers to as a "sack-tent").
  • An alternate take of Picard convincing Kirk to join him on Veridian III where Kirk compares the Nexus to orbital skydiving; exciting at first, but, ultimately empty. Kirk also realizes that Spock's advice of taking on such a mission would be illogical is correct.
  • An alternate climax where Kirk takes many of the falls that Soran takes in the final cut. After Kirk retrieves the PADD, he quips "The 24th century isn't so tough" just before Soran shoots him in the back with a hidden phaser in his boot. As he dies, Picard sets the solar probe to explode too early, foiling Soran's plans. Soran rushes Picard, who grabs Soran's phaser and kills him, while Kirk dies without saying a word.
  • Geordi and Worf rescue Picard in the shuttlecraft Hawking. Picard notices the damage to the shuttle and asks if the Klingons had given them any trouble, to which Geordi replies "You could say that".
  • Crusher and Nurse Ogawa sort through the shattered remains of the sickbay where Crusher wonders if she should take a stretcher herself, due to the exhaustion of treating so many patients.
• Executive Meddling:
  • The entirety of the movie wound up being a result of this. The executives were already planning on having the TNG cast transition to film to take over from the TOS crew, but, as detailed in "Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Continuing Mission" by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens, the studio mandated that the writers had to treat the audience as if they've never seen a single episode of the series before. This meant that they not only had to introduce the TNG cast as if it was the first time, but it also meant they had to do the same with the TOS cast, which wound up limiting the veterans of the latter series from the planned seven to just three.
  • Why Kirk ends up being underused and having a disappointing end. Brannon Braga (yes, him again, he always shows up in these situations) and Ronald D Moore were told from the outset that a) the movie had to be a TOS/TNG crossover, b) said crossover had to be an original-cast prologue and a Kirk-cameo ending, c) there had to be a comical subplot (which is Data getting his emotion chip). The screenwriters both admitted on the DVD Commentary that despite all this, what they wrote still wasn't up to scratch (both blame being over-stretched from having to also write the Next Gen finale "All Good Things" at the same time).
  • The crossover with TOS was actually executive producer Rick Berman's idea. Paramount had initially offered to greenlight a TNG film during the show's sixth season, Berman suggested the crossover as a "passing the baton" film, and the studio agreed.
  • Berman also mandated that the Duras Sisters' ship had to be a Klingon Bird-of-Prey, as he wanted to re-use the stock footage of Chang's Bird-of-Prey exploding from the previous film. Moore and Braga had intended to create an all-new Klingon ship for the film, but had to scrap that plan, though Moore later admitted that the duo had screwed up by making it a scout ship akin to Chang's ship, instead of one of the larger K'Vort-type ships from TNG's run, which were shown as being able to go head-to-head with the Enterprise much more convincingly.
• Focus Group Ending: Kirk's original death scene had Dr. Soran simply shooting him in the back. Test audiences hated it so much that it was completely reshot to the current Dropped a Bridge on Him.
• Friendship on the Set: William Shatner and Patrick Stewart became good friends. Shatner advised Stewart how to ride a horse properly.
• Killed by Request: According to Brannon Braga (as a defence, though Shatner would later confirm), William Shatner was actually involved in the choice to kill off Kirk.
• The Merch: An extension of Playmates' Next Generation line, this all but cemented Star Trek's status as a long-runner in the toy world. Besides the figurines, there were also two new starships, one of which was a "battle-damaged" Enterprise, and the Engineering Room playset, which hooked on to the Bridge playset, and could be accessed by the sliding doors.
• On-Set Injury: Marina Sirtis suffered some mild burns during the Enterprise-D crash sequence..
• Orphaned Reference: Soran's line about Geordi's heart not being in the conversation refers to a deleted scene that involved him torturing Geordi by repeatedly stopping his heart. It also has Dr. Crusher saying "I removed the nanoprobe" (that Soran used to stop Geordi's heart), leaving the audience to wonder "what nanoprobe?"
• Prop Recycling:
  • Only Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner had their own DS9-style uniforms made for them. Jonathan Frakes (6'3") wore one of Avery Brooks' (6'1"), and LeVar Burton (5'7") wore one of Colm Meaney's (5'11") costume, resulting in Riker's uniform looking too small, and Geordi's uniform looking too big.
  • The Enterprise-B model was a redress and repaint of the Excelsior first seen in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. ILM attached several break-away panels near the deflector dish which they could use to show damage without harming the model itself. They believed that they could remove the additions and restore the model for future use, however, they found that they could not remove the new parts without harming the base model. This is why the USS Lakota which appears in "Paradise Lost” resembles the Enterprise-B instead of the Excelsior. In the episode the describe the Lakota as having been upgraded.
  • The Oberth-class USS Grissom model from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the Miranda-class USS Reliant model from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and the Nebula-class USS Phoenix model from "The Wounded" are reused as the ships evacuating the Enterprise-D.
• Real-Life Relative: Walter Koenig’s wife Judy Levitt appears as one of the El-Aurian survivors.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: The demise of the Enterprise-D was a foregone conclusion; the aging Next Generation sets, built for television, were simply not up to big-screen standards. That's one reason that the bridge scenes are fairly dark. Rather than rebuild them, they opted for the Enterprise-E and brand-new sets for the next films.
• Reality Subtext:
  • Kirk and Scotty are a little… tense with each other, with the reality that Shatner knew full well by now that Doohan thought he was awful. (Though they did make up towards the end of Doohan’s life and Shatner credits their work on this film in helping to thaw relations between them.)
  • Riker wears his DS9-style uniform with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows. This was because Jonathan Frakes was wearing Avery Brooks' costume and is both taller than Brooks and long-limbed. The sleeves being rolled up hid the fact that the cuffs only came to Frakes' forearms.
• Recycled Script:
  • The Duras sisters' attack against the Enterprise-D is essentially the same as Khan's first attack against the Enterprise from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and they're defeated the same way: the Enterprise forces their ship to lower their shields, becoming vulnerable to an attack.
  • Geordi gets kidnapped, tortured, and has his visor manipulated by his abductors, just like in the TNG episode "The Mind's Eye".
• Refitted for Sequel: An early draft for Star Trek: The Motion Picture had the Enterprise conducting a saucer separation because of a Klingon attack damaging the engineering hull. Even still, the writers toyed with the sixth season finale ending with a saucer separation and crashing on a planet, but not done for being really expensive to reset something like that for a show entering its final season.
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: An example of the "both being made together" type. The action figures from the movie reflected certain aspects of the pre-production version, but did not accurately reflect the movie as released in theatres. For example, one problem was an action figure based around Captain Kirk in an orbital skydiving suit, which was from a scene which was filmed but cut from the theatrical release. Another, more famous problem with the figures was that all the Next Generation characters appear in new versions of their standard television uniforms: these new uniforms were intended to debut in the film, and were even designed by the costume department, but a last minute decision seen them pulled before filming began, replaced with the jumpsuits from Deep Space Nine (and Voyager). Nobody told the people making the action figures that these new costumes had been pulled, however, so all the action figures are wearing Starfleet uniforms that were never actually seen on screen...
• Throw It In!:
  • When Data is scanning for life forms, he was originally supposed to hum. Brent Spiner decided to ad-lib and started singing about "precious little life forms." Director David Carson was amused and decided to leave it in. The look of surprise on the other actors is real.
  • Kirk's wide-eyed "Oh, my..." just before death was improvised by William Shatner. He deliberated for a while on how his character would approach death, and decided that Kirk would find it wondrous. (Shatner himself says that he's terrified of dying).
• Troubled Production: While production might not have been as troublesome as the original cast's first film, but it was certainly a baptism of fire for the Star Trek: The Next Generation crew:
  • With TNG showrunners Michael Piller and Jeri Taylor too busy working on running Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and creating Star Trek: Voyager respectively, producer and franchise head honcho Rick Berman commissioned two competing screenplays; one from frequent TNG writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, and one from former TNG showrunner Maurice Hurley. Hurley's screenplay eventually turned out to be unusable, resulting in them being forced to go with the Moore and Braga script.
  • As detailed above in Executive Meddling, the studio handed out a requirement to the writing team that they had to treat the characters in the film as if no one had ever seen them before. This meant that the planned appearances from the TOS crew had to be trimmed down, as they couldn't handle the idea of juggling 14 different characters in the same way.
  • Berman handed Moore and Braga a "laundry list" of plot elements they had to use — specifically, that it had to be a cross-over film with Kirk appearing in the TNG era, that the opening had to show the until-then unseen Enterprise-B, that the Duras Sisters had to be involved and operating a Bird-of-Prey (so that they could re-use the Stock Footage of the Big Bad's Bird-of-Prey exploding from the previous film), and that the story had to end with Kirk's death — causing them to struggle to juggle all the elements required. To make things worse, they had to work on TNG's finale, "All Good Things" at the same time, and with that being the one more urgently required, it got the most attention, hurting the screenplay for Generations.
  • When it came to picking a director, Berman initially approached Leonard Nimoy, who was willing to do it. However, negotiations soon broke down when Berman made it clear that Nimoy would not have any creative input—Nimoy also similarly refused to return as Spock for the planned opening scene, as he felt the dialogue was too generic (subsequently DeForest Kelley bowed out when he learned Nimoy wasn't coming back either). Wanting a director who was more used to just filming the screenplay as written and not trying to over-step what he saw as the director's boundaries, Berman instead hired David Carson, who had recently directed DS9's pilot episode.
  • By that same token, George Takei and Nichelle Nichols wouldn't come back either, with the former outright refusing when they planned to make him the Enterprise-B's helmsman^note He had been aghast against staying the helmsman for the previous four films prior to The Undiscovered Country, and didn't want Sulu to take a step back in his career. Walther Koenig and James Doohan did agree to return for the opening sequence, but things between them and William Shatner were...tense to say the least. Shatner had only learned recently that his costars despised his prima donna antics during TOS and the six major films, and the three days for which they were on set made it difficult (though to Shatner's credit, he did admit that their time on set helped break the ice between him and Doohan, allowing them to reconcile just before Doohan's passing).
  • During pre-production and filming, the combination of a director, producer and screenwriters who were all new to theatrical film production resulted in numerous poor budgetary decisions, including spending exorbitant amounts of money on sets and costumes that would have only a few minutes of screentime, leaving the rest of the production short-changed.
  • They also had new costumes designed, but after the new designs proved unsatisfactory (it takes time to figure out actor functionality and how it functions under different lighting set-ups), they decided the DS9-style outfits had a more cinematic quality to it. Unfortunately, they only had the money to give Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner new outfits; Jonathan Frakes and Levar Burton had to make do with Avery Brooks' and Colm Meaney's DS9 outfits respectively (neither of which quite fit right), while Michael Dorn^note there weren't any in his size with the proper divisional color, which became somewhat ironic when he was brought over to DS9 and changed divisions, Gates McFadden, and Marina Sirtis^note According to Sirtis, she and McFadden flat out refused to wear the DS9 uniform because they thought that the design didn't look flattering on Terry Farrell and if a Statuesque Stunner like Farrell couldn't pull it off, then who could? were stuck with the TNG uniforms.
  • The ending was what caused the most trouble. At first, the film had a short, abrupt ending in which Kirk and Picard foil the Big Bad, only for Kirk to die from being shot in the back. This got such a terrible reaction from test audiences that Paramount told Berman to go out and completely reshoot the film's ending, adding in a new death for Kirk in which they Dropped a Bridge on Him. In a repeat of The Motion Picture, Generations ultimately proved a commercial success, but a critical failure.
  • The reshot ending could only use the outdoor catwalks because they were the only sets remaining after the original filming had ended. So the new ending had to take place there.
  • In a more hilarious example, Marina Sirtis caused the climactic scene of the Enterprise crashing into the planet to have to be reset, wasting four hours. Why? A burning ember from one of the explosions landed in the seat and burned right through her outfit.
• Uncredited Role: Whoopi Goldberg is uncredited for her appearance as Guinan, despite her significant role.
• Wag the Director:
  • Michael Dorn was so against the scene where Worf falls in the water that he had a ten-minute argument with Michael Pillar to have it removed. As he put it, "I just didn't think it was all that funny".
  • Malcolm McDowell was keen on playing a villain, but he didn't want to spend a long time in a makeup chair. As a result, Soran is a human-looking alien. Luckily, Guinan being a long-established character of the same species who also looks human made this very easy to buy.
  • Nimoy talked in a convention about how if he'd been there, he would have fought to get Kirk's death changed to be more heroic.
• What Could Have Been: See the page.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Tim Russ plays one of the bridge officers on the Enterprise-B several months before playing Tuvok on Star Trek: Voyager. Hilariously, the Voyager episode "Flashback" would show that Tuvok was serving on the USS Excelsior during the events of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.
  • One of the El-Aurian refugees is played by Walter Koenig's wife, Judith Levitt, who previously played a doctor in Star Trek IV and an admiral in Star Trek VI.

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