Well…Prestons fate is gruesome…and the whole ceti eel sequence is one of the most unsettling in any movie up til then. “One of”.
So…I’ll bet it was more of a “that came out of nowhere thing” then a “This is too nasty for out audiences”
We called them “ant lions” when I was a kid.
Heck, I can see it getting cut just for time. It’d take several minutes to lay out Saavik’s backstory and it’s pretty much irrelevant to the larger narrative. The opportunity could have come in the next film, if they’d decided to keep the David/Saavik romance elements, but they didn’t. Possibly if Kirsty Alley had stuck around to reprise the character, we might have gotten some details, but personally I think the character was doomed to obscurity when they decided to bring Spock back. Had he stayed dead, anther Vulcan character could have replaced him.
That’s just “two-dimensional” Hollywood thinking. 
There’s room for more than one Vulcan, despite conventional wisdom. But hey, they set the precedent and killed off Xon before ST:TMP even got rolling (and off-camera, no less). I know stdio execs, they LOVE to change things.
I don’t know if it would have been a good think or not to have Saavik continue all through the movies and have her (rather than Valeris) be the traitor. On the one hand, it would be good evolution of the character. on the other, I loved Ms Alley’s portrayal of the character, and I couldn’t see her being the villain.
Truth be told, it’s not clear to me Valeris was the villain. If post-Praxis there were still elements in the Klingon Empire willing to go to war with the Federation, it was arguably in the Federation’s interests to let them try, just to eliminate these elements. There’s no indication civilians would be at risk (if we buy that the motivation of Chang and his followers was to gloriously die in battle, why would they attack civilian targets?) so why not try for a negotiated, limited war?
I actually wrote a fanfic about this, heh. Shortly after James Kirk’s “death” (i.e. the first part of Star Trek: Generations), Lieutenant-Commander Saavik is aboard a science vessel (a posting she vaguely resents, attributing her posting to the stereotyped belief that Vulcans are scientists, not warriors) which is attacked by a Bird-of-Prey filled with Klingons who are following Chang’s example - seeking battle with the hope of dying in it. Saavik takes command after the captain is killed and destroys the Klingons. She then volunteers to keep doing so, playing a ruthless game of clean-up, sending any Klingon who wished it to Sto-Vo-Kor.
For her efforts, she eventually gets command of the Enterprise-B. Some 70 years later, Jean-Luc Picard expresses his misgivings about the choices made by now-Vice-Admiral Saavik. She shows no patience for him.
Anyhoo… my point was that Valeris and that Starfleet Admiral and Chang and (for no reason I can discern) the Romulan ambassador were engaged in an utterly pointless conspiracy. Pulling the Klingon’s fangs should have been done openly. The movie manufactured villains where none were necessary, just to keep the story simple and unambiguous. To me, that’s always been the film’s critical flaw.
If that character had been Saavik, I think the best we could hope for is a scene where Kirk rips into her, to be curtly told “Rogue Klingons killed your son, Captain. Why are you not on my side?”
I’ve never understood why Robin Curtis had to be “Saavik.” Different actress, different character name, why not?
Because it was a direct continuation of TWOK, using the characters from TWOK, especially with the finally omitted Saavik/David subplot.
Thank you, Mr. Spock.
Isn’t that why Christie Alley did not take the role again?
I heard she couldn’t stand working with William Shatner. Of course, that might just be scurrilous rumour… :dubious:
Kirstie.
No offense to the actress, but I did **not **care for Saavik, mk 02, mod 01. Better they should just have left her out, especially since the character wasn’t going anywhere anyway.
Damn right, she’s a very nice and funny person with whom I posed for a photograph back in 1993.
If Curtis’s performances in the third and fourth films seem limited compared to Alley’s, I’m inclined to blame Nimoy’s direction. He somewhat squandered the character, but possibly saw her as just the MacGuffin to find the resurrected Spock (incidentally, how did the Enterprise regulars know that Spock had been resurrected? As far as they knew, he was dead, so his appearance should have shocked them), so her development was unnecessary.
No. Kirstie Alley declined to repeat the role of Saavik inThe Search For Spock and was replaced by Robin Curtis because she didn’t want to be typecast. She was never seriously considered for The Undiscovered Country.
Writer Nicolas Meyer did want to make Saavik the traitor for the film, but faced strong opposition from Gene Roddenberry. Kim Cattrall refused to be the third actress to play Saavik, after Alley and Curtis, so Meyer agreed to change the Saavik character to that of Valeris.
She was both hot and very funny on Night Court.
Looking at her current photo at IMDB, I see she’s a dead ringer for an old girlfriend of mine. :o
The more I think about it, the more I conclude that Spock should’ve stayed dead. Nimoy’s later performances ranged from painful to tolerable, and his presence in TNG and the new films was more stunt-casting than contributive. It was such a great death and funeral; that should have been it.
I read somewhere Kirstie Alley was supposed to have a cameo in Cause and Effect (the TNG time loop episode with Kelsey Grammar, playing his first officer) but either there was a scheduling conflict or her Scientology beliefs wouldn’t let her be on screen with an actor who played a psychiatrist (I heard that’s why she never made a came on Frasier.)
Thanks.
IMO, it’s the crappy haircut they gave Cattrall.
Exactly. TWOK came out before someone decided that for some reason Vulcans and Romulans couldn’t have individual hairstyles anymore. In TOS, several Vulcan and Romulan women had long hair. In the later series, it was decided that since Spock had a bowl cut, all Vulcanoids must have the exact same haircut. Valeris didn’t have a bowl cut, but she would have looked better with Kim Cattrall’s normal hair.
According to Wikipedia, she was supposed to play Saavik, but was unable to because of a scheduling conflict.
It wouldn’t make much sense for her to refuse to work with Grammer because of her Scientology beliefs when they worked together on Cheers for six years. In fact, the episode aired during their run on Cheers together.