Perhaps, or not, but my point was that someone viewing Star Trek 5 in isolation would have a different view of that scene than someone who had seen "Operation--Annihilate!" Just as someone who had never seen or heard about ST:2 would have a different view of the end of "The Changeling" from someone who had.
Did Spock die because....
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Perhaps, or not, but my point was that someone viewing Star Trek 5 in isolation would have a different view of that scene than someone who had seen "Operation--Annihilate!" Just as someone who had never seen or heard about ST:2 would have a different view of the end of "The Changeling" from someone who had.
I wouldn't say "almost certainly" that Shatner wasn't aware that his own series filmed an episode which dealt with his character's brother's death. The guy even wore a fake mustache and played his brother's corpse.
Considering the film was made by people who not only worked on the original series but actually watched it (again, Harve Bennet alone did his research), it's well within the realm of possibility that they were referencing Sam just so Kirk could spin it for a sweet moment. The scene even works better that way rather than assuming it's a continuity error. Sure, even allowing Shatner didn't remember, anyone there could have reminded him. Even Roddenberry could have when he read this script he hated.
For all of the mental gymnastics fans go though to forgive things that are continuity errors, I find the insistence that this one is actually is a mistake is funny. Is it because Star Trek II is a better movie that people say "oh Chekov was below decks?" Allow that, then allow this.
Star Trek V has so much going against it, why not allow them something that make it nicer?
I think the reason Sam wasn't acknowledged in ST V had less to do with the filmmakers' memory than the audience's. The vast majority of moviegoers are casual viewers, not hardcore fans, so most of them wouldn't know or remember that Kirk had a late brother, and bringing it up would've been a needless distraction from the story the film was telling. Continuity with other stories is secondary to the demands of the current story.
Although they could always have chosen to leave out the brother line or phrase it differently, so that it would neither overtly reference nor contradict the existence of Sam Kirk.
Although they could always have chosen to leave out the brother line or phrase it differently, so that it would neither overtly reference nor contradict the existence of Sam Kirk.
I have top men to handle this question.
Yes. You make more allowances for the films you like. In STII, the Reliant not noticing a missing planet in the Ceti Alpha system makes no sense, no matter how you try to explain it away. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter, because the film works as an adventure, a drama, and an emotional journey. STV didn't really work, so people are much less inclined to cut it the same slack.
I agree.
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You mean the writers aren't astrophysicists?
I wonder if they got Warp Drive wrong, too.
Not really, because they consulted with actual scientists. ST:TMP's technical consultant was Dr. Jesco von Puttkamer, a literal NASA rocket scientist, and the explanation of warp drive he presented to the filmmakers in a 1978 technical memo was basically the same principle that Miguel Alcubierre famously codified with more mathematical rigor 16 years later.
Indeed, one of the things that made TOS more plausible than most of the nonsense that passed for science fiction in TV and movies at the time was actually acknowledging that you'd need some kind of space-warping drive to go faster than light. Other shows infrequently paid lip service to the idea of hyperdrives, but usually showed interstellar travel as something achievable by simple rocket propulsion, or by the Moon drifting from place to place in Space: 1999 (though a few of its episodes made token references to space warps). In Battlestar Galactica, the ragtag fugitive fleet passed through several galaxies in about a year while traveling at a maximum of the speed of light, and the writers didn't understand what "galaxy" meant, portraying different galaxies as adjacent and crossing between them like crossing a state line.
Oh, that's just one of the many, many things about TWOK that don't make sense. An event powerful enough to destroy a planet should've been observable at interstellar distances; either subspace telescopes would've detected it when it happened, or the Reliant would've seen the visible light from it when they came within 15 light years (or 18, per the Okuda Chronology's bizarre redating) of Ceti Alpha. Plus, even if Ceti Alpha V's orbit was shifted, the odds against it exactly duplicating all six orbital parameters of VI's orbit are infinitesimal.
Also, why did nobody know Khan's people were there? Kirk would surely have reported it to Starfleet, and the discovery of Eugenics Wars survivors would've been the historical find of the decade, with countless scholars and historians flocking to Ceti Alpha to interview them, along with whatever penal officials were sent to supervise them and ensure they didn't escape. And how come Khan's people were mostly twentysomething blonds when they were a more diverse group of adults when they were stranded 15 (or 18) years earlier? How did they have movie-era props and costume pieces when they were stranded in the TV era? How does a Genesis Device programmed merely to resurface an existing planetary body have the capability to manufacture an entire planet out of nebular gas? How does a torpedo that small have that much power? And where did Genesis's sun come from? And why did Scotty bring Peter Preston to the bridge? And why did the Ceti eel leave Chekov instead of killing him? And why is the radiation room this little chamber off to the side that doesn't connect in any way to the actual warp reactor in the middle? Aaagghhh!!
Except that's a meaningless consideration when it comes to locating a planet. It's not like they're all lined up in a neat row or spaced evenly. It's not like "My house is six down from the corner of Ceti Road and Alpha Drive." The planets are circling the star at various distances, speeds, and angles, and from a distance they're tiny points of light that can only be identified by tracking their movement over a certain span of time, unless you already know their six orbital elements, letting you compute in advance where to find them. It's like stargazing from Earth -- you can find Mars or Jupiter in the night sky, but only if you know where to look for it. It's not like the orbital paths are drawn on the sky so you can count outward. Knowing "how many planets out" will tell you nothing about the planet's actual distance, because different planetary systems are spaced differently. And it would tell you nothing about the shape and orientation of its orbit or where it can currently be found along the 360 degrees of that orbital path.
Not only that, but planets can be recognized by their physical characteristics -- their size, their density, their reflection spectra, etc. Ceti Alpha V would not only have had to somehow have its orbit altered to coincidentally match all six parameters of VI's orbit, which is essentially impossible, but it would've had to be the exact same size and mass.
Not to mention that the debris from VI's explosion would still be there in the system, spreading slowly out into a ring but still clustered pretty close together after only 15-18 years. Greg Cox handwaved this in his novel To Reign in Hell by saying there was an asteroid belt past the outermost sixth planet and the Reliant assumed the debris of VI was part of the belt, but that doesn't account for the problems I mentioned above. Vonda McIntyre offered a different handwave in her movie novelizations, but I forget what it was.
The only way it makes sense to me is if V & VI were a twin planetary system, both orbiting a common center of mass that orbited the star, like Vulcan and T'Khut. And if they were nearly identical in mass and radius. Khan's line about a shifted orbit causing the climate change could've been an erroneous assumption, with the damage actually resulting from the impact of the explosion's radiation and debris; it would probably have blown away a lot of V's atmosphere and water. If they were on the edge of an asteroid field, that could've maybe accounted for the debris. But no, it still doesn't work, because surely it would've been recorded that V & VI were a co-orbital pair, and Reliant would've seen right away that half the pair was missing.
Most every science fiction movie has things that don't make sense. In TMP, why does the all-powerful V'Ger not realize that its name is actually "Voyager" because of some schmutz on its name plate? Not only is it an underwhelming twist, I'd say that it's more damaging to the film than TWOK's missing planet plot hole, since it's what the entire climax of the film is built on.
But again, if the film works overall, you're more forgiving of that stuff and can come up with handwave explanations. And most people are of the opinion that TWOK works better than TMP overall, mainly because the character stuff rings true.
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Planets explode all the time. Alderaan. Krypton. Pluto. I'm pretty sure Earth was destroyed more than once.
Maybe I'm being influenced by McIntyre's novel, but the reasonable explanation (such as it were) is that the Ceti Alpha (Alpha Ceti) system is nowhere. It's like someone complaining why didn't they know where the rocks were in the middle of Nevada in the 1920s.
The aim of the story is to accidentally happen upon a very pissed off Khan Singh. Who was never reported because Meyer thinks Kirk is a shoot from the hip cowboy. It's all part of Meyer's "Kirk was a reckless young legend and now he will pay the price."
HOWEVER you get there, that's the end. Jack CANNOT fit on the door.
Doesn't work, though. The Reliant had prior knowledge of the existence of at least six planets in the system, which means the system has been surveyed, either telescopically or by the Enterprise when it dropped off the Augments. If they knew the planet existed, if they knew it was likely to be lifeless, then they would've known its orbital and physical parameters and would not have been so easily fooled. Plus, again, the energy required to destroy a terrestrial planet would be equal to the Sun's entire energy output for a week, so the event would've been bright enough to outshine the star itself for a time. The Reliant would've seen the explosion 15 (18) light-years away when they passed through the wavefront of the light, if Federation subspace telescopes hadn't seen it when it happened 15 (18) years earlier. They couldn't have not known.
Earthbound writers often fail to realize that there are no horizons in space. We can see galaxies billions of light years away. With a good enough telescope, you can see basically everywhere in the universe, except for things that are obscured behind dust clouds or nebulae or the mass of the galaxy (which is why we know less about its far side than we know about distant galaxies). But most any star system close enough to be reached by a starship (barring wormholes, exotic drives, and transgalactic abductions) is close enough to have been mapped telescopically beforehand. And of course said starship could do its own telescopic survey as it drew near.
None of which makes sense. Kirk was a student of history. Discovering 70-odd living people from a period of Earth history for which records were incomplete, including at least one infamous world leader, would've been a gold mine for historians. There's no way he wouldn't have reported it.
In my movie-era novels, I've implied that Starfleet Intelligence and/or Section 31 classified Kirk's report because the Klingons see human Augment research as a military threat, because of what happened in "Affliction"/"Divergence" a century earlier. So Kirk did let them know, but they buried it for fear of provoking the Klingons.
Still, there must surely have been a better way for the movie to set up the escape of Khan's people. If Ceti Alpha V had been established as a proper penal colony for them, with historians coming in to interview and study them, Khan could've manipulated that to arrange an escape. Then he somehow finds out about Genesis and goes after it, or maybe the MacGuffin is something other than Genesis and we avoid the nonsense of that technology -- although that would make it harder to resurrect Spock after Nimoy changed his mind about leaving.
Of course Kirk reported it. It's beyond me why anyone ever thinks he didn't. The final scene of "Space Seed" starts like this:
There's no reason for Kirk to record the hearing if it's not going into an official record of some kind. So yes, Starfleet knew that Khan was on Ceti Alpha V. It's not Kirk's fault that no one checked up on them afterwards.
As good of an explanation as any.
It's been a terrible sticking point for audiences for 40 years. Especially the ones where this is the only Star Trek thing that they know and like.
It still doesn't work.
It makes Starfleet look inept.
It makes Starfleet look inept.
The biggest problem with this complaint is that if CA-V is the planet in the goldilocks zone, there has to be more than six planets, a lot more. Our system has three gas giants, for god's sake, and our being in the goldilocks zone is a fluke. If the asteroid belt were a planet our system may not even HAVE a goldilocks zone.
