Star Trek: First Contact

***** (5 stars out of 5)

Oh, man, oh man! I'm excited from moment one of the overture. It's been too long, I guess.

Even those dullsville uniforms aren't enough to get me down. What's next? Black shrouds? Or is it too on the nose to complain that Mr. Blackman made the costumes too black?

The Enterprise-E is the most advanced ship in the fleet, but Starfleet doesn't trust Picard around the Borg. Is it worth noting that families aren't along anymore? Was that Picard's reward for crashing the D? A ship with no children at last?

Defiant's helmsman (Adam Scott) is a delightfully familiar fellow! His ancestors battled racoon hordes in Pawnee, Indiana, no doubt!

Picking off Starfleet ships left and right, the Borg cube is demolished by an attack on a weak dragon scale known only to Picard. Too bad Starfleet didn't invite him in the first place: they invited everyone else. I even saw the Millenium Falcon! But even the rousing score of the father/son Goldsmith team can't save everyone.

When Data says  'uh-oh, chronometric particles!', and Picard says 'temporal vortex', poor Riker is left to dumb it down even further and say 'time travel'. If anyone on the bridge didn't get that, they probably don't belong on a bridge. Just sayin'.

Assimilated Earth with green methane-fluorine clouds and crap-brown oceans is a hideous sight. That's what you show Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout when she simply will not take the garbage out.

The Borg time sphere bombards Montana on April 4, 2063, ten years after the Earth Minbari War. Sorry, wrong dimension. I meant ten years after Earth fucked itself over in WWIII, a nuke war between East and West with 600 million dead. Only 40 years left, humanity, let's keep wasting them!

Confident in his yellow-trim grey uniform, Paul Porter winds up the first redshirt anyway as Borg infiltrators fuse organic and inorganic together all higgledy-piggledy.  Crusher sacrifices her Emergency Medical Hologram to delay the Borg while she and Ogawa flee. And what a useful sacrifice it was: the medicine women instantly lose track of their patient. Within moments primitive local shipwright Lily Sloane is taking the Captain hostage! Fantastic work. Falling apart in a crisis: what our crew does best.

Speaking of falling apart, Troi gets hammered with Dr. Zefram Cochrane on what is probably radioactive deuterium. Troi is the comic relief? TROI? But of course, it works. It's lovely.

Data has the ability to deactivate his emotion chip now, useful in anxious moments. He does not burst out in a Paxton-like 'It's a BUG hunt, man! A freakin' BUG Hunt!' So, snapping necks and shooting our own crew is what we do now? It doesn't stop Data getting captured.

The Enterprise crew gives Lily and Cochrane all the treats Voyager's crew denied Rain Robinson.
They tell Cochrane that his warp ship Phoenix and the aliens he's going to meet tomorrow are what turns everything around for that scrappy little planet that could, Terra.

As Troi says: "It unites humanity in a way that no one ever thought possible when they realize they're not alone in the universe. Poverty, disease, war- they'll all be gone within the next 50 years."

Does the E even use transparent aluminum anymore? Or are all the windows forcefields? They must be very, very supremely confident in the ship's ability not to lose power. Ever.

The Borg Queen grafts some poor slobs' human skin onto Data. The sensations it grants him are meant as an enticement. But now that he has skin I assume it's crawling. Mine is.

Picard, having lost his mind at some point, decides that he an Lily are so pressed for time that they should dress up and go dancing in a Dixon Hill holonovel. Oh, right. The tommy gun holobullets with the safety protocols off.

BARCLAY! God, I missed Barclay. Beside himself with overwhelming hero worship for Cochrane. Somehow while attending Zefram Cochrane High School, Geordi never heard the expression "Take a leak". Although he knows what "pee" is and, like me, he laughs about it like a giant child.

Data, if he's being honest with the Queen, has not had sex in over 8 years (sorry, Ensign D'Sora). Although it IS implied he might've had to re-start that count after today. Yergh. Bjorn Bjorg's something, isn't she? Roger Ebert said of her sexuality it was like none he'd ever heard of, but it made him keep an open mind. I don't want my mind that open! Lovely woman, but that 'rotting cantaloupe stuffed with black extension cords' look has GOT to go.

Where did the Klingon Borg come from? Did the E have a Klingon officer? In wartime?

I think Worf as the voice of reason calling for evacuation is cuckoo-nutty. And moreover, I will always resent the fact that it is LILY, not Beverly, who can make Obsessive Picard see sense. Our lady crew never gets enough to do anymore.

11:15 AM, April 5, 2063- Cochrane breaks the Warp One Barrier with Geordi, Riker, and Steppenwolf as his co-pilots.

Data betrays his Borg Chippie, pretending to play along until he can get close enough to puncture the plasma coolant conduit and liquefy all their 2000 organic parts.

Say... Data's a fast guy. Why didn't he do that when Queenie was standing menacingly over the Captain with the circular saw? Or before she made him waste 3 quantum torpedoes not hitting the Phoenix? Did she keep him tied up all during whatever hideous interlude they 'enjoyed'? Best not think about it.

Think instead of those Raggedy Post-apocalyptic Apes and their first handshake with the Nerdy Space Elves. May that day (or one like it) come to pass in my lifetime, without the cataclysm if possible.

"Star Trek: First Contact" makes it so. So exciting. So creepy. So hilarious. So sad it was the last flawless TNG movie.

Good lessons here: Meet a new friend. Trust a stranger. Booze less. And dance more.