Kirk's execution of Nero/Optimus Prime "Any Last Words?" TF2

[M'Sharak]

Let's also move away from arguing the 9-11/Al Qaeda/Taliban/Osama bin Laden issues, okay?

Touching on those to draw a parallel to a story point in the movie is one thing, but this forum is not a place in which those subjects are to be the primary topic of discussion. Thrash that sort of thing out in Misc. or TNZ, please.

 

[Greg Cox]

It's also worth noting that fiction and reality are not the same thing. One can read and enjoy a CONAN novel without necessarily endorsing barbarism as a way of life . . . .

 

[sonak]

It's also worth noting that fiction and reality are not the same thing. One can read and enjoy a CONAN novel without necessarily endorsing barbarism as a way of life . . . .

very true. Also this is why we can find certain charismatic villains and supervillains interesting and charming and compelling in fiction(too many examples to name) but we'd think them monsters in real life.

 

[Greg Cox]

It's also worth noting that fiction and reality are not the same thing. One can read and enjoy a CONAN novel without necessarily endorsing barbarism as a way of life . . . .

very true. Also this is why we can find certain charismatic villains and supervillains interesting and charming and compelling in fiction(too many examples to name) but we'd think them monsters in real life.

As when Kirk and Scotty confessed to admiring Khan at the same time that they condemned him . . . much to Spock's confusion!

How boring would it be if fiction consisted only of sensible, civilized people who always behaved admirably? I'd much rather watch a STAR TREK movie where the characters reacted like real people, sometimes logically, sometimes emotionally, than movie full of perfect Starfleet drones who only experience the right and proper emotions when carrying out their missions.

 

[horatio83]

If that is your argument (and yes, I do see where you said essentially the same thing earlier in this thread) then perhaps you'd be good enough to explain why you feel that what Kirk did was unethical. You've been more or less stating it as a given, up to this point—indeed, you've repeated the assertion several times—but what is it that leads you to believe that Kirk derived enjoyment from the act of ordering Sulu to fire on Narada and seeing it destroyed?

To me it appears as Kirk tremendously enjoys to be able to break out of his role of Starfleet captain who has to play by the book and now can "fire everything we got". Why? I guess it's the look in his eyes.
This is the way I read the scene and if someone reads it differently and does not see any enjoyment in Kirk there is obviously no problem.

You know, I was toying with the idea that you were just oblivious to what it feels like for a given nation to be the target of the worst terrorist attack in human history, but, with this, I'm officially writing you off as someone who just doesn't know what he's talking about.

I am officially writing you off as a chauvinist. Nations cannot feel and people like yourself who think that nations can feel weigh the lives of the very citizens of this nation higher than the lives of citizens of other nations.

How boring would it be if fiction consisted only of sensible, civilized people who always behaved admirably? I'd much rather watch a STAR TREK movie where the characters reacted like real people, sometimes logically, sometimes emotionally, than movie full of perfect Starfleet drones who only experience the right and proper emotions when carrying out their missions.

It is not about how characters behave, it is about the subtext, what the movie says about the behaviour of characters. Take TUC and FC, Kirk and Picard err seriously yet overcome their mistakes. They are not idealized but portrayed as fallible people.
ST09 on the other hand doesn't portray Sarek's advice to Spock as dubious and questionable, as human/Vulcan weakness, but as actual goal for Spock. Same with him throwing Kirk overboard or the 'blow up the Narada' scene. A typical Bildungsroman aka coming-of-age story is about a young person making mistakes, learning from them and growing in the process. In ST09 on the other hand there is besides the real growth of Kirk and Spock after they learn from each other also some kind of pubescent deadlock.

 

[Greg Cox]

How boring would it be if fiction consisted only of sensible, civilized people who always behaved admirably? I'd much rather watch a STAR TREK movie where the characters reacted like real people, sometimes logically, sometimes emotionally, than movie full of perfect Starfleet drones who only experience the right and proper emotions when carrying out their missions.

It is not about how characters behave, it is about the subtext, what the movie says about the behaviour of characters. Take TUC and FC, Kirk and Picard err seriously yet overcome their mistakes. They are not idealized but portrayed as fallible people.
ST09 on the other hand doesn't portray Sarek's advice to Spock as dubious and questionable, as human/Vulcan weakness, but as actual goal for Spock. Same with him throwing Kirk overboard or the 'blow up the Narada' scene. A typical Bildungsroman aka coming-of-age story is about a young person making mistakes, learning from them and growing in the process. In ST09 on the other hand there is besides the real growth of Kirk and Spock after they learn from each other also some kind of pubescent deadlock.

Again, I don't think the movie endorses Spock marooning Kirk. That was a mistake on Spock's part, albeit one that serves the narrative function of introducing Kirk to Spock Prime and Scotty.

Beyond that, I suspect that we're talking past each other. You seem to think that Star Trek movies are intended to provided moral instruction on correct behavior, that adolescent rebellion is something to be strongly condemned, and that Star Trek characters can't even feel improperly unless that movie makes it clear that that they learn from their mistakes.

Me, I'm more concerned with what works dramatically. Conflict, emotion, catharsis, etc. And I get leery whenever people start putting the message ahead of the story. That's not art, that's propaganda. And it tends to make for preachy, didactic storytelling.

And again, to get back to my original point, it's not like TOS never indulged in cheap thrills, rebellious behavior, or "transgressive" emotions. If anything, TOS had distinctly mixed feelings about anything that made humans a little too peaceful and law-abiding--as in all the narcotized utopias I cited earlier.

In other words, TOS always had a strong streak of devil-may-care "adolescent" adventure. Why do you think we all got hooked on it as kids?

 

[horatio83]

City on the Edge of Forever works dramatically, isn't preachy and nonetheless doesn't feature dubious ethical issues.

I'd like to focus on your point about the episodes which warned about false utopias. They were by the way pretty preachy. You never notice propaganda when you agree with it, when it is your propaganda.
Let's pick "Patterns of Force", its liberal message is probably embraced by everybody. Beware of fascism as a device to bring order to a chaotic society. But on a second thought, have the horrors of fascism actually been caused by the totalitarian rigidity or not by the opposite, ethical transgressions of the worst kind?
We play this liberalism vs. fundamentalism game since 9/11 but aren't the fundamentalists, be they Al-Qaeda folks or Karadzic whom I quoted earlier not so much about restoring order but about breaking out of the limitations of liberalism? "This godhead forbids you nothing" is not a god of totalitarian order but of transgression.
The main paradox of liberalism is after all that we have as many personal freedoms as never before in history yet social life is as also as regulated as never before. 1000 years ago there were strict marriage rituals and your place in society was fixed but on the other hand there haven't been thousands of laws and orgies were still real orgies.

I think, and I am well aware of how proto-totalitarian it sounds, that besides the gaze of the other (the Vulcans have the role of a god or a father, it is embarassing for us if they see that we are not able to manage ourselves well) mainly social discipline made humankind change so quickly in the late 21st century in Trek's fictional history.

But your argument, liberal Federation vs. totalitarian utopias, is of course more sane and far closer to the material.

I like that we see Trek's utopia through the eye of an idealized military organization, i.e. one without all of the typical transgressive patterns of real-world militaries (Full Metal Jacket shows this pattern nicely in an exaggerated fashion and the movie is also another example for my argument. The point of the drills, the humiliation, the obscenities and so on is not to create obedient soldiers but killing machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgd0-qw4jYI), I like the idea that this great future without povery and war on Earth is the result of human discipline (which is by the way always a neat argument against people who think that Trek's utopia is a totally unrealistic land of Cockaigne).

http://www.techdigest.tv/picard-twitter.jpg

[Hotlinked image converted to link. - M']

 

[BillJ]

City on the Edge of Forever works dramatically, isn't preachy and nonetheless doesn't feature dubious ethical issues.

How can you say it doesn't feature "dubious ethical issues"? Kirk and Spock are making a value judgement that a world where Germany wins World War II is worse than the world they come from. They have no hint what happened in the new timeline beyond "Germany captured the world", it's Jim Kirk who stated in Mirror, Mirror that "conquest is easy, control is not".

The world that Kirk and Spock came from featured the Eugenics Wars ("entire populations bombed out of existence"), Sanctuary Districts, World War III (600 million dead), the Xindi attack (7 million dead), numerous interstellar conflicts that Earth participated in and the Borg.

Kirk and Spock made a "dubious" ethical judgement that because the Enterprise no longer hung overhead that the universe was automatically a worse place.

 

[Sci]

You know, I was toying with the idea that you were just oblivious to what it feels like for a given nation to be the target of the worst terrorist attack in human history, but, with this, I'm officially writing you off as someone who just doesn't know what he's talking about.

I am officially writing you off as a chauvinist. Nations cannot feel

That phrase was meant as short-hand for "the people who live in a given country." (To get really specific, in this case, the people who were all the symbolic targets of the 9/11 attacks -- because 9/11 was a symbolic attack upon all Americans in general, not just the people in New York and D.C. It was similar to a hate crime in that regard -- an attack upon a small number of people clearly identified as belonging to a given community in order to symbolically attack that community.)

I thought that context was clear; if it was not, then I'm sorry I didn't word myself clearly. But to try to take that and twist it into a belief that Americans' lives are more valuable than others' lives is pure nonsense and utterly unfair.

 

[Greg Cox]

Okay, I'm admit I've never thought of the Vulcans as God or fathers, or been embarrassed by what they thought of humanity! I always though they were an alien race, whose philosophy (according to STAR TREK) had both its advantages and disadvantages--and served as an interesting contrast to humanity. Again, the Vulcans aren't supposed to be role models for humanity.

Honestly, my main point here is not grandiose theories about society or liberalism or whatever, but calling out for the umpteenth time this persistent canard that the new movie was this crass, callow, "adolescent" crowd-pleaser--unlike the original series which (judging from the way some people talk) was a weekly symposium on Gene Roddenberry's Vision of the Future (TM), never mind all the fistfights, space monsters, and scantily-clad alien babes. And that NuKirk is an immature punk as opposed to Kirk Prime who was morally superior in every way and never behaved in a rash, impulsive manner.

(Let's be honest here, if NuKirk blew up the computer running an entire society, then joked about it with Spock and McCoy, there would be a million posts insisting that the real Kirk would never do anything so inappropriate--never mind that Kirk did this every other week.)

One of the things I love about the new movie is that it got TREK back to its brash, pulpy, space opera roots--as opposed to some of the latter-day Trek shows which sometimes came off as a little stodgy by comparison.

Better "adolescent" than geriatric!

 

[Jeyl]

Maybe if Kirk just left them there that'd be one thing, but shooting them when they're in the middle of being destroyed by a black hole? That's not really called for.

I hate it when writers cheat their way in giving characters a soft side when they just resort to them blowing up the bad guys anyways. It's cheap and it doesn't make the heroes more awesome. I mean, what if Nero wanted his crew spared but he wanted to stay behind and die? It's so boring taking the easy way out.

 

[BillJ]

Maybe if Kirk just left them there that'd be one thing, but shooting them when they're in the middle of being destroyed by a black hole? That's not really called for.

If, after 110 posts, you don't understand why the Narada needed to be destroyed you never will.

 

[horatio83]

City on the Edge of Forever works dramatically, isn't preachy and nonetheless doesn't feature dubious ethical issues.

How can you say it doesn't feature "dubious ethical issues"? Kirk and Spock are making a value judgement that a world where Germany wins World War II is worse than the world they come from. They have no hint what happened in the new timeline beyond "Germany captured the world", it's Jim Kirk who stated in Mirror, Mirror that "conquest is easy, control is not".

The world that Kirk and Spock came from featured the Eugenics Wars, ("entire populations bombed out of existence"), Sanctuary Districts, World War III (600 million dead), the Xindi attack (7 million dead), numerous interstellar conflicts that Earth participated in and the Borg.

Kirk and Spock made a "dubious" ethical judgement that because the Enterprise no longer hung overhead that the universe was automatically a worse place.

Whatever you do or don't do, you change the future without knowing what it will be like. But in this instance you know at least the neat future. With nazis all over the place you don't have to wait another 60 years for eugenical horrors.
I'd say that a history with a "happy ending" sounds better than one in which Hitler invades the whole world.

This issue is not merely a dilemma, it is time travel madness that, once you think about it, can only lame you for four acts like Hamlet. Kirk cannot freeze in a Hamlet-like fashion like in "Balance of Terror" in every episode, he is after all a man of action. When everything that you do could be wrong you gotta do something nonetheless.

Maybe if Kirk just left them there that'd be one thing, but shooting them when they're in the middle of being destroyed by a black hole? That's not really called for.

If, after 110 posts, you don't understand why the Narada needed to be destroyed you never will.

Let me guess, too much seaweed in the oceans of space?

 

[horatio83]

Okay, I'm admit I've never thought of the Vulcans as God or fathers, or been embarrassed by what they thought of humanity! I always though they were an alien race, whose philosophy (according to STAR TREK) had both its advantages and disadvantages--and served as an interesting contrast to humanity. Again, the Vulcans aren't supposed to be role models for humanity.

Honestly, my main point here is not grandiose theories about society or liberalism or whatever, but calling out for the umpteenth time this persistent canard that the new movie was this crass, callow, "adolescent" crowd-pleaser--unlike the original series which (judging from the way some people talk) was a weekly symposium on Gene Roddenberry's Vision of the Future (TM), never mind all the fistfights, space monsters, and scantily-clad alien babes. And that NuKirk is an immature punk as opposed to Kirk Prime who was morally superior in every way and never behaved in a rash, impulsive manner.

(Let's be honest here, if NuKirk blew up the computer running an entire society, then joked about it with Spock and McCoy, there would be a million posts insisting that the real Kirk would never do anything so inappropriate--never mind that Kirk did this every other week.)

One of the things I love about the new movie is that it got TREK back to its brash, pulpy, space opera roots--as opposed to some of the latter-day Trek shows which sometimes came off as a little stodgy by comparison.

About the Vulcans, that's just my fancy interpretation of the void between FC and ENT. As Cochrane was a drunkard all his life, even after first contact with the Vulcans, I am the first one to question my idea of social discipline and gaze of the Vulcan other.

I frankly admit that I come too much from a TNG angle. Everything that's great about Star Trek to me is the original stuff you don't encounter in other science-fiction. Adventure, fist-fights and holodecks are generic, Prime Directive and an utopian future with a military-exploratory agency are Trek-specific.

 

[BillJ]

Whatever you do or don't do, you change the future without knowing what it will be like. But in this instance you know at least the neat future. With nazis all over the place you don't have to wait another 60 years for eugenical horrors.
I'd say that a history with a "happy ending" sounds better than one in which Hitler invades the whole world.

But your whole argument is that Star Trek 2009 has "dubious ethical issues" that the other series don't. But the fact of the matter is TOS is loaded with "dubious ethical issues" and Deep Space Nine would probably make your head explode.

 

[Sci]

Maybe if Kirk just left them there that'd be one thing, but shooting them when they're in the middle of being destroyed by a black hole? That's not really called for.

"... and so I allowed the Narada to be consumed by the black hole."

"Thank you for your report, Mister Kirk. Now, I have some questions for you."

"Yes, Admiral?"

"The Narada."

"Yes, Admiral?"

"Romulan starship from the 24th Century."

"Yes, Admiral."

"From the year... 2387, is that right?"

"That is what our intelligence indicated, Admiral."

"So it was 129 years more advanced than anything the Federation has ever encountered. Does that sound about right?"

"Yes, Admiral."

"And this ship... the U.S.S. Kelvin encountered it in 2233, didn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

"It had, in point of fact, just emerged from another black hole when it destroyed the Kelvin, hadn't it?"

"Yes, Admiral."

"Tell me, son, are you an expert in 24th Century Romulan technology?"

"Sir?"

"You heard me. Are you an expert in 24th Century Romulan technology?"

"... No, sir."

"I see. Do you at least have, say, a passing familiarity with 2380s-era Romulan technology?"

"No, sir."

"No? Never took a class on it? Never took Intro to Alternate Future Alien Technology, Romulus Edition?"

"No, sir."

"I see. And... tell me. This Nero fellow. You offered him humanitarian assistance, did you not?"

"Yes I did, sir."

"Very good. Well you should. And this Nero -- he refused your assistance, didn't he?"

"Yes he did, Admiral."

"And in point of fact, he declared his eternal hostility and made it clear that, if he could, he would still seek to attack Federation starships and planets, didn't he?"

"Yes, sir."

"So, if he had escaped, he would still be a major threat to Federation security, wouldn't he?"

"Yes, sir."

"So... Let me see if I have this straight. Instead of firing upon the incredibly dangerous starship of an avowed enemy of the Federation who had made it clear that it was his continuing goal to commit genocide against every Federation world, you allowed it to be consumed by a black hole -- even though you have no idea what a 24th Century Romulan starship is capable of, and even though that same ship had already demonstrated an ability to survive passage through a black hole 25 years ago?"

"... Yes, sir."

"Thank you, Cadet Kirk. That will be all. Report for duty aboard the Enterprise at 0830 hours. Captain Spock will be needing someone to scrub those plasma coils."

 

[horatio83]

But your whole argument is that Star Trek 2009 has "dubious ethical issues" that the other series don't. But the fact of the matter is TOS is loaded with "dubious ethical issues" and Deep Space Nine would probably make your head explode.

That's not my argument. There is a difference between a character being transgressive, an unintended ethical dilemma like in City and a consciously designed dilemma like in In the Pale Moonlight, Tuvix or Cogenitor.

 

[Greg Cox]

The world that Kirk and Spock came from featured the Eugenics Wars ("entire populations bombed out of existence"), Sanctuary Districts, World War III (600 million dead), the Xindi attack (7 million dead), numerous interstellar conflicts that Earth participated in and the Borg.

.

To be fair, only the Eugenics Wars had been established at the time that ep was written and aired. The rest of that stuff was invented by the later shows, so I think Kirk can be forgiven for not figuring the Borg and the Xindi attacks into his moral calculations!

 

[BillJ]

To be fair, only the Eugenics Wars had been established at the time that ep was written and aired. The rest of that stuff was invented by the later shows, so I think Kirk can be forgiven for not figuring the Borg and the Xindi attacks into his moral calculations!

But from the characters' point of view all of those things had happened except for contact with the Borg.

 

[BillJ]

But your whole argument is that Star Trek 2009 has "dubious ethical issues" that the other series don't. But the fact of the matter is TOS is loaded with "dubious ethical issues" and Deep Space Nine would probably make your head explode.

That's not my argument. There is a difference between a character being transgressive, an unintended ethical dilemma like in City and a consciously designed dilemma like in In the Pale Moonlight, Tuvix or Cogenitor.

Or For the Uniform, where Sisko made an entire planet inhospitable to human life...