pauln6 said:
Chekov becoming chief engineer and Uhura beaming down to save Spock during the finale were two such stupid scenes. Uhura is an officer, a linguist, and a technician. I want her to do technical stuff and if, in her capacity as an officer she gets in on the action then that's really good. With a ship full of 50+ security guards, you put Uhura in charge of a team, you don't send her down instead of one.
I have to agree with this. With Chekov, as soon as I heard Kirk tell him to put on a red shirt it was the only time in the movie I felt a little nervous. He may not be anyone’s favorite, but the character
does work. It’s nice to know that he was shadowing Scotty for 6 months, and being a child genius, I’m sure he soaked up everything he learned, but there was a better way to handle this. Couldn’t we have seen him learning from Scotty sometime earlier in the film. He could have been helping him off duty or something, and then when the action picked up he should have been needed on the bridge as the ship’s best navigator.
I don’t believe for one second that out of an entire engineering department (all of which have dedicated years to the field, I’m sure) Chekov is the one to take over engineering as soon as Scotty and Keenser is gone. This would have been a great way for a woman to naturally do something. Let’s say there’s a woman who works with and reports to Keenser (who I’m calling the Chief Maintenance Engineer since he’s never been given a title). Perhaps she’s a supervisor of some sort, and she has to take over when they leave. Now, I could imagine her requesting Chekov’s help once things got really dire, as the ship kept taking beating after beating, and there just wasn’t enough of her to go around (she could have also called for any available hand with engineering experience down too, to help with the smaller things while the engineering crew works on the big stuff to keep the ship going), and then you have Officer Darwin (?) filling in as navigator for him. It’s just an idea.
And that takes me to something else. The people that think striving for equality in the writing is “arrogant” and “entitled,” all the while saying in the same breath what “should be” or even “has to be” for their beloved Trek are just interesting to me. I’ve got a couple of more words I’d rather use: Imagination and Creativity. If the writing team, as
artists, want to include people, then they can imagine that and create that. If they want to exclude people, then they can imagine that and create that, but let’s not act like it’s not a choice. And the very idea of IDIC means that they have quite a few choices at their fingertips, at least that’s what I think.
As to Uhura, well, I’ve already said that I agree that it didn’t make sense for her to beam down there. Actually, I think she should have been the one to have them both beamed up, Khan to the brig and Spock to sick bay in case he had any injuries. That would have been quick thinking on her part, but then that also would have meant that Spock and Khan couldn’t keep beating the pulp out of each other, so I guess that’s a no on that one? I don’t know; if it helps, it could have been at a time when it looked like Spock was kind of winning…
And their shuttle argument is one of the first things I’ve said didn’t make sense to me. First, as his mate, shouldn’t she already know that he can feel and that his problem is the fact that he actually is feeling a lot, despite his attempts to remain stoic? I ended up having the guess that Spock has some Vulcan form of PTSD because they never actually deal with it in the film (apparently, you have to look to the comics and the novelizations to get this info). There’s really no exposition there, and that would have been a wonderful, and natural, way for them to have their alone time together and at the same time deal with something that advances both of their stories.
I mean, I could just imagine him sitting in their quarters, in front of one of those Vulcan meditation candle things having a hard time clearing his mind. He sees images of Vulcan being destroyed, his mother reaching out for him as she falls, Nero’s face, and then Khan as a similar villain making similar threats against “the only home I have left”… Uhura notices (let’s say she looks up while reading a book or a novel on her PADD while she’s laying across their bed) and she tells him that he needs to see a Vulcan Healer or at least maybe call his dad because he might be able to help.
The conversation could have gone from there with Spock claiming that he’s okay and that the few Vulcan Healers that are left already have too much on their plates in treating the thousands of traumatized Vulcans that remain of their species, and his father has more important things to do than to trouble himself to show up because his son can’t “cope.” He’d mention that they’ve been over this before, and Nyota would mention that she thinks he’s getting worse because, as his bond mate, she can feel what he feels and see what he sees. She can tell that it’s getting harder for him to shield her from that and that he needs help. She tries telling him that it’s the “logical” thing to do, but he just shifts back into position and tries to meditate, to handle it on his own… That’s when she quietly decides to stop talking to him because he’s not listening anyway…
In about 3 minutes time I think a lot could have been covered there, and it would have better served the story/plot of the film than the shuttle argument. Plus it would have been in character and behind closed doors. But again, that’s just my humble opinion. By the end of the film, he could have learned that getting the help he needs before going on a 5 year mission is necessary, and that could have been one of the things he focused on in the year that goes by at the end of the film. I think this would have worked better.
