The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous.

[Saturn0660]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

She may been at the top of her class.. But it all comes down to one thing. Book Smarts VS. Street Smarts. I'd say most humans could smell that trap a mile away. But knew Valeris would walk right into it.

 

[Maurice]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

Well, yes, but what was she going to do? If it turned out the men HAD been resuscitated she'd have been screwed, too.

 

[urbandefault]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

She may been at the top of her class.. But it all comes down to one thing. Book Smarts VS. Street Smarts. I'd say most humans could smell that trap a mile away. But knew Valeris would walk right into it.

Well, yes, but what was she going to do? If it turned out the men HAD been resuscitated she'd have been screwed, too.

She was young and arrogant. I can imagine a bit of a panic moment when she heard the announcement, and impulsively grabbed a phaser before going to sick bay.

Even when caught, she was arrogant enough to think that she could resist Spock's mind meld.

Though Vulcans will deny it to their dying day, "everybody's human."

 

[Ithekro]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

Remember that Saavik was book smart and full of regulations. She was learning how things work on a starship in Star Trek II, and how things are in both films. Valeris is assumed to have slightly more experiance than Saavik in Star Trek II, but is still on the learning how things are side of things, while Spock has clearly done just about everything...including dying.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

Are Sammo, Burke and Anton Karidian the only three Classic TREK characters not to disintegrate when kill-phasered?

The phasers weren't set on kill. McCoy points out: "Phaser on stun, at close range."

 

[Captain Clark Terrell]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

Are Sammo, Burke and Anton Karidian the only three Classic TREK characters not to disintegrate when kill-phasered?

Nope. None of the Klingons shot by Burke and Samno disintegrated; recall that Gorkon was briefly revived by McCoy's attempt at resuscitation before he finally succumbed to his wounds. Also, there was the Klingon officer who spoke Kirk and McCoy's trial whose arm was shot off.

--Sran

 

[Mytran]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

Presumably, phasers only vaporise when on a certain high setting. Below that (and with a tightly focused beam) they can be used as a cutting beam (see also The Naked Time)

 

[Timo]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

There are basically two "standard" situations where a phaser set to kill leaves a corpse:

1) If there are many enemies to be killed. Presumably, leaving a corpse saves the batteries for further use. We see this when Tracey is cornered in "Omega Glory" but also, say, when the Starfleet contingent is cornered in "The Siege of AR-558".
2) If it's dramatically necessary for the victim to utter a few dying words.

One makes good in-universe sense. The other... Might. After all, the conspirators of ST6:TUC did want to make the assassination unambiguous: there had to be a body, and if Gorkon died in the hands of McCoy, all the better (although obviously that part was not scripted, merely improvised by Chang).

The use of stun to kill is nonstandard but effective: stunned victims don't object to being killed. Other settings can kill, too, such as the blast that sends a rock falling on Gary Mitchell, or the one that boils the Ceti Eel after it leaves Chekov's ear. Presumably, Starfleet personnel know their tools well enough to always choose the most convenient means of killing, but OTOH have standing orders to use the make-disappear setting whenever possible, as it's the most merciful one.

Timo Saloniemi

P.S. "Stunning to kill" might be what Valeris had in mind when going to Sickbay. A preemptive wide blast if anything moves, then lethal point blank blows against those who need to die; when everybody else comes to, they are none the wiser as to who hit them, at least after Valeris has wiped clean / forged the surveillance videos. Why change a working modus operandi?

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

She may been at the top of her class.. But it all comes down to one thing. Book Smarts VS. Street Smarts. I'd say most humans could smell that trap a mile away. But knew Valeris would walk right into it.

I'll give you that the "street smarts" argument has validity in some situations, but I just can't buy it in this one. Besides the obviousness of the announcement being targeted at anyone involved in the conspiracy in an attempt to reveal themselves, SIMPLE logic alone should have told Valeris that going down to the sick bay to finish the job was a lose/lose proposition.

1. If the announcement is true and they're alive, they've probably talked already and even if they haven't sick bay is certain to be abuzz with activity and many people, including for sure some security guards since we're dealing with attempted murder here and possibly Kirk and/or Spock in addition to the medical personnel. The odds of her getting killing everyone and getting away with it are zero, so she exposes herself in that situation.

2. If the announcement is a fake, then it's obviously a set up and if she goes for it then she's revealed that way.

So either way if she goes to sick bay, she's screwed and it really doesn't take street smarts to see that. It's incredibly simple logic and certainly one that a person who's grown up in a society of logic should be able to easily.

By not going to sick bay she puts her self in a maybe win/maybe lose situation depending on what Kirk has planned next. Maybe Kirk decides to just haul her off and interrogate her, maybe he thinks he might be wrong and while he's planning what to do next it gives the conspiracy enough time to succeed.

Simple logic dictates a maybe win situation is a better that a no win situation (Shout out to the Kobashyi Maru).

Again I'm not saying Valeris as a character is at fault for this. The writers for making her suddenly lose all sense and logic when she'd been so careful up to this point are at fault.

And remember Valeris didn't WANT to be caught. If it was the same situation on a Klingon ship then yeah I could see the conspirator going "Dah!!!!! I may have failed to kill my accomplices despite the fact I stabbed them a dozen times each with my special knife with the side blade thingies.......It may be a trap but honor dictates I do everything I can to stop this even if I die. So he grabs a Bath'leth a couple of phasers and charges down to sick bay guns blazing. But all of Valeris' traits indicate she was a sneaky character who wanted to pull this off and not lose her freedom or life in the process.

 

[Timo]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

And remember Valeris didn't WANT to be caught.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Getting caught was her best chance of survival, while continuing to serve the conspiracy would have made her survival very unlikely.

A suicide charge was Valeris' only logical option, and Spock drove it home while at gunpoint. The actual message got through loud and clear, too: "Screw logic and do the right thing instead, you fool!". So she did.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Grant]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

I agree, there are any number of ways they could have written a better/more logical scene. I don't feel as passionately about it as you though, because while it doesn't exactly "make sense," it's still enjoyable for me to see Spock and Kirk pop up out of the sick beds and scare the hell out of Valeris.

Not passionately enough to write a two thousand word essay? LOL.

It's pretty simple, they were pretty sure it was her and she after hearing the fake announcement knew that they knew.

She went to face her fate thinking that she could kill Spock and the rest and continue the covert mission.

But of course she didn't have it in her to kill her mentor and didn't go thru with it. The scene right after on the bridge shows that she figured the mission would succeed at that point anyway. (Jammed communications, secrecy of conference location and cloaked BOP guarding the space around Kitomer)

 

[BeatleJWOL]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

And spare me this "Mind rape" crap. It wasn't like Spock was screwing her brains out telepathically. He was reading her thoughts to get info which he's done many times before with no ill effects. It was her resistance to it that caused her pain

Not at all. If she was resisting the whole way through then she would have been in pain much earlier. Now it could be that she had a bit of a flair for the dramatic, trying to make it seem worse than it was, but certainly Spock going digging for information that she just plain didn't have could not have been a pleasant experience.

 

[urbandefault]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

The events following the execution of the assassins up to the mind meld on the bridge just show that Valeris was operating on the assumption that she was smarter and stronger than she really was. Simply put, it was youthful arrogance on full display.

Valeris didn't resist the mind meld at first because she thought she could block what little information she had from Spock's probe. She obviously underestimated Spock's ability to break down the barriers she put up.

"I do not know."
"A lie?"
"A choice."

She chose not to divulge what she knew, or didn't know. If she had, it would have saved her and Spock both the pain of the meld.

The fact that she didn't really know anything doesn't change the fact that she acted as if she knew a lot more.

No sympathy from me. She knew what she was doing, and the meld was part of the price.

 

[Timo]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

what little information she had

...And there's another little mystery. Valeris was not the top Starfleet conspirator, but rather a field operative in control of two lesser operatives. Why did she need to know exactly who were pulling the strings?

She might have known or figured out that Cartwright was her boss, even if there were further middlemen. And no doubt she was in on the whole deal exactly because of what she claimed was her motivation: her patriotic feelings and pro-UFP logic called for it. Cartwright could safely have drafted her personally, even going so far as to claim that Kirk, while victimized here, would greatly approve of what she did if he knew.

The assassination plot hinged on a top-level Klingon being in on it, too, and Chang would again be obvious even if Valeris weren't explicitly told it was him. And Cartwright could well have told: "This whole thing is gonna work because we have this Klingon in our back pocket. We help him out with his political assassination, then backstab him, and we have both our war and a Klingon Empire in chaos. This is our sucker; study the file."

But why would Valeris need to know the Romulans were in? Surely knowing about all three leaders would reveal to the casual logician that one side was playing two against each other. And while the cream of the cream of the conspiracy could delude themselves into thinking they'd emerge victorious nevertheless, the risk of lower-downs not thinking that way would be immense.

Valeris plays out perfectly for a mid-level conspirator, one who has ideals but ultimately isn't willing to die for them and can choose to be captured. She doesn't make for a convincing top-level operator. What happened to "need to know" here?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[urbandefault]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

She obviously didn't need to know, because we know now that she didn't know.

But at that moment on the bridge, we didn't know how much she knew.

Valeris knew what she didn't know, but Kirk and Spock had no idea how much she knew or didn't know. The only thing we know for sure is that she knew something. If she knew who was the head of the snake, they could use that knowledge to their advantage in a bad situation.

I was going for one of those "he knew that we knew that he knew that we knew" things, but it didn't really work out. Oh well. Maybe next time.

 

[Timo]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

we know now that she didn't know

She knew the identities of all the conspiracy leaders. It's the need for that that eludes me.

That she wasn't told where the second attempt at a peace conference would be held isn't really indicative of her status or clearance in the conspiracy. Rather, the matter was decided while she was stranded aboard the Enterprise! How could the news have reached her, even n theory?

It's pretty silly for Kirk to ask that question, when he has better sources for it - say, somebody in Starfleet he can (hopefully!) trust who is actually in the loop for things like this, rather than quarantined aboard a pariah ship that pretends to be deaf and blind to orders from the HQ. It almost seems as if Kirk asked exactly because he knew Valeris didn't and couldn't know: it's a standard torture technique to ask for the impossible, after all.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[enterprisecvn65]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

what little information she had

...And there's another little mystery. Valeris was not the top Starfleet conspirator, but rather a field operative in control of two lesser operatives. Why did she need to know exactly who were pulling the strings?

She might have known or figured out that Cartwright was her boss, even if there were further middlemen. And no doubt she was in on the whole deal exactly because of what she claimed was her motivation: her patriotic feelings and pro-UFP logic called for it. Cartwright could safely have drafted her personally, even going so far as to claim that Kirk, while victimized here, would greatly approve of what she did if he knew.

The assassination plot hinged on a top-level Klingon being in on it, too, and Chang would again be obvious even if Valeris weren't explicitly told it was him. And Cartwright could well have told: "This whole thing is gonna work because we have this Klingon in our back pocket. We help him out with his political assassination, then backstab him, and we have both our war and a Klingon Empire in chaos. This is our sucker; study the file."

But why would Valeris need to know the Romulans were in? Surely knowing about all three leaders would reveal to the casual logician that one side was playing two against each other. And while the cream of the cream of the conspiracy could delude themselves into thinking they'd emerge victorious nevertheless, the risk of lower-downs not thinking that way would be immense.

Valeris plays out perfectly for a mid-level conspirator, one who has ideals but ultimately isn't willing to die for them and can choose to be captured. She doesn't make for a convincing top-level operator. What happened to "need to know" here?

Timo Saloniemi

Another real shortcoming in the writing though is that ultimately having to get Valeris' knowledge of the conspiracy plot was really not that important to stopping it because they had Sulu on standby all along to tell them where the conference was.

Sure it was nice to get the names and all and it made the process of getting the exact conspirators easier in the long run. But what the really needed to know was where the conference was. I'm sure they tried Valeris first to see if she could tell them and then they wouldn't have to ask Sulu to risk his career.

But the fact is at anytime they apparently could have called up Sulu and said "We need to know where" and they would have had their answer.

Once the Enterprise got there Chang would have tried to stop it, so the Klingon end would be revealed. I don't think Valeris' information helped Scotty shoot the sniper or help Kirk determine he had to make that flying leap and tackle the President to protect him.

I'm sure eventually in the chaos that ensued things would have settled and incident would have been investigated that would have revealed everyone else.

So really her knowledge just saved time and red tape in nailing those in on it. The knowledge they really needed at the time, where the conference, they had at hand all along.

Which begs the question why did Sulu know. Excelsior wasn't as protection for the conference, it was supposed to be "Top Secret" yet a starship captain knew. Did they tell all their ship captains? If so that hardly seems "Top Secret" to me to inform hundreds of officers who weren't in anyway involved in the conference.

Again.....just weak thinking on the writers part.

 

[Timo]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

I'm not sure Kirk would have trusted Sulu unless he absolutely had to. I mean, he already knew that the very bosses of Starfleet wanted him dead! Anybody could be a traitor, especially when treason would consist of merely following orders and protecting the UFP and Kirk was the one who appeared to be serving the enemy.

But once Kirk learned he couldn't trust anybody, he'd have to start trusting somebody and see where it led him. Sulu might not know anything, but at least Kirk could ask, and see whether Sulu tried to arrest or kill him as the result. Who else could Kirk contact?

Sarek would be his absolutely best bet, knowledge-wise and trust-wise, but probably also much more difficult to reach than Sulu. And the Ambassador's thrice-damned logic might make him serve the conspiracy after all; Kirk already knew one Vulcan who had fallen that way!

Directly contacting the President might be impossible. And Kirk was only guessing that he would be the one to be assassinated; for all he knew, the President was actually the boss of the conspirators. The same for any of the top Admirals besides Cartwright.

In the end, Kirk was alone against the universe, and his best chance lay in barging in phasers holstered but accusations flying, and watching who would blink first. He might get killed that way, but more probably he would just get arrested - and whether by enemies or loyalists, wouldn't matter much, as the mere arrest would stir up things and allow Kirk to present his evidence and speak his piece.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Ithekro]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

One assumes that the relatively new USS Excelsior is the closest thing to a Federation flagship in this era with Sulu in command. It is likely still the largest ship in the fleet, and might still be the only one so far built. Why it wasn't there might be something to do with keeping the two fleets from even possibly starting a shooting war by an ichy finger on the button.

Though Sulu did try to rescue Kirk and McCoy, so one has to wonder how they got into the loop after running from Kang at the border.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Re: The Valeris "Trap" scene is just so poorly written it's ridiculous

I'm not sure Kirk would have trusted Sulu unless he absolutely had to.

On the contrary, Kirk would have absolutely trusted Sulu. They had served together for many years; Kirk surely knew Sulu well enough that he could trust him. Kirk would have known full well that Sulu would not be the type who would be suckered into a conspiracy like this.

Kirk would trust Sulu as surely as he would have trusted Spock or McCoy or any other of the 'big 7' that was the core of TOS.