In the lead-up to season three of Star Trek: Picard, Keith R.A. DeCandido will take a look at the last couple of times The Next Generation crew was together: the feature films Insurrection (1998) and Nemesis (2002). In addition, you can revisit his rewatches of Generations from 2017 and First Contact from 2013.
Star Trek: Nemesis
Written by John Logan & Rick Berman & Brent Spiner
Directed by Stuart Baird
Original release date: December 13, 2002
Stardate: 56844.9
Captain’s log. We open on the Romulan Senate, where a military delegation led by Commander Suran is having their petition for the senate to support an alliance with Shinzon of Remus denied by Praetor Hiren. Senator Tal’aura then departs the chamber for a meeting, leaving a doodad behind. Said doodad opens up and unleashes thalaron radiation in the chamber, turning everyone inside to dust.
We cut to the Denali Mountains in Alaska on Earth, where Riker and Troi have just gotten married, and Picard is giving a best-man speech. We learn that Riker has been given the captaincy of the U.S.S. Titan, with Troi accompanying him, and Data being elevated to first officer of the Enterprise. Data, for reasons passing understanding, decides to sing “Blue Skies” as a “present” to the assembled multitudes.
The Enterprise later heads toward Betazed for a second ceremony, but en route—amidst some tired and puerile discussion of the fact that at Betazoid weddings everyone is naked—Worf picks up some positronic emissions on a planet near the Romulan Neutral Zone. This means there may be an android on that world. They go to investigate, taking a shuttle down and driving around on a Space Dune Buggy called the Argo that Picard is eager to take for a test drive. They find various body parts, eventually culminating in a head that looks just like Data. The natives of the planet shoot at them so Stuart Baird can direct a car chase, and they escape to the shuttle with derring-do and head back to the Enterprise. It turns out that this is B-4, a pre-Lore and pre-Data prototype constructed by Dr. Noonien Soong and Dr. Juliana Tainer (though Tainer isn’t mentioned because we all know that girls aren’t supposed to do science). Data downloads his memories into B-4, hoping it will help him find a personality, as he’s very simplistic and has trouble with all but the most basic concepts. La Forge warns him that it may not work, as B-4’s neural net is far more simplistic than Data’s.
Starfleet Command then hails Picard in the person of Admiral Kathryn Janeway: there’s a new praetor of the Romulan Star Empire, and he’s a Reman named Shinzon. They’ve requested a Starfleet vessel to open peace talks and the Enterprise is closest to the Neutral Zone. So they head off, despite the fact that they’ve got a wedding to get to.
Data briefs the crew on the Remans. Second-class citizens in the empire, they mostly do mining and heavy-weapons construction on the inhospitable Remus. They also served as cannon fodder during the Dominion War. They figure the only way a Reman could become praetor is via a coup d’état.
They meet with a huuuuuge Romulan ship, the Scimitar, commanded by Praetor Shinzon—who, it turns out, is biologically human, and who bears more than a passing resemblance to Picard. An away team led by Picard beams over into a very dark space. Remans are sensitive to light. Shinzon says that he wants to speak of peace between their nations. He invites Picard to join him for a meal the next day, and also provides a blood sample. Crusher examines the latter back on the Enterprise, confirming that Shinzon is a clone of Picard.
Shinzon meets with his military support: Commanders Suran and Donatra and Senator Tal’aura. Suran is pissed because they supported him because he promised to open a can of whupass on the Federation. Shinzon pleads patience, and also privately tells Donatra that she should keep an eye on Suran and maybe kill him if he gets out of line.
Picard makes the dinner date, and Shinzon explains that he was part of a program to clone prominent Starfleet personnel and replace them. But the project was abandoned, and Shinzon was exiled to the Reman mines to die. But a Reman (who now serves as Shinzon’s viceroy) took him under his wing, and he thrived.
When Picard returns to the Enterprise, Worf reports unauthorized computer activity, though they can’t localize it, and it’s nothing classified or vital. In addition, La Forge scanned thalaron radiation on the Scimitar, which is incredibly—and instantly—deadly (as we saw at the top of the movie). The presence of this radiation in such large amounts proves that, whatever Shinzon wants, peace ain’t it.
Troi gets Riker to stop focusing on work and come to bed. But their sweet, passionate nookie-nookie is interrupted by the viceroy using his telepathy to insert Shinzon’s image into Troi’s mind’s eye. She eventually is able to break contact, but the damage is done—Troi is devastated, having been psionically raped.
Shinzon’s physical condition is deteriorating. The viceroy reports that they’ve received the transponder signal, and they can’t wait around anymore. The doctors are standing by. He orders both B-4 and Picard to be beamed over. Shinzon orders the android to have the information he downloaded from the Enterprise be put in the Scimitar’s database and then to be removed from his sight. Shinzon intends to transfuse Picard’s blood to himself, as he’s dying—which Crusher already figured out from the blood sample. The rapid-aging he was subjected to needed to be reversed after a certain point, but it wasn’t because the mission he was created for was cancelled, and he wasn’t expected to live this long in the mines.
The android later comes to where Picard is being held prisoner, telling the guard that Shinzon wants the prisoner. Then he uses a Vulcan neck pinch on him. It’s not B-4, it’s Data. They found the prototype’s subterfuge and Data took B-4’s place, changing the data that B-4 downloaded so that it provides disinformation to Shinzon about the deployment of Starfleet.
Picard and Data steal one of the Scimitar’s support craft and fly it through the ship’s corridors until they find a window and crash through it.
Suran once again bitches to Shinzon, who assures him that the Enterprise won’t make it out of the Neutral Zone and that the Federation will be toast in a couple of days. After Shinzon breaks the connection, Suran, Donatra, and Tal’aura confer over how crappy Shinzon looks, and Donatra also raises a concern that Shinzon isn’t going to invade the Federation, but annihilate Earth and possibly more planets, not just military targets. Do they want that much innocent blood on their hands?
The Enterprise will rendezvous with a fleet in Sector 1045. They pass through Bassen’s Rift en route, and that phenomenon will disrupt communications. Sure enough, Scimitar—which can fire while cloaked—choses that moment, when the Enterprise can’t call for backup, to attack.
The battle goes really badly for our heroes, as they can’t get a bead on Scimitar except by firing wildly, then focusing weapons fire on the spot where there’s a shield hit, but Scimitar moves out of the way before they can take advantage. Meanwhile, Scimitar’s weapons are pummeling the shit out of the Enterprise, at one point taking out the viewscreen.
Two warbirds show up in the rift and, to everyone’s surprise, help the Enterprise. Donatra tells Picard that this is an internal matter for Romulus and she’s sorry he’s involved. Unfortunately, the Scimitar pummels the crap out of both of Donatra’s ships. However, their distraction gives Troi the chance to try to reverse the mental link the viceroy established when he raped her and uses it to help Worf track the Scimitar. Their weapons fire combined with the damage Donatra did is enough to drop Scimitar’s cloak.
But Enterprise’s shields are down, and Shinzon is able to send over a boarding party led by the viceroy. Riker and Worf lead a security detail to stop them, and I’m waiting for someone to order the lights turned on very bright. Worf and the security team take out the Remans while Riker and the viceroy get into an extended mano-a-mano in a Jefferies Tube, including at one point them both dangling over an inexplicably large chasm in the middle of the starship, down which the viceroy eventually plummets to his doom. At no point has anyone ever turned the lights on very bright, for reasons passing understanding.
Picard orders the Enterprise to ram the Scimitar, which Shinzon was not expecting. At this point, Shinzon is clearly on his last legs, and he orders the thalaron beam activated to wipe out the Enterprise, even though killing Picard means his own death. However, Picard has La Forge use the last of the transporter power to beam him over to the Scimitar. Data, however, refuses to let Picard act alone, so he goes with La Forge to where there’s a hull breach and leaps across the void to the Scimitar.
Picard is able to make it all the way to the bridge of the ship, taking out all the Remans, who were apparently trained in gunplay by Stormtroopers based on their inability to ever hit what they’re shooting at. Picard and Shinzon have a final confrontation that ends with Picard impaling Shinzon on a really big pole, enabling Shinzon to have some ridiculous final words about destiny before croaking.
Data has a mini-portable transporter and puts it on Picard to beam him back to the Enterprise bridge. Data then blows up the thalaron weapon, which destroys the Scimitar with Data on it.
Donatra offers technical and medical assistance, which everyone hopes is the beginning of a beautiful friendship (and probably led to Picard advocating for the Romulans, as seen in the backstory for Picard season one). Eventually Enterprise limps back to Earth for repairs. Whether or not the wedding on Betazed ever happened is left as an exercise for the viewer. (Given that it was probably planned by Troi’s mother Lwaxana, the notion that it was cancelled is, um, unlikely.)
Picard sends Riker off to take command of the Titan and then tells B-4 all about Data, which B-4 doesn’t seem to comprehend in the least. B-4 then starts to sing “Blue Skies.”
Can’t we just reverse the polarity? Scimitar can fire while cloaked, because the plot wouldn’t work otherwise.
Thank you, Counselor Obvious. Troi is mentally raped, which—unlike when it was done in The Undiscovered Country—is an act committed by the villains of the piece, which is as it should be. She also gets some of her own back by using that rape to track the cloaked Scimitar.
There is no honor in being pummeled. Despite having spent four years as the strategic operations officer of a critical sector, two of those years in the middle of a war, and also being in command of a warship, Worf is now serving at tactical on the Enterprise, a position he had three grade ranks ago. Sure.
If I only had a brain… Data sacrifices himself to save Picard. At the time it was believed that Data’s death was at least in part because it was getting progressively harder to convincingly have the unaging android be played by an aging actor, though that didn’t stop them from bringing Data back two decades hence in Picard season one…
No sex, please, we’re Starfleet. Riker and Troi’s attempt to have some nookie is ruined by Shinzon and the viceroy’s telepathic rape. In addition, Picard at one point “jokingly” refers to Riker as “Mr. Troi,” to show that he’s an emasculated husband now at the mercy of his wife, because apparently this movie takes place in 1949 rather than 2379…
What happens on the holodeck stays on the holodeck. Shinzon uses a holographic communicator to talk to Picard at one point. This is, by the by, the only one of the TNG movies that doesn’t have any scene on a holodeck of some sort.
In the driver’s seat. Poor Lieutenant Branson only gets a few lines of dialogue before he’s redshirted out the viewscreen after it’s blown away.
I believe I said that.
“Romulan Ale should be illegal.”
“It is.”
–Worf, drunk, and La Forge, sober.
Welcome aboard. Besides the regular folks, we have an uncredited cameo by Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan, last seen in Generations, and to be seen next in Picard’s “The Star Gazer.” There’s also a credited cameo by Wil Wheaton as Wes Crusher, seen in uniform without explanation; last seen in TNG’s “Journey’s End,” he’ll next be seen in Picard’s “Farewell.” Kate Mulgrew also appears as now-Admiral Janeway, last seen in Voyager’s “Endgame,” and next seen in Prodigy’s “A Moral Star, Part II.”
Future Oscar nominee Tom Hardy plays Shinzon in one of his earliest roles, while veteran Ron Perlman plays Shinzon’s viceroy. Michael Owen plays Branson, Shannon Cochran plays Tal’aura (she previously played Martok’s wife Sirella in DS9’s “You Are Cordially Invited” and a Maquis in TNG’s “Preemptive Strike” and DS9’s “Defiant”), Dina Meyer plays Donatra, Jude Ciccolella plays Suran, Alan Dale plays Hiren, and J. Patrick McCormack plays a Romulan commander (he previously played an admiral in DS9’s “Dr. Bashir, I Presume?” and a Devore in Voyager’s “Counterpoint”).
Trivial matters: This film was not necessarily intended to be the last film featuring the TNG crew—pre-film publicity was inconsistent on the subject—but once it was released to horrible reviews it was pretty clearly stated as this crew’s swansong, a declaration that lasted right up until Secret Hideout expanded its Star Trek output beyond Discovery in 2020. Riker, Troi, and Data will next appear in Enterprise’s “These are the Voyages…” (taking place concurrently with TNG’s “The Pegasus”) with Riker and Troi’s next chronological appearances being in LD’s “No Small Parts.” Picard will next appear in Picard’s “Remembrance.” Crusher will next appear in Prodigy’s “Kobayashi.” Worf and La Forge will next appear in the upcoming third season of Picard.
Data was established in TNG‘s “Datalore” as having been created by Dr. Noonien Soong, which also established that there was a previous model called Lore. We got more background on his creation in the TNG episodes “Brothers,” “Silicon Avatar,” and “Inheritance,” the latter of which established the existence of several pre-Lore prototypes, of which B-4 is obviously one.
This movie has references to all four other extant TV series at the time: Riker makes reference to a maneuver named after Kirk from the original series, Shinzon is described as having fought in the Dominion War from DS9, we see Janeway from Voyager, now an admiral, and the Enterprise is set to rendezvous with a fleet that includes the U.S.S. Archer, named after the captain from Enterprise.
The other ships in that aforementioned fleet include the U.S.S. Intrepid (mentioned in both TNG’s “Force of Nature” and Voyager’s “In the Flesh,” the ship for which Voyager’s class of ship was named), the U.S.S. Valiant (a new ship with that name, as the one seen in DS9’s “Valiant” was destroyed), the U.S.S. Galaxy (the ship for which the Enterprise-D’s class of ship was named), the U.S.S. Aries (a previous ship that Riker was offered the captaincy of, which he turned down in TNG’s “The Icarus Factor,” and also mentioned in TNG’s “Identity Crisis” and “Redemption II”; the ship was misspelled “Aires” on the computer display), the U.S.S. Nova, and the U.S.S. Hood (the ship Riker and La Forge both served on before reporting to the Enterprise-D in TNG’s “Encounter at Farpoint,” later seen in TNG’s “Tin Man” and LD’s “Mining the Mind’s Mines” and referenced in several TNG and DS9 episodes).
While the rest of the cast was last seen in Insurrection, Worf had continued to be a regular on DS9, and he was last seen in that series’ finale “What You Leave Behind” being given the assignment to be Federation Ambassador to the Klingon Empire. Several novels showed Worf as a diplomat, including Robert Greenberger’s Doors Into Chaos, John Vornholt’s Genesis Force, Dayton Ward & Kevin Dilmore’s A Time to Sow, David Mack’s A Time to Kill, and your humble rewatcher’s Diplomatic Implausibility, The Brave and the Bold Book 2, A Good Day to Die, Honor Bound, A Burning House, and A Time for War, a Time for Peace, among others.
Early drafts of the script had Crusher intending to become head of Starfleet Medical (which she’d already done during season two of TNG) and Wes becoming part of Riker’s crew on Titan. Your humble rewatcher reconciled Wes being in uniform with his still being a Traveler in A Time for War, a Time for Peace, which chronicled full lead-in (and also immediate aftermath) of this film. My reconciliation was later supported by Wes’ appearance in Picard. In that same novel, I established that Worf was originally to become Riker’s first officer on Titan (and like Riker and Troi, this mission to Romulan space was his last hurrah on the Big E), but after Data’s death, Picard asked the Klingon to remain on the Enterprise.
Buy the Book
Wild Massive
As mentioned in the Insurrection rewatch, the A Time to… nine-book novel series by Vornholt, Ward & Dilmore, Greenberger, Mack, and your humble rewatcher chronicled the period leading up to this film. Among the things this book series did was chronicle the progress of Riker and Troi’s relationship from its renewal in Insurrection to their wedding in this film, show Riker being offered command of Titan, and establish how and why Worf was back serving in Starfleet from his diplomatic post.
The origin of the Remans was provided by the Vulcan’s Soul trilogy by Josepha Sherman & Susan Shwartz, which established that they were Romulans who were exiled to Remus and mutated by the conditions on that world (and who also retained their Vulcan telepathy, unlike the mainline Romulans). In addition, the last Romulan praetor we saw in power was Neral, as established in DS9’s “Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges.” The Vulcan’s Soul trilogy also chronicled the transition from Neral to Praetor Hiren from this film.
The short story “Twilight’s Wrath” by Mack in Tales of the Dominion War (which was edited by your humble rewatcher) shows Shinzon’s fighting on the Romulans’ behalf during the Dominion War, and also chronicles his discovery of B-4 and other bits of material he uses to further his plot in this film.
While the U.S.S. Titan is not seen in this movie, there is a series of Titan novels that give us Riker and Troi’s time on that ship, starting with Taking Wing by Andy Mangels & Michael A. Martin, which details the mission to Romulus that Riker describes at the end of this film. There were nine Titan novels (by Mangels & Martin, Christopher L. Bennett, Geoffrey Thorne, James Swallow, and Mack) plus an eBook novella (Absent Enemies by John Jackson Miller), and the ship was also prominently featured in the Destiny trilogy by Mack, the Department of Temporal Investigations novel Watching the Clock by Bennett, and in parts of the Typhon Pact and The Fall miniseries. Titan will later be seen onscreen in LD’s “No Small Parts,” and has appeared a few more times on that animated series as well. Picard’s “Nepenthe” will establish that Riker and Troi will have two children, but when one of them grows ill, they take extended leaves of absence to care for him until he dies. The Titan on LD is based on the design by Sean Tourangeau that won a contest for designing the ship held by Simon & Schuster, and which debuted on the cover of Sword of Damocles by Thorne. Titan will also be seen in Picard season three, but it’s a new ship with that name.
Besides the Titan series, several novels have dealt with the aftermath of the Romulan Empire’s travails in this movie: Death in Winter by Michael Jan Friedman, Articles of the Federation by your humble rewatcher, the aforementioned Destiny trilogy by Mack, and the Typhon Pact miniseries by Mack, Martin, David R. George III, Ward, Bennett, and Una McCormack.
Riker and Troi’s honeymoon was seen in the short story “Improvisations on the Opal Sea: A Tale of Dubious Credibility” by Mangels & Martin in Tales from the Captain’s Table (edited by your humble rewatcher).
The Enterprise-E’s adventures continued in fiction form beyond this, starting with a series of novels that showed the crew adjusting to the new status quo following this movie: the aforementioned Death in Winter, as well as Resistance by J.M. Dillard, your humble rewatcher’s Q & A, Before Dishonor by Peter David, Greater than the Sum by Bennett, the aforementioned Destiny trilogy, and Losing the Peace by William Leisner. The novels continued far beyond that, including being part of the Typhon Pact and The Fall miniseries, with the trilogies Cold Equations by Mack and Prey by Miller, as well as individual novels by David A. McIntee, Jeffrey Lang, Miller, Ward, and Mack. More recently, the Enterprise-E is seen in the Picard prequel novel The Last Best Hope by McCormack.
Make it so. “Why do you have a shiny head?” In 2002, I and several other Star Trek novelists who lived in the New York Metropolitan Area were among those who got invited to a special screening of Nemesis prior to its release. I distinctly remember walking out of that next to Michael Jan Friedman, exchanging glances and declaring that the movie was remarkably terrible. Indeed, we remarked on it for quite some time afterward…
Twenty-one years later, it isn’t any better. Picard show-runner Terry Matalas is on record as saying that part of why he’s getting the band back together for season three of the TV show is because he wanted the sendoff this crew deserves that Nemesis utterly failed to provide, and hoo-hah, he ain’t kiddin’.
There are a lot of failure points in this movie, but every time I watch it and/or think about it, I always come back to this: when Picard and the gang beam over to the Scimitar the first time it’s stated very clearly that Remans are susceptible to bright light. So when the viceroy leads a boarding party, my first thought in 2002 was, “Okay, here’s where Picard orders the lights turned on really really bright,” a moment that never came, and what the hell? That is Writing 101! There is no reason, none, to have the Remans be sensitive to bright light unless you’re going to use it in the story. But it’s never even mentioned after that, and it makes our heroes look like complete morons, because the obvious defense against the boarding party is staring them right in the face!
When I did my rewatch of The Wrath of Khan, I talked about the many sides of the argument about whether or not someone who knows Trek should work on Trek, an argument that started with Harve Bennett and Nicholas Meyer taking the reins of the movies away from Gene Roddenberry in that 1982 film, and continuing to the present in arguments about the shows on Paramount+.
This movie is a great argument against the notion of outsiders coming in. John Logan and Stuart Baird were specifically brought in as fresh blood, and man, did they shit the bed. We start with two WTF scenes of epic proportions: the Romulan Senate turned to pixie dust by a device that was just left on a desk, with everyone just staring at it for several seconds while it blasts radiation into the room. Why doesn’t this government installation have any security? (This actually was particularly ridiculous to watch in 2002, only a year after 9/11.) Then we have Picard’s low-comedy best man speech for Riker and Troi, in which we hear words come out of Sir Patrick Stewart’s mouth that sound more like they should be coming from Seth MacFarlane’s Ed Mercer than Jean-Luc Picard.
And it never gets any better. Like with Insurrection, there’s a lot of forced humor here, complete with wide-eyed smiles coming from the crew in response during which you expect to hear a muted trombone go “wah-wah.” There’s Worf’s being hung over (ha ha! the big strong Klingon can’t hold his liquor! that’s funny!), there’s the “Mr. Troi” line (Zombie Henny Youngman called, he wants his outdated hoary sexist joke back), there’s Picard and Riker’s stupid banter about going on away missions on three separate occasions, there’s the tee-hee adolescent idiocy regarding Betazed’s tradition of nudity at weddings (hyur hyur, naked bodies is funneeeee!), and on and on.
Plus we have the captain’s mid-life crisis-mobile, the Argo, complete with aliens who fire on them for no reason the script can be bothered to explain. Nor can the script be bothered to explain why everyone’s okay with this pre-warp society being exposed to a shuttlecraft and a Space Dune Buggy who proceed to shoot them with ray beams. I know I’ve complained about modern Trek’s absolutist adherence to the Prime Directive, but this is too far in the other direction…
I could go on and on about this movie. It’s just awful from the bottom up and it’s awful from the roof on down the other side. The themes of duplicates and similarities between beings who started from the same spot are ham-fisted and underdeveloped, and ultimately not that interesting. Data’s sacrifice is ridiculously constructed. Besides the Argo car chase, we’ve got a middle-aged human going through the Scimitar easily taking out an entire ship’s complement full of trained soldiers who survived being cannon fodder in a brutal war, er, somehow. The shifting alliances of the Romulan military make no sense on any level—not their initial alliance with Shinzon, nor their later switch (though Donatra’s change of heart is understandable given how Shinzon treats her). And at no point do I feel like I’m necessarily watching the characters I’d been following for fifteen years up to that point. With very few exceptions, the characters barely even sound like themselves—or like anybody else. The dialogue is incredibly generic. (One very well-done exception is Riker’s reminisce of the first time he met Data on the holodeck, with the android failing at whistling, in “Encounter at Farpoint.”) And the telepathic rape of Troi is utterly gratuitous and pointless; it’s typical for a TNG movie to marginalize everyone not named Picard or Data, but it’s particularly appalling that the only thing they can find for the trained therapist to do in a movie full of psychological issues for the main characters is to have her be raped.
Worse, the movie utterly wastes Ron Perlman in a pointless henchman role that could’ve gone to anyone. Tom Hardy, at least, does a good job—and man, he looks so young!—but making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear has become his thing in several movies (most notably the two Venom films).
Ultimately, though, the biggest failure of this movie is a fundamental plot one: Shinzon’s entire cunning plan to get Picard to Romulus depends on factors completely out of his control and impossible to predict. What if another ship found the positronic emissions? What if Starfleet Command sent a different ship—or, y’know, a diplomatic envoy like, say, the Federation Ambassador to Romulus, who’s probably already there—to meet with Shinzon? What if Picard politely asked Janeway, “Can you please send someone else? I’ll never hear the end of it from the mother of the bride if we’re late…”
On Thursday, we’ll take a look at the attempt to redeem this nonsense with my review of Picard’s season three premiere, “The Next Generation.”
Warp factor rating: 1
Keith R.A. DeCandido has been writing for and about Star Trek since the turn of the millennium, including 16 novels, 13 novellas, eight short stories, six comic books, a reference book, and a bunch of RPG material, as well as reviews, articles, think-pieces and rewatches for a variety of magazines, essay collections, and web sites, including on this site since 2011. His next work of Trek fiction is coming in April: the DS9 short story “You Can’t Buy Fate” in issue #7 of Star Trek Explorer.
