TANSAFAL
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, as Robert A. Heinlein said...
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, as Robert A. Heinlein said...
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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The scene in ST6 with Uhura trying to speak Klingon from reading the book is completely fine and absolutely fitting.
I never understood why people thought Uhura should be some super genius polyglot who speaks every language. There's no particular reason why she should be, she runs the comms on the ship, that doesn't mean she's a linguist.
I think SNW did a disservice to the character by making her some super genius. She didn't need to be that. She was a great self-insert for black women... she could be anyone... now, she's not. She is extraordinary, most people are NOT Uhura.
I never understood why people thought Uhura should be some super genius polyglot who speaks every language. There's no particular reason why she should be, she runs the comms on the ship, that doesn't mean she's a linguist.
I think SNW did a disservice to the character by making her some super genius. She didn't need to be that. She was a great self-insert for black women... she could be anyone... now, she's not. She is extraordinary, most people are NOT Uhura.
Was it thy she wasn't a polyglot, or was it the fact she was using physical books?
By the end of the 23rd century those books should have been digital.
As for Uhura's linguistic skills, she's a life long Starfleet communications officer who spent a lot of time along the Klingon border. It's reasonable to conclude she learned Klingon.
To your point, though, her linguistic ability was not necessary. Uhura was presented as a radio operator. It was the Abrams universe that first retconned her into a linguist, I believe. A retcon carried over into SNW.
It's not that she doesn't speak Klingon. (Although it would have been cooler if she did. Not because I saw JJ movies but because I read David Gerrold and Diane Duane books.) It's that a) they appear completely unprepared for the very possibility of bluffing their way through the border b) the book is comically massive rather than being on a screen and c) they have no name red shirts prompting her that she has to DO something.
The scene is not constructed to show her as someone who is good at what she does. And this is in the same movie where the First Officer / Science Officer enlists the CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER to go and add sensors to a torpedo! The scene is played for laughs and is meant to show Uhura specifically and the crew in general as rather hapless. They have NO hap.
Again, this goes back to WAY before Abrams.
That's because McCoy skipped Klingon anatomy class for Photon Torpedo Maintenance 101.
Yes, but we have no idea how many different Klingon languages and dialects there are. I don't find it hard to believe that there are at least a few that Uhura doesn't know.
And honestly, TOS never showed Uhura to have a remarkable facility with languages. They show her knowing English and Swahili, and that's it. Most of her skills were shown to be on the technical side, where she did things like rewiring her console, taking over navigation, or working at a transporter station. The language expert stuff started in the novels and eventually carried over to live action Trek.
At least in the Kelvinverse, you could chalk it up to all the other changes that were made in the wake of that disaster and anything that diverged from the prime universe afterwards - the Academy might have decided that all/many comms officers should cross-train in linguistics, or offered it as a double major where the prime universe didn't.
So any deficits that did remain showed up later?
Because we didn’t buy tickets to see Ensign Whothehellcares save the day.
But she was so on the ball when Uhura was trying to talk to the Klingons.
I think ENT established there were 80 dialects of Klingon. (Pretty sure it was in "BROKEN BOW".)
Actually, in Broken Bow, Archer tells Hoshi that Klingons were, "An Empire of warriors with 80 poly-gutteral dialects constructed on an adaptive syntax."
I don’t know if this counts, but I hate when some fan source talking about Trek (or for that matter any other property) insists that something they want to be true in the setting, or that they’ve decided is true, is canon. It shouldn’t matter, but it’s irksome. Even more so if the source also claims elsewhere either that they do just present their own speculation and don’t claim canonicity, or alternately that they definitely don’t make things up and only stick to canon; in either case, they’re breaking faith and, as far as I’m concerned, blowing up any reason to continue to follow them.
Without naming names, an example of the first would be a YouTuber I followed for a while who produced delightful videos detailing the imagined histories of various starships, all of which he presented, quite properly, as made-up… right up until a communication discussing his idea that in the Picard era, the Romulans are now close buddies of the Federation, and that whole Zhat-Vash-and-huge-invading-fleet thing was a rogue operation by a rogue faction and by the way, that’s canon. (Really? You could read it that way if you want to, but seems to me you have to strain a little to do it; it’s definitely not canonically stated, so WTH?)
An example of the second — actually, while I’ve seen them about Trek, the example that comes to my head is about Doctor Who, so apologies for the tangent: in this case, a book analyzing the franchise whose author starts off by saying he’ll avoid meaningless speculation— then goes on to summarize the unseen adventure that obviously happened to turn the Doctor into a half-Human before the 1996 TV Movie, and the other unseen adventure that obviously changed him back.
These types of thing just stick in my craw. Speculate away, but don’t pretend they’re Totally Canon Honest.
(And yes, of course canonicity is utterly irrelevant to good storytelling. But that’s not what I’m talking about here; I’m objecting to the pretense to factual, objective authority about a text while actually implanting one’s own stuff into it — particularly if you’re not engaging in textual/literary criticism, just [nominally] description.)
Without naming names, an example of the first would be a YouTuber I followed for a while who produced delightful videos detailing the imagined histories of various starships, all of which he presented, quite properly, as made-up… right up until a communication discussing his idea that in the Picard era, the Romulans are now close buddies of the Federation, and that whole Zhat-Vash-and-huge-invading-fleet thing was a rogue operation by a rogue faction and by the way, that’s canon. (Really? You could read it that way if you want to, but seems to me you have to strain a little to do it; it’s definitely not canonically stated, so WTH?)
An example of the second — actually, while I’ve seen them about Trek, the example that comes to my head is about Doctor Who, so apologies for the tangent: in this case, a book analyzing the franchise whose author starts off by saying he’ll avoid meaningless speculation— then goes on to summarize the unseen adventure that obviously happened to turn the Doctor into a half-Human before the 1996 TV Movie, and the other unseen adventure that obviously changed him back.
These types of thing just stick in my craw. Speculate away, but don’t pretend they’re Totally Canon Honest.
(And yes, of course canonicity is utterly irrelevant to good storytelling. But that’s not what I’m talking about here; I’m objecting to the pretense to factual, objective authority about a text while actually implanting one’s own stuff into it — particularly if you’re not engaging in textual/literary criticism, just [nominally] description.)
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Misinterpreted Canon violations are fine by me, like James R. Kirk or Klingons getting redesigned in TMP.
But these new cheap writers hold Canon as something that has personally harassed them and tries their best to go against it as much as they can.
I like SNW for what it is, but it's aesthetics are jarring cuz it's a prequel to TOS.
What's more annoying is ENT did TOS Connie perfectly, showing that it can be done in that way.
But as it stands now the SNW Connie looks more futuristic than 25th Century ships, no visual distinction at all.
But these new cheap writers hold Canon as something that has personally harassed them and tries their best to go against it as much as they can.
I like SNW for what it is, but it's aesthetics are jarring cuz it's a prequel to TOS.
What's more annoying is ENT did TOS Connie perfectly, showing that it can be done in that way.
But as it stands now the SNW Connie looks more futuristic than 25th Century ships, no visual distinction at all.
What makes it futuristic? If you held the Space X Starship (shiny, skin like a DC-3, lands on it's tail) up next to even the Space Shuttle (with no context of course) people would tell you to get the hell out of here with that Buck Rogers crap. The Space Shuttle is a more "futuristic" spaceship than one that looks like it was designed in the 1930s.
I have problems with the SNW ship aesthetics, but it's not more "advanced". The TOS Enterprise was smooth. The SNW ship has tiny little Lego pieces all over it that weren't put together properly.
They'll bend things here and there when they have to, same as every other series. 100% adherence to canon should never get in the way of a good story. Never mind the fact they actually do go to great efforts to stick the canonically established events.
It's also a sequel to Enterprise, that can't be ignored. Strange New Worlds absolutely looks like an advancement of the aesthetic of Enterprise, while also absolutely maintaining the 1960s aesthetic of TOS. It walks that line between the two eras perfectly, in my opinion. The production design of Strange New Worlds is some of the best in the franchise.
As a novelty.
How do you figure? The SNW interpretation of a Constitution fits perfectly within its era. It's TOS but modernized. And it works perfectly as an advancement of what we saw in Enterprise. Hell, you can even throw the Kelvin into the lineage, and it works.
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TOS is a novelty.
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