Star Trek’s Most Controversial Show Fixes Worst Movie In Franchise

This all goes back to the 1989 film Star Trek: The Final Frontier, a movie whose plot involves Spock’s crazy half-brother trying to find the planet where God lives. He hijacks the Enterprise to head to that planet, eventually finding an angry alien head claiming to be God Almighty. The impudence of Kirk (who memorably asks “what does God need with a starship?”) causes the God to attack, and Kirk decides to blow him up with photon torpedoes (no, really).

That all sounds pretty stupid, right? That’s why we were so surprised that the Star Trek: Discovery series finale involved Burnham speaking to an alien who created all intelligent life in the galaxy, a being who is basically her God. 

However, the show approached this portrayal of a kinda-sorta divine being very carefully, courtesy of showrunner Michelle Paradise. She told Variety that the revelation that the Progenitors themselves were created by unknown aliens was included in the Star Trek series to emphasize how “We’re not saying this is God with a capital ‘G.’”

In our always humble opinion, this approach worked very well for many reasons, including that it is relatively respectful of religions such as Christianity. With a bit of imagination, a person of faith could reconcile that their own divine being was responsible for creating the Progenitors rather than these aliens fully supplanting all religions. Incidentally, Captain Burnham actor Sonequa Martin-Green is a very devout Christian herself, and she had nothing but praise for the scene, saying that “it felt lifted” and that “it really did feel like [Burnham] and I were the only two people in this moment.”

By leaning into something more respectfully ambiguous than we got in The Final Frontier, Discovery was able to preserve the mystery of the biggest questions in the galaxy, like “where do we come from” and “what is our purpose in life?” The earlier film dangled metaphysical certainty and then killed it for a cheap finale. By contrast, Discovery helped pay off its season-long mystery while still leaving plenty for fans to ponder.

To us, the most surprising thing about Star Trek’s latest portrayal of God is that it was interesting enough and respectful enough to make us reconsider the ending of The Final Frontier. While that movie had Spock speculating “this is not the God of Sha Ka Ree, …or any other God,” there has always been the uncomfortable possibility that the Vulcan was wrong and that Kirk really did blow up a profound and beloved holy figure. The Progenitors being confirmed as the creators of humanity retroactively implies that Kirk just killed yet another godlike being (someone akin to Q, Trelane, or even Gary Mitchell) rather than anything divine.

None of this makes Star Trek V: The Final Frontier a good film, of course, but Discovery’s deft handling of “god” helped us see the film’s bad guy as nothing more than a powerful alien … basically, what Q would be like if he couldn’t flirt with Picard. The Progenitors are something approaching the real divine deal, and that’s enough to reassure us that Kirk didn’t blow up the real God (whoever or whatever that may be) at the end of that awful movie. 

As for us, we would have had a very different conversation with God than Captain Burnham. Mostly, we just have one question: “can you take us to the universe where Gene Roddenberry’s film about Kirk fist-fighting Jesus actually got made?”