A full, four-minute clip from the upcoming series Star Trek: Starfleet Academy has arrived online. This is likely a reaction to the bad response people had to the poster, released late last week. The poster was criticized for resembling an episode of Dawson’s Creek, so Paramount released a full four-minute clip of a space battle. Here it is…
Is this the worst scene in the history of Star Trek? I think it is.
As evidence, I submit this line of dialogue uttered by Holly Hunter’s captain character: “Fire a full spread!”
“Fire a full spread!”
A full spread of what? Normally in Star Trek, this line contains the word “torpedoes,” as in “fire a full spread of torpedoes.” Said this way, it would indicate the ship’s weapons officer should fire all the torpedoes they have in their torpedo tubes, all at once. However, no one has mentioned weapons up to this point, so it’s not clear what she wants a spread of. Butter perhaps?
Holly Hunter’s request for buttered toast is followed by this line, from one of her officers: “We can’t!”
“We can’t!”
The Karen speaking it never says why we can’t. Usually, this sort of line would have more words in it. Words like, “we can’t because there’s a tribble in the tubes,” or “we can’t because weapons won’t be installed until Tuesday.” However, the Karen failing to fire “a full spread” never says why she can’t fire it; she only says “we can’t,” and then no one bothers to ask why not.
Having now been stymied by her officer’s failure to fire a full spread of something, Holly Hunter orders, “emergency evasive!” Evasive what? Usually, this sentence would contain the word “maneuvers.”
A captain might say, “Emergency evasive maneuvers.” It might even be acceptable to leave the word “maneuvers” out if the word “evasive” is plural. For instance, a captain might say “emergency evasives!” Evading something usually requires more than one movement, which is why it’s pural. But Holly Hunter’s captain orders a single evasive of unknown type.
Is she ordering her officers to evade by ducking under their consoles and hiding? Are they supposed to give an evasive answer to her questions? She never says.
The ship’s officers, understandably, ignore those vague orders. No one responds to them at all, or does anything like an “evasive,” whatever that is.
Instead, the blue-haired Karen who sits somewhere behind the captain starts shouting that the ship’s systems are simultaneously overloading and running out of power. This should be impossible, because an overload implies too much power. Yet the ship seems to be running out of power at exactly the same moment it has more power than it can handle. Terrible luck.
Holly Hunter’s captain character responds to this news of having both too much power and not enough power at the same time by ignoring it. Instead of taking action to save her crew from being blown to bits, she calls the ship’s Doctor and asks for a report. On what, it’s not clear. The Doctor is standing in a hallway, waving his arms, and, as a Doctor without access to weapons or a background in engineering or combat, can’t do anything to help with their current predicament.
That’s when the villain appears and begins discussing an origami chicken. It’s the best part.
