How Star Trek: Discovery takes its cues from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country

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Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is the last feature film to star all of the major players from the original series; Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu, Chekov, and even Janice Rand makes another appearance here. (Kirk, Scotty and Chekov would later appear in Star Trek: Generations and Leonard Nimoy’s Spock Prime in the first two Abramsverse films, but the whole team was never brought together on screen again). Fittingly, for the end of the original crew’s journey, it tells the story of the end of the cold war between the Federation and the Klingon Empire that had been rumbling on in the background throughout the original series – but that viewers knew, thanks to Star Trek: The Next Generation (which had already been airing for several years) would not last into the twenty-fourth century.

The film’s plot is relatively straightforward. Spock volunteers his old crew to escort the Klingon Chancellor to peace talks, but the Chancellor is assassinated along the way. Kirk and McCoy are framed for the crime and sent to Klingon Siberia (the icy penal colony of Rura Penthe). However, Spock rescues them, they find one of the true culprits among the Enterprise crew, and they uncover a conspiracy to assassinate the President of the Federation as well – an attempt which, of course, they foil with a little help from Captain Sulu of the USS Excelsior. The film was made in 1991, as the real life Cold War between the USA and the USSR was drawing to a close and the USSR was breaking up (with the destruction of Praxis partly inspired by the nuclear accident at Chernobyl). Like much of the best science fiction, it plays out as a fairly straightforward metaphorical representation of how many Americans felt about Russia and Russians at the time.

general tone of Discovery are fairly obvious. While the earliest origins of the hostility between the Klingon Empire and the Federation were covered by Star Trek: Enterprise, Discovery and The Undiscovered Country bookend one complete story by showing the beginnings of a period of outright war in Discovery, to be followed by decades of cold war, ending in The Undiscovered Country. In this way, The Undiscovered Country is a clear starting-point for Discovery – we know the end of this story, so what was the beginning? This may be partly way the first nine episodes were specifically set in the Prime Universe; we are supposed to know the ultimate conclusion of these events, as context for the story.

By taking the war and ongoing hostilities with the Klingons as a basis for their story, both The Undiscovered Country and Discovery paint on a very broad canvas. The Wrath Of Khan was an entirely personal story – while the Genesis Device, in the wrong hands, could be a terrifying weapon, the actual plot of the film is on a much smaller scale and affects only the crews of two spaceships, one science station, and one group of exiles. The Undiscovered Country is a much bigger story. Kirk’s personal journey and the softening of his feelings towards the Klingons offers his character movement and direction, but the plot itself opens with the destruction of an entire moon than dooms the whole Klingon Empire, and the resolution looks to bring about peace for two huge space-faring cultures.

In the case of Discovery, the huge scope of the driving force of the plot is combined with a new innovation for Star Trek, the privileging of one specific character as the lead, rather than structuring the show around an ensemble (or a trio, in the case of much of the original series). The contrast between the individuality of Burnham’s story and the widespread consequences of her actions is part of what gives the series such a different feel from the other television incarnations of Star Trek, especially in the early episodes, before the rest of the ensemble starts to settle down. The significance of the consequences of anyone’s actions aboard Discovery also provide opportunities for self-sacrifice among the crew, particularly on the part of Stamets – though in that aspect, of course, The Wrath Of Khan has not been forgotten! Its most famous lines (“the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one”) are still being trotted out and re-considered in this harsh, war-torn context.