In Star Trek, the navigational deflector dish is supposed to deflect objects out of a starship. So during TMP’s wormhole scene, why didn’t that happen. They had to use photons. I know excitement and Special effects are the real reason.
TMP : Why couldn’t the asteroid be deflected?
- Thread starter ConRefit79
- Start date
"ILIA: Navigational deflectors inoperative, Captain. Directional control also inoperative."
http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie1.html
http://www.chakoteya.net/movies/movie1.html
The deflector beam is more for things like specks of interstellar dust, because at relativistic speeds those would hit with a kinetic energy equivalent to a nuclear blast. A whole asteroid would be much harder to deflect, but you could probably detect it soon enough to change course and go around it. Or, with a relatively small one, you could hit it obliquely and nudge it off to the side, out of your path. In this case, the asteroid was sucked into the wormhole with the ship, so they couldn't go around it or push it off to the side.
I think @Christopher may be overthinking this. Decker says that the wormhole has overloaded main power systems. The word Ilia uses in "inoperative" rather than something like "ineffective." It sounds like when the main power systems went down, so did navigational deflectors and directional control, in addition to phasers.
Because it was more fun to say "PHOOOOOTONNNNN...TOR-PEEEEE-DOOOOOOOES...."
“…AAARRRMMMEEEDDDD!”
I'm not really sure the scene was padding, though. It served to put the huge question mark on Kirk's fitness for command, and was crucial to the theme of conflict between he and Decker.
It could be argued that the wormhole sequence also visualized the method by which Voyager 6 was transported to the other side of the Milky Way after falling into "what they used to call a 'black hole'".
Yep, people should not second guess what is probably the best scene in the whole movie.
Think I shoulda put a couple more R's in there....
It also emphasizes the metaphor that the ship/crew doesn't work because Spock isn't there.
Well, not so much Spock but that not all of the crew are in place. he being the last one to the party.
It's always seemed galling to me when he swoops in and shows Scotty how to fix everything. I know, charitably, he might just be making the process faster, but Scotty personally overseen the whole damn refit but still doesn't seem capable of fixing shit until Spock turned up with his big brain. The whole Cult Of Spock stuff feels alarmingly like it's pandering to the audience's expectations of the big reunion/big reveal (him being the stand-out character in TOS) rather than the sensible narrative. That the rest of the crew don't seem to be able to pull themselves together until he arrives feels like it cheapens all the other characters.
To be fair, the idea of Scott sometimes needing Spock's help with the engines was seeded way back in the early first season, when Spock calculated the antimatter restart formula in "The Naked Time." So it was nothing new or revisionist.
Exactly. Scott thought it would take weeks with a row of computers working on the right formula. Spock managed the job in under five minutes.
Eddie Murphy had a whole bit on how Scotty was always freaking out and then Spock would be the one to actually fix the ship.
ETA: Brain fart
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I always just took it as Spock helping ("timely arrival and assistance") and complimenting the work of the engineering team. It never hurts to have one additional super-smart teammate when you're trying to solve a problem.
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