World Premiere/Advance screening discussions [SPOILERS GUARANTEED]

Well they did slave to book canon on it. Thats EXACTLY how McCoy came to join Starfleet via the books and what had been planned for his backstory in a few episodes but was ultimately dumped.

 

I don't think Abrams has had much do with the writing of Lost in a very very long time. Lost is Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse's baby, and any Trek references in Lost undoubtably come from those guys.

 

Did the shuttle pick up McCoy as a recruit in Iowa as well or did it do multiple stops? Because if McCoy happened to be in Iowa at the same time then well that is pretty absurd.

 

The thing is Vulcan IS important as one of the major influences in Spock's life, seen or unseen. If it's destruction is written off as as one-time event that is in the past and as far as he is concerned, it's now back to life as normal in the next movie, then it certainly dismisses him as a very shallow character, and it does not say a lot about his friends either!

 

If Spock were a real person, you'd be absolutely correct. However, as a fictional character Spock is literally whatever the writers say he is. I suspect the Kirk/Spock/McCoy we see coming out of the film will be close to the general confines of the characters established by TOS. Does that work if you compare them to the events of TOS? Probably not, but that's just the way ongoing fiction works.

 

But that is the difference between a well written character and a pedestrian one. A well written character will have multiple layers, just as a real person does. The writer will take into account the experiences that made their character the way he is. Otherwise, all we have is a cookie cutter just going through the motions. It is for the writers to decide which approach to take, but to me, as a viewer and a fan, the prior is certainly the more satisfactory one.

 

Everyone probably won't agree. The business about the wife getting the whole planet is pretty damned funny, and fannish assumptions about the derivation of his nickname have never been very imaginative.

 

Shame there's not more spoilers than complaining in this thread.


Anyway, I'm excited. Even with the revelation that Vulcan is destroyed and that there is no apparent reset in this movie. Sometimes good stories need to have lasting consequences.

 

It's been pretty well known from the time TOS was still on NBC that "Bones" was a derivation of "Sawbones," so I don't know about any fannish assumptions to the contrary.

So, yeah, stupid explanation for something that needed no explanation in the first place. Hell, in "A Piece of the Action", Kirk actually calls McCoy "Sawbones" at one point (right before he calls Oxmyx a "penny ante operator"), so there's your explanation right there in living color on NBC.

Couple this with destroying Vulcan, and you have JJ being an idiot in matters both small and large.

 

You watched TOS on NBC?

Sorry, never established onscreen.

The "Sawbones" thing is actually suggested in Whitfield's "Making Of Star Trek," which is of course not a canonical reference for anything.

Kirk does call McCoy "Sawbones" in "A Piece Of The Action," while he's referring to phasers as "fancy heaters" and so forth. This is probably the source of most fannish assumption that this is the actual derivation of the nickname, but again it's not established.

"Sawbones" is fanon at most.

It would, parenthetically, be a remarkably stupid choice for a modern film to use that explanation. At least in the 1960s a lot of TV viewers were familiar with that kind of old-fashioned slang from the considerable number of TV and movie westerns then extant (and which inspired a lot of TOS). As archaic as the colloquialism is now, it would be far more awkward and unlikely an explanation than the one being offered.

Abrams and his people clearly know exactly what they're doing.

 

"Sawbones" was more technically a nickname given to surgeons (not all doctors) going back to the early 19th century or so. Back when the solution to many internal problems was amputation.

I think it was a common sense (dare I say "logical") assumption to make that "Bones" in TOS was short for "Sawbones." Any more than if the ship had a chaplain, Kirk may have occasionally called him Padre.
Cetainly if we still know what it means today, it could still be used by some folks 200 years from now. Especially if the guy who uses it likes antiques, reads Shakespeare and Dickens (Dickens used the word), and can use the word properly like he did in "A Piece of the Action".

 

I have a pet theory that I'd like to share with the group, based on the villain's name and based on the fact that this Project is to be a Trilogy, imho. It somewhat follows of the early TOS Trek parallels of Romulan society with that of the Roman Empire.

The villain, Nero, is actually named after the Emperor Nero who sent General (later Emperor) Vespasian into Judea with to suppress the Jewish Revolt in A.D. 66. With Vespasian went two veteran Legions, X Fretensis and V Macedonia. These veteran legionaries, 60,000 strong, ruthlessly supressed resistance in Northern Judea. By the end of A.D. 68, resistance in Galilee and the rest of the North had been crushed.

While the Romans bided their time, two things occurred. Civil war broke out amongst the Jews, leading to great bloodletting and a purge of those Jewish leaders who advocated negotiation with Vespasian. Negotiations were made moot, however, when Emperor Nero was murdered and Vespasian himself called back by the Army and crowned Emperor. Vespasian appointed his own son, Flavius Titus, to be Commander of the Roman Expeditinary Army.

The Jewish Resistance, led primarily by the Zealots, fell back on Jerusalem and (later) the fortress of Masada, one of King Herod's old castles. Titus besieged Jerusalem and breached its walls in the Summer of A.D. 70. It was at the conclusion of this siege that the City was sacked and the Second Temple put to the torch. The Zealots then fell back upon Masada. Flavius Titus had to leave for Rome, and his legate, Brassus, died in Campaign. This left command to the very capable Flavius Silva. By now, A.D. 71, Julius Caesar's own Legio X had landed and was ordered to lay siege to the impenetrable fortress. The results of the siege are known to history.

The results of the Jewish Revolt are known as well: the Jews were scattered or enslaved in Diaspora for two thousand years. Emperor Nero was the individual who first incited their diaspora by suppressing the Jewish Revolt in 66. I believe that the Vulcans are being used as a parallel for the Jewish experience after A.D. 71. A highly educated people are suddenly few and made relatively powerless, and forced to migrated to a new home, or to many homes.

There is, imho, much more to JJ's new Star Trek trilogy than action and adventure. The destruction of Vulcan is not just for shock value, but is pregnant with meaning and will speak volumes about just how far the Federation has advanced as a culture. The reaction of humans and others to the destruction of Vulcan, and to Vulcans themselves, will say more about us than it will about them.

If JJ, Orci, and Kurtzman are doing what I think they are doing, they are following in the finest traditions of Trek storywriting.

 

I agree that it's kind of obsessive to actually come up with some explanation for 'Bones'. It's sort of like trying to explain a nick-name like "Doc".

 

Anything might be true 200 years from now. "Sawbones" is archaic now, and there's no real humor or wit to be derived from using it.

This is one of the most time-wasting aspects of fanon - some people become so attached to their expectations and assumptions that rather than being pleased when some aspect of a story surprises them or goes in an unexpected direction, they become protective of the assumption and in some cases invent some fairly closely-worked out rationalizations for why the writers were wrong to do what they did. I watched idiots do this with the later seasons of "Buffy," which was particularly sad because that series was so energetically off-kilter and counter-intuitive all along and would have been a lesser show without that quality.

 

Let's hope that they do in fact have in mind something with the same depth that you propose. It will have a lot more meaning than just acting as if nothing happened and going mindlessly onto the next "adventure"!

 

They had a little mishap on the sickbay set...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtosEkzHzLA

 

There are quite a few people on this board who would have been genuinely thrilled if the Trek XI production design had been identical to the sets and costumes used in This Ain't Star Trek XXX.

 

Probably.

"This Ain't Star Trek" isn't up to the set design standards of some of the better fan films - imagine if it were! - but the folks who built this stuff clearly are real familiar with and fond of Trek, as apparently are some of the performers as well.

 

Look, hand it to Larry Flynt; at least Uhura is played by Jada Fire (although personally, I could think of better AVN starlets to play Uhura than Jada).

 

Yeah, Jada Fire wouldn't have been my first choice.