Except Spock and Decker do most of the work...
Why is everyone more robotic than V'Ger in TMP?
- Thread starter Hey Missy
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Except Spock and Decker do most of the work...
Kirk unit...Kirk unit...
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Which doesn't matter. Regardless of what subordinates do or don't do, the commanding officer has ultimate responsibility for the success or failure of the mission.
Yeah, but Kirk's whole argument for kicking Decker out of his rightful command is that only Kirk's unique experience and wisdom could save the day. But what, exactly, did Kirk do that Captain Decker couldn't have done in his place? True, he pushed forward when Decker advised caution, but that was Decker's job as first officer. If Decker had been captain instead, he might've made the same choices Kirk did.
I like TMP, but that's a flaw in its story -- for all that it's an excuse to put Kirk back in command of the Enterprise, it doesn't really succeed in justifying his argument that he needs to be in command of the Enterprise.
You assume that Decker would push forward the same way Kirk did, you don't really know... and would he gamble with the bluff Kirk did that ultimately saved the mission? You may naturally think it's too little but I feel it's logical that until Spock becomes Spock again, Kirk can't really be Kirk and only then does he start to naturally assume his role.
I'm assuming nothing. I'm just saying it's possible. To prove a premise, you need to rule out its alternatives. Therefore, you need to list all the alternative possibilities and test them. Merely stating one of those possibilities is NOT "assuming" it is correct. It's just doing due diligence and weighing every possibility. That's the exact opposite of assumption.
To prove that Kirk's presence was vital, you have to prove that Decker could not have done it himself. The burden of proof is not on the premise that Decker could have done it, but on the premise that he couldn't. Therefore, if it's even possible that Decker could've risen to the occasion, then the premise that Kirk was needed is unproven.
But that's not the question. The question is, did he definitively do anything that Decker and Spock couldn't have done without him? Kirk's own contributions seem fairly minor -- the decision to push forward, the decision to bluff the probe. We can't assume that Decker wasn't capable of making similar choices, or that Spock wouldn't have been able to convince him to do what Kirk would've done.
Also, let's not make the mistake of arguing like any of this really happened, because it's always kind of delusional when people insist on debating made-up stories in those terms, as if their characters actually existed and their choices were their own instead of the writers'. What I'm talking about is a flaw in the narrative. If the filmmakers wanted to tell us a story that proved how necessary it was for Kirk to be captain of the Enterprise, then they made a mistake by having Spock and Decker do most of the work in the second half and leaving Kirk's own contribution fairly vague. It's just another symptom of how sloppy the writing process of the third act was, with the story being pieced together on the fly as they filmed it.
Ok, first maybe you need to remind me Decker's big contributions to the mission after they encounter V'Ger, apart from chaperoning the Ilia probe, I'm a bit fuzzy on that... the work seems mostly to be Spock's for sure, with the Kirk the eloquent vessel to see the way through... the flaw to me is that Decker is an unknown quantity as a captain so it's all speculative... Kirk is there because it's Kirk, of course. Decker, the younger capable counterpoint to remind the passage of time, thankfully not written as a moron as in many other cases, but still underwritten.
It was Decker's relationship with Ilia that reawakened the Ilia persona within the probe and helped them understand V'Ger. And of course it was he who merged with V'Ger and gave it the humanity it needed, which is the single most important thing that saved the day.
Again, the burden of proof is on the premise that he couldn't have done it himself. It's not necessary to prove that he conclusively could have, merely to be unable to rule out the possibility. The lack of certainty (in Kirk's favor) is my whole point.
But remember, Kirk personally chose Decker as his successor. He believed at the time that Decker had what it took to command the Enterprise. That seems like a pretty solid recommendation. And since he ended up admitting that his drive to take the ship back was more about his own personal obsession with command than about Decker's competence, and since he ended up relying on Decker's competence in the second half, it's pretty difficult to argue convincingly that Decker was likely to fail. There's nothing in the character's portrayal to suggest that that's true.
After all, TMP was based on the Phase II pilot script, setting up a series in which Decker would've been Kirk's regular first officer, essentially the character that Will Riker ended up being (essentially Roddenberry reworked it into TNG, with Kirk, Decker, Ilia, and Xon becoming Picard, Riker, Troi, and Data respectively). So it was built into the story that Decker was good at his job, that Kirk was wrong to have doubted him.
I think if you shift one piece, the whole situation shifts. If Sulu had been the template for the probe, maybe they could have stalled it but what if it had been Ensign Perez?
That said, it would have been cool if each of the recurring crew had been given a chance to prove their presence was Important to the mission: Uhura working with Spock instead of Decker to communicate, some deft flying by Sulu to evade one of the plasma bolts,, Chekov taking an active part in managing Ilia's tour of the ship, Chapel using her past knowledge of robotic life forms, and a damn fine cup of coffee from Rand.
That said, it would have been cool if each of the recurring crew had been given a chance to prove their presence was Important to the mission: Uhura working with Spock instead of Decker to communicate, some deft flying by Sulu to evade one of the plasma bolts,, Chekov taking an active part in managing Ilia's tour of the ship, Chapel using her past knowledge of robotic life forms, and a damn fine cup of coffee from Rand.
One thing that I don't get is Spock's total social ineptness. He's never been like this on TOS and he was supposed to have evolved in the meantime. Plus he looked a lot cooler in the next movie. I seriously don't get the point of that.
Huh? It wasn't ineptness, it was a conscious choice to reject all emotional attachments and pursue the pure logic of Kolinahr -- basically to become an ascetic monk, taking Vulcan emotional repression to its ultimate extreme. I thought that was explained well enough in dialogue. It was a driving element of the plot -- his search for pure logic was what drew him back to the Enterprise in order to connect with V'Ger, and when he did so, he realized that a life without emotion is empty and sterile, so he dropped the whole Kolinahr thing and reconciled himself with his emotional side. By the third act, he's far more in touch with his emotions and less at war with himself than he's ever been before, and that's the basis of his personality from The Wrath of Khan onward.
Granted, the film didn't really give a good explanation for why he chose to turn his back on his friends and become a hardcore ascetic after TOS/TAS. That's a question that various works of fan and tie-in fiction have tried to answer over the decades.
It's the crux of his story arc. He rowed away from friendship and emotional ties and retreated into logic and intellectualism. In his first encounter with the crew he's quite clearly processing the tide of emotion and gets the hell out of there. He's not socially inept, he's socially disengaged. Some people on the autistic spectrum might be able to relate to that. Social interaction just gets in the way of what they want to focus on.
Star Trek Continues offers up an interesting reason for Spock to seek relief from his unwanted emotions.
Agreed. I would have had Uhura immediately and quickly working her console right after Spock says, "We have been contacted. Why have we not replied?", then something like this would happen:
UHURA
(indicates a screen)
A signal... at a frequency overone million megahertz, and at
such high transmission rate the
entire message lasted only a
millisecond.
Kirk is up out of his chair and at the rail by her station.
KIRK
UHURA
working on it, but it’s the most complex
transmission I’ve ever seen.
SPOCK
(working; only glancing at Kirk)too primitive to be received. I am now
programming our computer to transmit
linguacode at their frequency and rate
of speed.
- There was material shot of Sulu trying to evade the energy bolts, but it was not used.
- Chekov was supposed to accompany Kirk to Ilia's quarters, but changes during filming excised him from this (as Koenig related in Chekov's Enterprise)
- Interesting idea about Chapel, but she communicating that experience without an infodump would have been difficult.
No. Just, no.
It's a shame some of those extra bits didn’t make the final cut. Despite getting a couple of cute comedic moments, Chekov really did feel rather under-used (albeit I understand they toyed with the notion of killing him off entirely). I'm ambivalent about shoe-horning in the recurring characters everywhere because on the one hand, I find the liberal use of extras does help paint the most effective picture of a realistically functional ship (transporter malfunction and warp field imbalance aside) in any of the movies.
On the other hand, I do enjoy it when they build on the established backgrounds of the existing characters and use them where it's logical to do so. It would have been better if Billy van Zandt's ensign at the internal security console had flagged up the Ilia probe incursion but then Chekov had accompanied Kirk. Similarly, Rand could have been seated at the bridge engineering station instead of a random beefy ensign to make her a bit more visible with possibly a couple more lines of dialogue. The coffee comment was, of course, paraphrasing Twin Peaks, although Trek also had quite a lot of character moments surrounding the delivery of a beverage. It can be a good opportunity to lighten the mood briefly, whether that's Rand heating coffee with a phaser, Barrows massaging Kirk's back, or Kirk being really horny before his shore leave.
As awesome as having little moments for the rest of the crew to shine, fixing the character arcs for the leading characters is where more attention was really needed. Adapting the phase 2 pilot into TMP was problematic as the pilot positioned Kirk to change from a leading to recurring character, either eliminate or reduce Spock’s character to a recurring character and Decker to ultimately succeed Kirk as captain of the Enterprise. In this context, Kirk awkwardly reclaiming command at Dexker’s expense would presumably have been paid off over the course of the first half season as Decker gained experience under Kirk’s mentor ship, and Kirk grew to gain respect and admiration for Decker, culminating in proudly relinquishing command to Decker. Not only would the pilot episode “In Thy Image” put Kirk and Decker on different trajectories, the episode only set up the character arcs to play out over several episodes.
When In Thy Image was repurposed for TMP, not only did the character arcs for Kirk and Decker have to be developed and resolved within the two hour story, they had to resolve to an outcome that no longer matched the setup they were meant for AND it now had to incorporate Nimoy’s character in a staring role. Decker became a vestigial appendage that while still woven into the fabric of the story, had no function beyond it. These were fundamental story problem that really needed to be solved.
As if this wasn’t enough, behind the scenes Roddenberry was arguably working against the screenwriter with his revisions to Harold Livingston’s screenplay.
In short, I think we were extremely lucky to get what little development of the supporting cast that we got. it might have been better had they just scrapped the story and started from scratch. I don’t think enough appreciation was given for how fundamentally different television pilots are from a one-off film.
When In Thy Image was repurposed for TMP, not only did the character arcs for Kirk and Decker have to be developed and resolved within the two hour story, they had to resolve to an outcome that no longer matched the setup they were meant for AND it now had to incorporate Nimoy’s character in a staring role. Decker became a vestigial appendage that while still woven into the fabric of the story, had no function beyond it. These were fundamental story problem that really needed to be solved.
As if this wasn’t enough, behind the scenes Roddenberry was arguably working against the screenwriter with his revisions to Harold Livingston’s screenplay.
In short, I think we were extremely lucky to get what little development of the supporting cast that we got. it might have been better had they just scrapped the story and started from scratch. I don’t think enough appreciation was given for how fundamentally different television pilots are from a one-off film.
Spock's arc is good and I actually enjoy Kirk's arc too. Maybe one or two Flashback scenes might have made Decker's feelings for Ilia or his New Human leanings feel more organic.
I tend to champion the extra little moments for the supporting cast because they might each add only 30 seconds or less to the run time. It feels like reworking the main character arcs to do them greater justice would add too much and possibly even slow the early part of the story down even more.
I've browsed the early drafts script of In Thy Image and, apart from a bit of dialogue, a scene with robot probes on the Rec Deck, plus the Memory Wall scene, I don't recall that much difference. It would be cool to know what story elements were in the competing versions.
It might have been cool to have a six episode mini series exploring some of the themes you mention, although in my YouTube comic I thought it would be more intriguing to explore what would happen to Decker and Ilia if they were restored after 6 months with no conscious memories of their experiences.
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I believe that only one line of dialogue suggests this: "I remember when you recommended me for this command." But does this have to be construed to mean that Kirk "chose" Decker? Kirk's recommendation would not necessarily have been the sole deciding factor.
Nor is it clear that Decker was Kirk's "successor" as captain; earlier Scott is speaking with Kirk and calls Decker "an untried Captain," and indeed he may have become captain sometime during the refit, not necessarily directly upon Kirk's promotion to Admiral a year before the refit began (two and a half years ago, with the refit commencing 18 months ago, both according to dialogue).
(Apologies if, among the hundreds of novels I haven't read, there are any that address the post-Kirk, pre-refit voyages of the Enterprise.)
They never considered killing Chekov. That was Walter musing about they deciding to croak him after he gets singed.
No flashbacks! Flashbacks are usually narratively lazy and tend to be speed bumps. Ugh. They just needed more moments to establish the Decker-Ilia relationship to make the tragedy land and to motivate his decision at the climax.
No flashbacks! Flashbacks are usually narratively lazy and tend to be speed bumps. Ugh. They just needed more moments to establish the Decker-Ilia relationship to make the tragedy land and to motivate his decision at the climax.
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Decker was relatively young. The fact that he was demoted to commander is suggestive that he was recently promoted. It would have been really scandalous for Kirk to demote someone who had captained their own ship previously, especially since the demotion wasn't even necessary - Kirk still outranked him.
This reinforces my point: It seems quite plausible that there was some other Enterprise captain after Kirk began his desk job 2.5 years earlier, and who presumably held that rank until the refit was under way, before Decker rose to captain and finished getting the ship ready for operational status.
