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What does everyone think about Admiral Cartwright?

jackoverfull said:
In his previous appearance he was mr. exposition: his only role was to interact with the president and show us how dire the situation was. Nothing wrong with this, but he was barely a character there, in TUC he has an agenda and is far from obvious.
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Which was better than him being obvious from the start. :D The occasional shock twists that don't fall flat are that much the better.

Valeris was pretty much a given as she came out of nowhere, even if the character was originally intended to be Saavik. Had it been Saavik, chances are audiences would be less to pick up on it. That said, there were still little proverbial breadcrumbs along the way for her, of which the moment Kirk had his court trial the reveal would be a given as well...

...but no such hints were made for Cartwright. Mostly because he wasn't on the ship and to put him there would be an obvious giveaway for the audience; how does a writer stick in visual or spoken dialogue moments that seem innocent and innocuous yet without giving away the big twist for the select higher-up individuals until the appropriate moment mid-way or at the denouement?
 
Admiral Cartwright as played by Brock Peters is one of my favorite. Peters was a powerful actor and I enjoyed watching just about anything he was in.

Reading thought this thread however, it occurred to me that there was a missed opportunity with this character. Cartwright never we established to have "history" with Kirk that is noteworthy. He was there in TVH and that's about it. To Kirk, he was just another admiral.

Cartwright was, as mentioned upthread, sort of a soft-recasting of Admiral Morrow. Early scripts for TVH had Morrow, not Cartwright. I don't know what circumstances led to this change, but had they continued with Robert Hooks as Admiral Morrow, we could have had a scene in TVH with him and Kirk. Why would this matter? Go back to TSFS - Morrow was the first onscreen Starfleet admiral shown in any of the films (aside from Kirk). And he was Commander of Starfleet to boot! In the movie, Kirk and crew defy orders and steal the enterprise to rescue Spock. In a real sense, Starfleet served as an antagonist to Kirk. But Starfleet is an organization - a "thing", not a character. Admiral Morrow however, is a character. In the story, he serves as the embodiment of Starfleet. When Kirk disobeys orders and defies Starfleet, he is betraying Morrow's trust.

We never get closure on this act - in TVH Morrow has been replaced by someone entirely different. On top of that, Kirk's "trial" and consequences don't even come from Cartwright - they came from the Federation President. Cartwright and Kirk never even talk to each other.

If Morrow was in TVH instead of Cartwright, I keep thinking that the ending would resonate much more if Kirk could be confronted with the person he disobeyed. They can still keep everything else the same with the Federation President and council chambers - and just have him add a line to say "at recommendation of Starfleet's Commander, all charges but one are summarily dismissed" with a quick cut to Morrow. After the trial, Morrow finds Kirk in the crowd, and says something like "Jim.. you've become a hell of a pain in my ass. But that was some pretty quick thinking by you and your crew. Nice job"

Flash forward to TUC - now imagine how much of a kick to the gut it would be to learn that Morrow was heading the conspiracy. With that history - with the man that Kirk disobeyed, and who salvaged his career to be the conspirator, setting him up to be the fall guy - now that packs a bigger punch. I mean, I would hate for him to go bad, but Meyer wanted to go that direction anyway - might as well go all in.

The flipside of this is we would have missed out on Brock Peters. Maybe you can have both of them in TUC. After all, they invented a new level "C in C" with yet another admiral we never saw before. Have that one be Morrow.

I think a lot of this falls on the production of TSFS - depicting everyone else in starfleet as arrogant or ineffective just to make our lead characters look better. But they weren't made with story arcs planned out - they were essentially making it up as they went along. I think since TVH didn't have Morrow for whatever reason, they worked with what they had.
 
I wonder how much of the decision to bring back Brock Peters - instead of just casting another new admiral - was down to his playing Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. Robinson was the quintessential victim of institutional racism. Now, in The Undiscovered Country, 'Robinson' is the racist authority figure who dismisses the entire Klingon species as "alien trash" and will take any action to prolong war with the enemy indefinitely.
 
Mister Spock said:
I wonder how much of the decision to bring back Brock Peters - instead of just casting another new admiral - was down to his playing Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird. Robinson was the quintessential victim of institutional racism. Now, in The Undiscovered Country, 'Robinson' is the racist authority figure who dismisses the entire Klingon species as "alien trash" and will take any action to prolong war with the enemy indefinitely.
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There is some particular irony to the casting decision, no doubt...but I’d guess the decision was heavily weighted on wanting the shock-value of presenting a familiar character as one of the traitors.
 
Cartwright loomed pretty large in my childhood memories of the movies. When I rewatched them as an adult, I was a little surprised at his relatively slight screentime, the presence he projected made it feel longer.

Also, despite the risk of small universe syndrome, how cool would it have been if Brock Peters had guest starred in an episode of TOS? Similar to Workbee's idea of having Morrow lead the conspiracy within Starfleet to give the betrayal more punch, it would have added a "look how far he's come!" flavor to seeing him in TVH, then turned that bitter with "...and how far he's fallen" in TUC.
 
Vger23 said:
There is some particular irony to the casting decision, no doubt...but I’d guess the decision was heavily weighted on wanting the shock-value of presenting a familiar character as one of the traitors.
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Not just a familiar character, but a familiar character who's also a member of a minority race and who "should know better". Except that, as I believe other posters have indicated, it establishes that by the 23rd century racism on Earth is such a thing of the past that even members of races who experienced it have forgotten their history.
 
Khan Jr said:
Cartwright loomed pretty large in my childhood memories of the movies. When I rewatched them as an adult, I was a little surprised at his relatively slight screentime, the presence he projected made it feel longer.

Also, despite the risk of small universe syndrome, how cool would it have been if Brock Peters had guest starred in an episode of TOS? Similar to Workbee's idea of having Morrow lead the conspiracy within Starfleet to give the betrayal more punch, it would have added a "look how far he's come!" flavor to seeing him in TVH, then turned that bitter with "...and how far he's fallen" in TUC.
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I think TUC actually has the least completing antagonist characters in the film franchise, with the exception of the So’na in INS. Pretty one-dimensional stuff, even for Star Trek.
 
Khan Jr said:
Cartwright loomed pretty large in my childhood memories of the movies. When I rewatched them as an adult, I was a little surprised at his relatively slight screentime, the presence he projected made it feel longer.
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not for me: until reading the fact files as a kid I had no idea Cartwright was in the movie at all when Valeris named him during her confession scene.

Which is why I’m conflicted about the white flashes added to that scene in the director’s cut: they totally destroy the scene’s pace but are very helpful in identifying the people she mentions.
 
Really? His presence is fairly prominent in the briefing room sequence at the beginning of the movie, especially when he says the Klingons would become, IIRC, "the alien trash of the galaxy".
 
It is rather shoehorned, which is a shame because it doesn't really require all that much to make him anti-Klingon in a way that makes him sympathetic. Not in the right, but more sympathetic than he was shown to be in the movie

It's largely forgotten about in the movie (and TNG), but the Klingon's empire expands by conquering other species, apparently rather brutally if Errand of Mercy is any indication. These are not people the Federation should be snuggling up with, atleast not without any conditions attached (like "release all your enslaved words"). The explosion of Praxis was probably a beacon of hope the worlds the Klingons conquered, not to mention being a relief for species near the Klingon border.

With that in mind, it really shouldn't be at all surprising that there are those in Starfleet who react in horror at the idea of propping up the Klingon Empire.

If there was ever a post-TOS, pre-TNG show, I'd hope to see a few species being upset with the Federation for effectively saving the empire.
 
Would any sympathy we might feel for him outweigh the fact that he conspired to kill both Gorkon and the Federation president?

The Klingons may not be innocent as a civilization, but the point that Spock tried to make was that for all their sins, they don't deserve a collective death sentence.

Also, for all we know any significant Federation aid was dependent upon the Klingons changing their expansionist policies. We see the beginning of negotiations, not the end.
 
Just because one understands the motifs behind a position doesn’t mean he can’t still think that position to be wrong.
 
I think it’s interesting that the Klingons and the Romulus both, within a century of each other, faced extinction-level events, and the Federation played major roles in the outcome of both.
 
And, for all we know, the onset of both.

Things unexpectedly blowing up are suspicious. Especially when convenient. And something had to be done about the Klingons; lo, they face extinction. Something new had to be done to promote Vulcan-Romulan unification, and Spock had declared that diplomacy wouldn't work; lo, Romulans relocate to Vulcan.

I'm not saying Spock did it. But, you know, insert meme here.

Timo Saloniemi
 
This will probably bring on a chorus of Boos, and not unjustifiably, but I wouldn't put it past 31 to blow up Praxis or whatever star blew up in '09 in order to either destroy or weaken the Klingon and Romulan empires.
 
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