Trivia / Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

• Actor-Inspired Element: General Chang was supposed to have hair; however, Christopher Plummer preferred his bald look, so General Chang became bald.
• All-Star Cast: In addition to the main cast reprising their roles from the original Star Trek television series and films, The Undiscovered Country included quite a few famous Hollywood actors, including Kurtwood Smith, David Warner, Christopher Plummer, and Christian Slater.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Kim Cattrall took the part of Lieutenant Valeris because "How many times would I be given a chance to play a Vulcan?"
• California Doubling: Camp Khitomer is The House of the Book performance hall and library building at the American Jewish University, Brandeis-Bardin Campus in Simi Valley, California (best known as the Command Center/Power Chamber from Power Rangers). The foreground is the Fireman's Fund Building in Novato, Northern California.
• Creator Couple: Walter Koenig's wife, Judith Levitt, is one of the Starfleet Admirals at the briefing towards the beginning of the movie.
  Starfleet Admiral: Bill, are we talking about mothballing the Starfleet.
• Deleted Role: René Auberjonois filmed a small role as a Starfleet member initially presented as being an ally to Kirk and Spock, only to be revealed as an aid to the conspirators. His scenes were cut for the theatrical release, reinstated for the VHS and DVD, only to be cut again on the Blu-Ray.
• Development Gag:
  • The subtitle "The Undiscovered Country" was one of the proposed titles for Star Trek II, also written and directed by Nicolas Meyer. It should be noted that the title is a reference to Shakespeare, and unlike the film's claim that it means the future, it actually was a euphemism for death. Knowing that, the title would have made more sense for Star Trek II rather than this film.
  • Sulu becoming the Captain of his own ship was in the works as far back as Star Trek II.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • According to William Shatner's Star Trek Movie Memories, Kirk's cold-blooded "Let them die!" wasn't how he had intended the line to come off. The unedited shot includes Kirk physically recoiling, to provide the impression Kirk had regretted saying something so bloodthirsty. Nicholas Meyer promised Shatner he'd use the full shot. He lied.
  • In contrast to past Star Trek productions that necessitated a Screen Shake when the ship got hit, here the bridge sets of the Excelsior and Enterprise had gimbals built into them that allowed them to be directly shaken — hence the small "table" in front of Sulu's chair where his teacup and saucer initially sit.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Gene Roddenberry. Again. He had a hard time with Saavik being the traitor. He won this battle, and a new character was created instead.
  • Klingon blood is pink for the first time in the entire Star Trek franchise because had it been red, the film would have been slapped with an R rating by the MPAA.
  • A Chekhov's Gun example is subverted slightly via Executive Meddling. At the film's start, we learn that the Excelsior has been cataloging gaseous anomalies... but in its Big Damn Heroes moment, it's the Enterprise that interestingly just had the same technology installed recently to create a gas-seeking torpedo to find Chang's ship. Shatner insisted on the Enterprise being the one to fire the torpedo instead of the Excelsior, turning the earlier mention into an Orphaned Reference.
  • If not for those pesky meddling executives,^note specifically Paramount's head of marketing, one Mr. Frank Mancuso The Undiscovered Country would have been the title for Star Trek II.
• In Memoriam: The film was dedicated to Gene Roddenberry, who died of a cardiac arrest a few weeks before the film's release.
• Network to the Rescue: The film might have never been made (or at least would have had to contend with a budget barely any bigger than that of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock) had the new head of Paramount not been a friend of Nick Meyer's.
• Playing Against Type:
  • Brock Peters playing a racist, especially considering his advocacy for civil rights. The film prompted Creator Backlash for him because of that characterization of Cartwright. Moreover, he played one of cinema's most iconic victims of racism in the 1962 film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.
  • Hold it, Kurtwood Smith as somebody that's not a Jerkass or evil? Instead he's a Reasonable Authority Figure.
  • David Warner not playing an Evil Brit? Playing the hero of the opposite side? Of course, he did so in the previous Trek film, too.
  • An in-family example from Michael Dorn. After so long playing as a humorless warrior type who angsts over not being able to truly belong to the culture he idolizes, here he plays that character's grandfather, a high-ranking lawyer, firmly ensconced in Klingon society and to whom physical combat seems the furthest thing from his mind^note One way in which Dorn is very not playing against type is the way Worf's grandfather genuinely does his best to defend his clients; he really and truly believes in honorable behavior and doesn't just phone it in. Worf also believes in the ideals of honor, despite his people's culture (at least at that time) being more about only paying lip service to the concept of honor, rather than actually behaving honorably.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: The Enterprise-A dining room is a redress of the Enterprise-D's observation lounge set, and the explosion which totals the dining room is so spectacular that it led to a long-standing rumor that the pyrotechnicians accidentally made the explosion far too powerful and completely destroyed the set, resulting in TNG not being able to use it again. In reality, that show continued to make regular use of the set until the end of its run. It did get a minor redesign in the aftermath of film's production, but that usually happened in-between seasons anyway.
• Promoted Fanboy: Christian Slater is a huge Star Trek fan in real-life^note Fun fact: His eyebrows are the way they are because he shaved them to try and look like a Vulcan, only for them to not grow back properly and got his cameo after pestering his mother Mary Jo, who was the film's casting director. He also stole the uniform he wore in the film because the maroon portion was the one William Shatner wore on Wrath of Khan.
• Real-Life Relative: Christian Slater, who has a minor appearance as an Excelsior communications officer, is the son of casting director Mary Jo Slater.
• Recycled Script:
  • Accidentally, as the writer didn't know there had been an episode of the series where Kirk fought a clone of himself. Though it does still work as twenty years of special effects advances allowed this fight to be much more convincing than the last one, which was mostly done through single shots of both Kirks.
  • "Day Of The Dove" had an energy being that accentuated Kirk's crew's racism towards Klingons (and vice versa), complete with the Klingons believing the Enterprise fired on their ship. This movie, being longer, can look at it with more depth and detail though.
• Recycled Set: This movie was filmed while Star Trek: The Next Generation was still in production. As a result several of the TV show's sets found their way into the movies. However, these sets were originally designed for the first Star Trek movie and late redressed for television. Some sets, such as corridors and crew quarters had a few different paint jobs and cosmetic touches, however, others were a bit more obvious:
  • Main engineering of the Enterprise-A was essentially the Enterprise-D's main engineering set with different graphics in the displays and a different paint job.
  • The officer's mess hall was the Enterprise-D's observation lounge set. This is why the little Enterprise statues that are present in that set during the first four seasons of the show mysteriously disappear. Those were accidentally damaged by the explosives used to show the torpedo impact in the final battle.
  • The Federation President's office is the Enterprise-D's Ten Forward with some curtains and different lighting. The Paris cityscape seen outside the window is a painted backdrop recycled from "We'll Always Have Paris".
  • Kirk's quarters set was recycled for Data's in Star Trek: The Next Generation and then recycled back for this film. The added replicator set piece had its panel changed and used as a shelf. Data's quarters were, themselves, a redress of Kirk's Motion Picture and Wrath of Khan quarters—this is the TNG "junior officer's quarters" set and is used variously for the quarters of Data, La Forge, Chief O'Brien and Worf, before he had Alexander.
• Role Reprise: Grace Lee Whitney, Brock Peters, and John Schuck reprise their roles as Janice Rand, Admiral Cartwright, and the Klingon Ambassador five years after Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.
• Troubled Production: The film had troubles mostly left over from the previous film:
  • Following the critical drubbing and underwhelming box-office of the previous film, Paramount were only willing to allow $20 million for a sixth film to be produced. Harve Bennett and The Final Frontier screenwriter David Loughery produced a screenplay for a prequel film that would have been set during Kirk, Spock and McCoy's days at Starfleet Academy, only featuring Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley in segments bookending the film. Paramount rejected the story immediately, and Bennett, who had been on extremely thin ice with the Paramount executives as it was, jumped before he could be pushed and quit the series. Nimoy was subsequently installed as the new executive producer and creative lead on the film, with Bennett's right-hand man, Ralph Winter taking over as line producer, and Nimoy's first decision was to re-hire Nicholas Meyer to direct.
  • After an initial draft by writers Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal proved unsatisfactory, Nicholas Meyer wrote a new screenplay with co-writer Denny Martin Flinn. However, Paramount initially refused to budge on their $20 million budget figure... until a personal friend of Meyer's took over as head of Paramount, and added another $10 million to the budget.
  • Filming went reasonably smoothly, though some of the cast objected to dialogue showing their characters to be bigots, resulting in Meyer having to switch around some lines, and delete others entirely. Brock Peters in particular had to take breaks while filming some of his lines, as he found himself getting emotional over the dialogue.
  • One last problem reared its head not long before release when, despite the screenplay being really written by Meyer and Flinn based off of Nimoy's story, the Writer's Guild of America awarded the writing credits solely to Konner and Rosenthal. Nimoy was absolutely livid and threatened to sue the WGA, who in turn threatened to have all their writers refuse to work for Paramount unless Nimoy backed down. Cooler heads eventually prevailed, and it was agreed that Nimoy, Konner and Rosenthal would be credited for the story, and Meyer and Flinn for the screenplay.
• Wag the Director:
  • There were a few lines that Nichelle Nichols refused to say, given their racist nature (said about Klingons in the movie, but they could easily have applied to African Americans). The line "Guess who's coming to dinner" was given to Chekov, while "Yes, but you wouldn't want your daughter to marry one" was deleted entirely. She also disagreed with the scene about needing to race through books to find the translation for Klingon, stating that as the Communications Officer she should be able to speak Klingon. She was overruled. Ironically, Reboot Uhura would be established as speaking fluent Klingon.
  • William Shatner tried it when it came to the line "Let [the Klingons] die!" Every take, he immediately recoiled as if in horror at what he'd just said. Director Nicholas Meyer promised Shatner they wouldn't cut the recoil. Guess what got cut.
  • During the final battle, Captain Sulu and the Excelsior was supposed to arrive dramatically and use its charting gaseous anomalies equipment to jury-rig a heat-seeking photon torpedo. Shatner, however, insisted that the Enterprise should save itself. In consequence, the Excelsior arrives just in time to be shot at, and the gaseous-anomalies equipment is magically onboard the Enterprise instead.
• What Could Have Been: See the page.
• Written by Cast Member: Leonard Nimoy has "Story by" credit with Lawrence Konner and Mark Rosenthal.
• You Look Familiar:
  • René Auberjonois, who appears as Colonel West in a deleted scene, would later be cast in the regular role of Odo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Notably, Auberjonois uses the same voice for West (his natural voice being higher-pitched and more nasal) that he would later use for Odo.
  • While Brock Peters reprises his role of Admiral Cartwright from the fourth film, he too would later pop up on DS9, as Sisko's father, Joseph.
  • David Warner previously played St. John Talbot, a disgruntled Federation diplomat, in Star Trek V. His role as Gorkon is substantially more important here. He also later played Gul Madred in TNG, who tortures a captured Picard.
  • The first of three times in Star Trek that Kurtwood Smith wants to put his foot in someone's ass.
  • Michael Dorn plays Worf's grandfather, who defends Kirk and McCoy at their trial.
  • The commandant of the Rura Penthe mine is played by W. Morgan Sheppard, who had previously appeared in Star Trek: The Next Generation as Dr. Ira Graves. He would go on to play Qatai, an alien driven by revenge for his family's deaths in Star Trek: Voyager, and then play the senior official who questions Spock at the Vulcan Science Academy in the first reboot film. This makes Sheppard one of a group of Trek actors to play a Vulcan, Klingon, and human.
  • The Klingon translator at the trial of Captain Kirk and Doctor McCoy was portrayed by Todd Bryant, who had previously appeared in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan as an engineering cadet and more notably as the Klingon Captain Klaa in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. While it was not explicitly stated on screen that the translator was Klaa, the officially licensed and endorsed reference book Star Trek Encyclopedia states that the translator was Klaa, and that he had been demoted to courtroom translator over his deeds in the previous film.
  • One of the admirals at the briefing is played by Walter Koenig's wife, Judith Levitt, who previously played a doctor in Star Trek IV.

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