Re: Less than a year away + we know nothing about this film/ No market
I love The Search for Spock! Doesn't make the "science" any less ridiculous. The "science" in The Wrath of Khan is just as ridiculous and yet it is considered one of the best Trek movies.
I never said anything about the science.
As far as bringing characters back, it is sci-fi. If I want to watch someone stay dead, I'll watch one of the umpteen crime shows that are floating around.
I don't think all dead characters need to stay dead forever in sci-fi, just that if you make a huge emotional death, and then resurrect that character not very much later, that guts any of the impact for me. I think the same is also true if a huge emphasis is placed on the survival of a character, and then they are immediately killed off (Alien 3 comes to mind).
But what about the emotional impact of a beloved friend miraculously returning from the dead?
That's a good point, there are obviously a ton of good story opportunities that can be had from the sci-fi/fantasy abilities of resurrection. Star Trek III just wasn't one of them.
Death itself will always be more poignant than a resurrection, regardless of the genre because it's a pretty big cornerstone of all drama. It's one of those things in life that people have a really hard time dealing with so it makes for good drama. If death suddenly doesn't mean that much, one of the cornerstones of drama is removed, and it leaves a lot less potential. It treats the audience with kid gloves.
I agree that Star Trek has never really been bold enough to leave its main characters dead. I think this is one of its flaws though, not something that needs to be clung to. A lot of the methods that were used to resurrect people (magic transporters, magic genesis, magic blood, etc) are best forgotten, which is pretty much how they operate anyways.
I think another bad offender, even though it didn't involve main character deaths, was in Generations. Picard was so torn up about his family. In that grieving period, he would be thinking like most people where he would have so many regrets about not being able to save them. But then with the Nexus he doesn't even bother to try. Those characters only stayed dead because they weren't the main cast. That's part of the problem of willful time travel though, which is a whole other can of worms.
Like you say eyeresist, there could've been a huge potential for a dramatic moment when he realizes he can save his nephew, but it was mostly wasted. Annorax was probably the best example in Trek of good drama surrounding using time travel to revive loved ones.
I can understand the point, to a certain degree. But honestly, it has been a part of TV and film for a long time.
I don't get it. The very first thing I said is that just because certain tropes have always existed in drama, doesn't necessarily make them good. Sometimes they need to be averted to present a more refreshing type of storytelling. To make drama actually count, and to actually have consequences.
To be honest, I don't even think STID is really that bad of an offender of this, but mostly because I just think of Kirk as being "mostly dead" and not really resurrected like Spock was (which was like 100x more convoluted). I just think the way the characters are made to react when such magical solutions exist doesn't really ring true for me. It makes these scenes appear much more constructed rather than something that seems to flow naturally. It might've especially seemed that way to me because of the homage to TWOK.
