Paramount Confirms TWO Star Trek films currently in the works!

Maybe in the Kelvin timeline, the Constellation isn't attacked by the Doomsday Machine at all, and therefore no need for Decker.

 

Despite what Spock Prime said in STID about vowing not to give out future information that would alter people's destiny, I've always believed he should've made an exception for extinction-level threats like the planet-killer, Nomad, V'Ger, etc.

 

KIRK: What do I get young you for your birthday?

SPOCK PRIME: I vowed never to give information that could potentially alter the future. That being said...

 

If you can stop WWII from happening, for example by killing Hitler and saving roughly 50-60 million lives; or the gulf war?

 

Maybe he really just didn't want to give anyone the information because he believed that he (and possibly a team he planned to assemble?) would be the best to deal with those problems, rather than handing the info over to people who might screw it up.

 

*reminds self to hack Pocket Books' servers and find The Hazard of Concealing*

 

I've always thought he was debriefed by Starfleet after the whole Narada incident was resolved (hence his presence at Starfleet Command at the end of the movie), and divulged the biggest threats there - which is probably why Khan was discovered years before the Prime Timeline's version of events. After the meeting, Spock was probably bound to a confidentiality agreement, so what he told the Enterprise bridge crew was true in a way.

 

But it's a dice roll. When conversations like this come up, I always think of the "Red Dwarf" episode where the accidental prevention of the assassination of JFK created a worse future. They had to go back in time and actually see that the assassination was carried out to restore the timeline to normal.

I also think of "Tapestry" in TNG. You just don't know what were the really important events in the unfolding of a life (or timeline) until you alter it and find out you made it worse instead of better.

If a Starfleet vessel came across the planet eater, maybe it would be ethical for Spock Prime to intervene and say, "Use antimatter to destroy it," rather than have events unfold like they did for him before they finally figured it out. Maybe after they come across V-Ger, he could say, "This is what it was...," and then leave it to them to defuse the threat with that help. But I'm not sure about preemptive stuff or advance knowledge. For example, setting them out to look for Khan based on Spock Prime telling them of his existence alters things far more than letting them come across him naturally and then giving Spock a briefing on him after he asks to help Spock come up with a way of defeating him.

 

Hitler wasn't solely responsible for the Holocaust; he was just the guy who managed to focus the anger and bigotry that were already seething in that society. I read once that his generation in Eastern Europe was raised by parents who believed that regularly beating children was important to their proper development, so that whole generation was badly abused and no doubt severely damaged psychologically. There were no doubt plenty of other psychopaths who would've taken Hitler's place if you got rid of him.

Not to mention that the Holocaust was far from the only or the largest genocide committed by Europeans over the past 500 years -- merely the best-documented one, so that we have an actual count of victims to look at and be horrified by. Nobody knows how many millions of Native Americans and Africans were slaughtered in the name of colonialism and white supremacy. The Holocaust and WWII were one installment in a much older pattern of brutality. So killing one person wouldn't make that big a difference; you'd have to go back and undo the cultural factors that led to colonialism and the invention of the concept of racial superiority in the first place. And that's a lot of factors spread out over centuries.

 

TVTropes has a whole detailed analyses of it. In short, there are too many variables and too many possible outcomes.

 

I had no problem with "Into Darkness" re-using Khan. That was fine by me, in fact, "Kirk having to team up with Khan to escape the Klingons" was a genuine exciting new angle I thought they would explore for a second. It's an established franchise - they are allowed to use the well-known players (Klingons, Gorn, Enterprise...).

They just have to tell new STORIES. New scenarios. THAT was the biggest problem with "Into Darkness": Not that Khan appeared again. But that, despite everything being "new", the goddamn FINALE of the goddamn movie was the exact. same. scenario as the previous time those characters met. That felt much worse than re-using the same explosion of the BoP in "Generations" in the finale like in the movie just before ("The undiscovered Country"). I have actually never, ever in a cinema felt that much be taken for a fool before. It's a feeling I don't want to revisit, and that has forever tainted my enjoyment of the Kelvin-timeline franchise ("Beyond" was the first Trek movie I didn't check out in Cinema, like apparently a whole lot of other fans as well - the movie was fine, but I was just so much burned by the previous one, I just didn't care anymore...).

That being said: I think the Doomsday device can work. It's a powerfull threat. They just have to create a completely new story around it for it to work. And for god's sake, a new scenario for the finale! The solution can't be the same (hurl another starship at it) - they have to defeat it in a new, creative way for the movie to succeed.

But, alas, they are never going to re-use the Doomsday device anyway. Why? Simple: No antagonist actor. They are never going to make an action movie whithout a badguy showing his face. They didn't even do that for the Borg. They are never going to have a movie not featuring a clear and obvious villain in the forseeable future. Not with this current iteration of the franchise...

 

I basically agree. I think STID was a good Khan story -- a better one than TWOK, because it was about the sane, nuanced Khan of "Space Seed" rather than the over-the-top madman version. It suffered mainly from the reuse of TWOK elements. Although it's an overstatement to say it had the same ending. Once they got past the stupid rehash of the death scene, they went back to telling a new story and giving it a different outcome, one where Khan survived.

Well, that's kind of unfair, since Beyond had an entirely different team of writers and director than STID did. The rehash elements of STID were evidently Damon Lindelof's idea -- over Roberto Orci's protests -- and Lindelof had nothing whatsoever to do with Beyond. It's a fresh start from a fresh creative team and it makes a clean break from the previous two movies in a lot of ways.

Not that I would want them to redo "The Doomsday Machine," but since reading this paragraph, I've already thought of two ways they could work a villain into the story.

 

Agreed for the most part. But TWOK was definitely the better Khan story! Just because every other Trek movie decided to re-use the same beats, and thus the original became diluted, doesn't diminish that. But yeah - the team-up angle was definitely a new(!) approach, and thus IMO far superiour than a beat-by-beat re-hash like they did in NEMESIS or even ST09. At least in theory. Again: The climax spoiled a LOT for me.

Yeah, I know. It isn't exactly fair. But enjoyment is an emotion, and thus rarely logical. In this case - I just had no interest in seeing it. I wouldn't have minded it, I wasn't actively avoiding it. There was just nothing that compelled me to invest my time with it. I'm just not interest in that particular movie franchise anymore (the Kelvin timeline that is). Especially with SO. MANY. better alternatives around.

I might be a Trekkie 4 Life. But if I want to watch a generic, entertaining blockbuster, I'm much better served with what MARVEL puts out on a regular basis, than this particular branch of the Trek brand.

Which is really a shame - I LOVE the actors, and the aesthetics, and even the style. I'm just burned out on this particular iteration of the characters. (Which is even more of a shame - TOS being my one, true Trek love, and I was looking forward to a TOS movie reboot for years!)

DO IT. Write it down. And then change a the Doomsday machine itself a little bit to another type of superweapon with a different backstory - and voilá! Entirely new, not-rehashed Trek story created!

 

I think it's a really, really dumb story on almost every level, but that's another discussion. My point here is that it wasn't a story about Khan. Not the Khan we met in "Space Seed," the brilliant leader and tactician with qualities that Kirk could admire despite his ambitions for conquest. TWOK threw away all that potential in favor of making him an obsessed madman, a radically different character. Sure, the film justified the change with all he'd been through over the years, but it was still a complete transformation of the character, with basically just the name remaining. It didn't really build on the potential of "Space Seed," just tossed it aside in favor of a stock "revenge against the hero" plot. STID's Khan is closer to the original "Space Seed" version of the character, with that self-discipline and cunning and ambiguity intact.

But that's kind of what I'm saying. The new team of Beyond handled the characters in a different way. There's a 3-year time jump between the end of STID and Beyond, which means a 4-year time jump since the body of STID. The first two films were an origin story, giving us younger versions of the characters who are still feeling their way toward the people they'll become. I think Abrams's original intention was always to make the whole trilogy an origin story ending up with the characters in basically their TOS form. But Beyond sort of skips over that thanks to the time jump and the change of creators, and it gives us characters who have already matured into their TOS versions, especially Kirk. He's not the hotheaded young rogue anymore, but the seasoned captain weighted with the weariness of command and questioning his career path. Also, Spock and McCoy are finally paired off with each other throughout the movie rather than just having token interactions as in the first two, the Spock-Uhura romance is largely a non-issue, and Scotty gets a major subplot rather than just being the comedy relief (unsurprising given that Simon Pegg co-wrote the film). The one thing that's really consistent with the prior films, character-wise, is that Sulu and Chekov, played by the two best actors in the cast, are still underutilized. But hey, that's pretty consistent with TOS too.

Honestly, even if I were lazy enough to create original SF by filing the serial numbers off of a Trek story, "The Doomsday Machine" is not a story I'm motivated to emulate. I think it's massively overrated. It's TOS's equivalent of a shallow FX-driven action blockbuster, visually impressive for its day but very superficial and often ridiculously exaggerated. I think the main thing that makes it work is Sol Kaplan's magnificent musical score, which elevates the material beyond its merits. If the episode had been tracked with stock music, I don't think it'd be half as well-regarded.

 

This tread got my gears turning on some ideas. Work in Progress, not even close to finished.

 

Whale probe is still out there somewhere in the Abramsverse..

 

Not necessarily, the Botany Bay isn’t.

Humpbacks were probably reintroduced on the quiet following a nod from future Spock.

 

All this acceleration of progress in the Kelvin Timeline is going to eventually attract a certain Q's attention.

 

a little detail though: this trek is another reality which, by itself, has the specific purpose of making things, well, not the same as they were in tos. They made it another reality precisely because they didn't want to be stuck with tos and its canon and thus wanted more freedom to do something different. And they did something different.
The characters can't, literally, become their tos counterparts because they aren't them and, in many ways, never will. They are another version with their (hopefully) own destiny and unpredictable journey to have, or at least this is what I honestly think may have been JJ's actual plan rather than 'let's make it a mere prequel of tos but call it alternate reality just because'. If everything is supposed to be just a prequel of tos and thus end up like tos anyway, then nothing new is valuable in this reboot as nothing matters unless it does fit with tos, or at the very least.. the charactters are doomed to have the same life, and we are doomed to see the same thing we watched 50 years ago (well, not 50 for me since I'm in my 30s myself lol).

I don't think Beyond catering to fans with nostalgia by focusing too much on old dynamics at the expense of the ones that are more important to this trek, thus more part of its own integrity as a narrative and as a trilogy, is such a great thing, or worth of unbiased praise as a strong, bold, writing choice.
For one, I really don't think it's good logic, let alone quality writing, to pair two characters together for most of the movie, even to the extent of giving them forced scenes (see action hero McCoy) just for the sake of giving them pretexts to interact, but also giving them both nothing interesting to do outside of that, and also taking away from the actual main plot with the villain that is already underdeveloped, not to mention taking away from one of the leads' own personal story by sidelining it a bit (eg Spock's personal life and his conflict and dilemma, but also Kirk's), all JUST BECAUSE they interacted in tos and old fans want to see it again. Balance is key ( I mean, Pegg is the same who called the Kirk/Spock friendship in the first movies forced for exactly the same reason that makes the tos dynamic of his own movie forced too ) and things don't have to be mutually exclusive. However, two characters should interact because the current story asks for it, not because THEY MUST according to nostalgia only.
There is no reboot's explicit rule, according to a tos priority scale or something like that, that dictates they were forced to do that and since the first two didn't, somehow it's a failure on their part.

The same 'respect' should be given to the new dynamics too, then. In that sense, since some things are canon too NOW, it may seem contradictory to want to ostensibly praise a movie for sidelining the new dynamics of this trek that might actually need more development, in the same breath one is praising their overinflating another dynamic just because it's a nod to the old thing, basically. That in spite of the new dynamics like S/U (but also aos Kirk&Spock and Kirk&Bones friendships and the new trio, that also were, by your logic, a non-issue in this movie) argueably being (still, even in this movie) more important to the narrative of this trek than paying homage to the old thing just for the sake of it.