In today’s episode, a misguided admiral teams up with a mysterious partner to bring one planet’s Fountain of Youth to the rest of the Federation. But the scowling man with unnaturally stretch skin draped in robes and jewels seemed so trustworthy! Will there ever be another Search for Spock–level novelization? Does Picard have a crush on his dead mom? And shouldn’t Worf know more Earth references? All this and more in Star Trek: Insurrection, the film that un-grows the beard.

Star Trek: Insurrection
Author: J.M. Dillard
Pages: 295 (HC)1This is one of the rare occasions where I caved and bought the hardcover. For some reason, it’s really hard to find a mass market paperback of this!
Published: November 1998
Timeline: Concurrent with about the middle of season seven of Deep Space Nine (closest to “It’s Only a Paper Moon”)
Prerequisites: There are some offhanded references to concurrent events like the Dominion War, but this one easily stands on its own

I know it isn’t the conventional wisdom, but God help me, I think I liked Star Trek: Insurrection more than First Contact and Generations.

What can I say? Sure, it had a bit of the usual Berman cringe, and it started to buckle toward the end. But it kept me engaged, most of the humor landed for me, and to be perfectly honest, in times like these, it sure did feel nice to see someone stand up for an ideal.2Not gonna lie, the scene where Picard removes his pips one by one got me a touch misty. F. Murray Abraham does a solid villain, though I wish he’d chewed the scenery a little bit more. Matter of fact, it seems like the whole cast is self-conscious about camping it up, even though that’s often when Star Trek excels. But I liked it in a far less qualified way than other TNG films I’ve seen, and I’m sticking to it.

Insurrection is the third of four movies starring the Next Generation cast. That positioning is apropos, because it does feel kind of like a middle child; neither lavished with praise nor apoplectically condemned, just kind of there. The stakes aren’t necessarily lower than other Star Trek movies, but rather more intimate, dealing with a small population on one planet (just six hundred, it’s mentioned a few times), even though their fate will still affect countless zillions of Federation citizens. It is about as unassuming as the ninth big-budget film in a long-running franchise can be, I think, and even through all the action segments, I was still able to get down with it as a kind of “cozy” experience.

The movie begins with the Federation and a race called the Son’a observing the idyllic Ba’ku from an invisible base near their village, but Data, who is on the mission, goes haywire, uncovers the duck blind, and sabotages the mission. Ahdar Ru’afo, the Son’a leader, wants Data terminated, but Picard agrees to come in and retrieve his rogue android, agreeing to scrap him only if the retrieval mission fails.

Turns out Data wasn’t malfunctioning; rather, his conscience kicked in and he was trying to end something his subroutines warned him was unethical and immoral. That immoral act is the intent to put the Ba’ku on a holoship to get them off the planet without them thinking they ever left, then harnessing the power of the metaphasic radiation in the planet’s rings that keeps the Ba’ku eternally young and healthy. The idea is distribute the adapted tech to the entire Federation, but it’s pretty clear that a slimeball like Ahdar Ru’afo has no intention of doing anything of the sort, and Picard won’t take an order to turn around and see to other missions in progress lying down, so he trades his military pips for some civilian drip and sees personally to protecting the Ba’ku way of life.

The impact of many of the movie’s revelations is dulled somewhat in the book, probably due to the necessity of getting to a decent page count by filling it out with characters’ internal psychology. Gallatin’s hand in particular is tipped way too early, and it takes a lot of the wallop out of the revelation that the Son’a are the Ba’ku (which is already pretty easy to at least suspect to begin with). It’s a little more successful in making Admiral Dougherty more sympathetic by giving him a dead wife, so he has the motivation that no one else will have to endure her pain and die as prematurely as she did (in her nineties!); if Madalyn is mentioned in the movie, it went undetected by me, but I don’t think she was.

Expanded content doesn’t really pick up until near the end of the book. Chapter Eleven features a discursion on Gallatin and Ru’afo’s schism from the Ba’ku comprising a decent number of pages that greatly broadens what we see of the past. There’s also a nice bit in the climax where Picard reflects on his own single-track craving for vengeance in First Contact when considering Ru’afo’s situation, which is a really thoughtful piece of connective tissue. Until then, however, it’s a pretty rote retelling of the movie.

Most notably, the book has a different ending than the movie. In the first ending written, Ru’afo escapes in a pod, gets bombarded by the radiation in the rings, and dies by Benjamin Button any% speedrun; this is the ending that makes it into the book. In the movie, he just gets incinerated in an explosion. I think the original ending has more of a poetic-justice edge to it, so it’s nice to see it preserved here, if only by the machinations of publishing deadlines. Plus, it’s not like it would have been overly unnerving to see Ru’afo de-age rapidly on-screen; after all, they show Admiral Dougherty die by getting his face super-stretched in the treatment machine, and that was freaky as hell.

The gold standard for novelizations will always, of course, be getting eighty pages of original fiction before the main story even started in Vonda McIntyre’s Search for Spock. Corporatization and brand management ensured that would never again happen even as soon afterward as this movie, so it’s unrealistic to have expected a major expansion on the themes and content of the story. But I’d at least like to feel like I’m getting at least somewhat of a bonus by reaching for the book instead of the DVD case.

MVP & LVP

• The MVP of the movie and the book for me is Data. Does anyone ever get alerted to what’s going on with the Ba’ku if his ethics subroutines don’t kick in? At first, I thought it was yet another case of Data actually turning out to be a huge liability, but this time his malfunctioning served a positive purpose. They did get me with that one!
• LVP goes to Tournel. That’s just one leader too many. I think we get the idea with Sojef and Anij, and there’s just nothing for a third wheel like Tournel to do.

Stray Bits

• I won’t go as far as to say I liked seeing a freshly shorn Riker, but it’s novel for one (movie-length) episode.
• One of the only scenes in this that significantly rustles my jimmies is when Picard asks Worf about Gilbert and Sullivan and Worf says he hasn’t had time to meet all the new crew members yet. A cute joke, yes, but one that has to throw a very obvious fact out the window to work, which is that Worf grew up on Earth! Even if he’s never heard any of their music, he’s got to have at least heard the name, right?
• Does … does Picard have the hots for his mom?? “He had been running along the water’s edge, laughing at the pull of tide and dissolving sand as the waves retreated, and maman had been sitting beside him, smiling, her dark hair pinned up, save for one errant curl at the nape of her neck….” (81)

Final Assessment

Average. There isn’t much reason to choose this over or even in addition to the movie—maybe about ten pages of new insight at the very most. Still, it’s a workmanlike effort that doesn’t offend. I wish J.M. Dillard had gotten to stretch her muscles more creatively than being the one that gets sent to the mines to thanklessly crank out stuff like this, but on the other hand, I’m sure this kind of thing is nice work if you can get it.

NEXT TIME: The Dominion War heats up as the Enterprise-E goes Behind Enemy Lines