No, I think the intended impression was that he was inexperienced. Those are profoundly different things.
Dillard's Generations
- Thread starter Odo
- Start date
No, I think the intended impression was that he was inexperienced. Those are profoundly different things.
That could be (maybe not overtly, but subtly). Maybe it was a bit of hey, we need to have Kirk swoop in and save the day. And that was fine. He, Scotty and Chekov were put in the film for more than just fluff. It just seemed at first glance a captain leaves Spacedock without all his parts, Kirk has to admonish him for leaving Spacedock without all his parts to which Harriman didn't have an answer, every one of his ideas is fruitless, and he turns to Kirk asking for him to basically rescue him---again, that's the first impression. Now I know better. But that was what I came away with on first viewing.
It never struck me as particularly odd that the E-B would have gone on what's obviously a PR trip strictly within the solar system(?) without all its parts.
Indeed, it strikes me as more odd (though maybe by this point it shouldn't), that once again the "only ship in range" card is played.
I haven't watched the film in quite awhile, but I do think Alan Ruck treads the line between "in over his head/inexperienced" and "incompetent". My impressions may have been colored by recognizing him from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Indeed, it strikes me as more odd (though maybe by this point it shouldn't), that once again the "only ship in range" card is played.
I haven't watched the film in quite awhile, but I do think Alan Ruck treads the line between "in over his head/inexperienced" and "incompetent". My impressions may have been colored by recognizing him from Ferris Bueller's Day Off.
Right. ST:TMP had the same problem. It's Sol system! It's the capital of the Federation! How is there only one starship available?
TNG had this problem too, at least in its first season, with characters mentioning that, at the very least, having Starfleet vessels returning to the Sol system was a rare event (from the episode "Conspiracy"):
Of course, maybe this excludes non-long-term-exploratory Starfleet vessels and of course regular civilian traffic, but the phrasing here always struck me as somewhat odd.
Ha-ha. Yeah. I'm still waiting to find out what was so important in the Laurentian System (and at least there were a couple other ships).
Ironically, one part of TFF that was a clever add in was when Kirk is ordered to Nimbus 3, he actually brings up the question, surely there are other ships. The response that time was no experienced captains.
They played that card less as time went on.
That's probably true. What got me there was Kirk stopping Harriman and accusingly telling him "You left spacedock without a tractor beam" That seemed to indicate there were some things you don't leave without no matter what. Kirk would know if this was an "option" for the car or a must have.
TOS tended to implicitly use "starship" as a label for a specific class of deep-space vessel rather than for spacegoing craft in general, so maybe that usage lingered into early TNG.
At any rate, even if we define "starship" to mean "a ship meant for interstellar travel," that still leaves room for ships meant to patrol and defend a single star system, of which there should logically be a great many around Sol. Too many Trek movies and episodes fail to acknowledge that any world belonging to an interstellar civilization would have a robust home defense of some sort. At least TMP acknowledges this (V'Ger is able to shut down Earth's defense grid because of the data it stole from the Enterprise computer), as does ST '09 (Nero tortures Pike to get the codes to shut down the defense grid). And "The Best of Both Worlds" makes a token mention of the Mars defense perimeter. But all too often, it's ignored.
The problem is, Trek is a franchise whose basic tropes were built around a focus on a ship probing the far frontier beyond known civilization, a context in which it would usually be on its own. Too often, writers who set stories closer to home fail to recognize that the storylines need to be adjusted accordingly.
I guess in theory, maybe there was a robust defense grid in the Solar System in TMP, but it just wasn't equipped to deal with something the size and sheer scope that V'Ger presented, maybe the Enterprise was the only heavy cruiser that had a shot at doing something about it. Pure conjecture of course, but I have to imagine the Solar System was equipped to handle run of the mill threats, say like a Klingon or Romulan fleet.
In Best of Both Worlds one could argue that there was a fleet, at Wolf 359 in the hopes of stopping the Borg before they ever reached Earth, for all the good it did. Of course the Dominion snuck in and attacked Earth, but there it was made clear the Breen did suffer heavy casualties--so as time went on they didn't seem to go to the 'only ship in range' card as much (even if it was the hero ship that saved the day).
It does get old with how often Earth is at risk in the movies in particular. One thing I liked about Beyond is it had nothing to do with Earth--I mean was it even mentioned in the film?
In Best of Both Worlds one could argue that there was a fleet, at Wolf 359 in the hopes of stopping the Borg before they ever reached Earth, for all the good it did. Of course the Dominion snuck in and attacked Earth, but there it was made clear the Breen did suffer heavy casualties--so as time went on they didn't seem to go to the 'only ship in range' card as much (even if it was the hero ship that saved the day).
It does get old with how often Earth is at risk in the movies in particular. One thing I liked about Beyond is it had nothing to do with Earth--I mean was it even mentioned in the film?
BTW. Maybe someday, when there's a new contract for novels that hopefully will include elements of the Abramsverse, someone can answer the age old question of what is so important about the Laurentian system. It's a question that has perplexed Trekkies for close to 10 years now 
Twice, in passing. McCoy refers to Uhura as "an Earth girl" when speaking to Spock, and the Franklin is referred to as "the first Earth ship capable of warp 4."
God, it's been years since I read both those books. I don't remember much about Crossover but Probe was a pretty good book I thought, with an interesting backstory about the probe. It has a, how shall we put it, interesting authorship history which can be found numerous places online. But it's still a pretty good book.
Oh, and the book for Generations does a pretty good job fixing some of the weaknesses I found in the movie--well except for Kirk's final death, there's only so much one can do with that.
Yorktown basically substituted for Earth in BEY. Same idea...but "not" Earth. Still a "place you should care about in peril" though.
And that's the way it should be. The Federation is supposed to be a vast interstellar civilization, after all.
Heck, Guardians of the Galaxy was able to make audiences care about some planet named Xandar being endangered, so maybe that helped convince studio execs that it didn't have to be Earth all the time. (And honestly, I felt GotG made Xandar look and feel more like the Federation than Abrams managed to do with San Francisco or London -- bright, airy, and utopian rather than gray and cluttered. Starbase Yorktown felt more like a Federation city should feel.)
That was one complaint I had about Star Trek (2009), the production design. The engine room, ugh. It was dirty, ugly and it was bigger on the inside then the outside (it reminded me of that ship in "Future Tense" in Enterprise). Some fans have said it added a bit or realism to it. But I always counter that you want a ship in space to be antiseptic--after all it's a self contained environment. You'd want it to be spotless. I thought in Enterprise Zimmerman did a pretty good job trying to make the Enterprise look less advanced then previous Star Trek shows but more advanced then today (not an easy job since you sort of have to keep in mind the NCC-1701 was supposed to be more advanced then the NX-01). But while it looked more primitive, it was still spotless. His team also did a good job trying to maintain some consistency in other areas, like Earth of the future. Taking what we saw of Starfleet in TMP and especially TVH and building off that (and backdating it a bit for Enterprise). One complaint I had about Star Trek (2009) is they threw all that out the window.
And Earth looked nothing like it did in previous iterations of Star Trek. In STID they seemed to improve things a bit. Some of the scenes on Earth, esp. Starfleet, reminded me a bit of what we saw in Voyager during the Pathfinder episodes. I give them a little credit for that. There were a lot of complaints about some of those things in Star Trek (2009) that they seemed to at least try to address in STID and even in Beyond.
And Earth looked nothing like it did in previous iterations of Star Trek. In STID they seemed to improve things a bit. Some of the scenes on Earth, esp. Starfleet, reminded me a bit of what we saw in Voyager during the Pathfinder episodes. I give them a little credit for that. There were a lot of complaints about some of those things in Star Trek (2009) that they seemed to at least try to address in STID and even in Beyond.
I actually thought GotG borrowed a lot of beats from the Kelvin Trek movies. But, I agree that Xandar felt more Trek!
Rather, they were both borrowing beats from Star Wars, which borrowed them from Flash Gordon.
The best part of the Generations novelization was that it had more 2293 scenes and Spock, McCoy, Sulu were all in it.
Which borrowed them from Valerian.
Similar threads
