TOS' T'Pau not Enterprise's? Right?
The Glaring Plot Hole of TWOK
- Thread starter Bry_Sinclair
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TOS' T'Pau not Enterprise's? Right?
Probably part of the reason it comes in at #2 of my favorite Star Trek films (behind TMP in fact).
I used to have 2 problems with the film. One was I agreed with Joaquin when he pleaded with Khan to take the ship and do what they wanted with it. Greg's novel did a lot to explain that one away for me so I don't really have an issue with that part anymore.
But losing a planet? Greg does his best in his novel to try to explain how that happened (like making it the last planet in the system and the orbital shift moving it to that of VI...among a few other things), but it just doesn't wash for me (that's no fault of Greg's...at the end of the day he had to end up where TWOK was on that plot point since that's canon). It just seems inconceivable that a Starfleet ship, a ship designed as a scientific ship in fact, would miss that little detail. Even if they had cursory scans, they should have noticed something was amiss. Hmm, something doesn't seem quite right here, let's explore this a little further. Ceti Alpha VI would have left some debris field. On Enterprise they were able to determine the Xindi homeworld not only exploded, but exactly how many years ago it did. It's something that always bugged me about the film to this day.
But I still rank it highly for other reasons. As fireproof noted it is a well done film, Meyer did a good job filming it, they didn't let a lower budget (compared to TMP) get in the way of giving us a well made film with good special effects, and it has some great character moments. Shatner has some of his best moments as Kirk in this film also.
And let's face it, TWOK is hardly the only Star Trek film...or show for that matter, with some problematical plot points. It's a little easier to forgive when the rest of the film was so well done in so many other ways. Reading the novels, like Greg's and Christopher's stories that feature different elements leading up to TWOK have helped as well.
I may take TWOK a notch or two for losing a planet (and a few other things scattered in the film), but not much. As I said it's number 2 in my book.
Now that has nothing to do with why TMP is my #1 film. I try not to reward one film for the faults of another, but try to rank it on its own merits.
I wonder. Did they turn the nebula into a planet? With the Genesis device, I mean. So that's something new I mean not only does it create life on a barren planet but it even coalesces a cloud of dust into one.
Yeah, I was never entirely clear on that. I believe the intent was that it was the nebula turned into a planet. But the planetoid is not too far away so I suppose it's possible that became the Genesis planet (or maybe at least part of it--I would think it was close enough to be affected by the Genesis wave). But no mention is made of the planetoid again or even the nebula itself (except that it's in the Mutara sector, which was the name of the nebula).
Yeah, it was weird and completely unexplained. There's VFX of the molten planet, apparently being formed.
I wondered about the Regula planetoid also, but there's no mention of what if anything happens to it either.
I think the general audience has to walk through an argument as to whether the molten planet we're looking at in the VFX is something new forming out of the nebula or whether it's something that's happening to the nearby Regula planetoid. The simplest assumption is probably that it's happening at "ground zero" of the explosion, which would mean it's something totally new. But I myself would forgive any viewer for being completely confused by it!
Correct.
I agree. The images the Juno probe took of Jupiter made it look downright unfamiliar…I wouldn’t have recognized it as Jupiter. As far as the the man torquing down that greeble…well, you better have a good grip. Do a search for “Dancing T-handle in zero-g”
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Rationalizing plot holes or oddities is fun in its own right, but sometimes these things really make me scratch my head. Not the questions or their answers, but the fact that they were asked in the first place. If these adventures took place in a Pacific island setting, say, we wouldn't blink even once, let alone twice. In a space adventure, we complain. This despite us knowing something about the Pacific and its islands, but everything we think we know about outer space being wrong our outdated as the first assumption...
Anyway:
Explosion? What explosion? Nobody ever mentioned any explosion. The Genesis effect just sort of propagates through matter and vacuum. Nothing wrong with propagation; that's how change usually happens in our universe. And most change is fascinating and complex, and putting enough energy behind it is what allows it to defeat entropy and increase the complexity.
100% cannibalism is a fine way for a species to exist in our reality. For mere fifteen years anyway. And for all we know, the last tastybeest only died a month ago. Plus, whatever Khan imported might have been hardier than the local fauna.
Celery and colored cubes, is my bet. Crews survive on barren starships for five years straight; clearly, one doesn't need topsoil or cattle in order to be fed in the future. Or even today, for that matter.
Why would we need to know? They already tell us something was, which is why the had to beam down and have a look in the first place.
I guess we should ask instead how any instrument could spot life through those dust storms. But the big issue there is what the sidekicks were looking for, or expecting or hoping to find. Their particular brand of "no life" seemed to be an exacting one, and if it were easily determined by sensors, Marcus would not have needed Terrell or the Reliant in the first place.
No, Kirk is. It's his birthday.
Besides, Saavik isn't a cadet. She's a Lieutenant. And yes, the test is solely for the commanding-officer-hopeful, as we learn in the 2009 movie; the others could be random folks from the street for all Starfleet cares. But not on Kirk's birthday.
Why? It would hardly be realistic for the thing to have a single inventor.
Which is sort of the point. Khan is a crazy has-been. Otherwise, he would have won hands down. His own crew points that out to him, even.
His emotions got the better of him back in "Space Seed" already. That's the sort of villain he is, only now a bit worse.
All this isn't even rationalizing. It's merely pointing out and accepting. Why should it raise any eyebrows? As regards the above sort of points, this movie holds together better than, say, Gone With the Wind or Die Hard.
Timo Saloniemi
Anyway:
Explosion? What explosion? Nobody ever mentioned any explosion. The Genesis effect just sort of propagates through matter and vacuum. Nothing wrong with propagation; that's how change usually happens in our universe. And most change is fascinating and complex, and putting enough energy behind it is what allows it to defeat entropy and increase the complexity.
100% cannibalism is a fine way for a species to exist in our reality. For mere fifteen years anyway. And for all we know, the last tastybeest only died a month ago. Plus, whatever Khan imported might have been hardier than the local fauna.
Celery and colored cubes, is my bet. Crews survive on barren starships for five years straight; clearly, one doesn't need topsoil or cattle in order to be fed in the future. Or even today, for that matter.
Why would we need to know? They already tell us something was, which is why the had to beam down and have a look in the first place.
I guess we should ask instead how any instrument could spot life through those dust storms. But the big issue there is what the sidekicks were looking for, or expecting or hoping to find. Their particular brand of "no life" seemed to be an exacting one, and if it were easily determined by sensors, Marcus would not have needed Terrell or the Reliant in the first place.
No, Kirk is. It's his birthday.
Besides, Saavik isn't a cadet. She's a Lieutenant. And yes, the test is solely for the commanding-officer-hopeful, as we learn in the 2009 movie; the others could be random folks from the street for all Starfleet cares. But not on Kirk's birthday.
Why? It would hardly be realistic for the thing to have a single inventor.
Which is sort of the point. Khan is a crazy has-been. Otherwise, he would have won hands down. His own crew points that out to him, even.
His emotions got the better of him back in "Space Seed" already. That's the sort of villain he is, only now a bit worse.
All this isn't even rationalizing. It's merely pointing out and accepting. Why should it raise any eyebrows? As regards the above sort of points, this movie holds together better than, say, Gone With the Wind or Die Hard.
Timo Saloniemi
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Too far away? Two crippled starships crawl at impulse from Regula to their destiny in a nebula that in the establishing shots seems to be all around the place to begin with. I doubt they ever got any appreciable distance away.
Could be an all-new planet. Could be Regula redone. Probably couldn't be any other local rock redone, or else Spock would have taken better care to add a Roman numeral to the name of the rock we saw.
In contrast, there is no limit on the number of rocks in the Ceti Alpha system. The more, the merrier - and the less likely that our sidekicks would worry about doing a count, or noticing anything amiss. "VI" is simply the appropriate number for the local desert planet, and all else is tedious debris and errata.
Timo Saloniemi
You can't defeat entropy anymore than you can punch through the event horizon of a black hole or square the circle or build a perpetual motion machine or find the gold cauldron at the end of a rainbow.
It’s not quite that simple; namely that entropy can be decreased locally as long as there is an external environment into which disorder can be dissipated: Primer.
That's not defeating entropy anymore than robbing peter to pay paul is making money.
It was supposed to be separate from Regula. The novelization of SFS was explicit in that regard, so it was a plot point at one time. Later revisions, and the eventual shooting script leave that information out, probably for pacing reasons.
Little is left for novelizations in the setup we see, though. Mutara is right where Regula is, in visuals at least, and Spock's giving of directions doesn't define a distance. That we get when ships moving at a snail's pace get there in a jiffy...
OTOH, a ship supposedly not crippled by anything but the putch that Khan performed on her crew takes what looks like a couple of days to get from Ceti Alpha to Regula, so those two could be different locations. It's just that they shouldn't be so different as to make some location of interest X more proximal to Khan's home than Regula is, so that Terrell can legitimately be the first to visit. Thus, the Encyclopedia insists on the "Mutara Sector" of ST3:TSfS fame also covering Khan's encounter with Kirk, and Khan's place of banishment. And while none of that makes it into dialogue, it's in the assorted maps all right.
("You can't defeat entropy"? Defeating entropy is what our very existence is based on, or consists of. We come to be and then persist by winning local battles. But we need to expend energy there, and a big kaboom thus goes well with bringing a lot of complex stuff into existence.)
Timo Saloniemi
OTOH, a ship supposedly not crippled by anything but the putch that Khan performed on her crew takes what looks like a couple of days to get from Ceti Alpha to Regula, so those two could be different locations. It's just that they shouldn't be so different as to make some location of interest X more proximal to Khan's home than Regula is, so that Terrell can legitimately be the first to visit. Thus, the Encyclopedia insists on the "Mutara Sector" of ST3:TSfS fame also covering Khan's encounter with Kirk, and Khan's place of banishment. And while none of that makes it into dialogue, it's in the assorted maps all right.
("You can't defeat entropy"? Defeating entropy is what our very existence is based on, or consists of. We come to be and then persist by winning local battles. But we need to expend energy there, and a big kaboom thus goes well with bringing a lot of complex stuff into existence.)
Timo Saloniemi
"Glaring" is a bit much. Especially since I'm able to overlook it without missing a beat.
SAAVIK'S VOICE
(intercom)There's new life -- a whole new
world, a Genesis world -- !
against the glass, destroyed. Bones looks on, helpless.
DISSOLVE TO:
237 EXT. SPACE
A spectacular look at Carol's planet being born!
246 EXT. SPACE
The Enterprise passes the new planet in all its beauty.
We can quote Maltz on this:
"They can make planets."
Maybe he was speaking literally.
"They can make planets."
Maybe he was speaking literally.
Possibly so. Or then not. At any rate, the writers don't give a flying fuck about scripts written by somebody else. Or, generally, by themselves at an earlier date. The next movie down the line completely alters what Genesis is about, throwing in the protomatter angle and the failure and the accelerated growth thing and whatnot. It doesn't outright say "This is Regula redecorated" or its opposite, so we don't need to care. But the writers wouldn't, either. And they are the ones who matter. Until they are through writing and the shooting starts, at which point they cease to matter and what they wrote can be put to better use in public toilets.
(Or in careful studies of what made Star Trek tick, but that's different from what happens in Star Trek the fictional universe.)
Timo Saloniemi
(Or in careful studies of what made Star Trek tick, but that's different from what happens in Star Trek the fictional universe.)
Timo Saloniemi
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