Ten Years Ago: Star Trek Into Darkness

Max DeCurtins looks up from the listicle he was reading on “Every Starship Enterprise – Ranked” to rewatch J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness and ask, “Do you even Khan, bro?”

About the only thing as reliable as death, taxes, and Stormtroopers who can shoot everything but their intended target, is a corrupt Starfleet Admiral. They’re the asterisk to Trek’s innate optimism that humans will eventually mature beyond their baser selves. I think it’s a stretch to call the Bad Admiral (“badmiral”!) trope intentional commentary; Trek never had a unified theory of the corruptions of power, but it’s 2023 and I’m not sure we need one. (Just open your preferred news app.) In other words, we’ve been here before, which brings us to today’s offering, Star Trek Into Darkness, or: NüTrek II: I Can’t Believe it’s not Wrath of Khan.

Four years after J.J. Abrams boldly polarized the Trekverse, a few things remain very much the same. Lens flares still abound. Composer Michael Giacchino’s bombastic, honestly pretty exciting score still survives, thankfully, basically intact from 2009. Scotty’s brogue is still kind of terrible—but like, maybe on purpose? Bones is still dropping metaphors like hit singles. Chris Pine is still very hot. And Kirk and Spock still radiate the most smoldering of platonic bromances. With all that in mind, let’s re-view a bit, shall we?

Into Darkness opens, contra Bones (“space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence”), on a planet with a bright blue sky, vermillion vegetation, and a civilization of primitive humanoids with white skin and yellow garments, from whom James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) is fleeing. There’s a volcano in the process of erupting next to their village, you see, and Kirk is determined to save these pallid aliens from their certain doom. In his flight Kirk rendezvouses with Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban), and the two of them, now improvising, jump off a cliff into a big blue sea, where we find the Enterprise hiding, completely submerged, ready to receive Kirk and Bones but, alas, not in a position to help Spock (Zachary Quinto), who is trying to deactivate the erupting volcano with support from Lt. Hikaru Sulu (John Cho) and Spock’s very de-emphasized girlfriend and resident Enterprise linguist Lt. Uhura (Zoe Saldaña).

When Spock’s mission takes a turn for the worse, Kirk orders the Enterprise up and out of the ocean to go rescue him, at the cost of revealing the ship to the aliens—a violation of the Prime Directive. The Enterprise successfully rescues Spock, leaving behind a group of very bewildered aliens who, the implication goes, will eventually incorporate the ship into their theology explaining how the fearsome volcano was defeated. Upon returning to Earth, Kirk and Spock get a dressing-down from a robustly sideburned Admiral Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), in which Kirk learns that Spock filed a report about the incident that puts the lie to Kirk’s own, er, edited account of what happened. (My dudes. Not coordinating your fibs is how every ’90s sitcom character gets caught. This isn’t hard.) As punishment, Starfleet revokes Kirk’s command of the Enterprise, reassigning the ship back to Pike; Spock is transferred to another ship entirely.

While all this is going on, a secondary exposition is unfolding halfway around the world in London, where an eminently forgettable Starfleet officer (Noel Clarke) and his wife watch—accompanied by some Yann Tiersen Amélie-sounding melancholy piano, apparently—as their daughter lies comatose with a terminal illness. A mysterious man approaches Officer Harewood, claiming he can save the girl. You only need hear the voice to know that this dude is none other than Benefronk Chumberspantz Benedict Cumberbatch, and that he’s Into Darkness’ villain. In short, in exchange for a vial of Crumverbatschen’s super blood to save his daughter’s life, Harewood agrees to sacrifice himself to bomb the London Starfleet installation where he works. Just before blowing himself to smithereens, he sends a “Cumberbatch made me do it” transmission to the head of Starfleet, Admiral Alexander Marcus (Peter Weller).

Back in SF, Pike and Kirk get called away from a make-up of sorts over glasses of whiskey to a meeting of nearby brass at Starfleet HQ. In the logic of timing that only movies can have, Kirk figures out a minute too late that the purpose of the London attack was to trigger Starfleet to gather its leadership so that they too could be attacked. The room goes red like we’ve suddenly fallen into a Kubrick movie and Cumberbatch, aka Commander John Harrison, piloting the future equivalent of an Apache helicopter just outside the conference room, lets loose with both barrels.

Alas, Pike’s silvery sideburns aren’t enough to save him from the assault, and in the first of Into Darkness’ two poignant scenes, he expires with Spock’s fingers pressed into his face for that little dying moment mind-meld rush of emotion, as if Spock were taking a bong hit. Kirk, fresh from taking down Harrison, sees Spock crouched in front of Pike, has a Very Profound 45-Second Cry, and then gets up and leaves without so much as a single word.

Thus we head into the film’s bloated second act. Uhura gets to speak some Klingon. We learn that Harrison is the infamous Khan, and that Marcus—who’s obviously smelled rotten since his first appearance—is responsible for unleashing Khan. Marcus has built himself a Federation warship (the USS Vengeance), which Scotty temporarily sabotages, and yada yada yada Khan kills Marcus and both ships end up nearly destroyed. Middle acts are supposed to raise the stakes, but nothing about this one feels dangerous or consequential, save one plot hole so glaring it could burn your retinas. Khan, archetypical evil genius, makes a Rookie-ass Mistake so egregiously noobish that you can’t help but let out an annoyed “Do you even Khan, bruh?”

With the Vengeance and the Enterprise disabled, both ships begin plummeting into Earth’s gravity well and Kirk rushes in to fix the misaligned warp core, knowing full well that doing so will dose him with fatal radiation exposure. Scotty, through whom Kirk had to punch his way to get to the warp core, comes to and calls Spock down from the bridge on the double-quick.

They exchange a few words about feelings, because everything in Kelvin Timeline Trek is about feelings, and how to feel or not feel them. Kirk tenderly puts his hand up against the glass, and Spock meets it with his own—a kind of bromantic Jack and Rose dragging palms down steamy glass moment—whereupon Kirk uses his dying ounce of strength feebly to coax his fingers into the Vulcan prosperity hand symbol (borrowed, if you know your Nimoy, from a Jewish practice of blessing a congregation with the same hand symbol, which resembles the Hebrew letter shin).

Now, this scene is one of the few in the movie to pack any pathos, and Pine and Quinto play the hand they’re dealt as best they can. Yes, a small lump rises in my throat, because I’m turning into a sap made of marshmallow Fluff in my old age. But Reader…

(A pause. A bird chirps outside the window. The author inhales.)

IT’S THE GODDAMN YEAR OF OUR LORD 2259.

WE’VE GOT PHASERS.

WE’VE GOT TRANSPORTERS!

WE’VE GOT SUPER ICE CUBES THAT CAN SHUT DOWN A WHOLE-ASS VOLCANO.

WE’VE GOT JETPACK-EQUIPPED SUITS WITH TACTICAL DISPLAYS FOR FLYING AROUND THROUGH ACTUAL FLOTSAM-FILLED SPACE.

But somehow, on a starship that depends on a highly radioactive energy source to warp its Cadillac ass around, we don’t have…radiation suits?!?!

(The author excuses himself to reheat his tea. The ambient temperature falls by one degree. Outside, the leaves rustle gently in the wind.)

Welcome back, everybody. If you’re just joining us, we’re talking about the ridiculous circumstances that set up and surround Kirk’s “death”—especially since we know that he’s not really going to end up permanently dead. (That would defeat the purpose of the “reboot,” you see.)

Meanwhile, thanks to Kirk’s sacrifice, the Enterprise has regained power, fortuitously allowing it to refrain from crashing straight the fuck into San Francisco. Khan, on the other hand, is so high on revenge against the Federation that he aims what’s left of the Vengeance at Starfleet HQ, and into the City by the Bay it goes—by the looks of it, crashing ashore along the Embarcadero somewhere between Pier 39 and the Ferry Building and taking a chunk of Alcatraz with it.

Reader, grant me a momentary, inline free-floating thought to say that I’ve long been done with disaster porn-style destruction just for the sake of pixels and particle physics. I get it: San Francisco is America’s favorite punching-bag city du jour. Yes, SF has big problems, but I have a lot of memories there so could we just fucking not for a hot minute? Of all the superfluous action sequences in Into Darkness, I just really did not feel this action sequence the most ten years later.

It’s around this time that Bones—thanks to a Tribble, because of course it’s a Tribble—realizes that he needs Khan’s blood in order to resurrect Kirk, and Uhura beams down to deliver the message to Spock, who has otherwise been busy beating the ever-loving shit out of Khan. A final blow to knock Khan unconscious, and we’re off to the epilogue. By now, you know what’s coming: Kirk wakes up in a hospital bed, right as rain; the Enterprise is repaired; and we’re back to a warp core that’s “purring like a kitten”, ready to seek out new life and new civilizations. The question is…why? More specifically: why should we care?

I consider myself a casual Trek fan, and I say this as someone who will idly click on Ars Technica’s ranking of every starship Enterprise and utter the words “it’s obviously the Enterprise-D, assholes” before going back to work. That being the case, I confess I’ve never entirely understood exactly what counts as “Star Trek” and what doesn’t—the fandom usually appeal to the high-mindedness of peaceful space exploration and stories laced with elements of classical literature, philosophy, and mythology, and yes, the episodes of TNG, for example, that do a narrative dance with Shakespeare, or with the epic of Gilgamesh, or that “engage” with topics like genocide or terrorism—as much as any single episode of 40-something minutes can plumb such subjects in the first place—are among the best offerings from the Trekverse. And who can’t help but be attracted to the idea that humanity got its shit together and solved the problems that have plagued our species since, oh, forever?

But these things, to the extent that they express Gene Roddenberry’s vision aren’t, and haven’t always been, the only facet of Trek. Partially thanks to Trek, we got the space exploration “alien of the week” formula for episodic television, and while it’s not necessarily derisive to say that a show follows a “____ of the week” format, it does often mean that said show will eventually grow stale unless it can find a new organizing principle. In other words, it’s difficult to stick with the same premise for as long as Trek has been around without mixing it up a little.

Sometimes, Trek does have to be about the corrupt Starfleet Admirals, and the protocol-bending, elbow-scraping brawls, and the ships shooting at each other, and, well, war. Without them we are painting humanity into a future corner that is, if anything, less believable—one that prefers to imagine that people aren’t still occasionally fallible, just as they’ve always been; to pretend that the final frontier comes with its challenges but is otherwise basically safe for human civilization and diplomacy. (Q even tells Picard and Riker that “it’s not safe out there” before flinging the Enterprise into premature contact with the Borg!)

Trek has been struggling between Starfleet’s demons and its better angels long before J.J. Abrams showed up with his lens flares; it’s well known that TNG had more corrupt Admirals than honorable ones. DS9, though never quite as popular as TNG, painted its characters with quite a bit of moral ambiguity, featured a seasons-(plural!)-long story arc about a war, and still managed to accrue positive critical and popular reception. If these things—the complicated characters who sometimes do underhanded deeds to achieve their ends, and the big space battles—aren’t Trek, then to what, exactly, were people responding so positively?

While it’s not the only offender, Abrams-era Trek in particular has come in for criticism about its turn away from a Starfleet that explores to one that has been “militarized.” And yet, Canonical Trek has example after example of officers appealing to “the uniform,” speaking about duties and obligations to a larger ideal, and indulging in ceremonies with flags and oaths. Dulce et decorum est, pro Federatia mori. Doesn’t this sound suspiciously like the culture of…the military? In other words, Trek has always taken more than a few cues from military culture; what’s different about nüTrek is that it chooses not to explore, which leaves only the shoot-‘em-up side of things.

Ten years ago, I think I was, if nothing else, curious about where Trek would go now that Abrams had essentially wiped out two of Trek’s core species, the Romulans and the Vulcans, from the Kelvin timeline altogether. While I didn’t notice it at the time, Into Darkness makes almost no reference to the fact that all these events are still happening in an alternate timeline. The only reminder is an extremely brief chat Spock has with his older self (Leonard Nimoy, in one of his final appearances) about the evilness of Khan and how to defeat him. Blink and you’d almost miss it.

That Into Darkness wholly abandons the core conceit upon which Abrams-era Trek stands reveals what even its creators apparently think of the creative vitality of the TOS-era franchise, which is to say: not much. An alternate timeline is about as close as you get to writing yourself a blank check to try something new, to explore sides of characters teased out by new situations that prior Trek didn’t, couldn’t, or wouldn’t explore. Faced with that potential responsibility, Abrams apparently balked. Perhaps the particular pressures of film are partly to blame; there’s no such thing per se as a mid-season course correction in film if you try something that doesn’t work. Though I haven’t seen them, it’s the streaming shows—Discovery, Lower Decks, Picard, etc. soon to be joined by a Starfleet Academy-based series—that appear to keep the Trek flame alive these days. And if the Abrams films haven’t cracked the secret to sustainable Trek, it’s not clear the shows have, either.

In the end, I’m not sure Into Darkness’ problem is that it’s not Trek. It is, after a fashion. The real problem is that it doesn’t leave us thinking about anything, at least not in the way that “Q Who” or “Darmok” or “In the Pale Moonlight” did. For all its entanglement with the figure of Khan, Into Darkness turns out to be a mundane retreading of themes told over many turns, across screens silver and small.

Kirk isn’t Picard, and Spock isn’t Data: There isn’t anything philosophical at work, with or without a more muscular Starfleet, that lets the audience inside the characters for a while as they learn about themselves. In fact, they feel more calcified than ever, as if Kirk, Spock, Scotty, and Bones are deterministic algorithms: given a particular input, they produce a consistent output. Neither Generations, First Contact, nor Insurrection ever felt quite as plug-’n’-play. (I choose to ignore that Nemesis exists.) Kirk and Spock read like Cory and Topanga without the ham-handed growth, and Kirk straight-up announces he’s taking responsibility for his actions like he’s proving something to Mr. Feeny. It’s all rather superficial.

That Into Darkness is watchable ten years later is entirely thanks to the actors. I didn’t see its successor Star Trek Beyond, but it’s hard to believe that it delivered where its predecessors didn’t. Ultimately, it’s not that Abrams et al don’t understand Trek or have sold out; it’s that they correctly understand—like anyone who owns the IP rights to a well-established franchise—that people will eat what’s put in front of them, just because it’s there. We’ve seen this movie before, and we will see it again.

— Max DeCurtins