Saturday, August 11, 2012

Hamlet's Father's Ghost's Speech in Paramount's Star Trek's Troi's Revenge

Star Trek: Nemesis [a.k.a. Star Trek X]. Dir. Stuart Baird. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, and Brent Spiner. 2002. DVD. Paramount, 2003.

In the worst of all the Star Trek films to date lies the final Shakespeare quotation of all the Star Trek films to date:
Remember me. (Hamlet, I.v.94)
The quotation had been used before—in an Original Series episode (for which, q.v.) and as the title of an entire Next Generation episode (for which, q.v.). In this film, it's used as a cry of revenge rather than (as in Shakespeare's play) a cry to revenge.

Deanna Troi has been psychically abused by the bad guys in this film; in this scene, she uses her empathic abilities to target the bad guys' cloaked ship:


And there you have it. Captain Picard's cry of "Fire at Will" is as likely to be a reference to Will Shakespeare as to Will Riker (in other words, not very likely), so the Shakespeare allusions in Star Trek stop at "Remember me." And that is, all in all, not a bad place for them to stop—even if the film itself is pretty bad.

Links: The Film at IMDB.

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Bardfilm is normally written as one word, though it can also be found under a search for "Bard Film Blog." Bardfilm is a Shakespeare blog (admittedly, one of many Shakespeare blogs), and it is dedicated to commentary on films (Shakespeare movies, The Shakespeare Movie, Shakespeare on television, Shakespeare at the cinema), plays, and other matter related to Shakespeare (allusions to Shakespeare in pop culture, quotes from Shakespeare in popular culture, quotations that come from Shakespeare, et cetera).

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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