VoteDave

I have been thinking recently about Star Trek Nemesis.

As a film, I rather enjoyed it, although there were certain aspects that I didn’t like, and it certainly would have been a better film if they had left in all the deleted scenes that were included on the DVD – especially the one in which Picard and Data share a bottle of wine in Picard’s quarters.

Crucially, I also think that a story dealing with Romulus, that needed a personal link to the Enterprise, missed an opportunity by not using the character of Sela (played by Denise Crosby). I think she should have been the main villain of the piece. She could have staged a coup and was trying to destroy Earth with a new warship etc, and it would have been a nice link back to the series, as the Borg had been in First Contact

However, that is not what this post is about. Forgive me, but I shall talk you through my internal ramblings. It all started when I was thinking about Riker getting his own ship, and I though back to the episode “Best of Both Worlds” when he was previously offered his own command, which he turned down. Admiral Hanson at the time said that if he kept turning down commands then Starfleet would stop offering them to him, and may explain why it took him another decade to actually get his own vessel in Nemesis. 

My thoughts then turned to the Dominion War. In wartime, promotion always tends to come more quickly due to officers being killed off and the need to replace them. So why wasn’t Riker given his own ship during the Dominion War? There was a Next Gen film set in the Dominion War (Insurrection), but Riker was not offered a ship, and indeed it barely dealt with the war at all.

So, that got me thinking, what if we merged Insurrection and Nemesis into one film – set during the Dominion War, with a personal link to Picard (hold that thought), and in which Riker leaves the Enterprise to take command of the Titan. Huzzah. That would be an awesome film with enough action and personal dilemmas to elicit a classic.

But, if it was in the Dominion War, then the Romulans would not be the bad guys. It would be the Dominion. 

So what would the personal link for Picard be?

Well, let us recall from Deep Space Nine that the Dominion’s ally in the Alpha Quadrant were the Cardassians. So they could be the big bad of the movie. And which Cardassian specifically?

How about Gul Madred? The Cardassian commandant played with aplomb by David Warner in the two-part episode “Chain of Command”.

Brilliant. Madred sadistically tortured Picard on Celtris III (“There are four lights!”) so we have the personal backstory and hostility already between these two characters, which would give Picard the emotional dilemma that would be needed, and would have provided a nice nostalgic link back to the series we loved rather than Shinzon who we’d never seen before.

Now, as I said, I loved both Insurrection and Nemesis, but it is intriguing to think how these two, not-so-successful movies could have been combined to make a spectacle of a war film that would have seen the Next Gen crew go out with a bang rather than a whimper. In fact, had it been successful, there may even have been more films in the series. Sadly, we’ll never know. 

The only problem with my idea, however; if the film was set during the Dominion War, then in that timeframe Voyager was still lost in the Alpha Quadrant, meaning we couldn’t have the cameo from Admiral Janeway, which was all time favourite part of Nemesis!

What are your thoughts on my random Star Trek musings?