If VI had featured Saavik instead of Valeris as the traitor

I'm happy with the way it ended up. Kim Cattrall was a good choice.

There was one scene though, where she turns with a bounce and almost smiles. Was that the gravity boots scene?

 

Yes, it's right when they find who the Gravity boots belong to. She slaps them on the locker and gives off a little smirk.

 

...Would have instantly made it a better film.

Though this depends on them having actually gone on with the Saavik is half Romulan sub-plot.

The big missing link in Valeris's arc is motive. While being half-Romulan doesn't inherently make her a traitor, it does offer reason as to why she might do it. And having her as the "new guy" just weakens the whole thing even more. But then I suppose it's better than if they had made her a red herring.

Of course, the plot (in whole) is missing a motive. The "We might lose our jobs because the director branded this motley crew of intrepid explorers a military!" excuse just doesn't fly. At all. The lack of motive is really the only thing that held the film back from being one of the great sci-fi films of all time. And the gravity boots.

Also, head of security not securing.

 

The motive is the same as Cartwright's. She logically saw it as a chance to bring the Klingons to their knees, thus eliminating a potential threat to the Federation at a stroke. She might have had a starkly different interpretation of logic to Spock - much more utilitarian - but that doesn't mean her actions weren't logical to her.

The scene in Spock's quarters basically reveals that - Valeris sees logic as the be-all and end-all, whereas Spock has the experience to understand that logic is only a part of wisdom. There's no reason to believe that all Vulcans are pacifist vegetarians like Spock is there?

 

Agreed. Cattrall did a great job as Valeris, but having Saavik turn traitor would have been much more gut-wrenching and dramatic.

(And, in an ideal world, Saavik would have been played by Alley.)

 

Not at all. As much as Vulcans are depicted as a uniform civilization, it's important to remember that even a species that focuses so intently on logic and mental discipline is bound to have individuals who either reject or misinterpret their applications.

The irony of having a character like Valeris appear in a movie that follows Sybok's appearance can't be ignored: Sybok rejected logic in favor of emotion, whereas Valeris misunderstood the applications of logic in the real world. Whether her error is the result of inexperience, fear, or both isn't clear, but she definitely lacks the wisdom and thoughtfulness of Spock.

--Sran

 

If anyone is interested, Cast No Shadow by James Swallow is a very good novel about Valeris that goes more into her motives and picks up six years after the events of the movie.

 

My word, I had no idea before that the TUC script was written with Valeris' dialogue originally intended for Saavik, with some mere 'find and replace' editting when Saavik was replaced. Frankly, I'd rather they'd recast the character a second time, and made a passing injoke or something. (They couldn't have really made the film less campy without major rewrites, let's be honest.)

http://www.scifiscripts.com/scripts/Trek/Star_Trek_VI.htm

 

But then there would be 3 different actresses to play Saavik in 3 movies.

 

The plan was for Alley to return as Saavik.

--Sran

 

I liked Robin Curtis over Alley, but would of been fine with Alley coming back, but it should of been Savik, the feelings of the viewer would be more personal and reactions of the crew would of made more sense if this was beloved commrade and not new character we just met

 

Plus, like 90% of her dialog was so clearly written for Saavik--in the same way all of Chekov and Scotty's dialog was clearly written for Bones and Spock ... err Data.

 

I wouldn't have minded Kim Catrall as Saavik.

 

But I couldn't blame Cattral for not wanting to be the third Saavik, thereby inviting comparisons to Alley and Curtis.

 

I don't think Alley or Curtis could have pulled off the mind meld scene as well as Cattrall did. In that scene I believed Spock was searching her mind and she was resisting as best she could.

Of the three I think Cattrall is the better actress.

 

This is probably an unpopular opinion, but I think Cattrall is pretty terrible in the role. Something about her tone of voice and smug demeanor really bug me. Add to that the fact that she's essentially a disposable character. Saavik simply makes more sense. Since Kirstie Alley was out of the film's price range, Nick Meyer should have just had Robin Curtis reprise the role and been done with it.

 

Isn't this a treat of almost every Vulcan character? Nimoy played it cool, but every actor else seemed to interpret "no emotion" as "angry and barely holding it" and/or "I despise inferior humans" and "I'm not well adjusted at all but they'll lock me in if I let it out". Vulcans in Enterprise (the series) were the worse, but 24th century's too.

Except Mark Lenard. Sarek was cool.

 

Totally. It seems to me that Meyer and co did nothing to really distinguish Valeris from Saavik aside from a few throwaway lines at the start of the movie and then changing her name on every page of the script. Cattral clearly worked very hard to try and make Valeris distinct from Saavik in her performance, which is to her credit. But it wasn't nearly enough to truly fight against what the script was trying to do.

This I do agree with to some extent, and again I appreciate Cattral's point-of-view in not wanting to simply reprise a role that had already been played by two other actresses. But the reality is that the script still had so many throwbacks to Saavik in TWOK -- the scene where Valeris questions Kirk's order to use impulse engines in spacedock is very Saavik -- that it almost invites us to make comparisons between them anyway.