For what it’s worth, I just watched the Star Trek reboot movie.
They did a good job on the characters (plus I like the fact that Abrams tried to avoid CGI’ing everything) but there were some huge plotholes that kept knocking me out of the story.
They did a good job on Spock & Uhura. Kirk was odious, and the rest were meh.
Cracked.com did an article on the ridiculousness of Spock and Kirk being separately stranded on the same planet and then running into each other. But they didn’t mention that the next person the two of them meet is Scotty.
They also don’t question the fact that Spock immediately trusts Kirk when he meets him - despite the fact that he knows this is an alternate history. The Jim Kirk he knew was raised by his loving father, who was a respected Star Fleet officer. This Kirk’s father died when he was born and he was raised by a stepfather who he didn’t like. Most people would consider the possibility that this not-insignificant difference might have had an effect on Jim Kirk’s personality.
Spock knows all this and he knows that in his universe Jim Kirk was chosen to command the Enterprise while this universe’s Jim Kirk was not chosen for command and was, in fact, kicked off the Enterprise for attempted mutiny. Spock even knows that the person who decided this Kirk had to be sent away was this universe’s version of himself.
But does Spock ask himself if maybe this universe’s Kirk might be a dickhead? No, he decides that this Kirk must be just like the Kirk he knew, despite the differences. So he gives him help getting back to the Enterprise and taking over command.
And how about the whole opening scene where there was an unusual anomaly in space that was investigated by a Federation ship? And the ship discovered an unknown alien spaceship coming out of the anomaly, which then attacked and destroyed the Federation ship. Now we know that survivors made it back to the Federation and we know that the Romulan ship traveled back in time and then stuck around the anomaly for twenty-five years.
So can anyone explain why the Federation never thought it might be a good idea at some point during those twenty-five years to send another ship to go check on that space anomaly and hostile alien spaceship? What did they think? “Hey, we sent one ship out there and it got blown up. No sense sending any other ships there. That’s just looking for trouble.”
Starfleet captains regularly complain about being the “only ship in the sector”. Till all those eye candy scenes in DS9, I thought that the TOS guestimate of only 12 big Constitution class vessels in the whole Federation was carried over to other ships and there wasn’t very much of Starfleet.
That’s a good explanation for why they only sent one ship the first time. But it doesn’t explain why they never sent any back-up investigation in the next twenty-five years.
Here’s another one. When Kirk rescues Captain Pike, Pike is obviously injured but he’s lucid enough to hold a conversation with Kirk. They then beam back to the Enterprise. But for some reason Kirk stays in command and nobody raises the issue that Pike is the actual captain.
A few thoughts:
- Initially, Spock didn’t know any of that stuff, unless Nero sat down and explained it all to him over a bottle of Romulan Ale (I don’t get the impression that they talked much on the topic).
I figure maybe Spock decided to back Kirk after he had a chance to talk to him a bit, and was operating on a gut judgement of the guy. Also consider his other options being Scotty, the dude who doesn’t speak English, and the Cloverfield looking alien, none of which probably had nearly as solid a chance of taking the situation in hand. Hell, the Cloverfield looking alien wouldn’t even be able to fit in most parts of the Enterprise.
- Space is big. Really big. Incomprehensibly big. I’m talking even bigger than Canada here. And Starfleet had (at least at that point that time line) a primary mission of exploration, which meant that you just wouldn’t have a whole bunch of ships near one place unless it was really needed. So yeah, just the one of them, with nobody to help for trillions of miles in every direction. I always figured that that must have the potential to be one hell of a lonely job.
And maybe they sent more ships. Maybe it took them so long to mass a big enough fleet to be comfortable poking around near the ship that had just effortlessly beaten the Kelvin into scrap metal that the Klingons got there first (deleted scenes again, the Klingons capture the Narada while she’s crippled from the Kelvin’s suicide attack, this also explains where the ship was for 25 years, sequestered away somewhere in Klingon space until Nero staged a jail break from Rura Penthe and took his ship back. That part of the plot actually doesn’t make any sense overall, which is probably why it got dropped, but that’s also why the forty-something Klingon battlecruisers got taken out in the message Uhura intercepted a couple decades later, and now you know…)
As for why Pike didn’t regain command, it was probably because he was badly injured and was taken to Sickbay. Dude was paralyzed. That doesn’t happen because you’ve suffered a minor concussion and a sprained elbow.
Also, I would like to point out, because it amuses me, that for a brief period of the movie, Sulu was Captain of the Enterprise. I don’t know why that amuses me, but it does. Just like how there’s most of a season of Babylon 5 where the smartass lieutenant who works for Ivanova was in command of the station simply because everybody important enough to make it into the opening credits was busy doing other things.
But Spock said he knew that history had been changed by the two ships coming back in time. And he knew that Kirk had a substantially different background (Kirk told him this).
And he did have an option besides Kirk and Scotty and Deep Roy: himself. Either beam over to the Enterprise or just sit back and let the alternative universe version of himself run things.
Even if the Romulan ship was captured (and it almost certainly hadn’t been. Nero said they had been waiting for twenty-five years with no mention of any Klingon POW camps.) the Federation should still have checked out the anomaly itself. Maybe put some traffic cones up around it or something.
So he was paralyzed. Big deal. Sit him up in the captain’s chair. FDR ran World War II without being able to stand up.
This, of course, assumes the anomaly was still there. No reason to assume these things are any more permanent than any other time travel pothole we’ve seen in the Trek universe. They might have sent other ships to investigate, only for them to find nothing but some wreckage in the middle of open empty space.
First off, FDR could stand up. He regularly did so for speeches. He was crippled, not paralyzed. Second off, FDR didn’t run WWII immediately after having been tortured by Romulans for most of the movie. Pike evidently had injuries serious enough to warrant immediate attention, particularly since this wasn’t a question of whether or not he was “still” in command. Does not make sense putting a badly wounded person in the captain’s chair when you have an able-bodied person there already.
Plus, the battle was already as much as won before he had been carried off the transporter pad, so what was he going to do? Give the demand of surrender while being held up between Spock and Kirk, or slumped in his chair a la Wesley in The Princess Bride?
The Man Trap - I’ve only seen about 8 episodes, and it already feels like they’re starting to recycle storylines. Uhura has the hots for Spock…and she looks much better in red. Speaking of which, I was laughing at how Uhura was upset when the crew returned with 1 dead, and Spock shrugged it off as business as usual.