Nicholas Meyer's Interpretation of Star Trek

The point I was trying to make (and maybe I didn't convey it well enough... I'm tired) was that the 80s was the beginning of a turning point in film from smart features into blockbuster schlock. Particularly in the 80s, you see that with the Trek movies.

TMP is very cerebral. TWOK and TSFS are fairly good romps, with TSFS a little less so. TVH is a comedy and while it has a nice message, I don't think either hold up today. It's too over the top in places. TFF...Granted, it was mired by a lot of problems with budget and the writers strike. And really? Even though it tries and the Kirk/Spock/McCoy stuff is great, it just isn't good overall. The forced comedy. The action sequences. Ugh. And personally, I like TUC. It, however, can be argued that the film destroyed characters in order to make its point and have a lot of action. But by the time you get to the TNG movies? Well, the less said the better. By the time you get to Nemesis, it truly is all just 'splosions and truly destroying the characters to make its point. And as entertaining as I find them and as much as I enjoy them, yeah, the same thing could be said about JJ Trek.

 

Gee, here's a thought... Don't respond at all. Anyway...

You know what... *I* agree with you. I would love to see the kind of stories you're talking about. But would audiences go for it? I really doubt it. Hollywood goes for what's succesful. They build off of ideas. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Star Wars was succesful. Audiences and critics agreed. Paramount thought they'd try it with Trek. Star Trek: The Motion Picture wasn't. Yes, it brought in money. But critics and audiences at the time were indifferent at best. Paramount went in a different direction. And Star Trek, ultimately, has thrived financially because of that decision. Creatively? There have been some questionable decisions. I was born in '79, but had I been my age now then, I would have loved to see more adventures in the vein of the original series. Just wasn't to be.

 

You see even with the issues I have with TWOK it still has redeeming elements. I applaud its energy and pacing and character, but I deplore the basic story.

I also dislike how it sort of retcons "Space Seed." Kirk did not maroon Khan and his people. Kirk offered Khan and McGivers a choice. But the film, as told through Khan (now a deranged character), paints a different story that many in the audience seem to buy. But that wasn't what happened.

Although I would have preferred a different story you could still have done TWOK essentially the same but fixing some of the things I didn't like. You could have picked up with the Enterprise crew on patrol about a year or so after the events of TMP wherein they answer a distress call from Regular One and the Reliant. The Enterprise responds, encounters the Reliant and the story proceeds much like it did in the finished film. I'd have done away with all that Academy stuff and the Enterprise as training ship. If you want age angst you've got Saavik and Peter Preston there to remark on it. And just when Kirk is wondering if he's still got it along comes his clash with Khan to prove that he does indeed still have what it takes.

 

Agreed, this always bugs me. It's a side-effect of movies having a wider audience than the TV shows ever did, so there genuinely are people in the audience who've seen TWOK countless times, but never so much as glanced at "Space Seed". Which means that the popcultural osmosis version of the earlier episode's events is weighted that it happened exactly as Khan describes it in TWOK.

It sure doesn't help that Admiral Kirk himself never disputes Khan's account of events at any point throughout the movie (Chekov, to his credit, tries to set the record straight when Khan first mentions the events of "Space Seed", but Khan just shouts him down).

Anyone who actually goes back and watches "Space Seed" will certainly see the situation differently. Problem is, not many of the casual viewers do go back and watch the TOS episode, so the picture that is painted by TWOK is taken as gospel: that Kirk deceived Khan somehow in his deliberations at the end of "Space Seed"... but it just isn't true.

 

It's quite obvious that Khan is insane and somewhat biased in his recounting of things with the death of his wife & the turning of a possible paradise with potential for growth in to a hell one random day. The mistake Kirk made was never checking back (which he didn't according to the show) and I think the audience is more inclined to trust the words and attitudes of Kirk and his crew (especially Chekhov) than Khan's recounting of the situation.

Khan isn't too dissimilar from Satan in Paradise lost, who places all blame at God's feet when it becomes rather in the story that he manufactured a lot of his own circumstance. As I mentioned countless times, this is part of his character! Khan is a megalomaniac who is not going to recount the story the way the hero is. Kirk's reluctance to mention why Khan has it out for him, except "I know what he blames me for!" shows fear, uncertainty, and doubt concerning his decision making. This is Kirk who is unsure of things, mostly himself as he fears he has lost his spark. By the time the film concludes he has his spark back, but he isn't going to start a soliloquy concerning Khan's prior motivations...

 

There is no mention in "Space Seed" that Kirk will or is obligated to check on Khan. Indeed after he reports to Starfleet (which he'd have to do given everything already in the ship's logs and that you can't silence 430 people who also know about the Botany Bay and Khan) he might have been ordered never to go back there. In the meantime Starfleet and the Federation can now take their time to decide what to do with Khan---leave them there or go get them. And there was a serious fuck-up in how the system wasn't flagged so that no other starship could go there either except that Reliant does just that.

 

And this whole business of Ceti Alpha VI "blowing up" ... what's THAT about? Does Nicholas Myer honestly go by the assumption that planets just randomly explode, on their own? Or is this also a product of a planet reaching "old age" like what the Enterprise and its crew are experiencing so profoundly? (Are our Solar System planets susceptible to this unfortunate tendency? NASA ... reassure me!) Was there a notation in the margins of the script that noted how Nero's Red Matter either got tested there, or that the Doomsday Machine happened to be wandering by and took a casual nibble? And the convenience of said explosion knocking Khan's planet in the precise orbit it needed to be in was a little too convenient to be believable, for my tastes ... and obvious intelligence. And that the planet took on the exact same features of Ceti Alpha VI, just from having been moved into that orbit is uncanny ... Wow! Sure fooled me! Looks exactly like it! Ehhhh ...

 

Funny thing about Khan being intelligent but unexperienced -- by the late 1980s, every other space simulator video game took into account the third dimension of travel. Khan's war was in the 90s and was frozen after that. If only Khan had spent more time with his Nintendo...!

 

What I really find telling is that Kirk should have thought of the three-dimensional aspect long before Spock reminded him.

 

Actually, to get the real tos feel, the exchange should have been the old finish-the-other-guy's-thought bit.

Spock: he's intelligent but lacks experience. His pattern demonstrates ...

Kirk: ... demonstrates Two-dimensional thinking!

 

Yeah that's always seemed weak to me. Kirk the experienced starship tactician should have been just naturally kicking ass on Khan the two-dimensional thinker, without having to talk about it. And speaking of dimensions, I always thought Enterprise should have pitched bow-up toward Reliant and fired away at her underside, rather than rising vertically as if on an elevator and firing at her narrower stern silhouette. Of course, the phasers really should have been able to just train "upward," without the ship having to "point" at the target, but that wouldn't be as cool.

 

Well I uess this is evidence of Nick Meyer's two-dimensional thinking.

 

Bender: "Like letting the air out of a balloon!"

 

Also Sallin's, Minor's and ILM's. (incidentally, I do agree that the pitch-up-&-fire notion would have been preferable.)

 

Well, heck, between the second and third seasons of Trek alone there were, what, six planets actually destroyed and at least two more that were set for obliteration if the Enterprise hadn't intervened? And with the Enterprise being refitted or getting a new trainee crew there'd be all those times the only ship in the quadrant wasn't even in the quadrant, thus, doom.

 

Alright, maybe a case could be made for the planet blowing up.

But you've still got the absurdity of the Earth-like Ceti Alpha V transforming - in 15 years, no less - into an exact copy of that toxic hell-hole, Ceti Alpha VI, of an entirely different composition, just from having taken its parking spot. Put another way: if Earth and Venus switched places, it would take a lot longer than 15 years for every trace of life having existed to just ... dissolve away. To say nothing of the oceans. And the air and clouds would not magically become Venus-like, from having made a do-si-do.

Now, I understand and get that this "is only a movie," but the premise is completely absurd, here. It couldn't happen. And nobody would be confused as to which planet they were looking at. That's the absolute worst about the whole thing - how it makes everyone on RELIANT grossly incompetent, at best. Because it is a movie, though, it's better to just accept it and move on, if there's any hope of being entertained, here. And there is. But it's pretty obvious that if they did have a scientific advisor for the script on STAR TREK II, he was most decidedly kept out of the loop.

 

^^ One hardly needs a science advisor to understand that what's proposed in this film is bullshit.

One could make a case for a chunk of one planet slamming into another and thoroughly disrupting the environment (although you still have to explain why/how a planet could explode). A good sized meteor would serve the same purpose. But whichever you use it still isn't going to shift a planet's orbit so drastically. And thus the crew of Reliant still look like complete idiots.

 

There is absolutely no science or logic in STAR TREK II, at all. It's just moving from plot point to plot point. Don't think about anything, don't question anything, just do it because it's dramatic. Or because it looks cool. Or because, no matter how unlikely, it will get us to the part of the movie we really want to get to, in a hurry. An example would be Scotty taking his bloodied-up half-dead nephew to the bridge, instead of Sick Bay. And why? To provoke an emotional response out of the Vulcans to show how deeply wounded the ENTERPRISE is and, thusly, how EEEEEEVIL Khan is.

Someone apparently reminded him, though, "Scotty ... shouldn't you be taking him to, uh ... you know ... to Sick Bay?" "Aye, lad?" "You know ... where the Doctor is. Nurses. Medicine. It's called Sick Bay." So, we end up back there and the corpse of this kid is now used for more emotional manipulation to underscore, once again, how Khan is EEEEEEEEEVIL, which we get from Kirk, Scott and Bone's discussion. And it leaves a red stain over Kirk's chest like a wound, to remind us eternally, of what Khan has done. All of these are reminders we simply did not need and are only there to eat up time, and for soap-operatic drama designed to manipulate the audience, emotionally. Not one damn bit of it makes any sense on its own. Change your shirt Kirk! Damn ... is that too much to ask? Put a clean shirt on, man ...

 

I've been saying things like this for years only to have it waved away.

I don't deny TWOK has energy, good pacing and decent character moments, but it doesn't bear one sniff of scrutiny. You can get away with one or two small logic missteps, but if you keep piling them one atop another---bang, bang, bang, bang---it gets impossible to ignore.

 

Obviously, Scotty knew Peter Preston was a goner.