Star Trek Free Movies

[Brinda]

Backin 2012, after a difficult year at an unsatisfying job that ended with a disagreeable departure, my life was in rough shape. Freelancing was barely making ends meet. Sending out hundreds of applications was wearing me down. To add insult to injury, most nights, I simply couldn't sleep.

After a fruitless midnight circumnavigation of my entire neighborhood, I flopped down on the couch, still feeling restless and miserable. So I turned on Netflix and found "Star Trek: Enterprise" first in my list of recommendations. (Read how to binge watch all 726 "Star Trek" episodes and 12 movies in this piece from Tom's Guide, our sister site.)

I've always been a moderate "Star Trek" fan. Even though my first exposure to the franchise was the decidedly mediocre "Insurrection," something about the mix of sci-fi action and mildly thoughtful philosophy made a powerful impression in my 11-year-old brain. From then on, my dad and I would gather in the living room every night after dinner to watch reruns of the original series. He explained what was happening in the world at the time each episode aired, and suddenly, I knew what "allegory" and "parable" meant. [How 'Star Trek' Technology Works (Infographic)]

Something about the show's optimistic message stuck with me. Technology can improve our lives. We can conquer our deeply held prejudices. There is other life out there, and it is willing to cooperate with us. And, importantly, no matter how far we come as a society, there will always be room for adventurers.

There's something uplifting about "Star Trek," even when you're at your lowest, so I turned it on and figured I would watch until I could fall asleep. The next night, I watched another episode, and sleep came a little easier. And so on and so forth, until I had completed "Enterprise," nd procured a new job.

But why stop there, I thought? I was onto something, and something good. What if I kept going and watched every single episode and movie of "Star Trek" ever made? I turned on the original series, and the rest is history.

Three and a half years after I started the process, I finished it. Though I can't recommend it for everyone, people who have watched some "Star Trek" and enjoyed it should at least sit down and watch one of the five series start to finish.

While the answer to this question varies from person to person, to me, "Star Trek" succeeds because it combines everything that's entertaining into a single franchise. There are gunfights, fistfights and ship-to-ship combat for action aficionados. Most episodes feature allegorical stories that pose difficult questions about our everyday society, addressing issues such as racism, homophobia, civil liberties, religion, personhood and the rules of war.

Each series features an appealing mix of characters who play off of the others' foibles, like Mr. Spock's logic confounding Dr. McCoy's sense of wonder, or Constable Odo's hard-nosed investigations foiling Quark's get-rich-quick schemes.

Lots of sci-fi shows and movies include these factors, but few of them have the breadth and scope necessary to include all of them at once. I can laugh at a deluge of fuzzy tribbles burying Captain Kirk, or despair at Major Kira confronting a war criminal. I can think about how Captain Picard's questionable past shaped the man he is, or root for Captain Archer as he goes head-to-head with a Klingon battleship. There is no "one best" thing about "Star Trek," save for its variety. [USS Enterprise Evolution in Photos]

Simply put, considering the franchise comprises 726 episodes across 30 seasons of TV and 12 movies released between 1979 and 2013, it's not all going to be good. The show's worst sin, in my opinion, is that it's occasionally just boring. Not every TV show is going to be guns-blazing action all the time. But when "Star Trek" gets the pacing wrong, it's spectacularly wrong.

Some episodes, particularly of "The Next Generation" and "Enterprise," are about the most minor diplomatic infractions imaginable, with forced banter between underdeveloped characters to populate the almost invariably inconsequential B-story. The first "Star Trek" movie can be almost unbearable to watch. Prepare for two and a half hours of absolutely nothing happening until the almost-brilliant-enough-to-justify-the-rest last five minutes. There's a reason they call it "The Motionless Picture."

You can't have a new set, a famous guest star, a pitched starship battle or a bizarre alien in every episode, or else you'd run out of money before the season finale. But let's just say that the stereotype of "Star Trek" being about a bunch of space diplomats talking at each other for 40 minutes, though mostly untrue, isn't without precedent. [The Restoration of Star Trek's USS Enterprise in Pictures]

Star Trek is an optimistic vision of our future, but it's also a cheesy space opera. It's a font of realistic, believable technology, but it's also a sci-fi series that leans heavily on fantastical elements. It's brilliant, overwrought, heartfelt, campy, profound and silly. Across so many episodes and films, it has time to be all of those contradictory things, and more.

But in spite of all its missteps, once I started "Enterprise," I never seriously entertained the notion of stopping until the end credits of "Into Darkness" rolled on my TV screen. "Star Trek" is more than just a story; it's an institution, and there's a reason it's endured and grown stronger for the last half century. At its core, "Star Trek" is a story about our shared humanity and the wondrous destiny that awaits us if we can get our act together, give up our meaningless divisions and embrace our future in the stars. [Why We Still Love 'Star Trek']

That's the big secret of "Star Trek." It doesn't really have any alien races; it has metaphors. Vulcans represent our logic, Klingons our pugnacity, Romulans our secrecy, Ferengi our greed, Bajorans our spirituality, Betazoids our empathy and Borg our overreliance on technology. In each race, there is something admirable and something twisted, and humanity can embody both sides of the gold-pressed latinum coin.

While it's not a novel observation, the reason "Star Trek" feels unique, even in a world of more ambitious sci-fi properties like "Battlestar Galactica" and "Black Mirror," is because it alone asserts that technology will make our lives better, not worse. Space travel will bring about untold prosperity and limitless adventures, not the agonizing downfall of humanity. There will be challenges to face and enemies to fight, of course, but "Star Trek" has always been more about conflict resolution than the conflict itself. This is why it's such a valuable property; this is why it had the power to bring me out of the blackest period of my life.

Marshall Honorof is a senior editor for Tom's Guide, overseeing the site's coverage of gaming hardware and software. He comes from a science writing background, having studied paleomammalogy, biological anthropology, and the history of science and technology. After hours, you can find him practicing taekwondo or doing deep dives on classic sci-fi. "}), " -0-10/js/authorBio.js"); } else console.error('%c FTE ','background: #9306F9; color: #ffffff','no lazy slice hydration function available'); Marshall HonorofSocial Links NavigationTom's Guide senior editorMarshall Honorof is a senior editor for Tom's Guide, overseeing the site's coverage of gaming hardware and software. He comes from a science writing background, having studied paleomammalogy, biological anthropology, and the history of science and technology. After hours, you can find him practicing taekwondo or doing deep dives on classic sci-fi.

There was a moment in "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" - only one, and a brief one, but a genuine one - when I felt the promise of awe. The Starship Enterprise was indeed going where no man had gone before, through the fabled Great Barrier, which represents the end of the finite universe. What would lie beyond? Would it be an endless void, or a black hole, or some kind of singularity of space and time that would turn the voyagers inside out and deposit them in another universe? Or would the Barrier even reveal, as one of the characters believes, the place where life began? The place called by the name of Eden and countless other words? As the Enterprise approached the Barrier, I found my attention gathering. The movie had been slow and boring until then, with an interminable, utterly inconsequential first act and a plot that seemed to exist in a space-time singularity all its own. But now, at last, the fifth "Star Trek" movie seemed to be remembering what was best about the fictional world of "Star Trek": those moments when man and his ideas are challenged by the limitless possibilities of creation.

As I've said, my awe was real. It was also brief. Once the Enterprise crew members (and the Vulcan who was holding them hostage) landed on the world beyond the Barrier, the possibilities of god or Eden or whatever quickly disintegrated into an anticlimactic special effects show with a touch of "The Wizard of Oz" thrown in for good measure. I do not want to give away important elements in the plot, but after you've seen the movie, ask yourself these questions: 1) How was it known that the voyagers would go beyond the Barrier; 2) what was the motivation behind what they found there; 3) how was it known that they would come to stand at exactly the point where the stone pillars came up from the Earth; 4) In a version of a question asked by Capt. Kirk, why would any entity capable of staging such a show need its own starship; and 5) is the Great Barrier indeed real, or simply a deceptive stage setting for what was found behind it? (What I'm really complaining about, I think, is that "Star Trek V" allows itself enormous latitude in the logic beneath its plot. If the Barrier is real, what exactly are we to make of the use to which it is put?) Before we get to ask those questions, "Star Trek V" spends much of its time meandering through some of the goofiest scenes in the entire series. The movie opens with the taking of three hostages on a desert planet, who have been captured for the sole purpose of luring Capt. Kirk and his starship to the planet so that the ship can be commandeered for the voyage through the Barrier. I have explained these plot details in one sentence. The movie takes endless scenes, during which the key crew members of the Enterprise need to be summoned back to their ship in the middle of a shore leave. And that process, in turn, requires interminable scenes of Kirk, Spock and Bones on a camping trip in Yosemite, during which they attempt to sing "Row, row, row your boat" and nearly succeed in sinking the entire movie. If there is a sillier and more awkwardly written scene in the entire "Star Trek" saga than this one, I've missed it.

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