TWOK: Why did the sacrifice have to be Spock's?

I didn't watch Enterprise <shrug>. Do they show anything over her eye (contacts or whatnot) or just have wave it by invoking the idea?

 

AFAIK, no makeup or prosthetics trickery is used to promote this idea. Which makes sense, sort of: dialogue establishes that the inner eyelids allow for vision, so making them too visible would run contrary to their physical description.

http://ent.trekcore.com/gallery/albums/4x07/forge_215.jpg

...Clearly, Spock's eyelids were either deformed or then incompatible with his human eyes somehow, to create the blindness effect!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Well said, all of it! You're probably spot on! And if Shatner even got a whiff of what was going on in that scene with Spock/McCoy, he probably would have insisted on something like what you suggested in your hypothetical!

 

I don't think the shot ever gets close enough to tell.

 

Nimoy wanted out

 

I would also add that the ship was laregly filled with Cadets it was supposed to be a training cruise before the ship was diverted by Starfleet to investiage the garbled transmission from Regula.

We know the ship had already suffered casualties, the most qualifed person Scotty was incapacitated, Spock no doubted assesed the situation and knew what he had to do.

 

Because Spock is a badass and he was decisive. I agree that the whole scene is great. I really like how everything is chaos except for Spock, who has a subtle but good moment of clarity and does what he has to do.

 

I just looked at screenshots. They did nothing.

 

The goggles, they do nothing!

 

Yes , that is in there ISTR. She spots him leaving the bridge, and that triggers her to put the facts together and realise what he's planning to do and why (and that only a Vulcan would endure long enough to succeed).
It doesn't (ISTR) explain why she didn't call out to stop him, but the logical conclusion would be that to do so, she'd have to alert Kirk and also convince him of the unavoidable need to sacrifice somebody else (her)... all in time to actually do it.

 

Spock said it himself: "It is logical."

He did what had to be done. I don't think he intended it to be a suicide mission, but he stood a better chance of survival than anyone else.

 

Well, no. He would know in advance that even if he survived the first step, of repairing the engines, he would always be condemned to die afterwards because the radiation lock could not be opened before well after his death. There was nothing unexpected about that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Re the transfer of the katra, there's no reason to say Spock didn't do two things: back up his consciousness to McCoy, and establish a psychic wi-fi link which would persist until his death.

Why the gloves? He didn't want the flesh falling off his hands in the middle of the operation.

 

Hi All,

I agree with many of the points brought up in this thread, but I'll summarize with my own 2 credits worth. 1) The ship was full of cadets, and short on senior officers. 2) Engineering had already been hit hard, so they may have even been down a few more experienced staff. 3) Scotty was already down and McCoy already on site - they knew that the radiation levels were fatal, so wouldn't allow anyone else into the chamber. 4) Only the bridge crew know WHY they needed warp drive in 4 minutes. Scotty and McCoy didn't know that Kirk's message was literal, if they even heard it at all.

So, knowing all of this, Spock made a split-second, logical decision to do what was necessary. There wasn't time to delegate, even if there was someone else qualified to do the repair. There wasn't time to convince anyone else WHY they had to die. Spock was the only one aware of the critical nature of the repair, with the capability to perform it, in position to do it, within the available time.

As far as the katra and the death memories, I agree that when his katra was restored, he probably received McCoy's memories of his own death.

Finally (as I've already gone on (almost) long enough), the inner Vulcan eyelid wasn't an "Enterprise" invention. There was a TOS episode (though I don't recall which) where Spock was temporarily blinded, but recovered because he had that extra inner eyelid.

Just my thoughts, YMMV.