"The Gap/Coolent Leak/Appointment with Eternity/Out of Control/Blasted/The Crash" by Dennis McCarthy
Note: as I write this, STAR TREK: GENERATIONS turns 30 years old to the day. I couldn't not pick this one today...
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, so for as much as I enjoyed the adventures of Captain/Admiral Kirk and crew, The Next Generation was my Star Trek.
Likewise, when I saw the original Enterprise destroyed in STAR TREK III, I wasn't that affected, because that film was actually my first Star Trek experience, and I had no context for what that ship actually meant.
This was different.
For seven years, the NCC-1701-D had been my television home. And when I went to see STAR TREK: GENERATIONS for the first time, I didn't know what to expect, but I certainly would never have predicted that we would be watching the secondary hull explode and the saucer section crashing on Veridian III the way it did. I was shocked, and to be honest a little bit angry for how they treated the ship that had stood up to the Borg, the Romulans, the Klingons, the Cardassians, and any number of other adversaries, including the anti-time eruption we saw the last time we all got together to watch this crew in action.
Eventually, I got over it...for the most part. And the events of Star Trek: Picard Season 3 certainly have changed how I watch this sequence today. And there are things I genuinely appreciate about it, even going back to that first viewing: the effects still hold up, it's really the first time we got a feel for just how crowded the ship was during a dangerous situation, and Data's "Ohhhhhhhh SHIT" moment was a HUGE laugh moment for the audience in the theater (and I still love it).
Another aspect of this sequence that I've always appreciated is Dennis McCarthy's score. As I mentioned earlier this month, I was initially lukewarm on the score in general, but I've always though the action beats were excellent (the fact that McCarthy would recycle many of these cues in later Trek episodes is a discussion for another day).
The original soundtrack release omitted several sections of this sequence, but the extended version puts them all together into one cue from the moment Picard notices the gap in the forcefield through to the saucer section coming to rest on the planet. In all, it's almost six minutes of exciting scoring with snare drums and brass ostinatos representing the tension of the evacuation and crash sequences, while McCarthy also brings in his main theme with some desperate-sounding strings to tie in the more human elements of what is happening. The little girl dropping her teddy bear is a particular moment that I will never get out of my head.
The final 50 seconds or so of the sequence are some of the most exciting music McCarthy wrote in Star Trek. His main theme appears with an almost-disaster movie feel to it as the bridge crew does what it can to level out the saucer. Running pianos, repeated statements of McCarthy's four-note "danger" motif, and the brass ostinato combine and build to the moment that the ship first strikes the planet. At this point, I think the right decision was made to have the music give way to the sounds of the crashing ship as the sequence reaches its conclusion.
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