When have you disagreed and thought the captain was wrong?

Even ignoring all the various whether it's plausible or believable for a starship to submerge underwater, I never understood why the Enterprise had to be submerged to begin with. The whole thing was to hide the ship from the natives of Nibiru. Just keep the ship in orbit, these people haven't invented telescopes yet so they won't be able to notice the ship at all while it's up there.

 

I actually like that they never explain that. If we'd seen the first half of the Nibiru episode the series of events that led to the ship being underwater would all make perfect sense, but we didn't, so it's left as a mystery.

 

I attributed the headscratchers in the Nibiru sequence, like everything else in Into Darkness, to JJ Abrams not sweating the details of how things go from point A to point B, and instead basing storytelling on constant action and "wouldn't it be cool?" moments without worrying about whether those moments make sense or fit together.

Wouldn't it be cool if the Enterprise rises up from the ocean? Yeah, but why is it submerged? I don't know and we're not gonna explain, but it's cool!

You can see the same storytelling dynamic applied in his other films, like Rise of Skywalker. Wouldn't it be cool if Lando shows up in the Millenium Falcon with a huge fleet to save the day? Yeah, but how did he do that in less than a day? I don't know and we're not gonna explain, but it'll be cool!

 

It's less cool when it happens at the end of the movie unfortunately.

 

True.

Into Darkness was a movie I went into really hyped for a good time, and then spent the last act of the movie totally pulled out of the film by the storytelling shortcuts Abrams went with to set up the action sequences.

-Transwarp beaming goes anywhere it needs to go, no matter how far away, even if it undermines the need for starships, because it's a plot shortcut needed to setup the attack on Starfleet and Khan's escape.
-Warp Drive operates by speed of plot necessity. Therefore, it only takes a few minutes to warp from Kronos to Earth, just because Abrams needs to get both ships near Earth to set up crashes and fist fights in San Francisco for the climax.
-While the Enterprise and Vengeance are that close to Earth, and Starfleet Command, there's really no other vessels or help from Starfleet to come in and support? Or at least to come in and find out what the hell is going on?

 

With the B'aku he instantly fought with the Admiral over removing them, then went rogue to stop the relocation. He acted somewhat regretful towards the Native Americans in the earlier episode I suppose, but he was going to move them, going rogue was never in the cards in that situation. The writing was just terrible in that episode and Insurrection anyway, but while unintentional the fact that you can honestly say "Picard wouldn't move a people where 95% of them (and all the speaking roles) were visibly white people, but barely argued about and conceded to forcefully relocate Native Americans" is messed up and definitely worth mentioning, especially since the Prime Directive has a place in the discussion and that was the main point of my post.

I obviously don't think that the writers of either the movie or the episode were purposefully trying to say anything bad, but even the episode by itself was bad and combined with the events of Insurrection makes it worse. That's not even talking about the stereotype stuff in the episode (like Wesley's vision quest). Star Trek had...issues with depicting Native Americans going back to TOS. Its not very surprising that Voyager would go on to hire a Hispanic man to play a Native American and hire a literal scam artist as their "native american consultant" (and one whose scam had been revealed years before Voyager hired him, because Rick Berman & Co really couldn't give less of a shit about basically anything on Voyager).

 

Picard's views aren't allowed to evolve between the episode with the Native Americans and INS?

 

I mean, that sounds better than the writers didn't know what they were doing...

 

Yes!! Thank you, Kor, the Dahar Master!

While at first glance being airtight beats being watertight, she's a Constitution class starship. A STARship!

There's a reason why we never heard of Starfleet starships landing on a planet until the Intrepid class over a century later. And why in "THE 37's", an excellent pilot like Tom Paris tells Janeway he has never landed a starship before, and why she says the same thing.

It's also why, except for ST09, we always see ships being constructed in space. Not on the surface... not by the mountains... not in a van by the river. In space.


(And I know the real world reason we never got ships landing each episode in TOS, and it kept going through the franchise. Doesn't matter. It's part of the franchise's dna, and one of the things that sets it apart from others.)