Well, at the time, simply saying "gay couples exist and are accepted in the 23rd century even if Kirk and Spock aren't one of them" was a major step forward. It's certainly more of a nod toward inclusion than Rick Berman was ever willing to permit.
Star Trek The Motion Picture 45th Anniversary Book Club
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Well, at the time, simply saying "gay couples exist and are accepted in the 23rd century even if Kirk and Spock aren't one of them" was a major step forward. It's certainly more of a nod toward inclusion than Rick Berman was ever willing to permit.
Definitely. Many of the "K/S ladies", as they were often referred to in the day, were in regular contact with GR, were elated even with this tidbit. They felt acknowledge and had a new term to use, and from the Creator.
That was the real trick, with GR. He alienated half the sci-fi legends in the community in the 60s by rewriting the dialogue... but his dialogue rewriting was always on point, and gave the characters a consistent voice form the get-go... something all subsequent series have pretty much required 2 seasons to figure out.
Sometimes Roddenberry wasn't a great idea man (though sometimes, he was!), but he was always a strong dialogue and characterization writer.
Really? What about "The new screens held?" :-)
If I was writing for Trek, I feel like the easiest retcon- factoring this film, as well as the TOS laim that intraship beaming was difficult, and the K-7 beam-to-transporter-room (which we also see echoed in SFS, TUC, etc.) would be to suggest that duotronic circuitry throws up enough interference that, while truing to beam through it is possible in an emergency, it is really only safe to beam onto a ship or station using two transporter systems in conjunction to cut through the interference. (Whereas a planet's surface ahs no such interference issues).
I had no idea that a'tha (I think that was what Spock's World calls it, but my memory may be faulty) originated in this novelization! I always found it a fascinating concept, and planned to play around with it in a fan-audio series (that never materialized, sadly). I would never have guessed that it actually came from Roddenberry!
Now I'm picturing a reality in which Earth was absolutely devastated and the Federation crumbled- because 'the only ship in range' that Kirk took command of was an Oberth-class.
Incidentally, I am catching up on this entire thread, but I wanted to say, thanks so much for doing this! It has been a delightful read!
Despite how the shows tend to portray Earth as the center of all things, I tend to think that the Federation is a loose enough alliance, or a sufficiently egalitarian one, that it wouldn't be crippled if it lost the capital. I can somewhat believe that the Klingon or Romulan Empire would collapse if the metropolis fell, since authoritarian regimes tend to concentrate all power at the center, but a democracy would presumably be better able to weather the loss. Indeed, Discovery arguably proved this, since the post-Burn Federation, while greatly diminished, still existed as a functioning government after Earth withdrew from it.
I would tend to agree with you, mostly just being hyperbolic for the humor of the statement. Although... I do feel like Shinzon seemed to think it would crumble in that way. (Arguably, though, that could be due to his Romulan-upbringing-mindset, or he was simply omitting the intended steps between 'destroy Earth' and 'the mighty Federation will fall before us'.) Not like the guy was being a superb long-term planner at that point, anyhow...
Indeed. It is... such a wild concept, based on V'ger's psychology, I truly do not even know what to speculate. V'ger 'expected an answer' and reasoned like a child... I have no idea how those two concepts would collide if its ultimate mission met with unresolvable failure...
I always took this as (retroactively) an implanted universal translator of some sort (much as we see in DS9: Little Green Men). But I have seen other authors also reflecting on the phenomenon that everyone in TOS seems to be speaking English.
It's worth noting that Spock only knew to even look for something seemingly non-existent because of the psychic link indicating it had already been sent. And to detect it- with help of knowing to look in the first place- understand, and program in a response takes as long as it takes V'ger to fire two whiplash bolts, a mere second or so before destruction; while other vessels that aren't as tough as the Enterprise and her new screens were shown not to survive the first shot.
So I could buy that no one else had
A. Managed to detect it when computers couldn't without a manual research
B. Survived the first shot to have enough time to prepare a response, and
C. Been as fast as Spock in reconfiguring so that they even made it before the second shot hit, even assuming they already passed A and B.
This reminds me of the obnoxious Azetbur complaint in the Undiscovered Country; "Inalienable 'human rights.' You should hear yourselves." Such semantic absurdity; that's not what 'inalienable' means, and why wouldn't a species name sentient rights after the only sentient species that they knew existed at the time they coined the term (which, one would assume, for most species would broadly predate space travel and first contact). And that's all assuming that the universal translator wouldn't smooth this over or wasn't in use (and the Klingons all speak fluent english) since it's wordplay semantics specific to the English language (and presumably not the Klingon-translated equivalent).
Looks, there's no nonwithstanding for me- if Scotty say it'll work, that's what forms my impression of if it'll work or not! :-) But, based on the times we actually see an unfettered matter-antimatter explosion (Contagion, All Good Things, Generations)... yes, I think at that proximity, it would've worked.
I really liked this touch in the 2001 edition, with the ship in profile. The 2022 edition with the ship head-on looks surprisingly-bad.
Shinzon's real motive was to destroy all Picard's achievements so he could get out from under his original's shadow and feel like his own person. Picard had saved Earth, so he had to destroy Earth. Claiming it would make the Federation fall was just how he spun it to convince the Romulan military hardliners to back him.
Rather, V'Ger was following its programmed imperative, like a salmon swimming upstream. It had to deliver its data to its Creator, because that was its entire programmed purpose. If it had failed to find the Creator on Earth, it would've probably just kept on searching for it, wandering the cosmos looking for advanced machine intelligences so it could ask them "Are You My Mommy?"
The writers established over and over again in explicit dialogue that they were speaking English. The writers intended them to be speaking English. Any attempt to retroactively handwave it as universal translators is just overcomplicating things.
I'd thought V'Ger should be shown head-on (well, rear-on) to match the angle the Enterprise had been pointing inside it when it emerges from the transfiguration, but there were a lot of odd finishes in the CG compared to the 2001 version's much greater success in matching the look of the original VFX, and the angle should've been something more like this to match the perspective of the ring of light rather than a direct, schematic-style view.
That seems like a fair assessment.
True, but with its certainty that the creator was on that specific planet...
Did they? Every alien race they came across- even, say, Romulans, who hadn't encountered a human in living memory, or Va'al's people, or others in first contact situations? Marc Cushman of These Are the Voyages points it out like an error every time. But in a series that has established the technology of a universal translator on the show (albeit not in the compact form that other series later refined it to), wouldn't that explanation be far simpler than 'somehow every race they encounter knows English' and/or 'the show is replete with continuity errors in almost every episode' as explanations?
Agreed. It wasn't the concept, it was just the execution. It also looks to be pure white or something- probably supposed to be the gathering glow, but it just ends up looking rather... cartoony, to me.
It might conclude that it had misidentified Earth, or that the Creator had moved on to somewhere else. If it's a programmed imperative, it couldn't just stop pursuing it.
That's a different subject. The fact that universal translators exist does not, in any way, shape or form, suggest that the human characters are not speaking English when they're explicitly said to be speaking English. I mean, for Pete's sake, Spock literally said in "Metamorphosis" that the UT "translates its findings into English." It doesn't get more clear than that.
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Honestly, I kind of liked the way they did it in the original theatrical edition, with V’Ger being so huge that you never really got a clear view of the whole thing in profile, just various bits and angles. Even if this wasn’t intentional but rather a budget/time issue, in practice — to my mind — it emphasizes the sheer alienness (?) and apparent unknowability of it, the ending notwithstanding. Once you get the full model profile in later versions, it kind of reduces it psychologically to just another spaceship model.
So you're saying V'Ger would have done the Battlestar Galactica thing?
I dunno...I see what you're saying, but I found it very rewarding to get a more full sense of what the heck Our Heroes were dealing with, and I don't think my imagination was capable of wrapping my head around it prior to that point.
Ah, gotcha. Okay, yes, that's a fair point. (Actually, I've always wondered- on the assumption that English has not become a universal language, that people from Japan are still speaking Japanese, people from Russia are still speaking Russian, etc , and the UT just handles that- what happens to the children that grow up in a UT world? How does that translator know what language to 'assign' as their default? Is it set by parental preference? Are children simply not affected by it the way alien species are, designed to be exempt until a certain age to allow unimpeded language formation? Or would they grow up with some new 'univeral-ese' hybrid language that comes from having no native language, but only what the UT decides to create- sort of a neutral machine-language that comes from being raised on an automatically-translated basis from the point of being a blank slate? I suspect that something like this latter concept may be what the TMP novelization was trying to suggest...)
That was the way it was for me. The DE have me two 'eureka' moments- one, finally seeing the whole thing and going 'ah, that's how all those bits connect,' and learning in the web commentary about the intended u-turn at the end of the sequence (which the 2022 edition finally implemented) and going 'ah, that's how the geography works, there wasn't a second section of V'ger on the far side of a vast chasm, that was the same section of V'ger they flew over, and then turned back to face it!'
To me, it was so rewarding to finally be able to understand the context and put all those pieces together.
That's not how it works. A universal language is most people's second language. They speak their native language in their own families and communities, but they speak the lingua franca when interacting with the wider public. Most Federation citizens would know both their native language and English, which is how it works on Earth today, where English is the most widely spoken second language. Spock would speak English to his colleagues on the Enterprise, but presumably speaks Vulcan when he's alone with T'Pring or visiting his family. Uhura canonically thinks in Swahili ("The Changeling," "Spectre of the Gun") but speaks English on duty or when socializing with her Anglophone friends.
The idea that Starfleet officers routinely speak different languages that have to be interpreted by the translator is absolutely nonsensical. For one thing, it would be incredibly stupid to depend entirely on a technology that might fail in a crisis. Starfleet officers would naturally be trained to do things themselves rather than depend on machines, so that they're still able to function when the machines break down. For another thing, despite fictional shorthands, no machine translation could ever be perfectly accurate and instantaneous, since different languages use different word orders and don't have direct one-to-one equivalents for every word and concept. So no machine translation could ever be as clear, quick, and accurate as just speaking a common language. It would lead to frequent misunderstandings and delays that could be fatal in a crisis. A common language would be vital for officers in the same service, so naturally English lessons would be a standard part of the Starfleet Academy core curriculum. (Any common language would theoretically do, but it's canonically established as English.) The only exceptions would be species that can't produce phonetic speech and thus would need to depend on translators and voice synthesizers to communicate, such as cetaceans, Phylosians, or Hortas.
While I don’t think that’s how it works in Star Trek, that sounds like a story that maybe you should try to write.
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