In today’s episode, when Picard starts handing the Borg a loss at Earth, they switch to plan B: un-inventing the game. Now the Enterprise-E has to follow the Borg back into the past and make sure history’s most important pilot makes it to the air. Did redshirts peak with this installment? Who’s holding Picard accountable? And which doctor took a greater timeline liberty: McCoy or Crusher? All this and more in Star Trek: First Contact, the book that needs to clean up its Klingon armory.

Star Trek: First Contact
Author: J.M. Dillard
Pages: 246
Published: December 1996 (HC)
Timeline: A little more than two years after Generations
Prerequisites: “The Best of Both Worlds” (3×26 / 4×01)
Not to be confused with: The episode titled “First Contact” (4×15)

We covered a crossover event shortly before this, and we’re going to look at one shortly afterward as well, but Star Trek: First Contact is unquestionably the major tentpole of Star Trek‘s 30th anniversary celebration. It was a huge deal. It was the Next Generation crew’s first standalone movie, and it was a smash hit with both audiences and critics. It is without a doubt the biggest TNG silver-screen success, and is second or third when you pit it against all Star Trek films. It gave us a shiny new Enterprise with sleek curves and brought back the Federation’s (and Picard’s) greatest enemy under new management. It was as exciting, bombastic, and spectacular as any Trek fan could have hoped for in 1996.

Which is why it gives me no joy to say I didn’t care for it all that much in 2022.

I mean, it’s fine. I didn’t outright hate it. But it never really got my blood pumping. I had a hard time getting excited about the plot, and almost all the action felt like it was in slow motion. But more than that, I hadn’t seen First Contact since it came out,1Some might opine that not feeling any great desire to revisit a work even once over the course of a quarter of a century could itself be posited as evidence of that work’s unremarkableness. Had that occurred to me before I watched the movie, it might have tempered my expectations a little. and I’m a much different Trek fan now than I was then. I’ve watched a lot more of it since then. TOS and DS9 are way more my flavor, and I’m surprised to find I’m even vibing more with Voyager in some ways. I’d still call TNG the best entry point to the franchise, but the more steeped I get in Trek as a whole, the further it slips down my personal rankings. I’ve also read a lot more Trek since then. I’m not going to harp on this over and over, and it’s not quite a 1:1 comparison, but I want to note for the record that Federation by Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens is a far superior Zefram Cochrane story by a frankly embarrassing margin.

But let’s not lose the thread here. In case you’ve never seen First Contact or it’s been a hot minute, the idea is that the Borg are on a direct course for Earth to stage a production of Wolf 359 II: Electric Borgaloo. Now, one might imagine that Captain Picard, having the newest and most advanced ship in the fleet and knowing the Borg as well as he does—better than anyone in the Alpha Quadrant, for sure—would be a huge asset in the forthcoming battle. Instead, they’re relegated to Neutral Zone patrol because Picard is an “unstable element”. Of course, he can’t stay on the sidelines as he listens to the game on the radio and hears the Federation getting their sack lunches eaten, so he enters the fray, and “to hell with [their] orders”, as Data so eloquently puts it.

Once Picard takes charge, he gets a psychic impression that tells him where the Borg cube’s red flashing weak spot is, and under his lead, the Borg cube goes down in flames. However, a small sphere escapes and opens up a temporal vortex. Pursuing it through the time hole, the Enterprise catches a brief glimpse on an Earth on which all nine billion inhabitants have been assimilated. They resolve to ride the wake all the way to its exit point and emerge on April 4, 2063—the day before Zefram Cochrane achieves Earth’s first warp-speed flight, attracts the notice of a passing Vulcan scout ship, and changes the galaxy forever.

The Borg do a sort of lazy drive-by hit on Cochrane’s launch site and don’t bother to send down any follow-up drones, so the project remains salvageable. While examining the damage, Lily Sloane, Cochrane’s assistant, runs into Picard and Data doing the same and faints after witnessing the latter’s invulnerability. Dr. Crusher beams with Lily up to sickbay to treat her radiation poisoning, which leaves Lily trapped on the ship when the Borg start to infiltrate and commandeer engineering. Data is able to lock them out of the main computer with some fleet-fingered encryption, but it only buys them so much time; the threat must be neutralized entirely. So while Riker, La Forge, and Troi attempt to persuade the shiftless Cochrane to move forward with his historic flight down on Earth, Picard defends his ship against the ever-advancing Borg siege—maybe going a little overboard here and there in his thirst for revenge.

That hellbent quest for vengeance made it tough for me to figure out how I felt about the movie in some ways. Picard gets sidelined because he’s an “unstable element”, but he’s clearly the only man for the job. However, it doesn’t make the admiral’s assessment any less true. Picard’s behavior is jarring, sometimes even upsetting. Normally he’s cool, collected, and unflappable, but get him in front of the Borg and he starts yelling and making questionable command decisions and turning his back on all his valued ideals. It doesn’t look like it adds up. But then I think about what Star Trek was originally built on—i.e., the idea that a day will come when we’ve evolved out of our baser urges, and conflicts can be solved with reason, non-violence, and maybe a rousing speech. Star Trek went through some growing pains in the 90s, however, as it started to come to grips with the notion that some threats will not be quelled with any amount of high-minded enlightenment, as demonstrated here by the Borg and in Deep Space Nine by the Dominion. So while I don’t condone Picard’s actions, I sort of understand them. Sometimes, yeah, you gotta draw a line here and no further.

I think what makes it all seem so out of character is actually the Enterprise-E. Say what you will about those ridiculously indulgent tracking shots of the refitted Enterprise in The Motion Picture, but they do help you understand how fans can get so attached to a gigantic fictional hunk of spacefaring metal. Here, we’re more expected to be caught up: the Enterprise-D got destroyed in Generations, yes, I remember, check, so naturally we must now move on to the E. The problem is, we’ve never seen the E before now, we’ve never gotten acquainted with it or had time to form an attachment—and so when Picard becomes fiercely determined to not self-destruct this new ship, it’s like “So?” Had it been the Enterprise-D, the desire to cling would be more understandable. Looking back on it, I think they might have screwed the pooch a little by demolishing the D in Generations, because now we have about 90 minutes to start caring about an entirely new ship as much as Picard does, and that’s a huge ask.

You might be saying by this point in the review, “Uhh, Jess? Not sure if you forgot or what, but you review books here, not movies.” I know, I know. I had hoped I wouldn’t turn this into a space to air out how I felt about the movie, but I suspected it would happen anyhow. In my defense, however, there just isn’t a whole lot to say about the book’s additions to the story. There’s some good backstory for Zefram and Lily, especially the latter. There’s a good six pages on her life before World War III, how kind and gentle and optimistic she once was, how she had to become hard to survive the fallout (both literal and figurative) from first her older siblings’ deaths at ground zero in Washington, D.C. and then her mother’s of cancer from the radiation carried on the wind, and how she only allowed herself to feel hope again after meeting Cochrane and entering his orbit. Dillard also explains Cochrane’s proclivity for drink as a means of self-medicating his bipolar disorder. And as far as significant original material goes, that’s about it. There is a spark of intrigue in the idea that Zefram and Lily share a history of grappling with diseases that before the nuclear holocaust had been solved by science (or nearly so), and that this might serve as a bonding quality, but Dillard either didn’t notice this connection or ignored it.

The best Trek novelizations don’t feel like the jobs for hire they technically are. This is not one of those. Practically every word of this one groans under that weight. Maybe by this point Dillard had been on this beat a little too long. Maybe it was a factor in that “tough year” she hinted at in Possession. I don’t know. Whatever the case, I had hoped the novelization of First Contact would elevate some source material I found somewhat tepid in my present-day viewing. Alas, no such luck.

MVP & LVP

• I’m giving out a co-MVP today, to Worf and Lily. They were the only two characters in both the book and the movie I was consistently engaged and entertained by. Perhaps not coincidentally, they are also the only two characters who make any sort of meaningful attempt to hold Picard’s feet to the fire regarding his rash actions. It’s weird to think of the Enterprise-E crew as a bunch of cronies and sycophants who are afraid to tell a crazy man no, but that’s kind of what they feel like here? So Worf and Lily’s perspectives are badly needed and extremely refreshing.
• Our LVP of First Contact is the Borg. If you’re going to take out a hit, you need to make sure you make thorough work of it. Half-assing it won’t do. They should have absolutely leveled that campground. There should have been nothing left of it but a smoldering crater. As it is, they barely even nicked the Phoenix! Assimilation is their game though, not assassination. Maybe it’s more satisfying to turn the inventor of Terran warp flight into a drone rather than kill him outright. Still. You had one job. Runner-up to Deanna, though that’s more a function of the writing doing her dirty. She’s blotto in her only featured scene, and outside of that, all she gets to do is stand around. I guess this scenario doesn’t really call for much from a Betazoid counselor’s toolbox, but yeesh.

Stray Bits

• My favorite personal First Contact memory: My friend Neal had a talking Picard figure that could say three or four phrases in a static loop. Two of them were “Damage report” and “Engage”, respectively. If you pushed the button fast enough when those phrases were on deck, you could make Picard sound like he was saying “Dammit, engage!” To two 12-year-olds, this was the apex of human achievement in comedy.
• First Contact contains the two surely most famous redshirts in the entire Star Trek canon. Of course, there’s Neal McDonough as Lieutenant Hawk,2The novel gives him the first name Sean. and when I was 12, that was cool, because at that point the only role I knew him for was goofball pitcher Whitt Bass in Angels in the Outfield. But the other is Adam Scott, a.k.a. Ben Wyatt from Parks & Recreation, playing the helmsman on the Defiant! When the battle was going sideways, he should have said, “Are we having fun yet?” His character, however, is female in the book, and is named Lieutenant Kizilbash.
• Another thing that would have helped Picard’s actions make more sense is if Guinan had been in this movie. Then you’d have someone on hand to testify for him and be like, “Look, I know he sounds crazy, but this is the exact energy you need to be bringing to a Borg fight.” 3Wasn’t it nice to see Patrick and Whoopi hugging in the Picard season 2 trailer? That didn’t look like acting. As of this writing, I am tentatively allowing myself to be cautiously optimistic for season 2.
• Just as Tuvok got to clap back at Janeway about the tea remark in the novel version of Flashback, book Worf rolls effortlessly with the punches with Riker when the latter makes a joke about whether he remembers how to fire the phasers: “It is the green button, right?” (p. 32)
• In the book, when Lily has the phaser trained on Picard, she has it turned to the lowest setting rather than the highest, and instead of saying he would have gotten vaporized had she fired it, Picard instead says, “…it would’ve given me a rather nasty rash.” (p. 134)
• Dillard misidentifies the mek’leth Worf brandishes in the zero-g scene as a bat’leth. Strangely, the caption on the photo pages gets it right, but I think the Reeves-Stevenses did the novelization’s supplemental material, and they’re a little more particular about those kinds of details. (p. 186)
• “Data complied, and as he worked, [the Borg Queen] stared into Picard’s eyes with such infinite malice, infinite satisfaction, that the captain realized He [sic] had never truly been the one who sought revenge. It was she, and she had waited six long years for it.” — I don’t know, I disagree. He definitely was feeling some want for revenge. I think this is just another attempt to let Picard off easy. (p. 228)
• “As for Zef, he was far too excited to touch the glass he’d poured for himself. Excited, but utterly lucid—Dr. Crusher had taken a timeline liberty and permanently cured his brain-chemistry disorder with a single injection.” — I’ve heard people go back and forth about Dr. McCoy potentially messing with the timeline by giving a woman a pill that grew her a new kidney, but this would be a way bigger instance of interference than that, right? Not that this story is terribly thoughtful about the ramifications of time travel to begin with, but you would think something like that would have a pretty big impact on the historical record. “One day, he was an insufferable, drunken lout, and the next, I could actually stand to talk to him!” I mean, if you’ve already cured one person’s radiation poisoning with a hypospray, I guess that can of worms is already open. Whatever. (p. 240)

Final Assessment

Average. At this point, the grind is starting to become very apparent in Dillard’s novelizations. The only significant extra-canonical addition to the source material is a little bit of background for Zefram Cochrane and Lily. Otherwise, it’s basically a straight retelling of the film (with a rushed ending to boot—didn’t mention that anywhere above). I didn’t enjoy this movie nearly as much as an adult as I did in the one theatrical viewing I went to when I was a kid, and this book didn’t shed any new light that would have substantially changed that.

NEXT TIME: We’ll get caught up in the Crossfire