Aw fuck now I gotta read that book.
Alan Dean Foster? Well, they certainly got the right guy…
Next time read faster, damn it! Good details there.
Thanks, Brad! All of that makes me like the movie considerably more. Good show posting it here.
deccan
405
A minor nitpick about something that Star Trek has never gotten right, and still hasn’t in this new film. Star Trek seems to use the term “flagship” to designate a ship that serves as a sort of paragon for the whole of Starfleet, a sort of the best of the best of the organization and an example to others. It doesn’t really make much sense when you think about it. So the rest of Starfleet are second-stringers? Unfortunately since the U.S.S. Enterprise always ends up saving the day, it’s seems that is indeed so.
In the real world, the term “flagship” designates a ship that’s flying a flag, i.e. a ship that’s carrying the admiral of the fleet it is supposed to be part of. Since StarFleet seems to operate its starships as self-supporting autonomous units most of the time, and only assembles fleets when it needs to deal with specific threats, I suppose it has less need to adhere to this convention. In any case, a true “flagship” should have a purpose-built flag bridge for the admiral to command the whole fleet in addition to the regular bridge for the captain to operate the vessel itself.
Again, it’s a very minor nit and I guess most of the folks in this forum are probably aware of this, but it’s very grating to me since I just got done reading “At All Costs” of the Honor Harrington series.
one thing i now noticed: kirk doesn’t really seem all that pissed at nero for killing his dad. when he was face to face to him, did he even mention it?
Hugin
407
Actually, this isn’t so far off. In some periods in some navies, including the British Navy, sometimes the “flagship” was simply the newest, coolest ship, or the most famous ship. It functioned as a psychological or morale based leader more than anything.
In any case, a true “flagship” should have a purpose-built flag bridge for the admiral to command the whole fleet in addition to the regular bridge for the captain to operate the vessel itself.
Not necessarily. A flagship needs those sort of facilities, but some ships are large enough to accommodate such needs anyway or are already oriented towards command and control type duties, and they don’t need anything specially added for an admiral and his or her staff.
Again, it’s a very minor nit and I guess most of the folks in this forum are probably aware of this, but it’s very grating to me since I just got done reading “At All Costs” of the Honor Harrington series.
I see no reason to be annoyed because a Navy from one narrative universe operates differently from a Navy in another, any more than getting upset because procedures and traditions or terminology might vary from the American, British, Russian, or French navies.
the gorn are part of the romulan star empire? when was this stated?
the only possible tv series reference to the gorn i know of is that on ds9 there was mention of a baseball team on a federation colony on cestus iii, the place the gorn blew up in tos and laid claim to.
Nero did. While he was choking the life out of Kirk, so Kirk was kind of indisposed to comment.
bloo
410
I was hoping it was Finnegan.
Actually, I was hoping that “cupcake” was Finnegan.
I’m glad to see a lot of the little justifications I made in my mind were written into the novel, especially the part about the absurd coincidences.
I remembered a scene from Farscape with Harvey explaining to Crichton how time is elastic, and disruptions in the timeline will tend to repair themselves if the cause is dealt with quickly enough. I applied that to this movie so I could enjoy it.
Kirk’s older brother? Was that mentioned in the film? From the birth scene I’d had the impression that Kirk was their only son. Or was it his stepbrother?
I find the ‘wild circumstance’ more plausible than time repairing itself. What could be the agents of this change? Time angels?
Meeting Scotty is only wild circumstance because we know that Scotty is supposed to be with them - but this is simply how Scotty came to be with them. Not that they were actively seeking Scotty. It’s still pretty goofy, because Spock gives him a the teleporter equation developed by Alt-Scotty - which is more of a Gee, Small Universe problem anyways.
Alt-Scotty would’ve eventually ended up with the crew through competence. He just happened to get an earlier bump.
Kael
414
Change doesn’t require sentient oversight. Your body heals, objects seek a state of rest, decompostion and erosion happen over time but none of these have intelligent controllers.
Meeting Scotty is only wild circumstance because we know that Scotty is supposed to be with them - but this is simply how Scotty came to be with them. Not that they were actively seeking Scotty. It’s still pretty goofy, because Spock gives him a the teleporter equation developed by Alt-Scotty - which is more of a Gee, Small Universe problem anyways.
Alt-Scotty would’ve eventually ended up with the crew through competence. He just happened to get an earlier bump.
Its not about knowing or not, its about the difference between the 2 time lines. We can assume that Uhuru, McCoy and Spock followed the same path to end up on the Enterprise. But that Kirk went through such a dramatic life change and still made it onto the enterprise with the same crew, and at the same time is a pretty big jump. Then when he gets kicked off that ship that he meets old Spock, who tells him what he needs to know to get back to where he was in the other timeline (captain of the enterprise), and then to meet scotty (on a planet that seems to only contain old spock and scotty) and have him join are odds so small it implies that their may be an effect at work (besides deus ex machina). Sort of like if you were to throw a bunch of basketballs in a stadium and no matter how you threw them they would always come to rest at the same place that you may assume that the floor isnt flat.
Point taken, and I like the basketball analogy. But that still implies that there are grooves in time that gets people to a required state that exists only in human perception (rather than one which is natural and physical), such as a career or friendship. I’d really hate to see Q-like involvement again - so I hope they don’t intend to explore that one-off by Spock too far.
I still prefer this point as coincidence, as they would have ended up with Scotty eventually, getting around as much as they do. Whether it be while doing a needless survey on a hostile ice planet, or while he was transferred from merit. And it’s a Small Universe, After All.
There was plenty of meta-awareness in the script, too, admitting that all of this is a bit silly, so we’re going to accept storyline contrivances as easily as we accepted scientific contrivances in the past - in the service of interesting fiction.
I was away when the Kobayashi Maru discussion was underway, (sorry for stirring up dead arguments) but the way it was handled in the movie was complete nonsense.
People have discussed a number of issues, but one ore point: in Wrath of Khan, the Kobayashi Maru is about “experiencing failure” rather than “experiencing fear”. Failure makes sense, especially for the Starfleet command type-A personalities that insist on winning everything. “Fear” does not make sense under any circumstances, unless you’re talking “fear of bad grades”, which we obviously weren’t.
The Kobayashi Maru only works in any capacity if the true intent of the test is kept secret. Publicly outing the test as Spock did is entirely counter productive, and poisons its results for the entire Starfleet class, and likely many classes in the future. Additionally, keeping a secret of this magnitude would simply never work in a scholastic environment. A proper place for the such a “no-win” scenario would be to determine if existing officers are fit for higher command. If you assume that large groups of students aren’t going to discuss and unravel your no-win game’s intent, you are insulting your students.
And as pointed out, if the scenario is designed to elicit failure, Kirk’s solution is a valid one. If Starfleet really never expected anybody to hack it, they’re incredibly naive. The proper way to handle it would be to have a simple, easily accesible but easily detectable back door left open to fake-win the test (low security), as well as another more secure, apparently undetectable way to win it. The view of “programming the scenario” taken by the film seemed to be a distinctly 1980’s era view of programming (insert a subroutine my ass).
So, they changed the purpose of the test and got the big trial, but in the process totally destroyed the test. This isn’t a science fiction nit-pick, this is, to me, a fundamental “human psychology” nitpick, and one that really should have been easily resolved.
Yeah, most of those complaints about the test being inherently un-winnable were present in Wrath of Khan as well. They talked about the test in public, and it seemed to be common knowledge. Maybe the test is sold as 99% unwinnable. Like, nobody ever wins… but you can. So people go in thinking they will be the first to win.
Also, creating “fear” in an artificial test environment?.. Highly unlikely.
StGabe
418
When Spock Prime meets Kirk in the cave, Spock explicitly says that the odds of them meeting at that time in that place are so astronomically tiny that “Dr. McCoy would argue that it is proof that there’s a higher power at work.” When they happen to run into Scotty, another big coincidence Spock starts hypothesizing that the timeline is trying to repair itself as these coincidences seem absurdly unlikely.
Justifying Deus Ex Machina after the fact doesn’t exactly work for me. The whole point of Deus Ex Machina is that it has to make sense in your Universe before you get there. In order to sell this they’d have needed other occurrences which set the seed for “oh, the galaxy is fixing itself”. That on top of the fact that there are easier ways for the galaxy to “fix itself” and as someone else said, it was kind of nice that they went the other direction in the movie, actively making fun of “time travel” cliches and pretending that it wasn’t a big deal.
I don’t think this is cannon actually, but from novels post Dominion.
Editer
420
It’s not uncommon in fiction about alternate timelines/universes for there to be a sort of universal constant that tries to bring the timelines as much into harmony as possible. Essentially, there’s large-scale predestination, but details along the way may get bent off their expected courses.
It’s certainly as plausible as… alternate timelines in the first place.
