Just one and only one. No other spoilers please.
I’ve always hated Star Trek, and there is one reason, one reason alone that made it irredeemable as far as I am concerned.
Did the away team consist of the top tier of the chain of command putting themselves in harms way all at once? Have they finally instituted space marines or do we still have Kirk and Spock behaving like grunts in addition to their command duties?
You’d still find it irredeemable.
Yes to the first question.
Thanks.
Yep. It’s made even worse in this movie because, apparently, there are only three command level personnel on the entire ship, and there are points in the movie when they’re all away, leaving an Ensign with the conn.
You will hate it.
Interestingly enough, they instituted ‘Space marines’ in the not-so-beloved Enterprise series, which takes place before this Star Trek movie (and of course the TOS). So, they kinda went retrograd on that, but that’s nothing new in the Star Trek universe…
That always seemed so goofy to me. The command staff and one redshirt would always beam to the planet and the redshirt would get zapped. By now, the jokes about it have been done to death and the Next Gerneration attempted to address it by making the XO lead away missions instead of the Captain. That’s not much better.
But you have to take it with a grain of salt, they’re the main characters. They’re the ones that the story is about.
The XO made a degree of sense for diplomatic and safe exploration type missions; you’d want someone with a degree of command authority. Still, you’d think they’d have dedicated marines for combat missions. If only I’d watched enterprise i’d be able to comment on their practice.
No only do they still do both of those things, but they’re so blatantly over-the-top about it that I strongly suspect it’s deliberate self-parody.
Ahh hipster irony being the only legitimate mode of expression anymore.
Well in that case I guess I can forgive them…sort of.
Intergalactic Gladiator Well as per Battlestar Galactica, you can always have combat troops that are main characters as well, and follow the command staff even though they aren’t heading into the firefight outside of their job description, or when they do they are advised against but the Admiral tells them to fuck off he’s going anyway.
I mean sure, Darth Vader leads the away team a lot but he’s a demigod.
It’s this, y’all.
It’s a space opera, not a frakking documentary.
I dunno though. Most of the away missions constituted first contact with a new life form/group. Would you really want to trust that to an ensign?
I think it makes perfect sense to leave well-trained staff in charge of the machines while highly trained responsible officers handle the inter-world diplomacy.
Mind you, taking Warf along was always a good choice. But sometimes Picard would say no to weapons or anything remotely threatening. Works for me.
Right, and as an afficianado of the space opera genre, I like a small amount of detail given to story telling. Hell, I like soap operas like Gossip Girl where the writing is head and shoulders above Star Trek.
In otherwords if you are going to specify that a person has a certain role, it is more interesting to see them fulfill that role. (to me) Your standards of course are welcome to be lower.
Star Trek doesn’t compare to Star Wars, Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica, all space operas. And one of the main reason is the lack of showing the characters in their roles. If Kirk has to lead an away team it shows he’s not good at delegating, IE, a poor commander, that his underlings are inconsequential and irrelevant. Give me a ship commanded by an Adama any day of the week over a ship commanded by a Kirk/Picard/Sisko.
No, I’d want to trust it to the (specialized role designed entirely for that purpose that has yet to be invented yet.).
We’re not talking about diplomacy, we are talking about landing on a planet without sufficient intel.
Wharf wasn’t a good choice because he was the security officer. Again, he was an internal ship role. They could have easily made wharf a leader of a platoon of commandos. They don’t even need to be an attack force, because that’s a specialized role too, but they can be an attack force that escorts an exploratory science team whose purpose is to determine the facts on the ground.
Wharf does indeed have an internal ship role. It’s where they tie up the shuttlecraft.
BSG gets it better (the captain/X-O almost never go on “away” type commando missions), but it’s still pretty dumb: Adama just ends up sending senior pilots (Apollo, Starbuck) on them instead.
Agreed, I was annoyed by that.
I understand the point of the question. In real life, what would happen is that the executive Officer (XO) would travel down to the planet, and check the place out with a number of other, more junior experts.
But let’s keep in mind [drum roll], that this is a TV show, or in this case a movie. What do you really want to happen? The movie goes on and introduces our main characters for 40 minutes. Then they have a mission on the planet. Do you really want to see a bunch of new actors, who you will never see again, who are not relevant to the plot for 30 minutes? Keep in mind, we are supposed to be drawn to the plot and the main characters. Parading out a bunch of new actors will just break the rhythm of the entertainment. Frankly, there are much worse issues in most films. If you can’t suspend your disbelief on this issue, you must hate all the other movies you see.
No, the XO wouldn’t go, the trained experts whose role is centered around that would.
You have a valid point, I just hate Star Trek.
But also, I love to hate Star Trek, so I will still go see it. 
I disagree with you that there are worse issues in most movies. Star Trek in general is one of the most abysmally handled properties in history as far as storytelling goes. There is just layer upon layer of stupid that it got away with because it was a pioneer of the genre, and if you wanted deep space Sci Fi there was nothing else. Of course Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers and the original BSG were just as cheesy so they got away with it. Star Trek’s cheese is of course Grandfathered in, so you have a point that there is no getting around it at this point. We are lead to believe that a starship has hundreds if not thousands of crew and yet in any given Star Trek show in the franchise EVERYTHING is done by the same dozen people.
Can I tag this for the next little while (like, until ST doesn’t have 5 active threads each forum?)