I don't recall any of them having the helmets, though. Perhaps that could have made a difference with sealing the wearer completely inside a radiation-safe environment within the suit.
Kor
Did Spock die because....
- Thread starter Dr. K.R. Kollman hon.
- Start date
Kor
Somewhat, surely, but with radiation it's always a percentage game. There's no such thing as a radiation-free environment; it's just a question of how much exposure you get in how short a time. A radiation suit can reduce your cumulative exposure, but if the radiation source is intense enough or you're exposed to it long enough, even the reduced level will still be fatal. Or if it isn't immediately fatal, it will still increase your likelihood of developing cancer or some other serious condition in the years ahead.
...What? That's not what I was saying at all. I brought up "The Corbomite Maneuver" because it was one of the most famous examples of Kirk bluffing his way to victory. That's why I included Kirk's line from TWOK "I haven't faced death. I've cheated death. I've tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing."
That line, and that entire plotline, works as metatextual commentary on TOS because, for the first time in the history of the franchise up until that point, Kirk didn't snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. The person who died wasn't an anonymous redshirt or a one-episode guest star who was never mentioned since like Gary Mitchell. It was Kirk's best friend, the guy who was by Captain Kirk's side for every episode we'd been watching over and over for 15 years. THAT'S why Spock's death in TWOK had impact.
Okay thanks for clarifying, but I'm still not sure I agree that it's a metatextual comment as much as character growth.
Having said that, the whole "I never faced death" seemed off. He's faced it and suffered great loss in the time we followed the character. I get that Kirk couldn't bluff or fast step his way out of this. Someone very dear to him had to die and, according to the script, this is his apparent first time dealing with that loss. Not counting his brother and sister in law within hours of each other, family on Tarsus IV, women he loved, old friends and so on.
Oh I agree he worked magic on a failed premise and added a lot, but this film always felt like a lean movie with a strong story with no time for BS. The script played on the trope of Kirk's love life and hit all of the right notes with the Kirk/Spock/McCoy scenes. But I really don't think he had time to craft a film filled to the top with meta commentary. Now I could be totally wrong, but really, I just don't feel it.
TUC though does feel like it. The whole film rides on it.
The thing is, continuity was loose in series TV in those days. Harve Bennett, like any of his contemporaries, had no problem ignoring or altering past continuity to suit the needs of the current story. For instance, when Bennett's The Six Million Dollar Man revisited Steve Austin's origin story in the episode "The Seven Million Dollar Man," it replaced the love-interest nurse played by Barbara Anderson in the original movie with a different character and actress filling an analogous story role (in addition to the previous change of Austin from a civilian astronaut in the pilot to an Air Force colonel in the subsequent movies and series).
So by the same token, when he made TWOK, he and his collaborators used TOS continuity only in broad strokes, taking what elements suited the story, like Khan (and Janet Wallace in early drafts, evolving into Carol Marcus), yet tweaking the details -- Chekov was retconned into "Space Seed," the age and ethnicities of Khan's followers were fudged, they were stranded on Ceti Alpha V with movie-era equipment and uniform pieces instead of TV-era... and Kirk's previous encounters with death in the series were glossed over, because they got in the way of the dramatic beat they wanted for this story.
So yeah, metatextuality wasn't on the table. Bennett and Meyer had no interest in planting Easter eggs for hardcore fans; they wanted to tell this story in the here and now, and continuity either served that story or got out of the way. It wasn't like today where fans-turned-creators approach everything new as a meta reference to the franchise's past.
These aren't "Easter eggs for hardcore fans". They're commentary on what everyone "knows" about Star Trek. Kirk is a rule-bending, daredevil, skirt chaser. And Meyer was holding that up to the light and addressing it. Was Kirk a rule-bending, daredevil, skirt chaser? No. But Meyer didn't know that.
He doubles down on this in The Undiscovered Country: Kang calls Kirk an "insubordinate, unprincipled, career-minded opportunist with a history of violating the chain of command whenever it suited him." Again, we're not meant to think these are Klingon lies made up whole-cloth. We're supposed to think this is the chickens coming home to roost.
When Kirk says "I've (only) cheated death" the audience is meant to feel that rings true. It certainly rang true to Meyer. That was his impression of the character.
I don't remember the exact quote from the Wrath of Khan commentary, but he is somewhat befuddled by the Utopian ideal of an improved humanity that Roddenberry and other fans would go on about. Because as far as Meyer was concerned it always came down to Kirk saying "Fire!"
Of course I think Meyer got more right than wrong. I think Roddenberry and many fans had a blindness to what was actually on the screen in TOS. (What kind of organization is Starfleet? I dare not say the words.) I have my own issues with Utopian Star Trek but Meyer could oversimplify in the other direction.
For someone who said he didn't know anything about Star Trek other than maybe that there was a character named Spock he certainly came up with a lot of ideas on his own that mysteriously reflected many of the popular perceptions of the show. Or maybe he was just echoing what the other script writers had brought to their drafts and channeled that. Who knows?
He doubles down on this in The Undiscovered Country: Kang calls Kirk an "insubordinate, unprincipled, career-minded opportunist with a history of violating the chain of command whenever it suited him." Again, we're not meant to think these are Klingon lies made up whole-cloth. We're supposed to think this is the chickens coming home to roost.
As far as Meyer was concerned continuity wasn't getting out of the way because it didn't need to. This was absolutely a story about James T. Kirk as we had seen in three seasons of Star Trek and the ramifications of that. Is that "meta-textual"? I don't know. But it is commentary.
When Kirk says "I've (only) cheated death" the audience is meant to feel that rings true. It certainly rang true to Meyer. That was his impression of the character.
I don't remember the exact quote from the Wrath of Khan commentary, but he is somewhat befuddled by the Utopian ideal of an improved humanity that Roddenberry and other fans would go on about. Because as far as Meyer was concerned it always came down to Kirk saying "Fire!"
Of course I think Meyer got more right than wrong. I think Roddenberry and many fans had a blindness to what was actually on the screen in TOS. (What kind of organization is Starfleet? I dare not say the words.) I have my own issues with Utopian Star Trek but Meyer could oversimplify in the other direction.
For someone who said he didn't know anything about Star Trek other than maybe that there was a character named Spock he certainly came up with a lot of ideas on his own that mysteriously reflected many of the popular perceptions of the show. Or maybe he was just echoing what the other script writers had brought to their drafts and channeled that. Who knows?
I think it's begging the question (in the rarely-used correct sense of the phrase, to presuppose a desired answer) to claim that was "commentary" on fan beliefs, rather than simply Meyer, Bennett, and Sowards writing the script based on their own interpretations of what they saw in TOS. After all, none of them were tuned in to fandom. They were hired to make a Trek movie, they watched all of TOS as research, they made a film based on their interpretation of it. That's what you do when you're hired to make a movie on a given topic -- you research the topic and base your script on your research. There's no basis for presuming any kind of metatextuality beyond that.
You're missing my point. I'm not saying they didn't use continuity. I'm saying they used the parts that suited them and ignored or contradicted the parts that didn't, because they used continuity to serve the story. They did not shape the story to serve continuity, e.g. by putting Spock in a red uniform as an extended joke on the redshirt gag. They wouldn't have cared enough about a trivial detail like that to make it a driving element of the climax of the film.
I disagree that that's inconsistent. The popular perception is based on a superficial or incomplete understanding of the series, on imperfect memories of having seen the show. It doesn't seem implausible that someone who's only binge-watched the show once would have a similarly broad-strokes perception of it and draw some of the same gross conclusions. I mean, obviously these beliefs didn't come out of nowhere. They're based on what's in the show, just on an insufficiently detailed reading of it. Yes, Kirk has a lot of romances of the week, so the first-blush perception is that he's a womanizer; you have to look closer to see how often he was the pursued rather than the pursuer or was not in his right mind, and you have to compare it to the rest of the TV landscape to see that Kirk was relatively less of a womanizer than many of his peers. Yes, Kirk often butted heads with his superiors and seemed to "break" the Prime Directive, giving the impression of being a renegade; you have to look closer to realize that he usually followed his superiors' orders even when he disagreed with them, and that he was upholding the Prime Directive as he understood it by correcting others' interference.
So Bennett & Meyer coming to the same stereotyped conclusions as the audience doesn't mean they were aware of or responding to the audience's beliefs; it could've just been convergent evolution arising from seeing the surface impression and not delving deeper. It's always a fallacy to assume that similarity proves deliberate emulation.
I don't think it was commentary on "fan" beliefs. Just that it commentary on the show based on their own impressions.
No they would not. I know that was the springboard for the conversation but we agreed this was certainly not the case a page ago.
I think there are two reasonable explanations for that, a real world one and an in-universe one.
The real world explanation is that bringing up Kirk's brother Sam, the Tarsus IV massacre, Gary Mitchell, Edith Keeler, etc., would just confuse the majority of the audience and dilute the drama of the moment. So of course the death of Spock is the worst tragedy Kirk's ever experienced. Because if it isn't, why are we even telling this story?
Meyer says in his commentaries for both Time After Time and TWOK that the protagonist has a moment near the end of the film where he literally says, "I know nothing." In TWOK, it's when Kirk's mourning the death of Spock. In TAT, it's when H.G. Wells is trying to save the woman he loves from Jack the Ripper. In TUC, Kirk has that same "I know nothing" moment at Rura Penthe, where he realizes his prejudice against Klingons was dooming the prospect of peace with the Klingons before it even had a chance to begin. Those are the moments when our hero realizes he's been wrong and undergoes growth.
The in-universe explanation is that grief and depression are vicious bastards that lie to you and make you look at a situation irrationally. Kirk was already depressed at the beginning of TWOK, and the death of his best friend on top of that made him near inconsolable.
I remember Meyer saying something along the lines of how classic works like Shakespeare still speak to us because human nature doesn't really change over the centuries. If it did, plays written 400 years ago wouldn't resonate with us the way they do.
Yeah, I agree. I think after 10-15 years of Roddenberry going to the conventions and constantly hearing how he was a visionary who created this optimistic, utopian future, he started to believe his own press a little too much and began misremembering what TOS was actually like. (Or more likely, he started mentally overwriting it with what he wished TOS could've been like with the benefit of hindsight, which is why he implies in his TMP novelization that TOS was just a sometimes-inaccurate dramatization of what really happened in the ST Universe.)
And Meyer seemed to lock onto this from the first. In his first meeting with William Shatner, Meyer said he wanted TWOK to be Horatio Hornblower in space and Shatner replied, "That's interesting, that was also Gene Roddenberry's original take on it."
It's basically the worst death he's ever had to face. Most other deaths, what does he do? Move on - fly to the next mission.
Most times, he didn't know the person that well - Edith Keeler, Rayna, and Miramanee must have seemed like fever dreams, or he'd drifted apart from them somewhat (George) (physical distance and time) in the intervening years; and in the case of Gary Mitchell (who he had to kill himself) was nearly no longer the friend he once knew. Spock is the closest friend/brother(like) person he's had to see die - the person he'd worked so closely with more recently than any other for many years.
Most times, he didn't know the person that well - Edith Keeler, Rayna, and Miramanee must have seemed like fever dreams, or he'd drifted apart from them somewhat (George) (physical distance and time) in the intervening years; and in the case of Gary Mitchell (who he had to kill himself) was nearly no longer the friend he once knew. Spock is the closest friend/brother(like) person he's had to see die - the person he'd worked so closely with more recently than any other for many years.
"City on the Edge" implied that maybe a few weeks might have passed with Edith. He was with Miramanee for two months, and he clearly remembered it after Spock cured his amnesia. Plus she was pregnant with his child when she died. That would hit pretty hard.
After a while, it would seem strange, because it wasn't his real (usual) life - it was an alternate life he could have lived, if things hadn't happened as they did. As he gets used to the routine of being captain again, he might push it into a corner of his mind and not think about it unless it overwhelms him. (After all, his crew is counting on him to stay in the moment - their lives depend on it.)
I'm wondering if Meyer was thinking along these lines in 1982:
"Non-fans [in times prior to widespread internet] would probably not know about George Kirk and the others, but it seems likely that they would know about Kirk and Spock's friendship, and that they would also know about Kirk's reputation, accurate or not, for having lots of romantic relationships, and his reputation, accurate or not, for disobeying rules when he disagreed. Non-fans probably thought what they were seeing was a new take on the show that addressed things they might have felt were problems with it, as in things that might make it feel dated at the time it came out."
So even if Meyer did watch every episode (and we don't know he did), he may have felt these things assumed by non-fans were part of Star Trek's "brand image" and tried to put them in the light without violating the story he wanted to tell. If one were to make a Batman movie, even having never read a comic, and having only seen a movie or two or some of the 1966 TV show, one would likely be lead to create a story with cool gadgets with bats on them, villains who knowingly act like stereotypes, and a her with a strong but individualistic sense of honor. If you wanted to tell a story that challenged any of those things, you'd need plot points to do that, or it would be seen as "not a real Batman movie."
Look -- the mistake laypeople make is assuming that writers are constantly thinking about how the audience will react. If, as a writer, you let yourself worry about what the audience thinks, you're just going to undermine yourself. It's like how if you try to think about walking while you're walking, you just trip over yourself. Dwelling on the result gets in the way of achieving the result. It's approaching the problem from the wrong end.
If you want to write well, your focus has to be strictly on what the story needs, and on whether you feel it works. If you don't have that confidence in your own creation, then the audience isn't going to like it either. If you create a story that has integrity within itself, then audience approval will follow -- or not, but that's out of the writer's hands. The writer's responsibility is to the story. Just like a coach's responsibility is to call the plays that will best win the game, regardless of whether the audience cheers or boos. You can't perform your best if you're self-conscious about the people watching you. Their attention should be on you, not the other way around.
So if Meyer was any good as a storyteller -- and I believe he is, even though I disagree with many of his creative choices -- then he wasn't worrying what the audience "assumed." At least, not to the extent that he formulated the story on the basis of it. That would've come later, in the review and editing process, like when test audiences found the ending of TWOK too depressing so they added the shot of Spock's intact tube and Nimoy's narration to end on a note of hope. But the way the creative process works is, first you tell the story you want to tell, and only later do you test it out with audiences or beta readers and see if they get what you trying to say and how you can refine it to get that message across better.
Reading your response, I realize that what I wrote might sound like something different from what I was trying to convey.
I get the impression that Meyer was critical of Star Trek, feeling that was part of what he was hired to do, and wanted to do without certain elements of the original series: specifically Kirk winning even when defying orders, and Kirk having a lot of relationships. So, if that's true, Meyer had two choices: just do it differently, or put a huge spotlight on what he wanted to do differently by having Kirk upset about time passing and have a son, and having things go wrong to extent that even Spock could die. In my view, Meyer made the call not to just change things to the way he wanted and hope the audience would go along with it, but instead to make those changes into plot points. Even though I am not very much a fan of his use of the term, that is probably why he calls his approach to Star Trek as having "irreverence."
I just think that's reading too much into it. The biggest fallacy of literary/media criticism is assuming that the interpretations you project onto something were intended by the author.
After all, both the things you mention are common fictional tropes not exclusive to Kirk or ST in any way. Many, many movies are about heroes who defy authority and break the rules, so turning Kirk into one of them could've been just fitting ST into the mold of standard movie conventions. And as I've already said, the trope of giving an older character a hitherto-unknown child is commonplace and has no correlation with whether the character has a reputation for promiscuity. Partly it's just that parenting is a natural part of older people's lives and thus stories about older versions of familiar characters often tend to focus on them being parents. Part of it is that American media culture values youth, and thus stories centering on aging heroes tend to insert younger characters to appeal to the much-coveted youth demographic. It's no coincidence that Kirk got a young adult son in the same movie where Spock got a young adult protegee.
Then Sulu gets a name-drop daughter.
TAS originally planned to give every Enterprise crew member a mini-me mentee.
TAS originally planned to give every Enterprise crew member a mini-me mentee.
Not exactly. That was Filmation's first concept pitch developed by Don Christensen in 1969, just after TOS was cancelled, and it would've centered on the trainee crew of the starship Excalibur with the TOS cast as their advisors. It fell through, and Filmation kept trying until they sold TAS a few years later. I don't think the Christensen pitch really counts as "TAS," because it was a separate proposal. It wasn't The Animated Series, it was just a pitch for an animated series.
That would have been a good concept for an episode, or a comic series, perhaps.
