Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

Our Review

The perfect send off for the original crew is a Cold War parable that arrived the week the actual Cold War ended. An ecological catastrophe forces the Klingon Empire to sue for peace, and Kirk, whose son was murdered by Klingons, must be the one to escort their chancellor into negotiations. The setup turns the franchise’s most human hero into its biggest obstacle, and Shatner, given real material for the last time, plays prejudice as something a good man can carry without knowing it. Let them die, he snarls at a dinner table, and the film never lets him take it back.

Nicholas Meyer returned to direct and brought his naval sharpness with him: a whodunit structure, Shakespeare quoting conspirators on both sides, a zero gravity assassination that pays off with pink Klingon blood floating in balls across the screen, and a courtroom sequence where Kirk and McCoy are framed with genuine menace. The mystery plot rewards attention, René Auberjonois’s Colonel West and the shape of the conspiracy still hold up on rewatch, and Kim Cattrall’s Valeris, a protege who betrays the future for the past, gives Spock a worthy final student.

The climax runs on a bit of action movie convenience, and the assassination mystery solution is a bootlegger’s excuse to fire everything. But the ending, the crew flying off into retirement on a course for the second star to the right, is the most graceful exit any franchise has given its founders. Nine out of ten.