Except Sha Ka Ree is established as being located at the center of the galaxy.
In the mind of a madman, so this is the part we can completely ignore. The order of things remains
1) Madman quotes fairy tale
2) Kirk points out the fatal flaw in even trying to put the fairy tale to test
3) Madman goes to deep denial about the fatal flaw
4) Kirk drops the matter
and
none of the further dialogue returns to the claim that the center of Milky Way would somehow be involved.
Another issue I have with ST 5 is, why would Sybok think that God resides in one particular spot, as opposed to being everywhere and woven into the fabric of everything? And if the fixed-residence, single Zip code God theory somehow held water, why would God then be at the center of our particular galaxy? Aren't there trillions of galaxies?
...Because God told him so? Some sort of telepathic rapport is implied there. And Sybok is perfectly willing to accept a God that is in wont of a starship, so having Him reside in a concrete Temple would appear fine, too.
But I see nothing wrong with Sybok thinking that this is the God of Milky Way. The universe beyond our little corner may have an infinite number of Supreme Beings, each omnipotent and omniscient and in total control of afterlife and whatnot. This doesn't stop us from having one of our very own.
About the Botany Bay, the thought has just occurred to me that Khan might have wanted to exile "supermen" who opposed him instead of executing them in order to seem reasonably but not excessively merciful to his fellow supermen.
...Loving this. Also, if only Spock's personal tin-hat research uncovers the disappearance of some eighty Augments, then odds are that they all didn't hail from the House of Khan or anything like that. The passenger manifest of the
Botany Bay is bound to be diverse, and the corpsicles possibly at odds with each other. Did Khan ever bother to melt all the seventy? Or did he just melt his own cohorts, the handful of people we got to see, while leaving his mortal enemies in the ice for the time being?
The latter would help explain not only the failure of the budget to cater for 72 villains, but also the discrepancy between Scotty's claim of an ethnically diverse troupe vs. the all-Aryan group we actually got to see. OTOH, would Khan's opponents die when he ditched the depowered sleeper ship? Or would their cryoshelves transform into cryopods that could be moved to the holds of the
Enterprise, ST:ID style? (If we want to believe in a low percentage of survival at Ceti Alpha V for TWoK and for the Khan who truly loves/needs all 72 of his co-Supermen, the latter would be preferable.)
The energy barrier in WNMHGB and BAON also appears in "Is There in Truth No Beauty?".
Yup, plenty of coverage there. And thus a nice excuse for ST5:TFF to introduce something new, and thankfully something unburdened by the long history of the Galactic Barrier, which by then would have been nothing but a pretty shower curtain the heroes would sweep aside when passing.
(Again, on topic, perhaps a similar storm repositioned the Botany Bay.)
Possible but IMHO undesirable - there already being the dramatic point that the ship lies where plenty of humans have gone before, but have found the location dull and moved on. A slow, old ship bravely trailblazing in an abandoned industrial backlot is an amusing and fitting image, and goes well with the discrepancy between prewarp and warp propulsion.
In a similar vein, perhaps Sybok's mind-meld treatment helped the Great Barrier get penetrated by giving everyone more or less singularity of purpose, a "psychic assist" to the exotic energy, if you will.
Intriguing and attractive. Although of course this wouldn't much explain why Klaa is the first Klingon to go there, if singularity of purpose for
them is a hardwired trait and requires no onboard Sybok-equivalents.
Impenetrable barriers that then get penetrated appear logical as a thing: folks are initially cautious, and those who make it through
and back may be motivated never to reveal that they did. OTOH, if going through a communications curtain is a breeze but something then eats the valiant travelers, progress will be slow - and here we already establish a threat force right behind the Barrier, apparently somehow luring all travelers to a very specific (or illusory?) spot there.
It's probably the same in ST:B - the villain making the exotic, shrouded location appear more dangerous than it really is, in order to control the inflow of victims to his own liking.
Timo Saloniemi
