Star Trek: No Subtitle [Archive] - The Five-Minute Forums

Nate the Great

05-11-2009, 07:52 PM

1. I have yet to watch, but I have read/watched ConfusedMatthew, The Spoony One, and a few others. I respect these guys and take their opinions seriously.
2. So Nero going back in time has created an alternate timeline. PNQs...
2a. Why is an alternate timeline necessary? I have two theories: The creators assume that the people are so indoctrinated in Star Trek=Kirk and Spock that having Kirk automatically equals more viewers, and if they attempted Kirk and Spock in the regular universe and made the slightest mistake, hordes of fans would swoop down on them (correct assumption) and nitpick to death.
2b. Why couldn't they have advertised FROM THE START that this was basically Star Trek's version of Ultimate Marvel? I have no problem with Ultimate Marvel because they don't pretend to be Marvel 616. Likewise, had they said FROM THE START, years ago, that they were going to split off an alternate timeline, there would've been a lot less bashing. But no, they said over and over that they were gonna be loyal to canon. But the first thing Nero does upon arrival is kill Kirk's dad? Suuuurrrrrrreeeee, THAT'S loyal to canon.
3. Vulcan is now gone? This is somehow okay? We're going to continue a timeline where Vulcan no longer exists?
4. The Magnificent Seven are NOT the same age! In the first season of TOS, Kirk is 35, Spock is 37, and McCoy is 39. Sulu and Uhura are late twenties, Chekov is early twenties. Rewind everybody ten years and they would have no reason to be in the same place at the same time.
5. You do NOT redesign the Enterprise! Whatever that ship in the movie is, it is not Constitution-class. And we are supposed to believe that this is the NCC-1701 (no bloody A, B, C, or D). I know the NCC-1701, the NCC-1701 is a good friend of mine, and you are not the NCC-1701. And don't say that the altered timeline altered the ship. The Enterprise existed in it's original form for almost twenty years before Kirk took command. A five-year mission with April, and two missions with Pike, with internal refits in between.

KillerGodMan

05-29-2009, 04:51 AM

1. Don't base anything on the reviews of others
2. grah
2a. That' actually probably why they did the alternate timeline thing, this movie is basically a reboot
2b. The DID advertise from the start that it was going to be an alternate timeline! The first tagline was "this isn't your parent's Star Trek"
3. ALTERNATE. TIMELINE!
4. Watch the movie. Kirk's in his mid 20's when he joins, and near 30s by the time he's on the Enterprise. Spock is much older, and a teacher at the Academy, Uhura and Sulu are mid 20s, McCoy is in his late 30s, and Chekov is 17, Not too sure about Scotty, but the movie says he's been in Starfleet for awhile.
5. It IS SO a Constitution Class! Sure, it looks newer, but it's escentially a CGI version of THE ORIGINAL FREAKING MODEL!

Nate the Great

05-29-2009, 07:31 AM

Don't base "anything" on the opinions of others? Awfully drastic, wouldn't you say? So I have to touch a hot stove with my own hands to learn that it hurts? So I have to run with scissors to learn that it's a bad idea? Sheesh.

Yes, don't base everything on the opinions of everybody. But base some things on those whose opinions you respect. And I respect Matthew, Spoony, SF Debris, and all of their colleagues.

I didn't mean we're supposed to be okay with a destroyed Vulcan in terms of disrupting canon. New timeline, new rules. I meant we're supposed to be FURIOUS that they BLEW UP VULCAN! I'm angry on a personal level, not a logical level. Now Tuvok will never be born under the same circumstances. Saavik may never be rescued from the Romulans. On and on...

Sa'ar Chasm

06-01-2009, 03:44 AM

Nate, you're giving us obsessive, nitpicky, unpleasable fans a bad name.

Also, ALTERNATE TIMELINE, Earth 2, Ultimate Marvel, What-If world, out-of-canon romp. Just chill out and watch the damn thing first.

(I know it's weird that I of all people should be saying that, but I watched a whole three episodes of Enterprise before I decided it was crap).

I agree with Derek about the guy playing McCoy. I could almost hear De Kelly at times. I also liked all the little references and in-jokes (figures) they threw in.

Spock's ship hurt my head, though. It looks really hard to steer whirling about like that. Still, if a Vulcan is flying it. It's also hard to take seriously a world-destroying MacGuffin that looks like a huge ball of Edam cheese. Also also, would Vulcan children really be taking their lessons in English, using Leibniz notation and IUPAC chemical symbols? I note that they're not learning stereochemistry.

Apart from those nitpicks, I was quite impressed with it. Scotty sounded more like Dr. Beckett, but that's OK.

Nate the Great

07-02-2009, 02:39 PM

I just now read about the circumstances of James' birth. Freaky to say the least. Yet another thing dissuading me from watching the movie. Was that really necessary?

Nate the Great

12-05-2009, 01:36 AM

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/blog/14313

Here we go again. An analysis of Star Trek 11.

Is this stuff true? Do the nacelles create exhaust? Do they really rotate the barrel of the phasers? Did they change the photon torpedo sound?

Why change this stuff? Did these changes really make the material more accessible to a wider audience? Really?

Wowbagger

12-10-2009, 01:08 AM

(1) No, I'm pretty sure that was an optical illusion created by lens flare. Definitely intended to create that impression (because it was a cool impression) but very deliberately not violating canon -- and going to some lengths to do that.

(2) Umm... why should we care about the rotation of phaser barrels? IIRC, we never saw the phaser emitters on the TOS model.

(3) Yes, but not significantly. It was basically uppitched and time-compressed -- clearly based on the original, much more closely than TNG torps were based on TOS ones.

Regarding canon... I still don't see how the destruction of Vulcan in 2258 violates TOS canon. At least, not anymore than the destruction of Qo'nos's entire biosphere in 2293 violates TNG+ canon. They relocated and rebuilt on a new world with the same name. Not really all that difficult.

Actually, I've thought about it long and hard, and I don't see how any of the events in this movie violated canon. I don't see the need to posit an alternate timeline. This could easily co-exist with the original 'verse with a minimum of imagination and traditional strict constructionist interpretations of existing canon.

EDIT: Heck, long as I'm at it, let's go through all of Nate's objections, now that spoiler season has long past. I do this not out of a personal hate for Nate, but simply because I have five minutes to kill and nothing better to do than argue canon, which is one of my favorite bits of life.

1. I have yet to watch, but I have read/watched ConfusedMatthew, The Spoony One, and a few others. I respect these guys and take their opinions seriously.
2. So Nero going back in time has created an alternate timeline. PNQs...
2a. Why is an alternate timeline necessary? I have two theories: The creators assume that the people are so indoctrinated in Star Trek=Kirk and Spock that having Kirk automatically equals more viewers, and if they attempted Kirk and Spock in the regular universe and made the slightest mistake, hordes of fans would swoop down on them (correct assumption) and nitpick to death.
2b. Why couldn't they have advertised FROM THE START that this was basically Star Trek's version of Ultimate Marvel? I have no problem with Ultimate Marvel because they don't pretend to be Marvel 616. Likewise, had they said FROM THE START, years ago, that they were going to split off an alternate timeline, there would've been a lot less bashing. But no, they said over and over that they were gonna be loyal to canon. But the first thing Nero does upon arrival is kill Kirk's dad? Suuuurrrrrrreeeee, THAT'S loyal to canon.
3. Vulcan is now gone? This is somehow okay? We're going to continue a timeline where Vulcan no longer exists?
4. The Magnificent Seven are NOT the same age! In the first season of TOS, Kirk is 35, Spock is 37, and McCoy is 39. Sulu and Uhura are late twenties, Chekov is early twenties. Rewind everybody ten years and they would have no reason to be in the same place at the same time.
5. You do NOT redesign the Enterprise! Whatever that ship in the movie is, it is not Constitution-class. And we are supposed to believe that this is the NCC-1701 (no bloody A, B, C, or D). I know the NCC-1701, the NCC-1701 is a good friend of mine, and you are not the NCC-1701. And don't say that the altered timeline altered the ship. The Enterprise existed in it's original form for almost twenty years before Kirk took command. A five-year mission with April, and two missions with Pike, with internal refits in between.

1. I do watch them but don't respect them very much, but to each his own. My favorite review: W. Joseph Thomas (http://www.noriega.biz/MovieReviews/star_trek.htm)

2a. I think the box office returns on Star Trek prove that, in the popular imagination, Star Trek in fact still does = Kirk + Spock, or at most Picard + Data. On this count, they were right. Plus, great excuse to see the characters again. The reason for the alternate timeline was, indeed, to avoid nitpicking.

2b. I think you weren't reading the pre-movie discussions very closely, since Orci came out about six months before the movie arrived and said, straight-up, to the fandom: "So, we're solving the potential continuity problems using an alternate timeline. Here's my take (http://trekmovie.com/2008/12/11/bob-orci-explains-how-the-new-star-trek-movie-fits-with-trek-canon-and-real-science/) on the Many Worlds Interpretation, which is the basis for the entire movie. Discuss. And then we did, for six months. No one (except apparently you) went into this expecting anything but an alternate timeline of some kind. As mentioned above, I question the existence of said alternate timeline, but I wasn't surprised by it.

Also, what on Earth is wrong with Kirk's dad being killed at his birth? We never heard anything about Kirk's dad in canon until this movie. For all we know, he always died aboard the Kelvin at Kirk's birth. So that's just a weird objection.

3. Yep. If you'll check your DVD's, however, you'll find that it has not been erased from them.

4. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and... well, actually, you're right about Chekov. He's too old. Kirk was always canonically born in 2233, so he's exactly the right age here. No one else's age was given in the new movie, so it can't contradict previous canon. More importantly, several of their ages were never given in previous canon (often showing up in online articles as a result of speculation by the Chronology rather than hard canon), so it would quite impossible to contradict the old canon. (And, in fact, Memory Alpha is assuming that the new timeline characters have the same D-O-B as the old timeline characters unless explicitly contradicted.) Chekov is the exception: he's 17 in new movie's 2358 and 22 in prime timeline's 2257. It's an alteration, but certainly one of the least important ones in the history of Trek. I mean, somebody's gone and contradicted "Who Mourns For Adonias?" It's not like they're changing the dates of the Eugenics Wars (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Doctor_Bashir,_I_Presume_(episode)) or the "supply problem" that was supposed to be a fundamental part of the series premise of Voyager (http://www.nitcentral.com/oddsends/voystat2.htm) or any crazily unacceptable thing like that.

As for them not having a reason to be together... I can't imagine why not. They're all Starfleet officers responding to a serious crisis, and all end up on the Enterprise, whether posted there or begging to get on there or kidnapped there or smuggling themselves there. The only meeting in the movie that doesn't add up is the one between Kirk and Spock Prime, which a deleted scene apparently attributed to "fate," which is a stretch at best.

5. Alright, no Enterprise redesigns. A shame. I thought the first four Star Trek movies were pretty good. Particularly TWOK. But they redesigned the Enterprise (with Gene Roddenberry's express encouragement), so to the scrap heap with them!

The alternate timeline explanation actually makes fine sense here. The timeline supposedly diverged in 2233. The Enterprise under April launched in the original timeline sometime in the mid-2240's. That means that the Enterprise construction was definitely during the affected area of timeline alteration.

Moreover, this isn't the first time a film creator changed the Enterprise's launch date -- and the last time they did it, they did it with far less excuse and for far more pointless reasons. That would be when Leonard Nimoy and Harve Bennett arbitrarily changed the launch date from the 2240's to 2265 (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Harry_Morrow) in Star Trek III for the sole purpose of selling more 20th Anniversary merchandise.

However, I would agree that the Ryan Church redesign is ugly. I don't like it. But canon-wise and production-decision-wise, I have no objections. I wouldn't have a leg to stand on if I did.

That was fun.

Nate the Great

12-10-2009, 01:46 PM

Maybe I went overboard with "alternate timeline=BAD", but I think what I really meant was "rewriting history=BAD." Had they just started out with a fresh reboot, not pretending to be the original universe at all, and both realities coexisting, I think I would've been okay with that, like Ultimate Marvel.

But they use time travel to undo everything I think of as Trek, with very few examples. And I still feel that the "We can do a better job of telling the life stories of Kirk and company than Gene Roddenberry did in the original show" sentiment of the creators is absolutely repugnant.

I wasn't referring to Vulcan's destruction being against canon. This is a new timeline, anything can happen. I meant that destroying Vulcan TICKS ME OFF! Just my personal opinion, but destroying Vulcan just seems drastic. And for what? Cheap drama? Is that all Vulcan has become in the eyes of the creators? Just another chess piece on the cosmic board to be kept or tossed aside on a whim?

Wowbagger

12-11-2009, 01:16 AM

That's fairer. I had the same objection when the news first broke about the alternate timeline. It was, like, "Yeah, the old timeline is still there... but this new fork is going off into its own territory, and we might never see the Prime Universe again!" And that bummed me out, because so much time and treasure is invested in the Prime 'verse.

However, I do think you're suffering from a misconception. Nero's incursion into the past did not, according to producers, alter the original timeline. Instead, it created a completely new timeline which forked away from the original. Orci took the idea from "Parallels," the TNG episode where we saw hundreds of different Enterprises from hundreds of different timelines -- all of which forked off from one another because different people made different decisions at different points, but all of which co-existed with one another.

According to the producers of the new movie, that's what happened here -- the new timeline is a fork off of the old one, not a rewrite of the original universe. Both universes co-exist simultaneously. In fact, Paramount is relying on this: they're continuing to market new material written for the "Prime" universe, including the upcoming Star Trek Online, which is based in the Prime timeline's twenty-fifth century, about fifteen years after the destruction of Romulus.

HELPFUL INFOGRAPHIC:

http://lh5.ggpht.com/_noHIKWUWuGU/SthmYVCHLEI/AAAAAAAAGqY/5wvKMA7J4U0/s800/Star%20Trek%20Timelines-01.jpg

This realization helped ease my pain a great deal. Everything we've seen is still there, and we can still revisit it whenever we want; the new movie did not "rewrite" one word of old canon. And the new movie went to such extraordinary lengths to pull that off, with the inclusion of Spock Prime and everything for the sole reason of making this movie fit into continuity without destroying it.

Not that I'm comfortable with everything -- I agree that the destruction of Vulcan was, in the final analysis, not treated as well as it could have been and probably should not have been done at all -- but I do think the filmmakers deserve a lot of credit for the insane amount of work they put into making the new movie tie into the old timeline without damaging it. And they should -- Orci is one of us. He's seen every episode, I believe, and he quotes the Tech Manuals, the series, and the novels with astonishing fluidity in online chats with the fans... especially when some of the fans start to argue with him. It's really quite impressive.

Final note: you'll notice that, if you go back and rewatch TOS, TAS, and everything Gene Roddenberry and the original creators ever did, you'll find that they didn't give us an origin story for the characters or the crew. Not once. Ever. So I don't think they're stepping on anyone's toes here by telling us that story. I certainly couldn't get up the bile to call it repugnant even if I hadn't loved the movie. I mean... the origin story was untold. It was fair game for a movie no matter how you sliced it, as long as you didn't break canon.

And the impressive thing is that, even in the alternate timeline, nothing from Kirk or Spock's backstory is changed. Kirk still grows up in Iowa, still goes to Tarsus, still cheats on the Maru test; Spock still takes his kahs-won early, still falls out with Sarek over the decision to go to Starfleet Academy, and still ends up as Captain Pike's X.O. for a little while. So, what was already there in the Gene Roddenberry backstory for these characters (which was, let's admit it, very sketchy anyways) has not been contradicted by the new film. I mean, wow.

So, I hear you to a degree, but I just don't think you're giving the filmmakers a fair shake here. It's a solid film. Better than TMP, TSFS, TVH, TFF, GEN, and FC, in my opinion. Worse than the others, but hey, fifth place out of eleven ain't half bad, is it?

Nate the Great

12-11-2009, 09:31 PM

Wowbagger

12-16-2009, 10:48 PM

Whether or not they showed us an origin for the TOS crew onscreen or not, there are hundreds of Trek books out there that show a relatively cohesive version of events that have served as an origin for the TOS crew. I read the books, they fit together rather well.

Every Star Trek movie, series, episode, and -- nowadays -- nearly every book out-and-out ignores every Star Trek book. Why? Because respecting them would be ridiculously binding and limit a huge part of the Trek universe to the tiny proportion of it that buys the books. We're not Star Wars, with its now insanely insular fanbase that's almost completely closed to normal people (oh, how the popular mighty have fallen!). I'm very happy with that.

Canon does not contain a TOS origin story. Now it does. It was rich, it was fun, it was beautiful. And scores of millions of people saw it, rather than the few dozen who read the typical Star Trek paperback book.

This how Trek has always worked. It's how Trek is supposed to work. Once you're saying that canon needs to stay away from something because, "Oh, the books already dealt with that," you are way gone from the path that Roddenberry, Moore, Behr, Berman, Braga, Justman, Solow, Hurley, Coto, Coon, the Okudas, and all the rest blazed for us over the course of four decades.

Plus, those books are not consistent. Let's just grab three, the first three that come to mind: Best Destiny, Kobayashi Maru, and Cadet Kirk. Reconciliation of those three works is almost as impossible as reconciling the movieverse and the Primeverse. They're spaghetti. The movie is a decided canonical improvement.

And I haven't even mentioned the Shatnerverse novels. Throw in Collision Course and your head will a'splode.

So, basically, you're wrong, and, even if you were right, you'd still be wrong. This choice of setting and storyline was appropriate, canonical, respectful, consistent... and, based on dramatic opportunity alone, correct.

And you STILL haven't addressed the "we can do it BETTER" mentality. Are there not enough fans behind the scenes to point out continuity or characterization errors behind the scenes yet?

Actually, I did:

...if you go back and rewatch TOS, TAS, and everything Gene Roddenberry and the original creators ever did, you'll find that they didn't give us an origin story for the characters or the crew. Not once. Ever.

Bottom line: there was no "we can do it BETTER" mentality, because there was nothing for them to do better than! This is like complaining that Isaac Newton was arrogant for coming up with the theory of gravity. "What gives him the right to publish these theories?" asks Nate the Great, "Does he think he can do a theory of gravity better than all the previous theories of gravity postulated by other physicists?" Since this origin story is the first origin story we've been given for the characters, and since it is consistent with the tiny flecks of background story we got for the TOS characters during the course of TOS (and, incidentally, those "tiny flecks" were themselves highly inconsistent), this complaint is, literally, nonsensical. Parsing the sentence actual results in concrete meaninglessness.

You can feel free to argue that there were characterization problems, but not until after you've seen the movie. For myself and most other fans, no characterization problems were apparent -- though I did find Chris Pine's interpretation of the Kirk character to be interesting and at times surprising, nothing appeared to me to be at all out-of-character for young J.T. Kirk.

Of course all the old stuff is still there; Paramount is going to sell everything with the Trek name on it for as long as they can make money off of it. It still doesn't negate the fact that they felt that they weren't up to the task of calling in a few fans to create a story that could fit in the mainstream timeline, nor were they confident enough to create a brand new universe without pulling Spock Prime in to muddle the waters in the public's eye about which universe is "real" now.

Clearly you have no idea who they had writing the movie. Roberto Orci -- I am not overstating this here -- could eat your knowledge of canon for breakfast. Then he'd polish it off with a spot of Tech Manual. The man is a walking encyclopedia (and apparently relied on Memory Alpha to double-check the script work throughout the process of scripting). They brought in hardcore fans throughout cast and crew, and, of course, you can't beat having a hardcore as co-writer. This is what those fans produced.

Why did they create a new universe? Because they felt it would be wrong to simply dismiss and destroy forty years of Star Trek canon. They love that canon as much as we do. Nonetheless, they did not believe it prudent to begin a prequel series that was locked on a preset course. They believed that doing so would drain dramatic tension, because, for example, if they killed off Sulu, we'd know that they'd have to bring back Sulu in the next movie, and so there would be no dramatic tension.

In their position, I am not certain of what I would do. I definitely understand and respect their position. Anyone who writes on even a reasonably regular basis must understand that. Dramatic tension -- suspense -- is one of the key tools of the craft.

The rest of it -- bringing in Spock Prime and so forth -- is not a cynical marketing move, as you seem to insist on believing. It's the greatest paean to the importance and beauty of Star Trek canon ever composed. That love of the canon, and the insistence on respecting it and linking the Primeverse to the Neroverse to preserve Trek's ancient continuity, was a trade-off. The fixation on canon was the direct cause of most of the movie's plotting and motivation problems.

And if that doesn't argue heavily in favor of an anti-canonista position, I don't know what does.

You're not going to love everything about this movie, Nate. If there is any Trek movie you love everything about, for which you would have done little or nothing different, then I must insist that you're wearing rose-colored nostalgia glasses. I think that if you look at this movie honestly, though, you'll find a series of brutally difficult creative choices, where the filmmakers couldn't get everything they wanted (both a Primeverse setting and a great TOS origin story) and settled for a happy medium in which they produced an incredibly surprising, unbelievably respectful, helluva good movie.

As to your question about which universe is "real": most members of the non-Trekkie public I've spoken to are not aware that there are two universes. They don't think about it. Those who are aware of the fact generally know the correct answer: both are equally real. We're just doing a few movies in this one while the Primeverse lays fallow for a bit. We'll see what happens after that.

Your bile against this film and its creators is so intense, Nate (and it just looks sillier and sillier now that everyone else on the face of the Earth has seen this movie and actually knows what they're talking about). What's your real deal here? What's your bone to pick with Abrams & Co.?

Nate the Great

12-17-2009, 02:42 AM

I don't expect the live-action stuff to act like every novel is canon, but there are certain things that most fans can agree on as being very nice ideas. Some of these come from the animated series or whatnot. And what's more, these events carry across novels by different authors in different "novel franchises". The creators don't need to read all of these novels and comic books, just ask the fans! There are millions of Trekkies out there ready to help out the creators for free, all you need to do is ask them!

Yes, the novels contradict each other; you can't expect every author to read hundreds of novels before writing their own, but you never see anybody wiping the slate clean to be able to ignore everyone else's versions either.

And I maintain my position that the creators felt that they can create a "better" universe. Alternate timelines that only exist for an episode or two are created for fun or to tell a single plot. With this movie there was no Reset Button. The universe has been changed (and billions of Vulcans present and future NO LONGER EXIST!) and will not be changing back.

Wowbagger

12-17-2009, 04:22 PM

I don't expect the live-action stuff to act like every novel is canon

If you expect the live-action stuff to act like any novel is canon, you're holding them to a higher standard than you have ever held any work of Star Trek. By this standard, you must hate on every single episode Trek produced after Spock Must Die! for disrespecting the non-canon. It's non-canon. It is not part of the universe. Period. Full stop.

but there are certain things that most fans can agree on as being very nice ideas.

...such as?

I'll give you "Yesteryear," though even that is controversial.

The recent "novel franchises" are not only the worst thing to happen in the history of Trek novel writing, on account of being not merely inexcusable dreck, but inextricably interconnected inexcusable dreck -- they're also contradictory of all the "good stuff" from previous non-canon romps. And said franchises tend to contradict each other anyway. And the fans don't agree about any of it being good, each supporting his own favored camp or none at all. (Extra credit challenge: find a New Frontier fan. Find a Shatnerverse fan. Provoke a fight between them. Enjoy. For extra extra fun, involve someone who thought that any Next Gen book released since Nemesis came out was a good idea. Then get popcorn.)

Bottom line is, you're not angry at the filmmakers for disrespecting canon. You're not even angry at them for ignoring the big pile of inconsistent sludge that is the non-canon. You're angry at them for failing to have a vision of the universe that is perfectly consistent with your own, personal, extra-canonical, one-man interpretation of the Star Trek universe. In short: you're a fanboy. And, like all fanboys, you are incapable of absorbing change, for no other reason than that it is change. Had you been born in 1963 instead of 1993, you would have hated Next Gen for its inexcusable depredations against your beloved TOS vision.

IMHO, that is. It certainly seems that way to me (strongly), but, as in all things, I could be wrong.

And I maintain my position that the creators felt that they can create a "better" universe.

That's my Nate. Never let evidence stand in the way of a good conviction.

The creators felt that they didn't have the necessary room to dramatically maneuver in the Prime timeline. They made a difficult decision to split off a new history, but were not willing to destroy the very great good that was the Prime timeline -- and insisted on linking the two together at the very root of the new timeline. They pray every day that their new timeline will measure up to the old one. With Star Trek '09, they're off to a very good start.

Nate the Great

12-17-2009, 08:52 PM

Shatnerverse is 100% non-canon. I'll give you that. A lot of Peter David, as great as he is, can't fit into canon.

Spock Must Die is one of the earliest books, back when TOS was the only Trek out there. I don't count any of the pre Pocket Books stuff for the simple reason that Next Gen either didn't exist yet or was brand new. In those days people thought they had the entire universe to play around with without another TV series to muck things up. Look at the intricate designs in Mr. Scott's Guide To The Enterprise, a wonderful book that is unfortunately contradictory to a lot of stuff that came after.

What's wrong with the novels being interconnected? Are the DS9 and Voyager relaunch novel series drek merely because they're interconnected?

I said it before, I'll say it again. Had they ignored the time-travel and just done a simple REBOOT, I'd have no problem. Why? Because they'd be creating the equivalent of Ultimate Marvel. Ultimate Marvel does not pretend to be the "real" universe, just another option. And you can prattle all you like about Paramount still marketing the pre-11 timeline, as far as the casual viewer is concerned THIS is now the Star Trek universe.

From Day One Paramount made clear their desire to ingrain Trek 11 as THE Star Trek universe in the public eye in an attempt to get more viewers. I mean, heaven forbid they just pull a Voyage Home and write a story that lets up on the scifi in an attempt to tell a story that can be accessible to the filmgoing public, right? Heaven forbid they tell a story based on the original Kirk and Spock that relies on drama and can still fit into (if you insist, the film-based) canon?

Sa'ar Chasm

12-18-2009, 11:18 PM

Nate, what you should be frothing angrily about is the fact that Nokia has apparently survived both the Eugenics Wars and WWIII as well as the death of capitalism and is making carphones in the 23rd century.

Also, I find it odd that the Vulcans use both Leibnitz notation *and* IUPAC conventions, complete with Latin characters.

NAHTMMM

12-20-2009, 02:29 AM

With this movie there was no Reset Button. The universe has been changed (and billions of Vulcans present and future NO LONGER EXIST!) and will not be changing back.
Eh, it's sci-fi. If you can bring one Vulcan back to life, it's unlikely that you'll have much difficulty doing the same for the entire race.

Personally, I don't think it's over yet. The problem with Romulus has yet to be fixed -- and, as Canon clearly demonstrates, Spock is incapable of screwing up on such a high level. So I fully expect ;) the next movie or so to deal with Old Spock finding a way to avoid the destruction of Romulus, or at least that of its people.* Possibly by sending a message to his old universe to warn himself to get on the ball sooner. What would that do, if successful, to his new timeline? I don't know, although you could easily make an argument for it staying intact, but Spock would be satisfied with creating a/another timeline in which all those Romulan deaths were avoided.

* This is one of the weaker parts of the plot, I think. I won't knock the "red matter" technobabble per se, but why is the star blowing up so early? Rather, how is it blowing up at all, without someone seeing it coming decades or centuries in advance? I may have missed something in the dialogue, but stars don't generally spontaneously get a stomachache one day and then go kerplooie a few weeks later. It takes a while.

So I am left to assume that either A: some unknown entity induced the star to explode or B: the Romulan government is, collectively, about as short-sighted and stupid as a totalitarian government can be. Because that's the only scenario I can think of to explain why gobs of Romulans were evidently still in the system when an undisturbed star blew its top. Especially if this occurs after ST:VI.

Now, Nero the miner doesn't have to pick up on this (nice characterization of him, by the way -- rough and uncultured without being an idiot bumpkin). Spock, however, ought to have thoughts along one of these sets of lines . . . and yet his speech and actions suggest nothing of the sort whatsoever. If B is the case, he could have told Kirk "I could not get there in time. I [or the Federation] could not even convince the Romulan government to move their in-system citizens out of harm's way." That would be in line with his purpose of explaining Nero's motives and with his refusing to avoid blame. If A is the case, Spock could have expressed curiosity in passing about the means of inducing a nova, or the identity or motive of the attacker. Even the simple "The Romulan sun was, somehow, about to go nova" would have been entirely reasonable dialogue while giving some indication that the writers had thought about the situation a bit. And then you even have an obvious hook for a future story in the novels or a movie: Who caused that, and why? And who else might they try it on . . . ?

Sa'ar Chasm

12-20-2009, 03:26 AM

This is one of the weaker parts of the plot, I think. I won't knock the "red matter" technobabble per se, but why is the star blowing up so early?

The first time I watched it, I assumed that the star blowing up was Romulus'. However, after watching it again I realised Spock said he was able to deploy the red matter before "any other" systems were destroyed. I seem to recall that the crazy-spinny-unpilotable-ship was outfitted and sent out *after* the star blew up. Both of these suggest that the star was in another system, since it was a race against time to get to Romulus before the wave front. However, since star systems tend to be light years apart and explosions travel at subliminal velocities, there should have been millions of years before the explosion got there, at which point it would have attentuated to the background. Therefore, since the plot so clearly violates the laws of physics, it can't have happened, therefore the move never happened, therefore we can all stop embracing the worst of geek stereotypes over it.

Ignore is a much better option than Contort Into Canon or Petulant Hissyfit.

Wowbagger

12-21-2009, 01:01 AM

Who caused that, and why? And who else might they try it on . . . ?

Personally, I think you're exactly right.

I think that the best way to explain Spock's reticence regarding the cuprit, whether natural or artificial (plus his obvious failure to explain radical violations of every known law of physics in the destruction of Romulus) is to suppose that Spock knew who it was, and that he left it out because explaining would have had dramatic, immediate, local effects on the "new" universe.

Specifically, I think Spock caused the supernova that destroyed Romulus. I think this stands to reason: he obviously wouldn't explain it to Young Kirk, because Young Kirk would freak the heck out on Spock Prime and that'd be the end of that. It explains Nero's really rather bizarre obsession with killing Spock, the Vulcans, and the UFP. It explains why Old Spock makes no apparent attempt to remedy the situation -- having just killed an entire populated star system, he's been humbled, and will not play God with time or space again.

This only leaves the question of why Spock would destroy a star. I sat with this question for a while, and it seemed so out-of-character for him that I put this theory aside for several months.

Then, one day, it hit me. Who was the last character in Star Trek who went around deliberately blowing up stars? Why did that character do that? What is returning to Federation space in 2410? What interest does Spock have in that phenomenon?

Answer these questions and I think you have a compelling reason for Spock to accidentally destroy Romulus in the course of an insanely hubrisitic rescue attempt.

I could, of course, be wrong. It's just an interpretation. Well-evidenced, I think, but an interpretation.

As for you, Nate...

And you can prattle all you like about Paramount still marketing the pre-11 timeline, as far as the casual viewer is concerned THIS is now the Star Trek universe.

As far at the casual viewer is concerned there is only one Star Trek universe. Only nerds realize the extent and nature of the continuity fork.

From Day One Paramount made clear their desire to ingrain Trek 11 as THE Star Trek universe in the public eye...

Give me one quote from anyone involved in production to illustrate that. In fact, if you are so insistent that this was made "clear" from "day one," give me three. Shouldn't be that hard, if your convictions are rooted in anything other than fantasy.

I mean, heaven forbid they just pull a Voyage Home and write a story that lets up on the scifi in an attempt to tell a story that can be accessible to the filmgoing public, right?

Ch'yeah, because sending a Klingon warship around the sun to travel back in time using a warp drive so that its dilithium crystals burn out and have to be reenergized using stolen protons while Kirk and Spock try to steal two whales to beam into a newly-invented transparent aluminum tank so they can save the Earth from a climate-ending whale probe that's travelled from beyond the galaxy to talk to whales was really a big letup on the science fiction.

Did I mention they time-travelled back at the end of the movie?

Heaven forbid they tell a story based on the original Kirk and Spock that relies on drama and can still fit into (if you insist, the film-based) canon?

This one does fit into film-based canon. As Roberto Orci observed, it is takes place chronologically in 2233 - 2258, but, causally speaking, it takes place after Star Trek Nemesis. You're just bugged that they found away around certain restrictions that another kind of story would have had. Don't pretend this movie threw away canon when it didn't.

Meanwhile, the whole argument of the creators in doing this was that they could not make a good movie, based on drama, that fit into the known lives of Kirk Prime and Spock Prime, precisely because the ending of those movies would be prefigured, automatically destroying any sense of dramatic tension.

It seems, incidentally, that they were right. Star Trek 2009 sold more tickets and pleased more crowds than any other Trek film in history, even after adjusting for inflation and limiting the figures to domestic audiences.

Shatnerverse is 100% non-canon. I'll give you that. A lot of Peter David, as great as he is, can't fit into canon.

Spock Must Die is one of the earliest books, back when TOS was the only Trek out there. I don't count any of the pre Pocket Books stuff for the simple reason that Next Gen either didn't exist yet or was brand new.

Exactly. You don't count it. But thousands of fans do. There's a faction of fans outraged that there was no reference in the movie to The Return. And, yes, The Return and Spock Must Die and Before Dishonor and Q&A and Mission:Gamma and House of Cards all have equal claims to canonicity -- which is to say, exactly zero. Anything you choose to accept or not to accept is your own personal deal, but it has nothing to do with canon. You're creating your own Nate-canon, which is unique to you and distinct from every other fan's definition of canon in the whole wide world, and demanding that all subsequent Trek movies either adhere to Nate-canon or throw all canon (all real canon) in the trash and start over in some Ultimate Trek reboot. That's insane. Not to mention incredibly egotistical.

(Incidentally, I personally accept Spock's World and much of Prime Directive, as well as To Reign In Hell, Dark Mirror, The Good That Men Do, large portions of Unity, and, just for funsies, The Entropy Effect. But this has absolutely no relation to what actually exists in canon -- it's just a way for my personal imagination to have fun fleshing out the Star Trek universe that exists in my head and no one else's.)

Look at the intricate designs in Mr. Scott's Guide To The Enterprise, a wonderful book that is unfortunately contradictory to a lot of stuff that came after.

Same with poor old Star Trek: Star Charts (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Star_Trek:_Star_Charts). Every non-canon reference book eventually gets overruled in some respect. Correction: every non-canon work eventually gets overrruled. This obsessive defense of the non-canon is (fortunately) a young plague that didn't pop up until Enterprise got canceled and the authors realized they had the entire Prime Universe to themselves.

For the record, the interconnectedness of the new novels is bad because (as is traditional in Trek novels) about half of them are horrible. Awful beyond words. I can't even look at a copy of Greater Than The Sum, much less the bloated These Gray Spirit or the poorly-constructed Death in Winter. Now that these stories are all tied into each other, the absolute suckitude of one affects the suckitude of everything else in the line. Used to be you could read a bomb like the Double Helix sextet and, once finished, immediately forget all of it, forever, and never be haunted by any of its absurd storytelling contortions. Now we are stalked by the insanity of Before Dishonor and The Farther Shore not for a day but forever. Every other novel has to deal with the suck; every other novel sucks more.

Awesomeness, sadly, fails to leak over in quite the same way. Ergo, the books which were once tolerable now suck almost universally. It's those magic standalones, like Burning Dreams, which can still be good if they try.

But this is largely irrelevant to our discussion of Trek XI.

Had they ignored the time-travel and just done a simple REBOOT, I'd have no problem. Why? Because they'd be creating the equivalent of Ultimate Marvel. Ultimate Marvel does not pretend to be the "real" universe, just another option.

Given that a reboot would have (1) terminated the use of the Primeverse much more surely than Trek XI did, (2) rejected outright everything about the original verse, (3) ignored just as (in fact, much more) completely everything else you love in Star Trek's non-canon, (4) been presented far more strongly as the so-called "real" universe to the exclusion of the Primeverse, and (5) blown up Vulcan anyways, your claim here makes no sense. I think you would have been just as pissed off.

Why? Because I think you're a fanboy. You cannot tolerate change. By the standards you have laid out here (great respect for non-canon material, insistence on non-contradiction of fanon, insistence on reboot over a sequel in continuity, championing own personal view of canon over official canon, rejection of anything surprising or original or new in the franchise), it would be utterly inconsistent of you to have enjoyed TNG or any of the spinoff series. You would be, if just a few years older, one of those irritating forum lurkers who to this day deny the canonicty or validity of any Star Trek made after 1987 (if not earlier).

You're just throwing this "Ultimate Marvel" stuff in here as tinfoil -- an excuse to hate the movie because "you could have done better" with so easy a stroke.

It's silly. At this point, though, I'm pretty much ready to let this go as "Oh, Nate's just being Nate: obnoxious, irritating, petulant, irrational, fanboyish," and call it a day. I suppose the only reason I've stuck with it so far is that, while I don't mind people not liking the movie, I do mind people accusing its creators of nastiness and/or ignorance and/or a failure to love/appreciate Star Trek, because that's just not fair to them.

Nate the Great

12-21-2009, 02:37 AM

Did I say that Voyage Home had no scifi in it? NO! NO! NO!

I said that Voyage Home let up on the scifi. By which I mean the object wasn't simply "two ships fighting each other in space for reasons that seem questionable and unexplainable for any reason other than 'the script said so.'" It went beyond the plot device of "a Big Bad wants to take over the universe through superior firepower" that was used in II and III. Not that it's a bad plot device, but Voyage Home went BEYOND that. It was about the human condition as much as anything else, which is what Trek is theoretically ABOUT. There was a message behind it that spoke in terms that didn't require a Ph.D. in scifi to understand. Loyalty, environmentalism, humor, a desire to help others even at grave personal risk.

"This one does fit into film-based canon. As Roberto Orci observed, it is takes place chronologically in 2233 - 2258, but, causally speaking, it takes place after Star Trek Nemesis."

How does chronological placement have ANYTHING to do with fitting into film-based canon? At all? Giving a year only means that events happened within that year, not that said events fit into prior canon.

And by the way, "2233-2258" and "after Nemesis" are CONTRADICTORY. Yes, you're referring to time periods before and after a time travel, but if I'm going to be flamed for being an obsessive fanboy I demand the right to flame for grammatical inaccuracy.

Yes, I'm a minority of one. Everybody on the planet is a minority of one. Our opinions are what makes us individuals and not drones.

How does eliminating the time travel and saying "this movie is a reboot in another timeline" terminate the use of the original timeline in marketing, etc.? In this very thread people have pointed out that the original timeline is still used in novels and computer games. It's another continuity! What does an Iron Man movie have to do with an Iron Man animated series or an Iron Man comic line? NONE! Toys are sold for all three, adaptations are made of all three, all three COEXIST!

Had there been no time travel in Trek 11, there'd be no reason for us to think that the original timeline was destroyed. But the original timeline WAS present, and now it's GONE. There's a big difference between "the original timeline is elsewhere in the multiverse" and "we rewrote history in front of your very eyes."

I'm sorry, but when I see history rewritten in front of my eyes without being restored before the end of the movie, I get the crazy idea that the creators don't care about the old timeline. This is another reason why I didn't like Cinderella III.

Wowbagger

12-26-2009, 04:06 PM

Not that it's a bad plot device, but Voyage Home went BEYOND that. It was about the human condition as much as anything else, which is what Trek is theoretically ABOUT. There was a message behind it that spoke in terms that didn't require a Ph.D. in scifi to understand. Loyalty, environmentalism, humor, a desire to help others even at grave personal risk.

I keep forgetting you haven't seen this movie, which is why everything you say about comes across as so stupid.

See it, then tell me you didn't see loyalty, humor, a desire to help others even at grave personal risk, plus humility, a nice (if understated) dialogue between reason and passion, and more humor.

Star Trek IV was shallow compared to other films (particularly: TWOK, TMP, TUC, INS), but managed to be excellent by throwing its characters into an outrageous situation and watching those characters work it out with difficulty and an irrepressible humor.

That is this movie.

How does chronological placement have ANYTHING to do with fitting into film-based canon? At all? Giving a year only means that events happened within that year, not that said events fit into prior canon.

Chronological placement does not have anything to do with fitting into film-based canon. Causal placement has everything to do with fitting in. TSFS is part of canon because its events follow on and are caused by the events of TWOK. TVH builds on TSFS. TFF builds on TVH (badly). TMP, in turn, is directly caused by TOS. The causal links are greater or lesser from movie to movie, but they are always there. TUC causes GEN. TWOK is caused as much by "Space Seed" (an episode) as by any movie.

Star Trek 2009 does not cause, nor is it caused by, TOS. Star Trek 2009 is linked to the canon not by TOS but by NEM, "Unification I" and "Unification II" from STNG. It does fit into the canon -- just not in the way you want it to fit in your fanboy rage.

And by the way, "2233-2258" and "after Nemesis" are CONTRADICTORY. Yes, you're referring to time periods before and after a time travel, but if I'm going to be flamed for being an obsessive fanboy I demand the right to flame for grammatical inaccuracy.

There was no grammatical inaccuracy. The one was a chronological placement, the other a causal placement. Consider your flametaliation dampered.

Yes, I'm a minority of one. Everybody on the planet is a minority of one. Our opinions are what makes us individuals and not drones.

I wasn't criticizing your individual opinion. I was observing that Orci and Kurtzman's justification for spinning off a new timeline -- that it would restore dramatic tension, therefore making an objectively better movie, therefore bringing in more theatergoers -- seems to have been correct. Now, you may value meticulous preservation of (your particular filtered version of) the original timeline more than having a good movie, and that's fine, but my point is that the writers did not arbitrarily change timelines. They were faced with a choice between two positive values (canon worship vs. excellent writing) and selected the latter. Your insistence on assigning evil motives to that decision is misdirected and unjust. And that's why I'm still in this thread.

How does eliminating the time travel and saying "this movie is a reboot in another timeline" terminate the use of the original timeline in marketing, etc.? In this very thread people have pointed out that the original timeline is still used in novels and computer games. It's another continuity! What does an Iron Man movie have to do with an Iron Man animated series or an Iron Man comic line? NONE! Toys are sold for all three, adaptations are made of all three, all three COEXIST!

Wait. So, aside from the fact that Iron Man and Star Trek are radically different properties with radically different marketing possibilities... it's okay with you to have two divergent continuities being marketed at the same time, with one (the movies) getting the vast, vast majority of money and fans while the comics are left behind as a tiny preserve for the hardcore nerd fans?

What's wrong, then, in your opinion, with doing the same thing for two divergent timelines? Not that I think that's what's going to happen to Star Trek, as we've already seen an uptick in interest in the several TV series thanks to this new movie, but, as far as I can tell, your whole argument against the divergent timelines is that splitting the timeline will ghettoize us just as it's ghettoized the comic book world!

But the original timeline WAS present, and now it's GONE. There's a big difference between "the original timeline is elsewhere in the multiverse" and "we rewrote history in front of your very eyes."

Alright. Time for you to read this, Nate:

http://trekmovie.com/2008/12/11/bob-orci-explains-how-the-new-star-trek-movie-fits-with-trek-canon-and-real-science/

I'm sorry, but when I see history rewritten in front of my eyes without being restored before the end of the movie, I get the crazy idea that the creators don't care about the old timeline. This is another reason why I didn't like Cinderella III.

So you ignore everything the creators have said, thought, written, shown on the subject and ascribe your own motives to them despite all evidence to the contrary.

If that's your principle, then there's very little I can say to change your mind.

Nate the Great

12-26-2009, 11:07 PM

Of course the creators are going to claim that the original timeline still exists. And technically it does, through quantum theory. But when the movies ain't going back, and it seems like any new television show won't be going back, I still say that the creators deemed it irrelevant.

And for the umpteenth time, in "Parallels" and all other cases of timeline manipulation, the crew eventually get back to their own reality, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. There's a big difference between "we're only here to tell a story that would be impossible in our original timeline, but we're going back" and "our story would be impossible to tell in the original timeline, so we're going to rewrite history to make a universe where you can't complain at us for violating continuity because we can rebut 'it's magic, we don't have to explain it.'"

Seriously, this is One More Day all over again.

NAHTMMM

01-05-2010, 03:57 PM

I seem to recall that the crazy-spinny-unpilotable-ship was outfitted and sent out *after* the star blew up.
I don't remember that at all. It arrived after the star blew up; is that what you're thinking of?

However, since star systems tend to be light years apart and explosions travel at subliminal velocities, there should have been millions of years before the explosion got there
Actually, I believe (off the top of my befuddled morning-head) that an exploding star releases enough nasty EM radiation--which does travel at the speed of light--to make its neighborhood miserable for us carbon-based life-forms. We should be glad we don't have any Betelgeuses (for example) sitting on our interstellar doorstep. This radiation would still be travelling at a rate of one light-year per year, granted, but it would arrive much sooner than you said. ;) Plus, since this is ST, one can always say "Well, there are a lot of icky tachyons released in the explosion, so there!"

Still, this is all academic, since that radiation would have been largely released in the actual explosion and therefore it would be too late for Spock to do anything about it. So he can only have been trying to deal with the matter part of the explosion, which, as you say, would travel at less than the speed of light.

Therefore, since the plot so clearly violates the laws of physics, it can't have happened, therefore the move never happened, therefore we can all stop embracing the worst of geek stereotypes over it.

Ignore is a much better option than Contort Into Canon or Petulant Hissyfit.
I like this way of thinking. :)

I think that the best way to explain Spock's reticence regarding the cuprit, whether natural or artificial (plus his obvious failure to explain radical violations of every known law of physics in the destruction of Romulus) is to suppose that Spock knew who it was, and that he left it out because explaining would have had dramatic, immediate, local effects on the "new" universe.
Oooh, that's possible.

I can't see Spock being responsible for the star's destruction, however. Even if he tried a stunt like that, he'd go for a star in a totally uninhabited system in a totally uninhabited neighborhood. (Or, it being the TNG-DS9-VOY era, he'd call up Geordi or someone else to technobabble him up a phenomenon that would imitate a supernova well enough to fool the Nexus. ;))

As Roberto Orci observed, it is takes place chronologically in 2233 - 2258, but, causally speaking, it takes place after Star Trek Nemesis.
Is that deduced from events in the movie, or did someone connected with the movie have to come out and say that, or what? I've been wondering about when in the original timeline this was supposed to be occurring.

Anything you choose to accept or not to accept is your own personal deal, but it has nothing to do with canon. You're creating your own Nate-canon, which is unique to you and distinct from every other fan's definition of canon in the whole wide world
*nods emphatically*

For the record, the interconnectedness of the new novels is bad because (as is traditional in Trek novels) about half of them are horrible. Awful beyond words.
Wow. I've read rather a large number of novels (nowhere near all of them, and none that have come out in the past five years or so), but there haven't been more than a dozen or so that I'd call horrible. There are a lot that I consider mediocre, being as they are uninspired, paint-by-number plots.

I guess you just have higher standards than I do. :)

NAHTMMM

01-05-2010, 04:28 PM

I'm not up on the latest advances in theoretical physics by any stretch, but this:
Anthony: So what happens with the destruction of the Kelvin is the creation of an alternative timeline, but what happens to the prime timeline after Nero leaves it? Does it continue or does it wink out of existence once he goes back and creates this new timeline.

Bob: It continues. According to the most successful, most tested scientific theory ever, quantum mechanics, it continues.
strikes me as a little . . . over-dogmatic? He's taking the many-worlds view and running with it, which is fine, but that's just one view. I'm pretty confident you don't need the many-worlds concept in order to have time travel. Although maybe he or the physics community has bundled something with the basic concept, and I'm thinking of a "naive", "prototypical" formulation.

. . . Hmm, you know, I don't think it matters. If MW had been proven I (or someone here) should certainly have heard about it. ;)

(He is correct about the implications, however, if MW is correct in any meaningful way.)

We are not relying on the time travel element to tell a good story.
Good or bad, I would agree that they didn't rely on the time travel element for purposes of telling a story. It just allowed the first part of the story to connect with the rest.

Bob: I would argue that, yes, any time there is time travel that they created a parallel universe, if they want to conform to our most current and advanced thinking on the matter, which is quantum mechanics.
According to the MW concept, every time they did anything--or failed to do anything--they created parallel universes, each of which, depending on your interpretation of the concept, may or may not have blended into a neighboring universe if the difference wasn't substantial enough.

Nate the Great

01-07-2010, 04:12 AM

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/blog/15620

Here we go again...

1. Was it strictly necessary for Kirk to be born during this emergency? If Winona was in fact an officer (a concept that spits in the face of my personal Nate-canon), why is she still on duty as a heavily-pregnant woman again? Especially during a crisis. Couldn't the plot equally be served with him as a five-year-old visiting the ship? His father could still save him, and every other part of the film's "plot" would work just as well, and this prelude scene could've used up less screentime as well.
2. What was the purpose of driving a car off the cliff again? An action sequence? The director does realize we're going to have much more impressive space battles later, right?
3. So the Enterprise is being built in Riverside for some reason, so presumably in this new timeline Riverside is a much more important location to Starfleet. That still doesn't explain what Academy cadets are doing there. Maybe the engineering students, but Uhura? Can you say "shoehorned"? I knew you could!
4. Actually, I don't have that much of a problem with the Enterprise being built ten years late. If that's what it takes to explain the newer tech (the Kelvin disaster forced Starfleet engineers to reevaluate every part of their designs), so be it. But why Riverside? You still need to build a shipyard to build the ship! And shipyards take MUCH longer to build than the ships that will be built there. You're telling me a shipyard capable of building the Enterprise was built in like five years? Can you say "implausible"?
5. Seriously, were the bad guys just hanging around for 25 years doing absolutely nothing? You can't even toss in a temporal anomaly to freeze them in time for that long?
6. Spock is a professor? Um, what?
7. "All the cadets are pressed into emergency service because the bulk of Starfleet is in the Laurentian System." Unless the Borg are attacking, the bulk of Starfleet should never be in one system, or even one sector! And what about the professors at the Academy? Or those on leave elsewhere on Earth? Or the umpteen outposts elsewhere in the solar system?
8. "A cadet...that was under academic suspension for cheating...was made acting First Officer...and is now assuming command." Again, what? And a few dozen more times for good measure, WHAT? Starfleet has a strict rank system, right? Whoever has the highest rank is in command. And "cadet" is hardly a rank, much less eligible for placement in the line of succession. Was it IMPOSSIBLE to do another time skip and have Kirk as a lieutenant helmsman or something so he still has to jump through hoops, but at least is in the line of succession?

NAHTMMM

01-07-2010, 08:33 PM

1. Was it strictly necessary for Kirk to be born during this emergency?
No. Was it strictly necessary for Kirk's parents to be on the ship that Nero's ship encounters when it exits the spacetime warp? No. If you want to look for absurd coincidences, that is where I'd look. ;)

If Winona was in fact an officer (a concept that spits in the face of my personal Nate-canon), why is she still on duty as a heavily-pregnant woman again?
Was she actively on-duty? I don't remember noticing.
And, yeah, it never occurred to me either to wonder whether Kirk's mother might be in Starfleet. *shrug*

Especially during a crisis.
I would consider that a mitigating factor, personally.

Couldn't the plot equally be served with him as a five-year-old visiting the ship?
The plot almost certainly could, but the story could not.

This is something that I felt was largely missing from Nemesis: a lot of the stuff felt (to me) devoid of emotional impact. When Picard and Data are trying to escape from Shinzon's ship, I didn't get a sense of "Will these two good guys escape from the nasty guys' clutches? Will they? Get up on the edge of your seat and don't you dare blink!" I got a sense of "Timeout while we watch two of the good guys zoom around an enclosed space on futuristic motorcycles." Maybe it was there and I was just not in the right frame of mind, but without some sort of emotional impact, a movie isn't likely to resonate with many viewers. Which is a bad thing.

I'm ambivalent about XI overall, but I felt that this first act was executed well (as opposed to, say, cheesily).

2. What was the purpose of driving a car off the cliff again? An action sequence?
And also to get a laugh at the expense of Kirk and his relative (brother? uncle? I forget). Kirk's relative got on the phone or something to Kirk while Kirk was driving the car and (poorly, IMHO) delivered a monologue in which, among other things, he warned Kirk not to injure his car, not even a little. So when Kirk overreacts to the cop and winds up trashing the car, there's a sense of "Ha ha, is he ever in trouble NOW!"

Not especially my kind of humor, but again there's that emotional impact and sense of consequences that a scene needs if it's to be remembered as more than just a really cool action sequence that will likely be forgotten about a few movies later. Whether done well or poorly, a movie has to have that if it's going to be more than a mindless popcorn flick, which is what I, for one, was afraid this movie would be.

The director does realize we're going to have much more impressive space battles later, right?
Er, well, I think I missed those. Maybe it's just me and my crazy, unrealistic preference for phaser beams that look like beams instead of like cactus needles or machinegun ricochets . . . :rolleyes:

(Actually, off-hand, I'd say the aftermath of the battle at Vulcan was the most impressive scene of the movie for me.)

That still doesn't explain what Academy cadets are doing there. Maybe the engineering students, but Uhura? Can you say "shoehorned"? I knew you could!
Yeah. *sigh* At least the main bunch weren't all there.

While we're on this, I dislike the way McCoy got his nickname here. "Bones" is apparently an old nickname for a doctor, which is fair enough and presumably the original inspiration. But now it's soaked with bitterness, and McCoy, for all the grumbling and criticizing he likes to do, is not a bitter character. Not primarily, anyway.

(the Kelvin disaster forced Starfleet engineers to reevaluate every part of their designs)
That's an interesting thought. Hadn't considered that possibility. :)

And shipyards take MUCH longer to build than the ships that will be built there. You're telling me a shipyard capable of building the Enterprise was built in like five years? Can you say "implausible"?
Why would it have to have been built after the Kelvin disaster? Modified to keep up with the use of improved tech, possibly, but it could have been there already.

5. Seriously, were the bad guys just hanging around for 25 years doing absolutely nothing? You can't even toss in a temporal anomaly to freeze them in time for that long?
What would you have them do? As a mining ship, they probably don't have any probes capable of sitting in space, waiting to detect a particular ship's emergence from a weird twist in the spacetime continuum. Nor would I expect them to be capable of running down Spock's little ship. They have to sit there pretty much constantly.

That must have been pretty bad for the underlings, though. Bewildered and grief-stricken, all alone deep in the past, and they're sitting around, doing nothing in particular aside from trying to keep on their tiptoes while constantly monitoring a point in space to see if it ever blinks. Day in, day out, year in, year out, and they have no certainty that it will ever do anything but stare back at them blankly. Nero must have been a pretty effective leader to keep everyone in line for that long.

6. Spock is a professor? Um, what?
Well, there wasn't any Enterprise for him to be an officer on . . . *shrug*

7. "All the cadets are pressed into emergency service because the bulk of Starfleet is in the Laurentian System." Unless the Borg are attacking, the bulk of Starfleet should never be in one system, or even one sector!
Usually it's the opposite, eh? ;)

Does make me wonder what's going on there, though.

And what about the professors at the Academy? Or those on leave elsewhere on Earth? Or the umpteen outposts elsewhere in the solar system?
No kidding. I guess that wouldn't be nearly enough to staff all the ships, though, so they're probably scattered in among the youngsters.

Come to think of it, though, the cadets might be best-situated to be getting training regarding the new starships. Since some of them would presumably eventually serve on them, it would make sense for them to occasionally engage in training scenarios, etc. that reflected the new capabilities. So they might have a bit of an edge as far as that goes.

8. "A cadet...that was under academic suspension for cheating...was made acting First Officer...and is now assuming command." Again, what? And a few dozen more times for good measure, WHAT?
I agree. Although, the thing is, presumably Kirk's performance in the scenario wouldn't count for much of anything after his first attempt, so I've always assumed that he kept trying out of sheer determination and orneriness, and there was no question of his improving his "grade".

To me, he ought to be suspended not for cheating but for deliberately violating whatever security precautions he violated to get at and alter the programming.

That wouldn't resonate with the audience the same way, though. I think a lot of the corner-cutting in the movie -- Kirk's promotion, Uhura and McCoy both being in Iowa, etc. -- was done for similar reasons. I don't agree with all of it, but I respect it more than I respect corner-cutting due to sheer laziness or stupidity.

Was it IMPOSSIBLE to do another time skip and have Kirk as a lieutenant helmsman or something so he still has to jump through hoops, but at least is in the line of succession?
Well, Pike did make Kirk first officer, and then Spock allowed Kirk to become captain. But those are field promotions and surely aren't guaranteed to be made permanent after the dust has settled.

This is undoubtedly another case of corner-cutting for purposes of effect. It would have been more realistic, as you say, to show a brief montage of Kirk rising through the ranks. It might have been more satisfying, too, to see glimpses of Kirk learning to control his attitude and maybe have Pike smiling approval in the background once or twice.

But TPTB decided to go for the big dramatic splash (and fulfill Kirk's earlier boast to Pike). Can't count on there being enough interest for another preliminary movie, you know, so we've gotta get everything in place during this one. *shrug* I agree, it was a ridiculous promotion, but I guess the alternative was to have the movie go a little too long for somebody's liking.

NAHTMMM

01-07-2010, 09:29 PM

Re: the (rather foul-mouthed) link.

But we also, with Winona Kirk, get to catch a first glimpse of the "wonderful" and "strong" female characters we'll see throughout the movie. All she does is give birth and cry.
She also manages to remain coherent and to try to include her husband in the experience as best she can, instead of (for example) dissolving into repetitions of "No! Get out of there! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME! YOU CAN'T LEAVE US!" etc. Part of her dialogue does move the plot along, yes, but it's neither stilted nor forced-into-the-scene. So yes, I'd say she's strong.

The part with the car kinda jarred with the rest of the movie for me, yes. Not having seen the deleted scene, it likely was deleted for purposes of audience appeal, sure. But unless there was some really good stuff in it, I personally could do without such scenes. You can guess how they're going to play out for the most part, for one thing, and . . . I dunno, I guess I just have an aversion to them.

Never occurred to me to question a chasm in Iowa. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v27/Sloublues/Smilies/konkgoofy.gif

Oh, right, the Klingon thing. That just sounds ridiculous, and I'm not going to defend it.

But then the movie suddenly remembers, "Oh, yeah, talking is lame and boring. We gotta get to the action!"
It rather felt like that, but for dramatic and plot purposes they needed Kirk's standing to be in that gray area. He had to be able to move around freely to get to the ships, but if the hearing had concluded -- cheating or security-violating -- the punishment would probably have been too harsh to allow for that, even if he weren't thrown out of the Academy.

This next bit about Uhura and Spock's relationship is, just to be clear, entirely made-up. I would be equally justified to wonder what the man's opinion of black women must be, for him to think that Uhura would have to be having sex with Spock to get a compliment out of him. ;) It's that unsupported and . . . stereotypical, for lack of a better word.

Not fond of the movie's warp "effect", myself. I like my warp effects to be kinda flashy, and the SFX people went with . . . barely anything at all. Probably the "realistic" route, sure, but this is supposed to be a blockbuster action movie and you're going to put an arrogant cadet in the captain's chair of Starfleet's best ship at the end, so give it some flair dagnabbit.

Not very happy about Amanda dying, especially what with her standing needlessly far out from the rest of the group for no apparent reason, but it wasn't just for cheap emotional value. It wound up driving the plot later on. Just to be fair.

The finale was not over-explosive. Kirk was not very bright, though.

But why did Nemesis fail where Trek XI had succeeded?
Because Nemesis's "plot" was disjointed, made precious little sense repeatedly, and screeched to a halt whenever it was time for a "kewl" scene?

The man has a point -- Nemesis contained more of a 'deeper message' than XI does, even if it did feel like an afterthought at times. But people don't generally watch a movie--even a Trek movie--primarily for its deeper messages. They might watch it for the engaging story, for the plot twists, for the characters, for the dialogue, for the SFX, for the scenery (human, landscape, or otherwise), for the humor, for the emotional effect, for the curiosity of seeing what on Earth the producers did with a thirty trillion dollar budget. Most of these, I felt, were missing from Nemesis. I think the biggest difference in terms of quality between the two movies, for me, would be the emotional impact and the story. (Have you guessed? ;)) XI's story, like it or not (and I don't entirely), mostly held together and flowed from one minute to the next. That much is good writing.

Nate the Great

01-07-2010, 11:05 PM

I'm prefacing this with the statement that I have STILL not actually seen this movie, but here are some ideas for timecutting measures so you can fit some actual plot coherence into this movie.

(I'm ignoring the Spock plotline here 'cause I don't know that much about it, but remember that they have to be in there somewhere. I'm also using the Wikipedia article for reference.)

1. Kirk is a young boy visiting the ship during the disaster. George has to trick Winona and James into the shuttle. Touching goodbye across glass a la Wrath of Khan.
2. Cut to Kirk as a young teenager in San Francisco. His bad behavior has caused Winona to send him to relatives at Starfleet Command. They attempt to indoctrinate him in the ways of Starfleet, but he'll have nothing of it. Starfleet killed his father, after all. (Oh, and the Enterprise is actually being built in San Francisco in the PREEXISTING shipyards).
3. Pike finds him in a bar, the same conversation ensues.
4. Forget academic probation; that's dumb. He reprograms and beats the Kobayashi Maru offscreen and people just comment on it to save time. He gets a commendation.
5. Cut to five years later. He's the helmsman on the Enterprise. Spock is visiting his old friend Pike. Kirk gets command because he technically outranks Spock.
6. Sulu and Scotty jump down to the drill. Hey, writers, don't put the Big Seven on a ship unless you intend on using all Seven. This ain't the Eighties anymore! We've been following Kirk and Spock for the last hour, let someone else have the screen, alright?
7. Oh, and Vulcan isn't destroyed. This is a big BIG BIG Berserk Button for me. Spock's mom can visit a Vulcan moon or outpost and you can destroy THAT, but not zarking VULCAN!

NAHTMMM

01-07-2010, 11:25 PM

I think all the Seven got plenty to do, actually. That was one of the aspects of the film I was unambiguously pleased with.

I was not pleased with Vulcan being destroyed, either. Still not exactly thrilled about it ;).

Wowbagger

01-21-2010, 10:52 PM

Nate, this one's for you. I was going to just repost it here, but it is way, way too long for me to post it for a second time, especially because 5MV's word limits are much tighter than the Beeb's.

Eleven is Prime: A (Ludicrously Long) Reconciliation (http://trekbbs.com/showthread.php?t=112365)

Enjoy. Or don't. Whatever.

Nate the Great

01-22-2010, 01:15 AM

Sa'ar Chasm

01-22-2010, 02:15 AM

This guy is trying, that's obvious. But the amount of Fanwank would choke a cat, and I'm dead serious.

"We all know that Star Trek 2009 took place in an alternate reality. BUT DID IT?!

Yes. Yes, it did...
...As I said, this “interpretation” is just for fun,"

The cat's too busy playing with a ball of string (or torturing some small mammal) to care. Less serious, more revelling in insanity.

Wowbagger

01-22-2010, 07:32 PM

The Vulcan we see in TOS is a resettled, second Vulcan? Covered with "ruins" that are actually recreations of structures used by the ancient Vulcans? I find that insulting. Vulcans are suppose to be logical, and any justification for rebuilding ruins eventually boils down to "sentiment."

Explain to me why Vulcans have art at all, then. Why does Spock love the lyre? Why is the Hall of Ancient Thought so glorious? Why the ornate robes of the Vulcan clerics? Heck, why Vulcan clerics? Why is the mountain where Kohlinar studied (freakin' Kohlinar!) literally covered in astonishingly ornate artwork?

Is all that "sentiment"? Either way, your conception of Vulcans does not seem to conform to canon. Not even your personal Nate-canon. It simply has nothing to do with Star Trek.

The refit proved unstable, so the ships had to be "defitted?" I call B.S. It would be a zillion times easier to just junk the ship and start over with a new Enterprise. Saying that they had to rebuild key structural systems for a ship of a smaller size is also absurd. Since when does "our new tech is unstable, so we have to rebuild the ship" equate to "we also have to make the ship smaller while we're at it"? That would involve replacement of just about every piece of the ship's skeleton. Nonsense!

Everything you said may well be true. But all that would also be true of (drumroll)... a refit! So I presume you're also declaring TMP and all subsequent movies featuring the original 1701 non-canon. I mean, it's undeniable that the TMP refit saw the "replacement of just about every piece of the ship's skeleton" and the "rebuild key structural systems for a ship of a [larger] size." Just like the defit.

This guy is introducing wonky stardate math to correct errors in the characters ages? And claiming that Kirk wasn't really made Captain in XI? He's trying so hard, but the tapestry of Trek canon can't stretch enough to cover the holes made by XI without ripping a seam elsewhere.

The stardate math is definitely sketchy, but I'm not one to care about character ages very much (no more than I care about, say, characters' middle initials (http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/en/images/1/12/James_R_Kirk_tombstone.jpg)). But the author's work on the Kirk captaincy, claiming the last scene of the movie takes place in 2263 instead of 2258, checks out very nicely, especially in light of the travel-time-to-Vulcan sequence. If you'd watched the movie, you might recognize that, but -- since you haven't seen how the narrative flow actually works on-screen -- you can't.

Plus, I thought you [i]liked fanwank. Last I checked, that was the basic theme of the movie you proposed.

The cat's too busy playing with a ball of string (or torturing some small mammal) to care.

Oh, yes. And that small mammal's name is Nate the Great. :P

Nate the Great

01-22-2010, 11:33 PM

1. Why do Vulcans have art?

Because a person can't meditate or study lab equipment all day. Because creating art exercises the mind. Because becoming fully logical takes time, and this art could be really old. Tradition.

2. Why does Spock love the lyre?

"Love" may be a strong word. Because creating music exercises the mind. Because everybody needs to listen to music every once in awhile.

3. Why is the HOAT so glorious? Why the ornate robes? Etc.

Because ancient Vulcans were more like Romulans and actually had emotions. You can't attribute logic to anything more than (say) a thousand years old. It takes time to fully purge emotion.

Replacing key structural members to increase size and replacing key structural members to decrease size are different propositions. And at least to increase a ship's size you can simply technobabble-bolt on more bits of beam.

Every piece of a starship's infrastructure is based around supporting a crew of X people traveling at Warp Y assuming the warp core has power capacity of Z. This guy is suggesting that Z proved unstable, so that had to be shrunk, requiring X and Y to be shrunk as well. This is drastically altering the fundamental formulas that dictate the design strategy of a ship.

Before any structure can be built we must know what forces will be applied to it. We then magnify (for safety) and combine (for simplicity of design) the forces to find out what each piece of the puzzle could be subjected to. Lowering the power output of the engines and the maximum speed of the ship reduces the magnitude of the forces acting upon each structural member. Hence a slower ship with a weaker engine could handle a larger infrastructure size. If the new "defit" engine is THAT much weaker that the ship STILL has to be shrunk, shrinking the ship enough to move is just creating an engineering disaster.

Wowbagger

01-26-2010, 01:20 AM

1. Why do Vulcans have art?
...Tradition.

If "tradition" is not un-Vulcan, then it provides an entirely sufficient justification for the reconstruction of New Vulcan with certain reflections of Old Vulcan.

I don't share your view of Vulcans, mind you; I think the fact that the kohlinar movement exists at all (to say nothing of T'Pol) proves that your treatment of Vulcans as soulless calculators misses a very important, very deep, and very personal center at the heart of Vulcan life. After all, the kohlinar people could very easily have destroyed or at least moved the art off their mountain. Certainly the same is true of its clerics.

All canonical evidence suggests that the logical Vulcan people nonetheless found some need to maintain these things as they had been handed down to them. The reconstruction of New Vulcan to resemble the Old makes perfect sense.

Replacing key structural members to increase size and replacing key structural members to decrease size are different propositions. And at least to increase a ship's size you can simply technobabble-bolt on more bits of beam.

And you can simply technobabble-bolt off more bits of beam. The beauty of technobabble: you can do whatever the hell you want with it. That was Gene's basic vision of it. That's been the basic vision of it throughout Star Trek's history. Why do you suddenly insist on resisting every attempted justification through technobabble for everything related to this movie, and this movie alone?

Unless its a matter of personal animosity to the new movie and its creators, of course.

Every piece of a starship's infrastructure is based around supporting a crew of X people traveling at Warp Y assuming the warp core has power capacity of Z. This guy is suggesting that Z proved unstable, so that had to be shrunk, requiring X and Y to be shrunk as well. This is drastically altering the fundamental formulas that dictate the design strategy of a ship.

You misunderstand the writer's argument. It has nothing to do with warp core power supply, but with the efficiency of the structural integrity field, which functions as a single member. (Each individual member would snap like a twig if not for the SIF field; the magnitude of forces they can individually withstand is so tiny on the vast scale of warp power as to be utterly insignificant. This is why you never see a nacelle sheer off at warp speed -- you only see success or near-instantaneous complete structural failure.) The SIF field efficiency is furthermore unrelated to the number of crew X and the warp core's power capacity Z. It relates only to Warp Y. And -- math majors feel free to correct me here -- if one determines in advance that the maximum warp must remain constant (and, according to the evidence, the maximum warp of the 2253 Connie, the 2258 Connie, and the 2263 Connie consistently remained at Warp 8 [TOS scale]), then the relationship between structural integrity field strength A and maximum size of the vessel B can be described by a simple linear equation.

In short, once you have less efficient SIF fields, you've got to cut off a chunk of the ship. Since the precise equations are already well known and were in fact used on the Enterprise for ten years before the refit, defitting it back to that point wouldn't alter the "fundamental design equations" one iota. In fact, the defit would be a much, much easier than the refit, because it would simply return the ship to an earlier state.

I'll note lastly that the fact that you must resort to extremely speculative technobabble-based attacks only loosely grounded in canon or warp physics as generally understood or real-life physics is fairly good evidence that you're scraping the bottom of the barrel here.

Give up, Nate. Give up and enjoy this highly enjoyable addition to the Star Trek saga. You'll thank yourself if you do.

(Otherwise I'm going to have to start calling you a sedevacantist (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedevacantism). ;) )

Nate the Great

01-26-2010, 03:04 AM

Vulcans believe in traditions. What they don't believe in is illogical things like rebuilding ruins and pretending that they're the originals. That's simply absurd.

All Vulcans don't go through Kolinar training. It's basically extra credit that some Vulcans do to make themselves feel like they're better Vulcans. And I'll fully concede that different Vulcans have different levels of emotional control. Just look at young Tuvok.

If there are fundamental design flaws in a starship, it is more efficient to start over with a new ship. When warp drive started damaging subspace, they didn't replace the E-D's nacelle pylons with the bendable kind because that would've taken years to do this, and it would've reduced the E-D's top speed to a crawl anyway. They added a warp speed limit to current ships and fixed the problem in their future ships.

However, the current ships in the warp speed limit era were not all called back to base for a complete top-to-bottom redesign. The Enterprise refit between TOS and TMP is because every piece of technology had been rendered obsolete, and let's face it, Kirk pushed the ship too hard and Scotty broke every design standard achieving his miracles.

Making a ship, ANY ship, smaller is simply ridiculous! Trash it and move on to the Enterprise A twenty years early!

Wowbagger

02-01-2010, 11:18 PM

Vulcans believe in traditions. What they don't believe in is illogical things like rebuilding ruins and pretending that they're the originals. That's simply absurd.

TRADITION: (\trə-ˈdi-shən\) (n.) Any irrational activity which Nate thinks is perfectly sensible despite being irrational. (CONTRAST: "absurd" - irrational activity which Nate thinks is just downright silly.)

All Vulcans don't go through Kolinar training. It's basically extra credit that some Vulcans do to make themselves feel like they're better Vulcans. And I'll fully concede that different Vulcans have different levels of emotional control. Just look at young Tuvok.

It does not make them feel like they're better Vulcans. It perfects Vulcans as disciples of one particular school of Surak-based philosophy -- an extreme form, which rejects all emotion-based impulses. This is opposed to the rest of Vulcan society, which -- note this well -- does not go to that extreme and does admit emotional and semi-emotional relics of various kinds.

Even if I conceded that historical tradition is illogical -- I do not -- Vulcan society might well still follow it. Because it is not and never has been portrayed as entirely logical, even in pretense.

When warp drive started damaging subspace, they didn't replace the E-D's nacelle pylons with the bendable kind because that would've taken years to do this, and it would've reduced the E-D's top speed to a crawl anyway.

Wrong on all counts. (1) The bendiness was not the reason Voyager's warp drive was environmentally friendly. That's non-canon speculation from an unpublished version of the Tech Manual. (More likely a change in the dilithium crystal chamber.) (2) Therefore, we don't know that they didn't upgrade the E-D. (3) Even if they didn't, that's because the D exploded less than a year later. (4) If they had upgraded it, there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever, anywhere, except for your own contorted anti-XI logic, to lead anyone to believe that it would have lowered their max speed one jot.

If there are fundamental design flaws in a starship, it is more efficient to start over with a new ship.
The Enterprise refit between TOS and TMP is because every piece of technology had been rendered obsolete

These statements are contradictory. Fortunately, since the second statement supports me and the other does not, and only the second statement references canon, you've pretty much proved my point.

Making a ship, ANY ship, smaller is simply ridiculous! Trash it and move on to the Enterprise A twenty years early!

Making a ship, ANY ship, bigger is simply ridiculous! Trash it and move on to the Enterprise A ten years early!

Gotta run to class. Cheers!

Nate the Great

02-02-2010, 12:44 AM

"Fundamental design flaws" =/= "obsolete technology"

The first is "the ship will explode if we keep using this tech." The second is "this ship is old and rickety, will slowly fall apart, and will be increasingly resource-intensive to repair."

The article implies that although the neo-E had flashy new tech in it, it (surprise, surprise) still had bugs in it that rendered the whole thing a deathtrap. A refit was necessary.

The pre-STTMP refit (if you want to follow non-canon like I do, from Constitution class to Enterprise class) was not to make the ship safe. The tech might have been obsolete, but it still WORKED. The refit was to update the specs, not make the ship safer.

Nate the Great

02-02-2010, 12:47 AM

If the bending pylons wasn't to get around the Warp 5 limit, tell me why Voyager had them and no other ship we've ever seen did.

PNQ: Did we even see "variable" pylons? Either they were down or up, right? Did we ever see in-between? And was the ship ever at warp with the pylons down?

Sa'ar Chasm

02-02-2010, 04:49 PM

If the bending pylons wasn't to get around the Warp 5 limit, tell me why Voyager had them and no other ship we've ever seen did.

Because it looked cool but was too graphics-intensive for a ship that wasn't mentioned in the title of the show, plus the writers were hoping that whole Warp 5 speed limit thing could be quietly swept under the rug and forgotten.

Nate the Great

02-02-2010, 11:03 PM

It looked cool? I always thought it looked ugly. Besides, speed limits aside I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be able to change according to the specific warp factor the ship was traveling at, but I only saw "up" and "down", never anything in between.

Wowbagger

02-26-2010, 11:37 PM

It looked cool? I always thought it looked ugly.
Agreed. TPTB disagreed. But TPTB were often wrong, sadly.

Besides, speed limits aside I'm pretty sure it was supposed to be able to change according to the specific warp factor the ship was traveling at...
Nope. You pretty much just made that up. As far as I can tell, you got it from a theory posted on EAS.

Oh, Nate. How much you want to be Justice Scalia, and yet at every turn you show yourself to be a Stevens. (I guess that analogy makes Abrams into Kennedy, though, and I can't stand that fence-sitting wuss [no offense to Kennedy fans out there!], so maybe we should forget about this whole paragraph.)

Nate the Great

02-26-2010, 11:52 PM

http://www.star-trek-voyager.net/ship4/voyship_all1.htm
http://www.startrekmovie.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1754

Apparently the variable geometry nacelle hypothesis isn't that strange.

Wowbagger

02-27-2010, 12:36 AM

Are there people who believe it? Sure. I mean, EAS does have a wide readership, and the ecological claim is at least based on something the producers said once, off-screen, in an unpublished book. Are these two theories plausible? I'll even grant that that they are.

But, in terms of canonicity, they are roughly on a par with Sixteenth Amendment conspiracy theorism and the "collective model" of the right to bear arms. Which is to say, they're made up out of whole cloth in order to justify a set of prejudices, and no one who treats the theories as binding can seriously call himself a canon originalist.

You're a Trekkie judicial activist raging impotently against the Abrams Supreme Court.

And I am enjoying this metaphor far, far more than is healthy.

Nate the Great

02-27-2010, 02:55 AM

Fine, you tell me what the purpose of the folding nacelles was. Is there an alternate hypothesis?

Wowbagger

02-27-2010, 04:30 PM

Fine, you tell me what the purpose of the folding nacelles was.

I have no idea. Canon is silent on this point. I mean, asking me what the purpose of the folding nacelles was is like asking me why there are two separate stages for flux chillers or in what year Pancho opened the Happy Bottom Riding Club. There is no answer. There is only speculation.

Incidentally, my speculation is that Pancho bought the lot in 2369, right after the UFP took over, but didn't finish relocating from his old location at the Antares Shipyards until after the end of the attempted Bajoran coup in 2370. But that's pure speculation, a flagrant interpretation based on the two facts we know about Pancho's Happy Bottom Riding Club. But Abrams should feel free to override me on that, and other interpreters of canon should feel equally free to ignore my speculation and substitute their own, which might suggest that Pancho joined the Promenade near the end of the Occupation. We can do the same thing with the VOY nacelles.

Because speculation ain't got the canonical weight of the virtual paper it's written on.

Nate the Great

02-27-2010, 07:51 PM

Nate the Great

02-28-2010, 12:05 AM

Returning to Trek 11, from this article...

http://www.comicmix.com/news/2009/05/12/star-trek-movie-annotations/

"Romulan military normally wear dark, checkered uniforms, sometimes involving sashes, and have haircuts similar to most Vulcans. However, Nero and his crew are traditionally miners, as he explains, and have different outfits entirely. Their shaved heads and tattoos were an effort by Abrams to distinguish them further from the Vulcans, as he did not want to confuse new fans who were unfamiliar with Trek lore and might assume that Nero was an "evil Vulcan" rather than a member of a completely different culture and society."

Oh, come on! We're not talking about Rigellians here (they're a fairly obscure Vulcanoid race mostly seen in the novels, think friendly emotional Vulcans in a strong clan system), they're Romulans! Romulans appeared in The Original Series and looked identical to Vulcans except for haircuts and uniforms, and NOBODY confused them!

Besides, "evil Vulcan" is as succinct a definition of "Romulan" as I've ever heard. How else can you describe them (except with "and they don't believe in controlling all emotion")?

Sa'ar Chasm

03-02-2010, 02:24 AM

Oh, come on! We're not talking about Rigellians here (they're a fairly obscure Vulcanoid race mostly seen in the novels, think friendly emotional Vulcans in a strong clan system), they're Romulans! Romulans appeared in The Original Series and looked identical to Vulcans except for haircuts and uniforms, and NOBODY confused them!

ViewersAreMorons

...

Uhhh, pretend that's a hyperlink.

Tate

03-03-2010, 09:13 PM

Time to give my two cents (three cents Canadian).

You make a lot of good points, Nate. Having seen the movie, I will readily admit that it's far from perfect. There are especially problems when the movie interacts with Prime Trek. The decisions they made in the new timeline don't bother me too much, but things that happen in the Prime timeline don't seem to match up with established canon (or logic for that matter, and Spock's the one telling what happened...)

But despite all the problems with the movie, I love it! For me, this movie is the first time the original series crew and their world seems real and relatable for me. I really enjoy the characters, I really like the Enterprise, and I just like the movie.

Now, this may be a sign of weakness on me part. Perhaps if I was a better person, I'd be satisfied with the original Trek. It may be a sign of the decadence of modern life that I don't enjoy things as much without expensive production values, neat special effects and copious lens flares.

I admire those of you who really liked the Original Series. But for me, TOS never appealed to me as much as the other Trek <s>series</s> (what's the plural of series anyway? seriess? series's? series? :)) shows did. It was an enjoyable diversion, but never something I could really get into. This movie is.

So there are my thoughts on the matter. There are a number of problems with the movie, but I really like it anyway, and I'm looking forward to sequels.

I think that hyperlink's broken, Sa'ar. I keep clicking on it and nothing happens. :(
;)

Nate the Great

03-03-2010, 10:15 PM

"It may be a sign of the decadence of modern life that I don't enjoy things as much without expensive production values, neat special effects and copious lens flares."

Yes, it is. Very much. All that stuff means absolutely nothing without a compelling plot and characters you can relate to.

Things like "CG is better than animation or traditional special effects", "big name stars are always better for any part", "action is better than talking", "sex is better than actual romance", and other such morals of the modern cinematic mentality really get my goat.

Just taking my collection of DVDs, ask me what's the most recent live-action movie that I own. X-Men 3. By any critical judgment, X-Men 3 is subpar, perhaps even horrible. But guess what? I'd watch it over any Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, or Indiana Jones movie any day of the week. I enjoy X-Men 3 because even though there are umpteen unnecessary characters shoehorned in, even though they spit in the face of comic canon, even though the plot is uneven at best, I ENJOY WATCHING IT. It's a fun movie.

"But despite all the problems with the movie, I love it! For me, this movie is the first time the original series crew and their world seems real and relatable for me."

I won't begrudge anyone their opinion, but I question your reasoning for saying that the original cast wasn't relatable.

Wowbagger

03-04-2010, 08:31 PM

From startrek.com's article on the ship:

"Voyager's folding wing-and-nacelle warp drive system allows the starship to exceed the warp 5 "speed limit" without polluting the space continuum."

And I think we can all agree that in-universe information at startrek.com is at least beta canon.

Thanks for bringing up StarTrek.com. That gives me the opportunity to quote them saying: nope (http://www.startrek.com/startrek/view/help/faqs/faq/676.html).

You might also want to take a look at memory-alpha's canon policy (http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Memory_Alpha:Canon_policy#Valid_resources), which (like every other self-proclaimed canon lawyer) puts ST.com on a par with "producer interviews" -- producer interviews which include this one (http://trekmovie.com/2008/12/11/bob-orci-explains-how-the-new-star-trek-movie-fits-with-trek-canon-and-real-science/). So if StarTrek.com has authority, then of course Trek XI is canon. And doesn't that pretty completely undermine your own position?

Romulans appeared in The Original Series and looked identical to Vulcans except for haircuts and uniforms, and NOBODY confused them!

Newbies not only confused them in the past; they still do. Try sitting a complete Trek newbie down in front of "The Enterprise Incident" and see whether you confuse him/her or not. My experience is: yes, they get confused. Multiply that by Abrams' hyper-fast pace and new makeup schemes not just for the Romulans but for the Vulcans, and you have a great opportunity to lose your entire audience.

This is why all fans always recommend that newbies see "Balance of Terror" before later Romulan episodes. But since Abrams could not require all Americans to watch "Balance of Terror" before seeing his movie, he went with a slightly different makeup scheme, consistent with but additional to the original.

Oh, the humanity. Makeup changes. We've certainly never does that before (http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/4062/tmphd0036.jpg).

Now, if you don't think the characters of the new movie are relatable or interesting, that's fine, and I honestly don't begrudge you not liking this movie. I object only to the nasty and often personal attacks on the motivations and logic of the new movie team.

Nate the Great

03-04-2010, 10:23 PM

Trek 11 is canon, but a different universe. One that I don't particularly care for. If they're going to cover their butts and say that all the old stuff is still canon, I'm going to take them at their word and treat all the old stuff as canon.

And by the by, even if people get confused and think that Nero is an "evil Vulcan", does that undermine any part of the plot, particularly? How much time does 11 spend on the Vulcan culture itself, particularly?

It still annoys me that Vulcans MUST be seen as "good" at all times and such a concept as an "evil Vulcan" must never EVER enter people's heads. Vulcan's aren't allowed to be evil? Klingons are allowed to have both good and evil portions to their society, Romulans are allowed to have both good and evil portions to their society, HUMANS are allowed to have both good and evil portions to their society! Why not Vulcans? Since when does "logical" mean "good"? Does nobody remember T'Pring?

Wowbagger

03-04-2010, 10:48 PM

Trek 11 is canon, but a different universe. One that I don't particularly care for. If they're going to cover their butts and say that all the old stuff is still canon, I'm going to take them at their word and treat all the old stuff as canon.

Oh. Well, then. I don't object to that. In fact, though not to the same degree, I believe I agree.

And by the by, even if people get confused and think that Nero is an "evil Vulcan", does that undermine any part of the plot, particularly? How much time does 11 spend on the Vulcan culture itself, particularly?

And that... is actually a pretty good point. Anyone who knows anything about Star Trek will be able to tell the difference between Vulcans and Romulans, and anyone who doesn't know enough about Star Trek to know that isn't going to know enough about Vulcans to see a problem there. And, even if they did, they could always just chalk it up to this movie's outrageously bad plotting.

Vulcan's aren't allowed to be evil? Does nobody remember T'Pring?

Or Stonn? Or V'Las? Or Tolaris? Or Valeris? Another valid point -- though I'm not sure it's all that relevant to the thought process Abrams & Co. had.

Hunh. And here I'd resigned myself to permanently disagreeing with you.

Nate the Great

03-05-2010, 12:55 AM

Many people have complained that far too many alien races are treated as homogeneous so that writers don't have to worry about creating individual characterizations. And yet humans are presented as having many different cultural and religious beliefs. Blatant hypocrisy.

That's another reason why I like the novels so much. In the novels writers can get away with differing personalities and mindsets for the alien races. They can have entire planets of Klingon farmers who have no particular bloodlust for the Federation, but prefer to wage war against the elements and battle to make things grow. They can have Romulans who work in secret to aid Spock's dreams of reunification while still defending the accomplishments of Romulan culture. They can have mercenary humans working for Section 31 or along the lines of Vash. They can have races who prefer to spend their entire lives on their own planets or races who never ever want to set foot on solid ground.

This is what Star Trek is supposed to be about, right? New life and new civilizations. Not just big splashy loud action sequences!

Tate

03-05-2010, 04:49 AM

It still annoys me that Vulcans MUST be seen as "good" at all times and such a concept as an "evil Vulcan" must never EVER enter people's heads.
Actually, there are some evil Vulcans in the movie. At least, there were some Vulcan bullies who pushed young Spock around and insulted his mother. And there were some older Vulcans who subtly insulted grown-up Spock. So Vulcans aren't exactly portrayed as monolithic in the movie.

Nate the Great

03-07-2010, 07:06 AM

I'm watching a series of YouTube videos called "100 Reasons Star Trek XI Sucked", and...

McCoy got the nickname "Bones" from an insult by Kirk?

WHAT? The term "sawbones" as a synonym for "surgeon" is hundreds of years old! This nickname did not need an explanation! Furthermore, what with the recent popularity of everything pirate-related, "sawbones" is NOT an obscure word! Come on!

NAHTMMM

03-09-2010, 05:35 PM

McCoy got the nickname "Bones" from an insult by Kirk?
Actually, it was worse than that.

McCoy made it clear that he wasn't happy about going into space (reasonably in line with canon), but he felt the need to get away from Earth after his marriage ended in divorce (again, in line with canon, or at least with widely-held beliefs). He says something to the effect that his ex-wife took everything and left him with nothing but his bones.

Now, McCoy can get ornery and argumentative, and even fatalistic, but if I had to describe his character in one word, "bitter" would not be in the running. It's one thing to have your own little explanation for how Kirk came to refer to McCoy as "Bones", but I don't care for how this warps my perception of the character.

Wowbagger

03-10-2010, 03:12 PM

Oh, for Sybok's sake, Nate. At least read the gorram transcript of the movie, so you stop making blindingly obvious discoveries we all learned back in May.

http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie11.htm

For the record, I loved the "Bones" bit. The old "sawbones" explanation was fine, of course, but never canonized, and I always thought it was a bit generic. Now we've got an individualized anecdote based on a pretty funny line that summarizes a great deal of his character. I don't see the bitterness NAHTMMM speaks of -- but I do see a cantankerous, wisecracking country doctor still reeling from a painful divorce and forced separation from his daughter, no longer certain how he fits into a wide and scary universe.

Now, go read that transcript, Nate. At least then you'll be up to speed about the movie you think you despise (but haven't even seen).

Nate the Great

03-11-2010, 04:14 AM

Okay, I’ve read it.

1. Do people watch Star Trek to see children born during an alien attack? I don’t think so.
2. Does abandoning a ship really need a specific General Order?
3. Time is precious, does the origin of Kirk’s middle name need explanation? Furthermore, has George failed to notice that they’re UNDER ATTACK? Try defending your ship now, worrying about names later!
4. Was that driving scene really necessary? And really, the Beastie Boys? In the 23rd century that would be beyond “oldie” and not cool or rebellious at all!
5. “You’re neither Human nor Vulcan and therefore have no place in this universe?” What happened to Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations?
6. “Human whore?” How is Amanda Grayson a whore? That’s not logical at all. Human scum, human trash, human whatever; there are umpteen insults available that would be better.
7. “As Ambassador to Earth, it is my duty to observe and understand human behavior. Marrying your mother was logical.” How does that follow ANY definition of logic?
8. Spock asks if he can ask a question, then makes a rhetorical statement. That’s not a question!
9. So the Vulcan Council considers having a human parent to be a “disadvantage,” but they still let Spock in. Then they rub it in his face that they’re letting him in despite said “disadvantage.” That’s called spite and condescension. Spock should’ve called these guys on this one.
10. Kirk gives his full name to Uhura, but she won’t give her first name? That’s petty beyond belief.
11. “Well, not only [farm animals].” Ugh. Kirk, I know you supposed to like a good roll in the hay every now and then, but I thought you respected your lovers unless you’re seducing in the line of duty.
12. George Kirk didn’t believe in no-win scenarios? Talk about blatant fanservice. Heaven forbid they actually have George SAY that he doesn’t believe in no-win scenarios, perhaps to Winona so she’ll instill this lesson in James, AKA character development?
13. So McCoy is a divorced veteran doctor, yet he’s afraid of the dangers of space travel? So he’s going into space…because? Being a few thousand miles away from his ex-wife isn’t ENOUGH?
14. “All I’ve got left is my bones.” That’s a stupid line that nobody would say. The line is “All I’ve got is the clothes on my back.”
15. Seriously, Nero and company have been doing NOTHING for twenty-five years? Could they not get trapped in the event horizon and be spat out again twenty-five years later?
16. Kirk took the Kobayashi Maru test three times? A test that’s deliberately designed to make you face loss? How does winning the third time validate your stubbornness? That’s not ingenuity, that’s a refusal to learn your lesson and face reality!
17. How is Kirk supposed to be in trouble? I don’t think anyone said “you can’t reprogram the simulation.”
18. Spock tried to keep Uhura away from Enterprise to avoid accusations of favoritism? If she’s the best person for the job, she’s the best person for the job. How can anyone be accused of favoritism?
19. “External inertial dampener?” What the photon is that supposed to be? Something to make the ship unable to move? That’s what stationkeeping thrusters are for!
20. Chekov has the conn? In a Red Alert situation? Yeah, um, what? He’s supposed to be seventeen, right?
21. The nature of Kirk’s promotion to First Officer still mystifies me. He’s on probation, he’s not supposed to be on board, he should be in a brig cell, etc. so WHY is he a serving member of the crew?
22. “You are clear from USS Enterprise airspace.” Airspace, really? Ugh.
23. “Centaurian slugs?” Why invent a new creature when they could just use Ceti Eels? It’d be a good reference for the fans, too!
24. Nero is the last of the Romulan Empire? Since when were all Romulans other than miners living on Romulus? You can’t call one (or two if you want to include Remus) planet an Empire! That doesn’t work! And even if you buy this ridiculous premise that Romulans only live on one planet, what about the fleet?
25. “The Enterprise has had its maiden voyage, has it? She is one well endowed lady. I’d like to get my hands on her ample nacelles, if you’ll pardon the engineering parlance.” NO NO NO! Scotty does not see the big E as a sex object! Kirk may see it that way, but to Scotty she is a lady, a work of art, and NOT a sex object!

Tate

03-11-2010, 06:49 PM

15. Seriously, Nero and company have been doing NOTHING for twenty-five years? Could they not get trapped in the event horizon and be spat out again twenty-five years later?
Actually, Nero and his crew were imprisoned by the Klingons for the twenty-five years. The director just cut that part out of the movie so as not to confuse viewers. (Insert criticism of viewers here)

24. Nero is the last of the Romulan Empire? Since when were all Romulans other than miners living on Romulus? You can’t call one (or two if you want to include Remus) planet an Empire! That doesn’t work! And even if you buy this ridiculous premise that Romulans only live on one planet, what about the fleet?
I know. That's where the movie really doesn't make sense. I would have preferred for them to just stay vague on the subject of the main Trek timeline rather than making statements that don't mesh with established fact.

NAHTMMM

03-14-2010, 09:04 PM

Okay, I’ve read it.

1. Do people watch Star Trek to see children born during an alien attack? I don’t think so.
And yet, I think I saw more genuine, heartfelt emotion during that sequence than in all of Nemesis.

I think ST is perceived as having a problem with getting too much into the technical details and letting the human part of the story suffer. Hence "Treknobabble" and "deflector dish" jokes. Right or wrong, I suspect that sequence was partly intended to make it clear to the audience that this movie wouldn't be like that.

3. Time is precious, does the origin of Kirk’s middle name need explanation? Furthermore, has George failed to notice that they’re UNDER ATTACK? Try defending your ship now, worrying about names later!
This sort of thing happens all the time, where an impending blow takes forever to fall so that we can get all the characters' reactions. I can just about guarantee that there's a name for it on the TV Tropes website somewhere.

I trust I needn't point out that there wasn't going to be a later for George.

4. Was that driving scene really necessary? And really, the Beastie Boys?
I sympathize on this.

5. “You’re neither Human nor Vulcan and therefore have no place in this universe?” What happened to Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations?
6. “Human whore?” How is Amanda Grayson a whore? That’s not logical at all. Human scum, human trash, human whatever; there are umpteen insults available that would be better.
Given that the purpose was to test Spock's reactions, presumably they had already tried the "better" insults.

10. Kirk gives his full name to Uhura, but she won’t give her first name? That’s petty beyond belief.
As KJ says, that may have been a nod to the fact that we didn't officially know her first name for a loooong time.

16. Kirk took the Kobayashi Maru test three times? A test that’s deliberately designed to make you face loss? How does winning the third time validate your stubbornness? That’s not ingenuity, that’s a refusal to learn your lesson and face reality!
How is this directed at this particular movie?

17. How is Kirk supposed to be in trouble? I don’t think anyone said “you can’t reprogram the simulation.”
I agree that, if anything, he should be in trouble for violating whatever security measures he had to violate.

18. Spock tried to keep Uhura away from Enterprise to avoid accusations of favoritism? If she’s the best person for the job, she’s the best person for the job. How can anyone be accused of favoritism?
Spock is undoubtedly still having a difficult time predicting humans' reactions. ;) And humans aren't logical anyway.

19. “External inertial dampener?” What the photon is that supposed to be? Something to make the ship unable to move? That’s what stationkeeping thrusters are for!
I dunno. That may have been the jargon at that point in time.

20. Chekov has the conn? In a Red Alert situation? Yeah, um, what? He’s supposed to be seventeen, right?
He's supposed to be in grade school, dagnabbit[/canon-grumble]

21. The nature of Kirk’s promotion to First Officer still mystifies me. He’s on probation, he’s not supposed to be on board, he should be in a brig cell, etc. so WHY is he a serving member of the crew?
Just one of those crazy things that strong-willed Starfleet captains do, I guess.

24. Nero is the last of the Romulan Empire? Since when were all Romulans other than miners living on Romulus? You can’t call one (or two if you want to include Remus) planet an Empire! That doesn’t work! And even if you buy this ridiculous premise that Romulans only live on one planet, what about the fleet?
I hope Nero said that, and not Spock. Nero is a little unhinged and possibly prone to deliberate exaggeration.

25. “The Enterprise has had its maiden voyage, has it? She is one well endowed lady. I’d like to get my hands on her ample nacelles, if you’ll pardon the engineering parlance.” NO NO NO! Scotty does not see the big E as a sex object! Kirk may see it that way, but to Scotty she is a lady, a work of art, and NOT a sex object!
Yeah, that was probably a little over-the-top.

Nate the Great

03-14-2010, 10:53 PM

Wowbagger

03-18-2010, 04:44 AM

In the Wrath of Khan there is no mention of Kirk taking it three times. If he heard about the test being a no-win scenario and then reprogrammed the computer to allow for a win scenario, that's forcing reality to conform to his ideals. Failing twice and then cheating is petty.

SPOCK: The Kobayashi Maru scenario frequently wreaks havoc with students and equipment. As I recall you took the test three times yourself. Your final solution was, shall we say, unique?.

Nate the Great

03-18-2010, 04:46 AM

Oh, I'm so ashamed. How can I ever look at myself in a mirror again? My Trek cred is officially history! Boo hoo!

Where would I be without sarcasm? ;)

Wowbagger

03-18-2010, 04:54 AM

Where would I be without sarcasm? ;)

Wiser.

Of course, what I want to know is: since all that stuff actually did happen in TWOK, do you now believe (consistently) that TOS Kirk was a petty stubborn fool all along, or did that criticism only apply when it was directed at the new movie and the new Kirk?

Nate the Great

03-18-2010, 07:30 AM

Wisdom is overrated. And rereading the transcript, I find the apple bit over the top.

If you want a penitent apology from me you're barking up the wrong tree.

And if you want to throw TWOK lines at me, Kirk also says "I changed the conditions of the test. I got a commendation for original thinking." I don't recall any mention of academic probation in there, do you? In fact, I see the exact OPPOSITE of him getting into trouble.

Wowbagger

03-18-2010, 08:12 AM

I am not at all looking for an apology from you. Putting on sackcloth and ashes about a canon error would actually be a little weird, even in Lent. I simply want to know whether you apply the same extremely high critical standards to TWOK and old Trek as you do to the new movie.

So I'll ask you again: in your judgment, does TOS-Kirk's taking the test three times make him into a petty, stubborn idiot as you suggested? Or do you hold TOS and the TOS movie canon to a lower standard?

Interesting but irrelevant tidbit: in the original draft of the new movie, Kirk did win his commendation for original thinking in the KM scenario. This was scripted to take place during the final promotion ceremony at the end of the movie, simultaneous with the lifting of Kirk's academic probation. The sequence was cut for pacing reasons, and (as I understand it) because it was seen as overly fanboyish.

Nate the Great

03-18-2010, 08:38 AM

I apply higher standards to Trek 11, yes. We are far, FAR past the point where it should be a given that the opinions of Trekkies of all stripes (from casual to rabid fanatic) should be taken into consideration. I understand the desire for a wider viewerbase (look at the success of Trek 4), but studios of all kinds (film, television, gaming), need to get it through their heads that you need to respect your older fans AS you try to attract new ones, not DISCARD one fanbase in the vain hope that the new one is larger and more profitable.

You know what happens when you discard one fanbase to try to attract a larger one? A disaster, almost every time. One key reason why Pixar does so well is that it never insults the fans or tries to forcefeed them subpar media and treat it like the greatest thing ever. And say what you will about Apple, they know how to let their product line evolve without spitting in the face of everything that came before and try to pretend that it never happened.

They're having a new crew direct new actors on new sets in a new timeline. The sheer number of things that can go wrong with this scenario are Brobdingnagian. Furthermore, I really don't see anything in that script that require this to be the "Star Trek" universe, per se. Sure, we got characters, costumes, and ships that are vaguely familiar, but you could tweak everything and get a completely new setting very easily.

I'm of the opinion that if you're going to tell a Star Trek story, you should tell a Star Trek story. What is this story? A few shovelfuls of references tossed into a plot that has very little to do with what Star Trek is all about. What strange new worlds were explored? What new life or new civilizations were sought out? When did we have people going where no man has gone before?

NAHTMMM

03-19-2010, 04:00 PM

"How is this directed at this particular movie?"

In the Wrath of Khan there is no mention of Kirk taking it three times. If he heard about the test being a no-win scenario and then reprogrammed the computer to allow for a win scenario, that's forcing reality to conform to his ideals. Failing twice and then cheating is petty.
I always figured that this was about how it happened, albeit with less of the overt smugness on Kirk's part during the rigged attempt.

In fact, I'm not sure whether it's Explicit Canon or not, but you're not supposed to know going into the Kobayashi Maru that it is impossible to "win".

It's never occured to me to think of Kirk's cheating as "petty". Interesting thought.

The sequence was cut for pacing reasons, and (as I understand it) because it was seen as overly fanboyish.
Good move there. It would have been absurdly fanboyish.

Nate the Great

03-19-2010, 07:23 PM

How can you possibly not know going in to the Kobayashi Maru that it was impossible to win? How many cadets have gone through this thing? Is it possible for each and every one to be ordered to secrecy about telling other people it's a nowin scenario?

And the apple really WAS over the top. Sure, tweak the program to up the firepower of your weapons or the speed of the ship, but DON'T act like you're not taking it seriously.

NAHTMMM

03-23-2010, 05:18 PM

Is it possible for each and every one to be ordered to secrecy about telling other people it's a nowin scenario?

Yes. Whether all of them maintain the secrecy is another matter, but as best I can remember, the novels tend to hold the position that they do keep it a secret. (The Kobayashi Maru and Sarek would be two to check.)

This may seem overly idealistic, but keep in mind that

1. the cadets are expected to keep much bigger secrets, both at the Academy and in their eventual careers, and to obey much more demanding orders.

2. the test (and, in fact, most simulations) probably doesn't exactly show up on any syllabus, which closes off the possibility of someone asking someone else, "Hey, what's this one about?"

3. it is very much in the Academy's interests that not a hint of the possibility of a no-win scenario get out to those who haven't yet taken it. The character demonstrated by a given cadet will be much different if he or she knows going in that it might be an unwinnable situation in which the best thing to do is to impress your superiors with your character. Since the leaking of such a secret would be very detrimental to the Academy, then, the Academy is certainly going to make it clear to cadets who have taken the test that their spoiling it for others would be very detrimental to their careers.

Nate the Great

03-23-2010, 10:34 PM

I've never read Kobayashi Maru, but I have read Sarek. In that book Kirk's nephew Peter was about to take the test and he knew that he was under scrutiny about whether or not he'd be the second person to beat the test. Of course he did, but if it's public knowledge that Kirk was the only one to beat it, this implies that it's public knowledge that no one else ever has.

To expand the logic, if the test was supposed to be beatable and only one has, simple reasoning would yield only two possible scenarios:

1. The test is impossibly hard. After all, you can't exactly grade on a curve with the Kobayashi Maru. There are only two objectives (save the Maru and save your own ship) and very little slack in accomplishing this. This is a pass/fail test.
2. Everyone knows it's supposed to be unbeatable.

Nate the Great

03-27-2010, 11:25 PM

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/inconsistencies-trekxi.htm

Ha ha! More inconsistencies, this time from an external source.

1. "Jim Kirk is born in the year 2233 on Stardate 2233.04." Huh? If the Stardate is simply the year, why call it a "Stardate"? Furthermore, a hundredth of a year is over three days. That's what I call inadequate precision. You'll need another decimal point, guys.
2. "Why is Captain Robau wearing a blue instead of a golden (or even a red?) uniform?" Valid point! Why shuffle the departmental colors? What's the point?
3. "Why is the appearance of the Romulan Nero not a total surprise to the crew of the Kelvin? At this time, humans have never seen Romulans face to face (at least no one has survived to report of it), as clearly evidenced in TOS: "Balance of Terror". Why doesn't anyone surmise that he has to be a Vulcan because that is how he must have looked to them?" Yeah, I forgot about this one, too.
4. I forgot about the age discrepancy with Captain Pike. Shouldn't he be less than ten years older than Kirk?
5. "When the shuttles from the Academy arrive at the Enterprise, we can see that about a dozen of them are stacked on two levels on either side of the shuttlebay. The shuttlebay has to be some 40m across to accommodate the 10m+ shuttles in the shown fashion. This would translate to a length of the Enterprise of over 700m meters!" Good point. Is there a reason there needs to be a dozen shuttles being stored in the main shuttlebay? Don't most series imply that long-term shuttle storage is via garages off the main bay, which is strictly to be used for embarking and arriving shuttles and "visitor parking"?
6. They call Klingon ships "Warbirds?" Was there NOT ONE Trekkie on the production staff to say "Wrong. Romulans have Warbirds, Klingons have Birds of Prey." NOT ONE person had the courage to stand up for accuracy for something that is trivially easy to get right?
7. Why is Delta Vega apparently in the same star system as Vulcan? Would a mention of long-range sensors or a subspace telescope or something be too hard?
8. "The interior of the engineering hull of the Enterprise is nothing like anything we have seen on any Starfleet vessel so far. There is no centralized engine room, there is nothing identifiable as power transfer conduits. There is no visible deck structure. It looks like most of this section is comprised of a maze of water pipes. Pipes with rivets. Purportedly this part of the movie was filmed at an actual brewery. This would explain the look, but definitely not excuse it. Overall, the set also seems too large for the secondary hull of the ship, which was designed to be overall just 366m long." Rivets? Water pipes? Was a simple warp core too "boring"?

JVTruman

03-28-2010, 03:23 PM

For #2, I don't think the department colors were changed. The Kelvin is a science vessel, so I figure having a science-department officer in charge works.

Nate the Great

03-28-2010, 05:50 PM

I'm not so sure about that. I can see having a much larger than usual percentage of the crew be in the Science divisions for a Science vessel, but you're still going to have Security, Engineering, Medical, and so forth personnel. And the skills necessary to command a starship are basically the same no matter what kind of vessel it is. You're going to need command training (including the Kobayashi Maru) to command a ship, and that means (in the TOS days) a yellow uniform.

Nate the Great

04-25-2010, 08:17 PM

http://thatguywiththeglasses.com/community/blog/20720

Three guys sit around and discuss the past, present, and future of the Star Trek franchise, including discussing the movie.

Chancellor Valium

04-30-2010, 08:20 PM

Finally got to see this. It's fine; the plot is OK (and mercifully free of Bermanaga reset-buttoning), the visual design is good, the camera/sound direction excellent, the acting reasonable if rather Hollywood and the story is decent. This is, at least, a better film than the last two films, at least.

The chief problem with the film is that there isn't a single shot that isn't ripped from somewhere - whether it's other Star Trek films, Babylon 5, The Empire Strikes Back, or Alien. And Sean Pegg was far less annoying than I expected. It's no The Third Man, by any means; it's not really even a Wrath of Khan. But it's still far better than average.

Wowbagger

05-20-2010, 11:12 PM

4. I forgot about the age discrepancy with Captain Pike. Shouldn't he be less than ten years older than Kirk?

Why? Canon is silent on Pike's age.

5. [...] Don't most series imply that long-term shuttle storage is via garages off the main bay, which is strictly to be used for embarking and arriving shuttles and "visitor parking"?

The size discrepancy is the most seriously troublesome continuity point in the movie (although anyone who gets agitated about this and not about the Bird of Prey size problems is a hypocrite). So I dig that complaint, and Bernd at EAS does a good job handling it in his article on the new Enterprise.

That being said, no, shuttlebays have always been used for shuttle storage. The only series to suggest otherwise was Voyager, and then only very indirectly. For non-canon support (if you go for that stuff), consult the TNG Ent-D blueprints.

6. They call Klingon ships "Warbirds?" Was there NOT ONE Trekkie on the production staff to say "Wrong. Romulans have Warbirds, Klingons have Birds of Prey." NOT ONE person had the courage to stand up for accuracy for something that is trivially easy to get right?

It was undoubtedly an error -- and a vanishingly small one, at that. Would you say the same to Brannon Braga about "Broken Bow"? If you impute it to producer cowardice, you must say the same of the ENT production staff, at least.

8. "The interior of the engineering hull of the Enterprise is nothing like anything we have seen on any Starfleet vessel so far. [...]" Rivets? Water pipes? Was a simple warp core too "boring"?

This item is the actual reason I'm posting (on such an old thread!), because the first time I saw it I thought the same thing. Later, I found out that, actually, Abrams & Co. wanted a really cool, multi-level engineering set, with a pretty sexy-looking warp core in the center. You can see the early designs in The Art of Star Trek. Unfortunately, the designs were never finalized, because the entire set had to be cut -- they ran out of money.

So, the hideous engineering set we got was because of budget issues.

Nate the Great

05-21-2010, 02:12 AM

Wowbagger

05-22-2010, 07:41 AM

Canon is not silent on Pike's age. Look, Spock said he served eleven years with Pike in "The Menagerie." Fanon suggests that this means two five-year missions with a year in between for refit and long-term shore leave for the crew (many of which didn't go home in that five years). After Pike was another refit, and then Kirk. Did Pike appear to be more than ten years older than Kirk would be when he was in "The Cage?" No, they looked to be basically the same age; mid thirties. And if Kirk is 17 or whatever in Trek 11, Pike should barely be thirty.

The fanon here is both not related to canon and also... I'm not actually following your logic with it. I agree, however, that "The Menagerie" (almost) definitely took place in 2267, and therefore "The Cage" in 2254 ("thirteen years ago," according to Spock). That makes Kirk 34 for "The Menagerie" and 17 for "The Cage." 2255 is the year in the Abramsverse that Pike meets Kirk in the bar. So Abramsverse Pike in the bar should be one year older (give or take eleven months) than Prime Pike on Talos IV.

Thing is, we just plain don't know how old Prime Pike was on Talos. Canon makes no clear statement on the subject, so we can assume nothing. He is clearly older than 12 and younger than 134 (we have little canonical data on the capacity of 23rd-century medicine to slow or alter the appearance of age). Some might base their speculation on the age of the actor, Jeffrey Hunter, at the time, and this is at least a reasonable method for figuring things out. Hunter was 38 years and one day old on the first day of filming for "The Cage" (and considerably older when it finally aired :) ). If we go by the actor's age, which is a pretty speculative method (after all, just two years later Hunter was asked to reprise the role, but this time he was supposedly thirteen years older), that would make Prime Pike's birthday somewhere in the vicinity of 2315.

That, of course, would make him 17 or 18 years older than Kirk, not ten.

Bruce Greenwood was 52 during the filming of Star Trek XI, which (subtracting 52 from 2258, the year of the movie's main events), gives Alt!Pike a birthday somewhere in the vicinity of 2306, or about ten years older than Prime Pike. However, given the dramatic drift between actors' actual ages and the supposed ages of their characters (cf Koenig and Chekov), it is not unreasonable to suppose that, in-universe, these characters are the same people with the same birthday and the same lives up until at least the divergence of timelines in 2233.

That's all I mean by that.