But the only reason a send-off is needed is because of the new continuity. And again, the Picard version of the supernova story actually makes sense. The Countdown version is much more implausible. I see no reason to prefer it.
Yeah, it does seem implausible. The only thing I can think of is The Last, Best Hope hinted that the supernova may not have been natural, but the result of an attack. We'll see what happens, and if the Krenim are involved I don't think anything can be ruled out. Perhaps something they did resulted in the Romulan Star exploding in the novelverse without warning. There is some basis for that when you think about the trilithium weapon Soren used to destroy the Veridian star. So it's not out of the realm of Star Trek possibility that someone attacked the star in the novelverse. It'll be interesting to see where Coda goes. We're assuming the trilogy is going to bring the relaunch novels into continuity with Picard somehow (unless we are way off base on that). I think some people assumed the Countdown comics had some canonical value because Bob Orci was involved with the story. But even he would confirm, correctly, that the comics were not canon. I had wondered after the comics came out, though, whether or not the relaunch novels would adopt any of those storylines into the novels as we got closer to 2387. But the only things I think that might be considered similar are in one novel, not long after the comics came out, had Picard considering his future and thinking about whether he might like being an ambassador someday, which he was in Countdown, and Data's resurrection which occurred in the novels, but by a much different method than Countdown. And obviously as the years passed it became clear that the novels would be far different. I do wonder if there wasn't any legal or licensing issues (or whatever it was) where the novels had to avoid the Abrams movies events, would the supernova had been brought up by the novels and more of the future history we saw in Star Trek (2009) from the mind meld be incorporated? IIRC when Star Trek (2009) came out the novels were around 2380 or 2381. If there were never any issues referencing the movies then maybe the supernova that wiped out Romulus could have been developed in the novels. According to The Last, Best Hope it was 2381 when the Federation became aware of it. But we'll never know. I think the purpose of the trilogy is to bring the relaunch novels in line with Picard. Perhaps this will open the door to future novelverse novels following Coda that will be consistent with Picard. Time will tell, I suppose. But it's a credit to the relaunches that S&S sees enough interest there to even give it any sort of conclusion. It's highly unusual to see a Star Trek novel that is inconsistent with current canon (even one that we assume will be brought in line with canon at the end of the day). Usually they'd probably just let it quietly go. Diane Duane's Rihannsu novels are the only other case I can think of where novels came out that weren't consistent with the shows up to that point (and even then, she did incorporate some of the new existing canon elements in her later novels that didn't conflict with her Rihannsu stories).
Yet if it happens in two totally different ways (one with years of advance warning, one without), then it's rather implausible that it would happen in the same year both times. I still say the simplest fix would be not to have it happen in the novelverse at all. If it was artificially induced in the canon timeline, then maybe the Borg Invasion prevented that from happening in the novel timeline. The problem was that TrekMovie's Anthony Pascale inappropriately pressured Orci to concede in an interview that Countdown was canonical, which Orci eventually agreed to just to shut him up, basically. Orci walked it back in the comments mere hours after the interview was published, but the damage was done. Stands to reason. The novels were racing ahead through the early 2380s pretty quickly for a while there, which made it seem to me (just as an observer, knowing nothing about actual editorial plans in that regard) as if they were trying to catch up with '87 so we could do the supernova story. But then they slowed down considerably, as if trying to avoid catching up to '87 once it became clear we wouldn't have a license to cover material from the new films. If we'd had the license, I'm sure we'd have done our version of the supernova, probably as part of the Typhon Pact narrative. I recall putting some thought into figuring out a way to make sense of the movie's rather incoherent portrayal of the supernova, just in case I got the opportunity to write that story. (What they came up with for PIC works so much better than anything I had in mind, though.) Although if we had done a novelverse version of the supernova, PIC would now have overwritten it anyway, so it's kind of academic.
Yeah, if it happens in the novelverse it would have to be different somehow. Maybe somehow the attack traveled through subspace, or some wormhole, or even through time if the Krenim are involved. Or maybe it doesn't and the catastrophe wipes out the novel timeline somehow. Whatever they would come up with I imagine would at least make sense from a Star Trek perspective. It sounds like something catastrophic is going to occur in the trilogy from the blurbs, and a supernova certainly would qualify. Yeah, I actually was a frequent visitor over there at the time and I remember Orci posting in the comments clarifying that the comics are not canon. I think Anthony was just getting carried away. But Anthony was basically the lead guy over there so yeah, he of all people should have known comics will never be canon (unless the events in the comics are actually dramatized on screen, but then the comics still wouldn't be canon, just the on screen adaptation). Don't know if he still is the head guy there. Honestly I haven't checked trekmovie.com in well over a year. Once I discovered trekbbs I just kind of faded away from it. I used to go over there a lot because they usually were up to date with Star Trek news, but so is trekbbs so I guess I just don't feel the need to go over there anymore. Plus the people that post over there aren't quite as, um, nice. And there was a lot of Berman hate over there which started getting tiresome. Any time there was any article there about Berman era Trek or about Berman himself they would all come out. "Berman sucks....Berman ruined Star Trek...Berman is evil incarnate...blah blah blah." And God help you if you actually posted a comment defending anything he did. I still can't believe, as long as I've been a Star Trek fan (since 1986 really) that I didn't discover or come across trekbbs until 2017. How did I not even come across it just by accident when doing a search. I basically only found it when I was trying to figure out why no books were being announced for 2018. I did a search for Star Trek 2018 books and that's what brought me here because this was the only place that came up (and probably only because someone had created a thread here). Yeah, as soon as I heard the 'future history' from Star Trek (2009) was from 2387, several years still in the future from where the novels were at that point, I thought the novels would start to move in that direction. And yeah, for a while we were just churning out the years and then all of a sudden several books were taking place in the same year. A shame. I've said numerous times there are probably a lot of good stories that could have been told from the novelverse perspective, esp. considering the Typhon Pact in the mix. And seeing how Picard handled it makes me even more curious how it would have been handled in the relaunches. What kind of help would the Typhon Pact be? What would that Federation do? How would Spock become involved? And the aftereffects in the novelverse? All kinds of stories that we'll never get to see. Even if Coda does somehow incorporate it into the novelverse, I think the goal is to bring it in line with Picard so there will be no what happens after in the novel universe.
I actually have an objection to the Picard version. Which is: "What was Spock accomplishing then?" If he failed to stop the supernova then why blast anything with Red Matter? But I've already mentioned how sad I was we never got to see the Novelverse take on the supernova with the Typhon Pact in the background. I suppose the closest we'd ever get was ST:O's take.
Yeah. The Spock thing is the one thing that doesn’t really work in the Picard version. Maybe they will tell us one day the new version of it. Maybe the Spock that appears in the JJVerse isn’t Prime verse Spock, but in fact the novelVerse version?
Oh, now that mention it, I think I do remember that coming up in another conversation about Picard books. Definitely curious to see what the new one will be then.
Huh? That's not a problem with the Picard version. That's a problem that's always been inherent in the movie version. The movie said that Spock arrived after the supernova had already destroyed Romulus, but that he released the Red Matter anyway. That never made sense. The only issue with the PIC version is that it didn't come up with a good explanation for it like it did with the rest. But that's not PIC's fault, it's the movie's fault for positing it in the first place. PIC simply didn't address it one way or the other, because Spock was not part of the story they were telling. Heck, I've spent the past dozen years trying to come up with an explanation for what possible good it could've done for Spock to release the Red Matter too late, and I've never been able to think of a decent one. So I can't blame PIC's creators for having the same difficulty explaining away something so self-contradictory, especially when they did such a superb job explaining everything else that didn't make sense in the movie.
Maybe to limit further destruction/disruption from the supernova? I dunno, I haven't watched the flick in a while.
Obviously that was the intent in the film, but it's sheer nonsense because it couldn't possibly work that way. The radiation front is already expanding outward from the supernova at the speed of light, or nearly so for the particle radiation. Nothing you do at the source of the explosion is going to magically suck back the radiation that's already gone far beyond it. It's closing the barn door after the horse has escaped at relativistic speed.
Unless that's how RED MATTER WORKS! Like a subspace radiation sponge! "That doesn't make any sense!" Yes it does! WITH SCIENCE! Mind you, I'm completely down with goofy Trek science. Why is a yellow star going supernova? There's a Great Bird of the Galaxy in it.
Even fantasy should be consistent within itself. At Vulcan, the Enterprise was able to escape from orbit without difficulty while the planet was sucked in. At the climax, the Enterprise didn't get caught by the gravity well until it drew too close. So the movie consistently showed that a Red Matter black hole had a fairly small range limit on its gravitational effects. The science was goofy, yes, but we were clearly shown what it could and couldn't do. Spock's Red Matter shouldn't have affected the expanding supernova radiation any more than Nero's affected the Enterprise. Not to mention that no gravity well can slow down or reverse gamma radiation, which can only travel at the speed of light. It can bend the course of a ray of light moving past it, but we're talking about a sphere of radiation expanding radially outward from where the Red Matter was set off. The only thing a gravity well could do to that radiation is redshift it, reduce its energy (as I explained it to a friend in college, "You'd lose energy too if you had to climb all the way out of a gravity well"), but it was already way too far away for the RM to do that.
Well, red matter is a totally fictional creation. Maybe it has a totally fictional effect of being a giant vacuum cleaner and sucking everything back into itself. We see what it did to Vulcan, basically it vacuumed Vulcan into oblivion. It wouldn't be the first time Star Trek came up with something that would be hard for real science to explain. Or maybe the mind meld was not a step by step retelling of the facts. Maybe the supernova happened quicker than Spock anticipated and he simply released the red matter too late to do any good. I have to admit I never liked red matter. The very name just sounds ridiculous. I know the Abrams team was a bit critical of the Berman teams over-reliance on technobabble. And yes, sometimes the technobabble was a bit over the top. But red matter was like the anti-technobabble. We'll call it red matter and that will explain everything. Um, perhaps a little more exposition would have been warranted in this case. It's usually not a good idea to force your audience to have to figure something out because you didn't provide enough information. It reminds me of a review Roger Ebert did about the end of Jaws: The Revenge (a movie so awful it's almost entertaining by its sheer awfulness). He said the ending to that movie was so awful and muffled that you had to figure out what happened by 'empirical evidence.' That's a little like red matter. Now, Star Trek (2009) was a far better movie overall than Jaws: The Revenge (don't know how they got Michael Caine to do that movie--amazing because it was the same year he won an Academy Award for another film, guess he never turns down work, LOL). It's just that we have to assume what red matter did by empirical evidence because it's not very well explained in the movie. Somehow it prevented the supernova from being worse than it was supposed to be. Kind of hope either Picard, or maybe a future Picard novel, tackles that part of the story a bit better. Kurtzman was part of the Star Trek (2009) team so maybe at some point that will get covered a bit better.
As I said, the movie explicitly showed that the "suction" only worked on things close to it. Vulcan was sucked in while the Enterprise had no trouble escaping its orbit. The Narada was sucked in while the Enterprise was unaffected -- and then the Enterprise inexplicably drew close to the black hole while manuevering away and only then got caught in its gravity. So no, it doesn't suck in "everything," only nearby things. The movie shows us that unambiguously, twice. So the supernova's gamma and particle radiation, traveling at or near the speed of light, would be far out of range of the red matter's gravity pretty much immediately, long before Spock got there. (Plus, as I said, it is impossible to "suck in" gamma radiation from behind, because light cannot slow down.) Hmm... okay, you may actually be onto something there. We already know the mind meld's sequence of events is out of order, because it starts with the supernova and then shows Spock promising to help Romulus, whereas Picard proved that there were years of advance warning and rescue plans in motion before the supernova happened. (Presumably the Vulcan Science Academy took over the effort once Starfleet reneged on the evacuation.) So if the supernova happened, say, moments after Spock fired the red matter and before it reached the star, that could account for it. It would be a heck of a coincidence, but I guess no more so than the heroes succeeding with only one second left on the countdown. Abrams likes his "mystery boxes." He fills his work with Hitchcock-style MacGuffins, things that are important to the characters but unimportant to the audience except in how they motivate the characters, so the specifics of what they are or how they work are never explained. The most blatant example is the Rabbit's Foot in Mission: Impossible III, where Simon Pegg gets a whole speech about how people have theories about what it might be but nobody's sure what it actually is. Abrams is also fond of spherical red blobs of mystery liquid. The Rambaldi device in Alias featured one too.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SPOCK details the plan in the "united narrative" that Spock was going to use the Red Matter to absorb the Sun beforehand (or perhaps somehow stabilize it) but didn't get there in time by seconds. However, Picard speculates that he did save some lives.
Yeah, I'll admit I was grasping here. Yeah, Star Trek has plenty of that. Bond films are famous for taking us to the last second too. I was impressed in Goldfinger that they stopped the bomb with 3 whole seconds to go on the clock. That's like an eternity (though I have noticed there must be some time dilation going on because the way the counter goes when it's getting close it takes them way longer to diffuse the bomb then they have, if you count with the counter). For once it'd be nice to see a movie or show actually leave us a minute or two before doomsday, just for a change of pace. Though I guess there'd be less dramatic effect that way. It's much more 'exciting' when they just barely stop destruction. And as a Hitchcock fan I'm ok with that usually. It's just in this case it seemed more integral to the overall plot and there just isn't much information on it, leaving the audience to have to guess a lot. It's hard to explain, but for whatever reason in Hitchcock films you never felt like you were missing out on something because the MacGuffin wasn't well explained. It was what the main characters were after, yet the story wasn't about that at all. I was just watching Notorious a week ago and in that case uranium was the MacGuffin (at a time when very few knew what uranium was). It was the basis of what everyone was after, yet the movie wasn't about that at all. Red matter just didn't have that same effect. I hope someday either Picard or some future novel covers that end of the story somehow, providing more details on that and maybe clearing up some of the confusion. I imagine for now no novels will touch it while the show is on the air in case some future episode decides to tackle it.
"Far enough." As Galaxy Quest shows, the shut off doesn't initiate until it's one second to detonation.