All the characters are still the same.
No, they're not! Pauline Kael was, in my opinion, correct that "the same actors who looked flabby and embarrassed [in
TMP] turn into a troupe of confident, witty professionals."* Not to mention the evident consensus here that Spock did undergo a major change as of the end of
TMP (or prior to the start of
TWoK, depending on your point of view).
*This may largely be a matter of who the director was. Take Kirk's "casual" lines, for example, the sort that are independent of the story at hand. In
TMP all such lines (or Shatner's line readings, as the case may be) are awkward and stilted, right up to "thataway," whereas in
TWoK lines such as "this is damn peculiar" get just the right emphasis. A lot of the difference in characterization, I think, has to be attributed to the generational difference between the directors of
TMP and
TWoK the difference in the nature and extent of their prior experience, and the impact of all this on how they direct actors' line readings, movement, etc. Robert Wise may not have been the right director for exchanges such as the one that includes Kirk saying "now that we've got them just where they want us" - which is meant to be witty but just lies there and has done so ever since 1979.
It is not a direct sequel in terms of story but it is an implied sequel. For the hardcore fan you can still join the dots between the movies.
Okay, I'll grant that this is possible - the producers of
TWoK would have to be pretty clever to have thought in those terms, and maybe they were; the inclusion of Spock's "Remember" scene is proof enough that they were thinking ahead.
I do hope that in all these posts I am not perceived as a mere contrarian. I've been watching since the third-season premiere ("Spock's Brain") - right around the time I bought my copy of
The Making of Star Trek - and had no idea, until weekday reruns began, that what I saw first-run was (other than in special effects and music) not the best the series had to offer. I remember quite well the drought of the mid-1970s when the animated episodes were over with, and the only "new" Trek was a Kirk-and-Spock anti-drug-abuse radio spot, which took the form of a conversation at the end of a planetary survey where addiction had ruined the native society. So I became very sensitive to early reports of both of the first two movies. I remember seeing the "A 23rd Century Odyssey Now" ad for
TMP months before release, with the artwork of the early version of the
TMP ship and with Roddenberry given part of the writing credit. I would buy weekly Variety at a newsstand (less than a dollar and on newsprint) in 1981 to read about the production of
Star Trek II: The Undiscovered Country. I remember quite clearly the difference in the reception given the first two movies. I'm even reasonably sure that I'm personally responsible for Leonard Maltin's annual movie guide including the sentence "Originally released without the 'II' in its title" in the entry for
TWoK starting in 1991. I'm interested in facts, and as someone who has worked in nonfiction publishing for many years, I know that published books (or magazine artlcies, etc.) on a given subject are always likely to include and exclude certain facts selectively, shade the meaning of certain facts, be prone to the vicissitudes of the editing process at a given publisher, etc. [This can happen in journalism as well, of course, but in general journalists have tried harder (in the pre-internet era, at least) to be factual.] And because I'm interested in facts, I suppose I'll never be the kind of fan who would rather weave these various filmed Trek stories into a greater continuity.
I hadn't heard of the Allan Asherman book on the making of
TWoK and will start looking for it. I wonder whether I'll find it trustworthy. Maybe so.
As a matter of fact, on Friday December 7,1979, I still remember that the majority of the audience, including myself, thought it was a funny Kirk comment.
