The idea that Kirk never faced the “no-win scenario.”
He took the test. He faced the scenario. He lost.
He took it again, with full knowledge of what was going to happen. He faced it again. He lost again.
He cheated, changed it so that it was a possible-win scenario, took it again and won. “Woohoo! Told you so; there’s no such thing as a no-win scenario!”
Well, Kirk acknowledged the hollowness of his Kobyashi Maru victory, especially compared to the no-cheats-can-help death of Spock. It’s in his conversation with David Marcus near the end of the movie,
[quoted from memory]
:
“I’ve never faced death, I’ve cheated death, and patted myself on the back for my cleverness.”
See? Even he doesn’t realize he’s faced death. Remember when he was trapped in a spacesuit in space, shifting back and forth between realities? Fighting a dual, mano-a-vulcano, with Spock (and getting his ass kicked)? He’s faced death ALL OVER THE PLACE. Hell, the man has already DIED a couple times by that point.
I happened to catch a fair portion of Saturday Night Fever on cable one night a couple of years ago, and while it didn’t really impress me as a movie I was surprised by how dark it was. I had expected, based on basically every other dance movie I’d ever seen, that Tony would come to regret having ditched Annette to partner with Stephanie for the big competition and would end up reuniting with her to dance their way to victory.
Not one of my better movie-ending predictions, not by a long shot.
Last season they did a SNF tribute episode of *Glee *where the teacher handed a student a copy of the movie and basically ordered him to watch it, which left me going “I think you could be fired for that in real life.” (Although compared to the other inappropriate things teachers have done on Glee, this barely merits a raised eyebrow. ETA: Wikipedia tells me there was a PG-rated edit of the movie released after the original R-rated version became a success, so maybe that’s what the teacher had.)
The drinking of the Kool-Aid, a` la Jim Jones. I see more and more people, use it to question someone’s sanity. And others think they are being called “crazy”, when it’s used towards them. And ICBW, wasn’t it actually Flavor-Ade, that Jones’ followers drank?
Yeah, but nobody knows what Flavor-Ade is, so it fails to support a meme.
Do you hear it used to question someone’s sanity generally ? I only hear it used to describe someone who has apparently adopted a set of beliefs with the fervor and blind obedience associated with a cult member , although often with the implication the person is crazy or stupid for doing so.
Yep. Just general crazy. I doubt most of the people using it that way, know who Jim Jones was.
He went through the scenario, but he didn’t accept it, and therefore he didn’t really face the implications.
He has risked his life and seen death, but not accepted the possibility of the reality and unavoidability of death.
But hey, he managed to cheat this round, too. It just took him a bit longer.
Exactly. I think his point was that he had confronted death many times but he never had to endure the death of somebody who cared about.
One that got brought up in another thread: Elvis Costello’s song “Less Than Zero”. When it came out a lot of people (including me) assumed that Costello was singing about Lee Harvey Oswald. But the song is about Oswald Mosley.
Although to confuse the issue, Costello later wrote a new version of the song that is about Lee Harvey Oswald.
Yeah, he and his brother Sam weren’t that close.
They had both Kool-Aid and Flavor-Ade at the compound. There’s no question that at least part of the deadly concoction was made with Flavor-Ade, but I don’t think it’s known, or knowable, that Kool-Aid was not used.
Except that you can see little wires and flashes of light in the A.I. robots. Not something usually seen in fleshy aliens.
The fact that I forgot the one episode where his brother was mentioned kind of rebuts the argument that his brother’s death was a life-defining event for him.
There were also Benjamin Finney and Gary Mitchell, who in a couple of different episodes, were each described as Kirk’s closest friend. Both died and neither was ever mentioned in any other episode. And no mention was ever made of Kirk living through the Tarsus IV massacre after the one episode in which it was mentioned. And Kirk never mentioned his son David again in later movies.
James Kirk may seem to have an uncanny ability to shrug off the deaths of people close to him. But his absolute silence on them indicates he may just be repressing his memories due to the trauma he experienced from their loss.
That or poor script writing.
“What do you mean we’re supposed to remember all the things we’ve said and done in previous episodes? That would be, like, hard.”
How about “Indigicans”? I like it.
I don’t get this. Surely the movie could have been about how artificial intelligence lasted so far into the future aliens encountered it. In fact, the idea that human-designed AI would some day be encountered and interpreted by non-human intelligence seems like an entirely reasonable premise for science fiction.
Now hold it right there! The same director made another movie with an alien in it known by a two-letter abbreviation in the title.
E.T. definitely displays flashes of light in his interior.
Furthermore, it’s his most famous movie and one of the most famous movie aliens of all time. I submit that it’s entirely to be expected that a Spielberg alien could light up from the inside.
George Samuel Kirk was mentioned in “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”, but he died (and his corpse was “played” by William Shatner wearing a mustache) in “Operation – Annihilate!”. James Kirk found the corpse, Sam’s wife Aurelian died screaming later in the episode, and James’s nephew Peter was touch-and-go for a while, there. What happened to Sam’s two other children remains unclear, but one would think this would be a pretty memorable moment in James Kirk’s life.
Finney didn’t die - he just went nuts. But, yes, he and his daughter (named Jame, after James Kirk) effectively evaporated after their episode.
Sure, he did. His log entry that included the phrase “I’ll never forgive the Klingons for murdering my son” (or words to that effect) was entered into evidence when Kirk (and McCoy) were tried by a Klingon court in Trek VI. Kirk (well, Shatner-Kirk) only had one movie appearance after that, and it was pretty incoherent and inconsistent with all that “Nexus” crap, so I just shrug it off.
Annoyingly, he says at one point (the fifth film, I think) “I lost a brother once, but I got him back”, in reference to Spock. I recall the novelization dropped a passing reference to Sam (and that Kirk wasn’t talking about him), but that struck me as just indicating the novelization writer knew the source material better than the screenwriter.
Well, that’s a given.
Of course they didn’t drink Kool-Aid. It’s more expensive than Flavor-Aid, and you’ve got to be money conscious on your last day on earth.
