Poll STAR TREK CONTINUES: "To Boldly Go (Parts I & II)" - Grading & Discussion Thread

I used to look forward to STC episodes. This two-parter felt like such a huge downer. I don’t think I could bear to watch this again.

 

While I thought the new theme during Kirk's speech and his final bridge tour was fantastic, I found the quoting of the movie-era themes to be distracting and out of place. The most off-putting was the use of two-note Horner's TWOK theme during McKennah's farewell.

 

I can’t remember the actual scene right now, but there was a shot of the viewscreen that was straight out of TMP, and even used a snippet of that theme. That little nod worked for me, though I release others will have felt differently.

Another thing I liked, Kirk’s initially promotion being to a lower rank than when we meet him in TMP. That was a nice touch.

 

Likely Rear Admiral (lower half) so that when we see him in TMP he's Rear Admiral (upper half).

 

To be sure. Really amazing work. I'm sure there are a ton of reasons why not to, but I wish they'd release the score. Bravo!

We were watching The Sound of Music while putting up our tree (we do that). I've always thought Christopher Plummer gave of a Kirk / Shatner vibe. Especially when he's doing comedy. (Of course I later learned their shared history.)

Tonight I realized that Vic is the Shatner / Plummer missing link! Now I'm really missing that musical episode.

 

I know at one point Andy Farber linked the scores from previous episodes. Hopefully he will for this episode (if we ask nicely.)

 

I have always found fan films a bit underwhelming. But Continues is without question the best of them, irrespective of any behind the scenes controversy and resentments from other fan film makers. The fact is the care and effort that goes in to these in terms of making it look and feel like TOS is really quite amazing.

Overall, aside from the past 15 or so minutes, I thought this was actually one of their weaker episodes (in fact the two parter as a whole didn't do it for me - I think they've had better scripts in the past). But it nonetheless shows a lot of hard work and dedication and I really have a hard time criticising people who do this for their love of TOS and not for profit, unlike some supposed fan film makers that are trumpeted by some out there *cough* Alec Peters*cough*. I think they deserve respect for that alone. Then on top of that you have the fact that they don't have the usual trappings of fan films. The acting, while not stunning, is far better than on other fan films. The direction is better. The sound mixing and sound editing is vastly superior to most other fan films (why is this so often an issue? It even was on New Voyages). I think if you could swap out the actors for the actual original cast as they were 50 years ago you'd be hard pressed to tell Continues apart from TOS. That's no small feat.

 

Watching it again (which I never ever do with fan films, so kudos) I find that the episodes on the whole hold up very well, but the ending (when you already know exactly how they're going to do it) drags out a bit.

I also didn't think they quite "stuck the landing" with Spock's motivation for leaving Starfleet. IMHO his motivation was nicely contained in the original episodes, but I don't think they really played up THAT unhappy Spock in the other STC episodes.

I heard a podcast debating the "canonicity" of these episodes. They mesh with the film of TMP well enough, but I don't think they quite got the details of Roddenberry's novel. Most significantly that McCoy left Starfleet because of Kirk's promotion. But that would have been its own entire episode.

 

Good point.

 

Mind you, I don't consider this criticism as much as observation.

1) Haberkorn's Spock is entirely his own. Mignogna may be doing his level best Shatner, but Haberkorn isn't really trying to channel Nimoy. And good for him. 2) Nothing is perfect and where I would have gone one way rather than another might not have made as good of an episode as what we got. What is the saying? It's not that the bear dances well, it's that the bear dances at all? And this bear danced pretty well.

I tend to take changes to The Motion Picture in an oddly personal way.

 

You are very much not alone in wishing @Not Herbert would put his complete STC scores online at some point. I'd download them all in a heartbeat!

 

They said pretty much the exact thing on the Facebook page, funnily enough.

 

I still scratch my head that the Romulans didn't use their killer plasma weapon until the end. Had they tried it once and phasers detonated it (as Sulu suggested in BoT) then there'd be a reason not to use it til the end, but as is it's just a "why aren't they trying their strongest weapon?"

 

They addressed that in part 1 - the Espers were blocking the Romulans from actually firing the weapon, so they likely assumed they couldn't until the Kongo's engines were destroyed & the Espers abilities were reduced through injury.

 

Okay. I missed that, or forgot it by the time they got to the weapon's use in Part 2.

EDIT: Actually, no. my complaint still stands, because Lana stopped the Romulans from firing while she's on the Enterprise but both ships are firing on the Kongo full of ESPers in Part 2, so why would a bunch of them ESPers only stop them from firing one particular weapon and not just stop both ships from firing at all?

 

I liked the use of the blaster beam in the soundtrack, but what a downer of an ending. May as well be watching Deep Space Nine!

 

Hi gang,

Vic is planning to make the music available for download. This will include the original music recorded for episodes 4,5,6, and 11. I also wrote a few short cues for episode 8. We re-arranged and/or re-recorded transcriptions of some classic TOS cues for each episode that we scored, so that stuff will be included as well. Hopefully, we'll have photos from the scoring sessions available with the music, and all of the music credits. There are several cues that we recorded but weren't used, so those will be there too.

Here is a bit of a preview. This cue wasn't used in episode 11. I wrote it in about 20 minutes on a lark. Well, actually, on a paper, but it wasn't planned for a specific scene. I wanted to have my own Kirk theme, so I came up with a motif, that IS used in the score for episode 11, but this treatment is more like a main tittle cue. It is sort of a cross between the theme for DS9, VOY, and First Contact (the movie, not the 4th season TNG episode), although that was not my intention when I wrote it. This is the type of thing I would have submitted had I the opportunity to audition for Discovery, or The Orville for that matter.

https://soundcloud.com/ajfarber-1/alternate-theme-edit

 

That’s really wonderful. I look forward to the score!

 

Thank you, Not Herbert, that was fantastic. Looking forward to the Ep 11 score.

 

Ok, I've been putting it off, but here goes:

Kudos to all the hard-working crew of STC for 4-5 years of continued ( ouch) efforts behind the scenes, those include soundman Ralph Miller, dp Matt Bucy, the costume and hair people (though McCoy`s wig was completely the wrong colour for whatever reason).
The FX guys worked overtime for this one, though I was really mainly impressed with the one shot where one of the ships`s hull was eaten up by the Romulan fireball, and i was tickled more by the low-key FX shots like the lightning fingers.
Most of the new music was enjoyable, but sorry, the V'Ger blasts and reuses/sampling from James Horner`s music was flirting with ridiculousness...too much contrast with the rest of the episode with its jazz orchestra-based style. Some people liked it, myself less so.

Spoiler: Dante`s Divine Comedy!!!

As for the story, here goes:
In two episodes totalling about 90 minutes, there should have been focus and development for both returning ''villains'', the Romulan commander and the Espers. To put it bluntly, that entire ''side story'' with Sentek and the sharp detour into the Neutral Zone and the Commander should have been entirely excised from the story. None of it made any sense, kirk needed to get to the barrier in the first place, but the worst offender is that Robert Sawyer did NOTHING new with the Romulan Commander, he just revisited all the plot points from her original episode (her unresolved flirtation with Spock, her conflict with Thal) but the worse thing is, at the end from the point of view of the Romulan Empire, Thal is the one in the right. The Espers were no longer a threat, and the commander should have done her duty and accepted to sacrifice herself for the benefit of her Empire who would have had a conclusive victory against Starfleet.
At the end of the episode, no mention is made of the Commander`s fate...she probably returned back to Romulus to be executed for treason, but that`s ok, because Thal has been made aware that ALL of Starfleet's Constitution class ships are now destroyed entirely except for the broken down Enterprise...so long humans!!
the Romulans should simply have NOT been a part of this story, because they also impeded any development for the Espers, who are barely even there in the story. They desperately needed the extra 20 minutes that was parsed out to the unneeded Romulans sub-plot.
The Espers: all I can say is that the writing team completely misunderstood Gary Mitchell's arc as well as the entire nature of his transformation. Mitchell`s powers during Where No Man Has Gone Before rapidly increase towards omnipotence (exponentially, spock says...he never implied a limit), yet in the span of days during Mitchell and Kirk's death battle his might is MUCH greater than Lana`s who seems stalled at the same low level throughout the entire story, yet she had acquired her powers weeks if not months earlier (at least shortly before STC's 6th episode).
In WNMHGB, Spock clearly states that in a matter of days Mitchell was to be as evolved over regular humans as humans were over a mouse, IIRC. That doesn`t mean just in power levels, but also consciousness.
As that episode went on, both Mitchell and eventually Dehner were losing their human perceptions and were fast evolving beyond. I'll repeat what I've previously said, while Gary Mitchell was written like Alan Moore's Kid Miracleman character, Lana was written like a 1950s Phantom Zone villain from the Superman comics.
I have no idea what the point even was to have 25 Espers with ''powers'' if they're stuck in a starship and we only really see 2 of them use their powers...
here is the major difference between Gary Mitchell and Lana, if I use the scene at the end of part 1. Lana and Sentek burst out of the turbolift and spout comic book villain dialogue: ''Relinquish command, or the Enterprise will suffer the same fate as the Hood''...(what? hasn`t she acquired her powers for weeks at this point?) then has a semblance of a fight and runs away after being blasted once by someone who just manifested hers (even Dehner took some time before she could fire those bolts, while Smith does it instantly)...
If this were written like WNMHGB, Mitchell would have rampaged all throughout the ship and knocked out/killed a sizeable portion of the crew and taken over the systems well before making his way to the bridge. But for the sake of argument should he head directly for the bridge: no supervillain dialogue, just grabbing crewmen telekinetically and snapping their necks or some other more impressive feat (remember he knocked out Kirk, Spock, Piper and who knows who else before escaping with Dehner).

Jumping ahead to the space dogfight, it made kirk look impotent to have him split his ship in two and teaming with the Romulan BoP against the kongo. The Enterprise even if it was controlled by the m-5 managed to beat 3 ships on its own, and all the advantage it had was surprise and a single computer consciousness to help shave off a few seconds of response time.

As for Kirk, Spock and McCoy`s transition between this episode and their reappearance in TMP:
McCoy: (sad enough he was barely even in this episode, seemed like he just popped up to invite Kirk for dinner) His departure was way too amicable at the end of ep11, far from the visibly angry TMP bearded McCoy who clearly was ready to knock out Kirk in the transporter room.
Spock: Spock and McKennah at the beginning of Ep10 seem like good friends, but the circumstances behind her death (contrived and necessitated having Spock this time behaving out of character) are a huge leap of logic between this and TMP Spock. I could more believe him troubled by the death of the Romulan Commander if there had been significant progression in their relationship, or even his guilt over Zarabeth from All our Yesterdays.
Kirk: all of a sudden feeling pangs of guilt over crewmen's deaths might have been more credible if there had ACTUALLY been visible crewmen deaths in front of Kirk this episode, but the bridge fight scene wasted this opportunity completely. Lana slapped a few crewmembers around and didn`t even snap the necks of the two redshirts in the turbolift (wow, what a villain).
at least if a couple of people had died protecting kirk it would have made his decision less out of nowhere...
Ok, i was too long-winded, but I'll conclude with a couple of things that were kind of annoying
- The navigator and helmsman musical chairs bit...i know you want to give a chance for people to get camera time, but man, every time they went back to the bridge there was somebody else sitting in those seats...
- the illusion-casting bits were totally ridiculous (where was this in WNMHGB, and why wasn't it explained by Spock?)
-Why wasn`t there a squad of redshirts along with Smith to board the Kongo?
With THOUSANDS of Starfleet crewmen killed off (from both the Enterprise and all the other ships) the Admiral seems unconcerned that this might complicate recruitment for the future. I know I'd reconsider going off to die in space so easily...
Peace out