Pointless & Pedantic Nitpicks: Generations

[knine]

-There was an Admiral on board the Enterprise B, a female seen in the background on the bridge. Why didn't she offer any input during the rescue op? Why was it just Harriman and Kirk running the show when an officer who outranked them was present?

Because she would have just been pushing someone aside.

Every other time on Star Trek where anybody ever came along and threatened someone else's job in some way, there was always a big stink about it, and that totally makes sense. Here we're just supposed to accept it so that a character we know can fit in the story.

I'll let you think about that one for a bit.

-Inside Kirk's house, Kirk tells Picard to get the dill weed out of the cupboard, second shelf to the left. Picard then reaches to the right of the cupboard and gets the dill weed.

I'm still getting over when Riker in Encounter at Farpoint turned right instead of left. Or was it left instead or right. Heck, the whole series is ruined for me now. I need a wizard.

 

[Shazam!]

Pointless nitpick: How did Kirk know that Picard was a good guy? He could've been a bad guy in disguise trying to con Kirk.

 

[Shazam!]

How about that extra with the stupid grin on his face when the ENT was crashing?

The extra who does Data's fist pump right before Data does it is my favourite extra moment.

 

[Anticitizen]

There was actually a line cut from the movie. The full quote should be "Second shelf to the left... and straight on till morning!"

I just spat red wine all over my white khakis. Thanks, jerk

 

[GalaxyX]

There's also the gross misconception that tear ducts produce tears. They don't.

I was about to say that tear ducts are simply for channeling tear fluids away from the eye into the nose channel.

When someone cries, the duct is overloaded and the extra tears spill out into the face!

 

[Trekker4747]

These nitpicks are not really all that important, and may have already been pointed out before. But I'm going to post them here anyway.

-There was an Admiral on board the Enterprise B, a female seen in the background on the bridge. Why didn't she offer any input during the rescue op? Why was it just Harriman and Kirk running the show when an officer who outranked them was present?

Chain of Command likely doesn't work like that. She can't just take command of the ship without authorization.

-Inside Kirk's house, Kirk tells Picard to get the dill weed out of the cupboard, second shelf to the left. Picard then reaches to the right of the cupboard and gets the dill weed.

It was the Nexus. It's possible it made the dill weed appear where Picard reached for it.

-The two confrontations with Soran, him and Picard before they enter the Nexus, and him, Kirk, and Picard after they leave the Nexus, have different cloud patterns in the sky. Yes, I know this is because the scenes were shot at different times of the day, but it does beg an in-story explanation.

No. Obvious contnuity problems that occur due to production problems/scheduling don't "beg" for in-story explanations. Such a thing would be stupid and be more disruptive and out of nowhere for characters to stop and say that "The transverse jetstreams of the exo-class world is causing severe distortions in the cumilonumbulous formations in the mid-atmosphere."

Most of the audience aren't going to notice the changing cloud patterns and if they do they'll likely know why.

 

[Timo]

Chain of Command likely doesn't work like that. She can't just take command of the ship without authorization.

But Kirk couldn't, either. He was still free to advise and assist.

It's quite possible the Admiral on the background had nothing to offer in the situation, of course. But she'd be an authority figure, so it's odd she was so completely ignored.

Yet we know Kirk was retired at this point. Perhaps this Admiral was as well? She'd then be back to the same status level with Kirk, not a formal figure of authority at all, and not a trusted expert, either.

Obvious contnuity problems that occur due to production problems/scheduling don't "beg" for in-story explanations.

Oh, I dunno. In TOS, it was usually impossible to create a perfect illusion of the transportees staying completely immobile during transport: the actors and the camera had to move between the "demat" and "remat" scenes, sometimes across several days and hundreds of miles. The result was that we could see it was possible to move while in the transporter beam. And that's good for continuity - because that's exactly what we saw later on, in greater deliberation, in instances such as ST2 or "Realm of Fear".

Perhaps the cloud movement could be used to support some argument of a similar nature, one that similarly makes life easier for the continuity-minded, not harder. Such as "each Nexus-facilitated iteration of time was subtly different, because that's how it has to be in a workable forking-path theory of time travel".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[JarodRussell]

Perhaps the cloud movement could be used to support some argument of a similar nature, one that similarly makes life easier for the continuity-minded, not harder. Such as "each Nexus-facilitated iteration of time was subtly different, because that's how it has to be in a workable forking-path theory of time travel".

LOL, no, this is taking it too far, even for my tastes.

 

[Trekker4747]

But Kirk couldn't, either. He was still free to advise and assist.

Kirk was asked by Harriman for his input/advice/to take charge. Kirk didn't just pull rank and start ordering things around.

 

[Timo]

Quite true. Nevertheless, that leaves the question of why Harriman didn't ask for advice from the other flag officer present. Which probably takes us back to the idea that she did not have a history of expertise on such things.

It's not unexpected that everybody would turn to Kirk for ideas - and that Kirk would be itching to voice them. It's just a funny detail that the other flag officer wasn't considered worth anything much, either in terms of expertise or in terms of chain of command.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Trekker4747]

She was probably just a pencil-pusher who had never been in deep space. Kirk was a highly decorated and respected commander of a starship and, hey, it looked good to the press.

 

[G2309]

-The two confrontations with Soran, him and Picard before they enter the Nexus, and him, Kirk, and Picard after they leave the Nexus, have different cloud patterns in the sky. Yes, I know this is because the scenes were shot at different times of the day, but it does beg an in-story explanation.

Kind of shows how dull the scene is if you notice that.

 

[Green Shirt]

Little Jimmy Kirk: "Mommy...How do I cook?"

Winona Kirk: "You fill the pot and turn on the oven. When it boils, put in the corn and let it boil for a while until it is plump and delicious. Put it on a plate and have a stick of butter ready. Got it?"

Little Jimmy Kirk: "Yes, Mommy"

Commander George Kirk: "That's my boy!"

Too bad this scene has been wiped out of existance.

 

[Green Shirt]

How do we know there wasn't a comma in the script?

I would take Kirk's directions to mean "The left-hand side of the second shelf down."

Shatner forgot his dramatic pause.

 

[SPCTRE]

She was probably just a pencil-pusher who had never been in deep space.

Yup, I'd imagine there to be quite a few individuals to advance to the rank of Admiral without actually having field experience in commanding starships and the like, e.g. following a carreer in Starfleet Intelligence, or a posting like the attache to Admiral Dougherty in INS.