NuTrek's Faulty Moral Compass

Not to mention said organization gives him the authority to glass entire planets.

 

Yup. People are right to say that not everything needs to be spelled out but it was things like body language and tone of voice that added to the my discomfort in the scene as shown. This is wrong but it feels so right is better than three cheers and a promotion for the summary execution of Nero and all the prisoners on his ship!

Kirk's decision to beat up Khan after he'd surrendered is on a different level but it's a similar issue. Police officers who beat up suspects after arrest, many of whom have committed terrible crimes, would open themselves up to prosecution for assault. Two wrongs don't make a right!

 

It's not that Nero and Khan deserve mercy. They deserve death. But civilization deserves merciful protectors.

 

Some thoughts:

I think Kirk intended to destroy Narada anyway. Since Nero refused rescue, well, too bad. FIRE!

There was no way at the time Kirk could have known they would be caught in the singularity's gravity. If he had, he might have hightailed it out of there sooner.

In STID, Kirk tried to beat the crap out of Khan because he was overwhelmed with anger. Since he already had authorization to kill him, no big deal. And that's what it was to Khan. No big deal. The same with Spock later. But that time, if Uhura hadn't shown up when she did, Khan might have killed Spock. We don't know for sure.

Overall, even with Kirk's inexperience thus far, he still tries to do the right thing. His methods are still questionable at this point, but his motives are honorable.

In the next movie they will probably show Kirk as more measured, if still unorthodox. And Spock will be more in control of his human side and not go off half cocked at the drop of a hat.

And that's what I'm thinking.

 

I would agree that, for all the complaints, the progression of the characters, with the probable exceptions of Chekov, Chapel, and Rand have been reasonably well done so far. I feel with Chekov they just don't know what to do with him so they just do everything and see what sticks.

 

I don't doubt that if Nero would have said "yes, please save us," that Kirk and Spock would have made a real effort to save them. One can despise another person for their actions, but act to save them when they call for help. That said, I think Kirk knew Nero would say no.

 

My moral dilemmas in STID are:

1. Kirk punching out a prisoner

2. The proposal of killing Khan with 72 missiles


Yes Kirk punching out a prisoner was wrong but really who looked bad - just Kirk. Khan didn't care. Kirk was beneath his contempt. I suppose its meant to show us Kirk was pretty volatile, Khan was a superhuman and how Kirk felt about Pike's death.

I'm going to give you the condensed version of how stupid the 72-missile thing was on everyone's side. Marcus was stupid for putting 72 super-missiles in Kirk's control. And why would Kirk fire all 72 missiles anyway? And where was he going to aim them? And was he going to destroy a section of planet without checking if it was occupied (which it was)? Did Kirk think the Klingons were going to sit by while he stayed on the edge of the neutral zone and lobbed missiles at their planets?

I was thinking it was very wrong for Kirk to even entertain Marcus's proposal. But you know when you're in the military sometimes you have to follow orders from the upper echelons without question because TPTB might be in the know about something. It just happened that Marcus was corrupt. But if he wasn't then Kirk was duty bound to follow through as was his crew including Scott.
PrimeScott would have followed Kirk's order's no matter what unless he considered him insane (Turnabout Intruder). In Taste of Armageddon he was prepared to raze a planet on Kirk's orders. He trusted Kirk to make the right decisions when he was in his right mind.
I had thought that Prime Kirk would never obey a dodgy command order but I considered 'Enterprise Incident' where he and Spock stole the cloaking device from the Romulans. As far as we know this wasn't a desperate act to save the Federation from destruction but something thought of to keep the balance of power. I think in the 60s it was considered justifiable to commit espionage if you were on the side of 'good'. But know it seems to me that Kirk's actions in that episode were morally wrong. Perhaps as morally wrong as the potential deploying of deep range missiles into Klingon Sovereign Territory in STID.

 

Torpedo, not missile.

 

Yeah I mean its not like the last time the Romulans got an advantage with cloaking technology they went around lauching unprovoked attacks that ended up blowing up Federation Outposts for the purposes of seeing if another war with the federation was feasible, and that their new undetectable cloaking device might cause them to try again....

Oh wait thats exactly what happened.

 

Well if they might try again then you're morally justified in stealing all their military secrets just in case.

James T Kirk whipped their butts and chased them down when they destroyed the Federation outposts. The only other time they had trouble with the Romulans in TOS was when the Enterprise invaded the Neutral Zone. OK and the 3rd incident was also when the Enterprise was in the wrong.

My evidence that the cloaking device was unecessary was that the Federation never used it again in TOS and that even in the TOS movies they still couldn't detect a 'cloaked' ship without improvisation.

 

Count me among them. I recently had a very visceral moment reading "The Romulan War" where we see Captain Archer ordering a damaged Romulan ship to withdrawal, seeing how the Romulans are no threat to the Enterprise but they might make repairs and come back later. They have to send MACOs down to the surface because you never know when their warbird might come back and try to murder the science team down there.

So what happens? The Romulans whose lives Archer spared in a fit of Starfleet compassion warp out to the edge of the system, then go to maximum warp and ram the planet to keep it out of Coalition hands. The entire planet destroyed -- its entire biosphere, every living thing on it -- because an officer decided to do an altruistic half-measure and left his enemy to get up and stab him in the back.

You pull Nero out of that black hole -- or worse, let him go through it intact -- and he'll just come at you again like the omnicidal lunatic that he is.

 

Two things:

First, Kirk apparently came to most of the same conclusions you did, which is why he didn't fire the torpedoes and tried to arrest Khan anyway. Trying to punch him out would be a "nobody's looking, this one's for Pike" moment that backfired hilariously.

Secondly, you're assuming that Admiral Marcus was doing a patently immoral thing by trying to have Khan blown away with 72 torpedoes that (sadistic/ironically) also contained the corpses of his buddies. Have you entertained the possibility that Marcus was actually PLAYING Kirk and that those torpedoes never would have detonated at all, but instead would have simply soft-landed on Qo'nos and Khan and his people would have gone on to conquer Qo'nos and use it as a Section 31 proxy army?

To the second point, considering how little hesitation Marcus showed to destroy the Enterprise and its entire crew just to keep Khan from getting the upper hand, it's possible that Khan was still acting on Marcus' orders when he gunned down most of Starfleet's brass and that Kirk's flash of moral clarity (and Khan's decision to exploit that morality for a chance to conquer a less shitty world), in which case the "moral" of the story is "Never trust the military."

 

Every case is fact specific but if you follow your logic through to conclusion you get an unarmed black kid shot dead walking through a gated community. Minimising risk does not always mean that lethal force is required.

And let's be honest, with Trek tech the way it is, it's silly that more villains don't use similar tactics. You wouldn't need red matter at all, just warp capable robo-ships.

 

I certainly assumed that was his plan. But I was quite confused.

 

If that unarmed black kid is positively identified as a time traveler who recently destroyed an entire planet with a weapon of mass destruction and has been VERY clear about his intention to do so again given half the chance, then your analogy makes sense.

To be less hyberbolic: if the unarmed black kid is someone known to have killed someone AT ALL and is very clear on his intention to do so again, then your analogy makes sense.

It does when the survival of the offender represents a risk in and of itself. Nero, in particular, can never be convinced by any rational means to turn away from his half-baked revenge scheme; hell, he spent twenty five years waiting for his chance just to get this far.

Therefore, his continued freedom is NOT an option. He must either be captured and permanently detained, or he must be killed. Nero refused to be surrender and be captured, so that leaves option B.

I'm pretty sure that's what the Cardassian Dreadnought was supposed to be: a giant warp-capable planet killing missile.

Actually, I suspect the reason more people don't use those kinds of weapons is because doing so is a tremendous war crime and will turn you into a pariah just for thinking about it. Maquis and Cardassians don't have this problem because everybody hates them anyway. Nero doesn't have this OPTION, because he doesn't want to die.

 

73 people conquering a planet of billions is a bit of a stretch, even for genetically engineered super humans. Especially a planet like Kronos, with a population armed to the teeth.

 

Not for 73 people plus every disaffected Klingon thug in the slums of Ketha Province and god knows where else, people who respect strength and ferocity and precious little else, people who could be tricked into believing -- correctly, in this case -- that a rebellion under Khan's leadership would be triumphant.

Which is pretty much how the Augments got control of Earth.

Besides, clandestine services have tried crazier things in real life. The Bay of Pigs invasion, in particular, was intended to overthrow Castro by landing a thousand trained mercenaries and then collecting local rebels as they moved inland. The one thing the CIA never counted on was that the Cuban people's hatred of Fidel Castro wasn't nearly as strong as their own propaganda claimed it was.

What makes you think the Klingon population is armed to the teeth? Certainly the warrior caste is, and certainly the wealthy families that can afford their own battle cruisers.

What about the average joe-schmoe Klingon who can barely read and has never seen a bird of prey up close?

 

I've always thought that warp collisions should be impossible. Why even have space fleet wars? Remote control a cloaked shuttle, ram a planet at warp speed and you've probably destroyed an entire system.

Not to mention had Riker been able to ram that Borg cube at warp...right over Earth, he would have destroyed the Earth.

Talk about a guy who can 'make the big decisions'!

 

I think you are HUGELY over-estimating the amount of energy that would be released in that sort of collision.

 

If anything, I'm underestimating it.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/20/