The DVD says something on the cover like “A Generations final journey begins.” Was that in the movie posters or anything or did they make that up after they knew they were making another TNG movie?
That’s the scriptwank I was referring to. They came up with it because they felt Data looked older than his first season appearance. And, of course, Spiner never liked it.
And the whole looking older thing is not that big a deal. Look at the last episode of Enterprise, which was set during the season 7 episode “The Pegasus.”
The thing is that Star Trek XI doesn’t screw with the timeline – it’s an alternate universe. The ‘prime’ Star Trek (TOS, TNG, Voyager, DS9) all occurs in the original universe. It’s just that by Nero going back in time and destroying the Kelvin, he created a splinter universe.
And I’ve seen a couple of people complain that XI was just Nemesis rehashed, but honestly I don’t see it. The only simularity is that the villains are Romulans (or really, in Nemesis’ case, a human raised by Remans who takes over the Romulan Empire). Nero and Shinzon aren’t anything alike. Shinzon is Picard’s clone who was raised by Remans and who needs a blood transfusion from Picard to survive and who psychically rapes Deanna. Nero is a Romulan from the future with a badass mining ship who’s been driven insane by the destruction of Romulus (and with it his wife and unborn child) and who is determined to get his revenge on Spock Prime. Their backgrounds and motivations are very different. And IMHO, Bana is a lot better than Hardy (not that Hardy’s neccesarily a bad actor, I saw a trailer for Bronson which looks incredible, but Bana’s Nero has more gravitas and doesn’t come across as such a skeezy little punk).
I wondered if they were trying to duplicate a Spock moment in First Contact too IIRC. When Data gives us his “to hell with Starfleet orders” line, it felt a bit like Spock’s “Go to hell” line in The Undiscovered Country, but without the resonance.
Data was always TNG’s Spock. He was the emotionless smart jerkoff. In “Unification” Spock and Data even discussed how they were alike, and you totally know they wanted to make out with each other if Picard wasn’t there.
When people have invested a lot of time into a work of fiction they expect some sort of satisfying closure when it’s time to wrap things up. For whatever reason, Star Trek writers have a terrible track record when it comes to killing off main characters. The only really good Trek death was the death of Spock in The Wrath of Khan. I’ll give them a small amount of credit for the death of Yar though.
So fans of TNG received a double whammy. First, Nemesis was just a big old turd sandwich before you even take into account the death of Data. Second, the death of Data wasn’t really all that dramatic and the sacrifice is mitigated by the appearance of B-4.
Odesio
PS: I attribute the dune buggy scene to the influence of TNG episodes that were running on TNN cable network at the time. TNN = The Nashville Network, then it became The Nation’s Network, and it’s now Spike TV.
I see I’m going to need to do some geeking out myself.
That just plain is not how time travel has been treated in any of the Star Trek series, and they’ve done a hell of a lot of time travel stories. More than enough to establish which theories of time travel work in universe.
Whenever we run into a time travel story in the main continuity, the characters are constantly fretting about “poluting the timeline”, “altering the timeline” or “restoring the timeline”. This suggests that, dispite there being paralell universes, these have nothing to do with time travel, and the timeline is a singular, capable of being altered, damaged, and the present uncreated.
If it were just creating branching paralell universes, the characters might well still have been fretting, but the concern would be returning to their own branch of the multiverse, not worrying about how the changes wrought on the past could effect the timeline.
New Spock’s lines about it being a paralell universe were to demonstrate that they weren’t following a predestined path and what choices they made still mattered. They were not a litteral analysis of the temporal mechanics of the situation.
Everything from the Year of Hell on Voyager, to Kirk’s first trip slingshotting around a black hole, to the Borg interfearence with the launch of the Pheonix, to the Guardian of Forever supports the single timeline theory, as we can see the changes happening to the timeline from privledged reference points (behind temporal shields of one sort or another)
Fact of the matter is, Nemesis opened with the heroes of the previous series having finally failed everyone and everything they’ve struggled and suffered for, and their sacrifices and victories now mean nothing because they’ve been wiped from existence.
(And that’s ignoring the fact that even if it were a split timeline, which doesn’t fit established Trek timetravel rules, the situation Old Spock describes still sees everyone we care about in the original timeline dying pointlessly by a stellar phenomenon.)
And I missed the edit window. That should read Star Trek XI, not Nemesis.
If you want a nice review of the movie, I suggest this guy’s review. He also does a wonderful review of The Phantom Menace.
As far as the dune buggy goes, I learned from that review that Patch linked to that they wrote in the dune buggies because Patrick Stewart likes to go off-roading. Seriously.
They mention how they are different in that same scene too. Data mentions that Spock tries to push away human experiences while he seeks them out. Bones also compared him to a Vulcan in Encounter at Farpoint though.
Now, back to XI. Had someone gone back in time with intent to trash all kinds of the past, the Enterprise-E would have been there seconds after to make them regret time travel.
Why couldn’t it have been Wesley Crusher???
I had forgotten that Data was killed off. Probably because with great effort, I have erased memories of “Nemesis” and “Insurrection” from my mind. Both are really bad, dull movies that make you switch to “time remaining” on a DVD player to give you something to look forward. “Final Frontier” may actually be worse than these two turkeys but at least it was so-bad-its-kind-of-mesmerizing bad. These two TNG are guilty of the worst crime: they are boring.
The first third and last third of Nemesis are alright. It’s the middle that drags. I like the final battle with the Romulans helping the Enterprise.
Insurrection should have been an episode. It also should have cut out Worf’s puberty and Data being a flotation device.
Yes, Picard had retired and become an Ambasador.
Its an alternate timeline in that they didn’t have the opportunity to correct it, and apparently never will.
In First Contact, they actually asked the question - “why are we still here” - and answered it with “we’re caught up in the timey wimey goo and protected from the changes” - showing that if they arent in just the right position, they are just as affected by timeline changes.
This is even more evident in “The City on the Edge of Forever” - and seems that that episode sets the general formula for time travel in Trek.
In most of your other examples - the crew was vastly aware of the need to preserve history/timeline to insure they got back.
We (as the audience and fans of trek) have the unique ability to see both timelines play out.
Well, I’ve been saying for many years that the biggest problem with Star Trek has become the endless fixation on Time Travel. Hell, even the new movie involved it.
Just. No. More. Time. Travel. In. Trek.
Period.
It isn’t fucking Time Trek, it is Star Trek.
And I don’t disagree with you - but, done properly, it can lead to interesting scenarios and story lines (what if’s) - when used like they did in Voyager, it can be very frustrating (Year of Hell reset to “everything nice again”).
It can indeed be done well, but I agree with Chimera - it’s been done far, far too much. Enough for now.
I second this. If you can get past the monotone, the review of Phantom Menace is hilarious, as is the review of Nemesis and First Contact. I’m not saying I agree with everything he says but he has some really good points.
vislor
The wedding reception was NOT nice, it had wesley in it! (And personally I always thought Troi & Riker were the lamest and post predictable couple.)
Oh please, yet another Data? As if we hadn’t seen that before.
And another horrible mistake: those Romulans are paranoid, tricky, scheming, plotting, suspicious bastards, right? Yet in the Romulan senate, one person suddenly has to leave early, leaving behind a small mysterious device. Yet everyone present is watching it sitting back with that curious expression of “how strange, I wonder what it does”.