Whatever happened to Starship Exeter?

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

The movie also made the characters once again into people like they were in the first season and not the heroic types they became in the later seasons and into the majority of the TOS movies.

Y'see, it's statements like this that make me wonder just what in the hell you've been watching to come to this conclusion. Pine's Kirk bears no resemblance whatsoever to Shatner's Kirk, regardless of which season or movie, but especially in the first season. The same applies to every other character in varying degrees.

The same show you've been watching but without the rose-colored-Roddenberry lenses you wear. Nor do I treat canon as dogma or let it dictate what can be considered an "entertaining story."

You're right ... Pine's Kirk doesn't resemble Shatner's Kirk in the first season. But that's not the point I was making. The point I was making was that the characters were written as people, not generic heroes who could do no wrong. People who make mistakes, have bad judgments, get angry and sometimes use arrogance to mask self-doubt. Just like how they were treated by the writers in the first season.

Wait, come to think of it, Pine's Kirk does resemble Shatner's first-season Kirk. Both have an underlying self-doubt that is masked by bravado and both use women as a means to an end.

In "Conscience of the King," Kirk uses Lenore to get to Kodos. In the Abrams movie, Kirk uses Gaila to "cheat" on the Kobayashi Maru test (and, yes, I know it was cut, but the point remains).

In "Balance of Terror," we get a sense of the self-doubt that tortures Kirk underneath his sterling captain's image. Same again in "The Enemy Within."

In the new movie, Kirk scoffs at Pike's offer to join Starfleet and the context clues of the scene — i.e. Pine's acting — suggests that this Jim Kirk is also filled with self-doubt. Then later in the movie, Uhura tells Kirk, "I hope you know what you're doing." And Kirk responds, "So do I."

It's subtle but it's there, carried by the actor.

QED

 

[Therin of Andor]

Y'see, it's statements like this that make me wonder just what in the hell you've been watching to come to this conclusion.

Right back atcha!

Amazingly, I don't recall too many ST novel readers complaining about the novel tie-ins' approaches to brash young Jimmy Kirk. Diane Carey's Young Kirk novels inspired the 2009 movie team when they wrote the script. Even Shatner's own novels, when doing flashback scenes, show us a pre-Academy Kirk who is sullen, smart-mouthed and hiding his self-doubt. If Shatner doesn't know Young Kirk, who does?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Abrams and his team focused mainly on the aspects of Star Trek (the original) that were always there — i.e. fun, adventurous and colorful — and focused less on the pretentious sophistry...
.
.
.
The movie also made the characters once again into people like they were in the first season and not the heroic types they became in the later seasons and into the majority of the TOS movies.

Absolutely Right(TM).

I've missed this version of Star Trek for...well, longer than a lot of folks have been watching Trek. Abrams's take on this pleases me no end.

 

[bob reed]

And this all deals with Exeter how?

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Ah, it's all about TOS and recreating TOS.

One aspect of working on Exeter was trying to recreate some aspects of the original series that a lot of us liked but which are not really part of modern Trek to the same extent that they were in TOS.

A show like "The Doomsday Machine' has a "moral" or social message to about the same degree as a "don't shave the cat" episode of He-Man And The Masters Of The Universe - what it really is, though, is an hour of action melodrama built around a guest character portrayed in broad strokes, executed as excellently as anything of the kind that network TV ever presented in the 1960s.

 

[USS Intrepid]

Personally, I'm always looking for the kind of tone you see in the first half of the first season of TOS, or the third season (and some of the second) of TNG.

Those are really the high points for me. I enjoy the rest of franchise a great deal, but overall those particular periods in Trek's history are certainly my favourite (though there are also some standouts scattered across the various shows and seasons). It's also one of the reasons I've always enjoyed Exeter; it captures that tone very well.

But as with all else, it's a purely subjective thing.

 

[BillJ]

And those analogies are infinitely better than incomprehensible technobabble, that no one really cares about and doesn't make any sense anyway.

"The notion of transwarp beaming is like tryin to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet while wearing a blindfold riding a horse."

The "tailpipe" in TUC.

Or the nearly complete lack of explanation in TWOK for the Genesis device ... "life from lifelessness"

With the exception of Star Trek 2009, the other two have actual (in movie) explanations to flesh out how they work.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

And those analogies are infinitely better than incomprehensible technobabble, that no one really cares about and doesn't make any sense anyway.

"The notion of transwarp beaming is like tryin to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet while wearing a blindfold riding a horse."

The "tailpipe" in TUC.

Or the nearly complete lack of explanation in TWOK for the Genesis device ... "life from lifelessness"

With the exception of Star Trek 2009, the other two have actual explanations to flesh out how they work.

If you can say right now exactly how a transporter works in the real world, and convince me Orci et al should have been aware of that explanation, then I'll agree that they might have considered fleshing out the bullet analogy, for the sake of realism.

 

[BillJ]

And those analogies are infinitely better than incomprehensible technobabble, that no one really cares about and doesn't make any sense anyway.

"The notion of transwarp beaming is like tryin to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet while wearing a blindfold riding a horse."

The "tailpipe" in TUC.

Or the nearly complete lack of explanation in TWOK for the Genesis device ... "life from lifelessness"

With the exception of Star Trek 2009, the other two have actual explanations to flesh out how they work.

If you can say right now exactly how a transporter works in the real world, and convince me Orci et al should have been aware of that explanation, then I'll agree that they might have considered fleshing out the bullet analogy, for the sake of realism.

Seems to me it would be about as difficult as fleshing out a magic terraforming torpedo. YMMV.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Personally, I'm always looking for the kind of tone you see in the first half of the first season of TOS, or the third season (and some of the second) of TNG.

The first year of TOS is Star Trek, to me. There are about seven or eight episodes scattered between years two and three that I really like as well.

 

[ST-One]

And those analogies are infinitely better than incomprehensible technobabble, that no one really cares about and doesn't make any sense anyway.

"The notion of transwarp beaming is like tryin to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet while wearing a blindfold riding a horse."

The "tailpipe" in TUC.

Or the nearly complete lack of explanation in TWOK for the Genesis device ... "life from lifelessness"

With the exception of Star Trek 2009, the other two have actual (in movie) explanations to flesh out how they work.

Nope.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The "tailpipe" line is one of the lamest things ever put on screen in a Star Trek movie, and the bullshit "explanation" for the Genesis device makes the case for "red matter did it" as brilliant by comparison.

 

[BillJ]

And those analogies are infinitely better than incomprehensible technobabble, that no one really cares about and doesn't make any sense anyway.

"The notion of transwarp beaming is like tryin to hit a bullet with a smaller bullet while wearing a blindfold riding a horse."

The "tailpipe" in TUC.

Or the nearly complete lack of explanation in TWOK for the Genesis device ... "life from lifelessness"

With the exception of Star Trek 2009, the other two have actual (in movie) explanations to flesh out how they work.

Nope.

Might want to go back an re-watch The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country. Whether or not you like the explanations are irrelevant... they do exist.

CAROL (on viewscreen): What exactly is Genesis? Well, put simply, Genesis is life from lifelessness. It is a process whereby molecular structure is reorganised at he subatomic level into life-generating matter of equal mass. Stage One of our experiments was conducted in the laboratory. Stage Two of the series will be attempted in a lifeless underground. Stage Three will involve the process on a planetary scale. It is our intention to introduce the Genesis device into the pre-selected area of a lifeless space body, such a moon or other dead form. The device is delivered, instantaneously causing what we call the Genesis Effect. Matter is reorganised with life-generating results. ...Instead of a dead moon, a living, breathing planet, capable of sustaining whatever lifeforms we see fit to deposit on it.

 

[Expo67]

Not to mention the reasoning behind the 'tail pipe' sequence in The Undiscovered Country.


Spock: Gas. Gas, Captain! Under normal, impulse power she expends fuel like any other vessel. We call it, "plasma", but whatever the Klingon designation is, it is merely ionized gas.

Uhura: What about all that equipment we're carrying to catalogue gaseous anomalies?

*Kirk's brows go up*

Uhura: Well, the thing's gotta have a tailpipe.

If it could work for today's heat seeking missiles, it could certainly work for 23rd Century photon torpedoes.

 

[Tallguy]

If it could work for today's heat seeking missiles, it could certainly work for 23rd Century photon torpedoes.

Which is why it seems unusual to me that it would take a communications officer to re-think of it. Yes, I know Spock started the line of reasoning. But why did one of the greatest minds of the Federation wait until he was being shot at to come up with a cloak detector?

I'm torn between being glad that they didn't try to hypercharge the subspace spectrum in the gluon phase in order to detect Chang's ship and hating that instead they came up with a fairly simple 20th century weapon that someone should have thought of before.

They came up with an unbeatable weapon and didn't ever come up with a really good way to beat it. (See also The Picard Maneuver.)

Red matter still sounds like a place holder where they had written "BAD STUFF happens, pisses off Nero and causes time travel".

Genesis is magic, but at least they don't try to over explain it and the characters find it magical.

 

[FalTorPan]

If it could work for today's heat seeking missiles, it could certainly work for 23rd Century photon torpedoes.

Which is why it seems unusual to me that it would take a communications officer to re-think of it.

Uhura must have spent her Klingon language classes reading textbooks about Impulse Engineering.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Well, there is a case to be made for detailed explanations.

Good thing Kirk was paying attention during Sulu's mini-lecture during Shore Leave on how guns work:

Sulu: It fires lead pellets propelled by expanding gases from a chemical explosion.

Because, this knowledge certainly came in handy a few weeks later during Arena. Otherwise, Kirk might not have ever known people ever used chemical explosions this way, back in the day.

What would you call this dialog from Shore Leave, "anti-techno-babble"?

 

[Captain Robert April]

Kirk's response of "the fresh air seems to have made you trigger happy" indicates to me that he didn't need a lecture on the function of basic firearms.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Kirk's response of "the fresh air seems to have made you trigger happy" indicates to me that he didn't need a lecture on the function of basic firearms.

My point exactly: neither did we.

I guess I forgot to say *ahem*.

 

[BillJ]

Sulu: It fires lead pellets propelled by expanding gases from a chemical explosion.

What would you call this dialog from Shore Leave, "anti-techno-babble"?

That line of dialogue is designed to make the weapon seem exotic by future standards... and it serves its purpose.