STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS - Grading & Discussion [SPOILERS]

Personally, I don't see the need to defend the magic blood bit, it is what it is, just a silly part of a rather good film. You can't let Kirk really die, so you come up with some way to save him, after he uses regular muscle power to realign the warp core... (snickers) sorry, there were a lot of silly things in that film.

 

Exactly. And I have no problem with embracing the silliness, I could just (as usual) do without people retro-fitting the rest of Trek to justify it.

 

Problem being, it just isn't "Unnatural Selection". The transporter is used to restore crew to a prior state in "The Enemy Within", "Lonely Among Us", "Unnatural Selection", "Rascals" and "Tuvix".

I'm pretty sure I'm missing one or two as well.

The magic of the transporter is actually more pervasive then magic blood. Yet, somehow, people were able to keep their suspension of disbelief in check.

As far as the magic blood goes, McCoy says he's going to put Kirk in a cryotube to preserve brain function. Under that scenario, I'm not sure that Kirk is clinically dead.

 

Precisely. And many times people were killed/dead for a short period and brought back to life (Deanna with the guy who siphoedn off his evil thoughts to her, the queen in the racist episode that fought Tasha to the death, and several other times)

 

The central dilemma in TNG's "Rascals" is resolved using the transporter as well. I suppose you could also throw in "Realm of Fear" (life forms trapped in the transporter beam) and even "Relics" (rescuing Scotty from the transporter buffer) and "Second Chances" (a duplicate Riker is created when the transporter beam is reflected back to Nervala IV) too, as stories using the rely on the magic of the transporter, if in a less traditional and tangential way.

Too, Enterprise's episode about the creator of the transporter, "Daedalus" sought to utilize the "magic" of the transporter as a means of recovering a character thought dead as well.

I, for one, am amazed at BigJake's theoretical understanding of all the possible permutations of functions the transporter device is capable of. I don't know why he's declaring the transporter's use as "mischaracterization" of "Unnatural Selection" -- I watched it the other day.

The crew used Pulaski's DNA fragment from before she was infected to isolate the healthy pattern and used the transporter to filter out the virus that was aging her. It's ridiculous and very likely not at all scientifically plausible, but that is undeniably how the show portrayed that particular "fix" for the episode's dilemma.

I had no problem believing the Khan's blood regenerates Kirk bit. It was another crazy futuristic fix in the film series for something that we wouldn't be able to do today. It was also something that was spoiled for me by Robert Meyer Burnett on Twitter and Facebook about two months before the film's release, when he viciously nerd-raged about it when he discovered it's use in the film. When several of his friends all responded with comments along the lines of "That better not be a spoiler" he wound up taking the comment down, but the damage was done. Even still, I don't see what the big deal is, at least within the confines of the story in Star Trek Into Darkness.

 

I remember the audience laughing (myself included) when McCoy quipped that Kirk was barely dead. Urban's McCoy was just a blast. I hope to see more of him in the next movie.

 

To be fair there is a lot of silliness through out Trek, it just seems to ebb and flow. Sometimes there is a decent stretch without too much goofiness, then BOOM, a wave of silly stuff appears.

You will never get bored pointing out dumb/silly stuff in Star Trek.

Flashing Ferengi globe light that gives very specific people headaches - anyone?

 

I can only refer you to the discussion upthread, most of that was already covered. Right down to the point of getting desperate enough to defend a weak point to bring up "Tuvix."

A character thought dead. The distinctive characteristic about pretty much every particle in the ink cloud of false comparisons here is that none of them involve actually resurrecting someone. "Restoring a prior state" is not the same thing.

I'm declaring BillJ's claim that it was "used to reverse ageing" as a mischaracterization (designed to make it sound kinda like resurrection). Your description of it is, as it happens, correct and not similar to Bill's claim.

Like I said earlier, most instances of the transporter's "magic" were given specific explanations and limits. Pulaski's rescue in "Unnatural Selection," for instance, was an extraordinary procedure that could easily have killed her. Giving it limits and explaining extraordinary outliers -- however silly the story at hand may have been, and they got plenty silly (hello "Tuvix") -- was a deliberate decision by the writing team at odds with the claim that as the stories went it was just "magic." I'm talking about how it functioned narratively, not about how thin the scientific justifications were or weren't.

 

The transporter can turn old people young, young people old, take one person and turn them into two and merge two people into one.

If that isn't magic, I don't know what is.

 

I agree. You don't know what is.

(EDIT: It would appear this was an ill-judged joke. Sorry. I'm just being a smartass, what I'm really saying is "agree to disagree." )

 

Except, that's exactly what the transporter did in the episode. Putting aside your getting hung up on a mere turn of phrase, the episode clearly shows, effectively, that the transporter reversed Pulaski's advanced age.

It may not be the ultimate goal or intention behind the crew's action to save her, but when she steps down off the pad after rematerializing, her age, magically, has been reversed.

[yt]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBelT-Xi1CY[/yt]​

 

And just think, the JJ-Verse had a clean slate with the option of making a more consistent and believable world with as little "magic" as possible. They threw away their opportunity in the second time around, now we have magic blood. Warp to Warp transportation was cool enough in the first film... at least it was used as it was intended , to transport someone from point A to point B.

 

I'm simply not interested in a consistent and believable world. I grew up when Star Trek was weird and wild and inconsistent more often than not. When anti-matter could destroy the universe and there could be two Kirks and Vulcan had been conquered and they fought lizard men and Greek gods and had a showdown at the OK Corral.

From 1987-2005 they bought into the hype of Star Trek being this social entity for change and it was worse for it. Abrams brought back the fun and excitement. I like Star Trek when its fun and exciting.

 

That's your prerogative. As discussions of tech and "magic" go I personally am interested in this:

Because it just seems to me like a solid guide to good sci-fi storytelling period, Trek or not. (And I think you're drawing a false dichotomy between something being intelligently crafted in this sense and being "fun and exciting.")

 

Star Trek is full of technobabble solutions to problems which ought to have huge implications for future stories but are conveniently swept under the rug. To single out one of them as somehow being uniquely awful is to say "it's bad because it's mauve" when looking at the entire spectrum of purples.

 

I understand what they wanted to do originally. But, in the end, they blew that off pretty quickly. Gary Mitchell becoming a God has no basis in any science fact or theory I'm aware of.

But then to me, Star Trek is science fiction to a degree but it is of the very lite variety. It gave me a love of sci-fi but I want it to be fun, first and foremost. I want to go on a thrill ride with these characters (Kirk, Spock and the rest) every chance I can. Because they are fun characters. I think Abrams understood that to a large degree.

My first exposure to Star Trek was at a very young age and I understand that that exposure colors my views to some degree. Anytime I want hard sci-fi, my Kindle and bookshelves are just a few steps away. When I want a sci-fi thrill ride, I grab a disc that has Kirk and Spock adventures on it.

So, magic blood doesn't bother me. Neither does transwarp beaming. Nor magic transporters from the Prime timeline nor a realm of the universe with giant snowflakes nor the heroes battling a giant lizard head as the Enterprise spirals down from above. Because from 1966-1969, a lot of people with a lot of imagination got together and made the most entertaining TV show I have ever been exposed to. They weren't too concerned with how it all fit together. If that was good enough for them, then it is good enough for me.

As in all things, others mileage may vary.

 

This is a point I've tried to get across in this discussion. You said it much better than I have. Thank you.

 

No, I'd say some of them were uniquely awful, they aren't all created equal. "Threshold" for instance was a great example of setting up a story whose resolution was, by the rules it set up, just broken. "The Alternative Factor" was... well, what it was. And so on.

 

I have to agree with that, however it's like they're trying to have it both ways and it just doesn't work for me.. hi- tech 3d readouts, non-stop references to the "parallel timeline", it's just all a gimmick, and the tech is almost unrecognizable. (Where the heck are the phasers? We get stun balls instead.) At least the engine room looks like it can brew a pretty damn good beer.

 

That would be one way to recruit people to Starfleet.