You know, I was watching Plinkett's review, and I think I know how you could re-write at least the Kirk sections to be considerably more in character:
Instead of opening with the christening ceremony of the E-B, you open with her testing runs. She's not headed to Pluto, but the shipyards at Alpha Centauri. She's practically coasting, taking two weeks to make a trip that even passenger liners take only a couple of days to make.
Kirk isn't aboard for a ceremony, but to dead-head a lift. He's a retired Fleet Captain, now, and he's got some land on Centaurus that he kept for retirement (apologies to Diane Carey). Kirk's the only original cast member there. He's not even in uniform any more.
The ship's still got only a skeleton crew, but her systems are intact. Nobody's staffed or stocked any part of the ship that wasn't needed for testing. She's really, really empty. I could imagine the opening credits being Kirk simply wandering the empty corridors and spaces, only occasionally meeting anyone else.
The crews are on the bridge, in Main Engineering, and the ship is otherwise empty.
Cue the Nexus. It's a heretofore unobserved FTL phenomenon, right in the heart of Federation space: naturally the E-B makes a side trip to study from a distance. They'll just turn on the sensors and record everything for Starfleet.
Once there, they discover two trapped alien ships. They've been dragged along with this thing who knows how far.
Harriman send general distress signals: while the ship has ample space (it's practically empty), she doesn't even have the staff to beam the crews of the ships aboard except in very small groups. Then there's nothing in Sickbay but a token doctor and emergency aid kids.
To make matters worse, the ships aren't all there. They keep coming and going. Kirk recognizes it as Interphase (he's done that). They have to do something, and fast: they lost a whole ship to Interphase, once. If they're in this universe at all, now's the time to grab them.
Harriman decides to go in with tractor beams. They can at least tow the ships to safety, by which time the rescue ships should be arriving.
There's then a huge amount of suspense in the E-B having to avoid enormous ribbon sections, some larger than the ship herself. Lots of visuals, the ship occasionally being singed in spite of Ensign Sulu's efforts.
Wherever the ship is touched, chunks of her just
disappear. No explosion, no impact, it's as though the ship's not even there as far as the ribbon's concerned. It touches something and that something simply disappears as though it never even existed.
Naturally this causes the ship the to take a beating. Nobody ever designed a hull to survive parts of it just disappearing.
The bridge is chaos and cacophany, the tiny crew trying to hold everything together on this massive, empty ship. The place is coming apart.
There's an unexpected ribbon: the E-B is whacked hard, and Demora is injured, possibly dead. Without a Helmsman, the
Enterprise is head straight at a section of ribbon the size of Montana.
Kirk takes the helm, piloting the E-B to safety and then into position. They use the tractor beam: it's not enough. Kirk suggests overloading the system and feeding warp power straight to the tractors. The downside is it will burn out the system in a matter of minutes, along with a chunk of the Engineering hull.
Whoever gets to short the breakers will only have a couple of minutes to clear the area. Naturally Harriman isn't going to delegate the probable suicide mission, so he gives Kirk the conn.
Kirk refuses, saying that you don't switch quarterbacks mid-play. Right now, Harriman's place is on the bridge of his ship: Kirk will take care of it.
Kirk makes his way through a barely-populated and falling-to-pieces-around-him Engineering, cross-circuiting. The ship's coming apart, and there are no damage control teams to even think about fighting it. The only Engineering crew is up trying to keep the engines running: there's no one down here.
When the last breaker is shorted, Kirk calls Harriman and makes a mad dash for safety. The tractor fires, a massive beam of energy that slowly and with increasing strength pulls the ships free.
Unfortunately, it's also melting away the ship's hull, exposing the tractor beam assembly and ship's keel to space.
But the
Enterprise is pulling free, dragging the two ships behind her, trailing debris, missing sections ... but she's chugging along in spite of it all. She's the
Enterprise, after all.
Kirk is madly trying to avoid death on his run. Blast doors repeatedly seal behind him, only to boil away into space.
Finally we can see safety in sight: a set of huge engineering blast doors. Kirk's going to make it again. It'll be close, but the old Kirk magic still works.
Then a massive chunk of debris drops in Kirk's path. The enormous blast door in front of Kirk that would have saved his life slam shut on the other side.
There's no way out. Kirk turns to face his approaching doom. The camera watches only Kirk, never what he faces. In fact, the audience is put in the position of being what Kirk faces, visually.
The camera slowly dollies to Kirk. We can see him thinking madly: what can he use, where's the thread he can grab onto so he can pull himsel out of this mess? There's always been one before.
The scene around and Kirk is a literal Hell, systems frying, debris everywhere, the entire area trembling like an earthquake, and nothing that's supposed to remain in one piece will do so ...
Not this time. This is it. He knows it. We know it. There are no options left, really the first time in Kirk's life. It's the
Kobayashi Maru we all face eventually, whether we like to think about it or not.
And Kirk's always known he'll die alone.
Kirk sets himself and straightens. He cracks that Shatner mischievous look. Maybe -- just maybe -- he whispers, "To boldly go ... " as he steps toward the camera, straight into his death --
At which point the massively unthinkable happens. A trailing section of ribbon whips out, casually brushing the ship. An entire section of the engineering hull disappears, Kirk along with it.
It's finally too much for the ship. The ribbon took half the tractor beam assembly with it -- ironically saving her from further damage. No more tractor beam.
But it's enough, the
Enterprise and her charges are drifting free ... the rescue ships are warping in ... we can hear the subspace chatter as they begin to hail: "
Enterprise, this is Captain Pavel Chekov of the USS
Tyurin. Prepare to receive boarding parties, they will be arriving momentarily ... "
The camera follows the Nexus, away from the scene of the disaster. The viewer follows its trip through space, obviously accelerated to a blinding speed. Decades pass as the Nexus makes its way, casually oblivious to the destruction is causes.
78 years later ...
You'd still have to re-write the whole rest of the movie to make sense, but at least the part with Kirk might not feel so awkward ...
The other thing is that it leaves an interesting bit of story continuity. The last we saw of him, Kirk was finally facing his Kobayashi Maru. By making no ifs, ands, or buts about it, we know exactly how Kirk would deal with it.
From Kirk's perspective, his death went exactly the way he figured it might. Now he finds himself in a near-fantasy world, where everything --
everything -- is going exactly his way. It can't possibly be real, except that from everything Kirk remembers, he should be dead, now.
But if Heaven exists, would it really be like
this?
Then along comes Picard to confirm his suspicions.
Convinced to get out? Hell, Kirk would be
plotting how to get out by the time Picard showed up. The way the meeting should have worked was:
Picard arrives in KirkWorld. They exchange words: indignant, Kirk wants to know who Picard is, why he's brought Kirk here, and where the hell "here" is? Klingons? Romulans? Somebody went to a truly astonishing amount of trouble for a retired Starfleet Captain. Maybe one of those omnipotent aliens with a grudge ...
Picard explains he's a victim, too, but he's talked with somebody who knows how to get out of here. It's not hard, but Picard's got this problem he could use Kirk's help with ...
And then it comes out: Kirk could just as easily step back to moments after his own death on the E-B and live the rest of his life as if he'd never died.
It's not a difficult choice. Go back to retirement or 80 years into the future? This is James Kirk, after all.
So, knowing that they have all the time in the world to do it, Kirk and Picard sit down, have a drink ... and dream up an intricate, detailed plan to defeat Soran.
They methodically write the end of the film to their liking. We watch as two brilliant men execute a meticulous plan so that, literally, the Good Guys completely vanquish the Bad Guys and there is a Happy Ending. There are no casualties on either side, and the Bad Guys are all captured and sent to prison. It's just that perfect.
Lots of time for wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff, too. Planning in advance means that one could arrive weeks before the other and work in the shadows.
The only flaw is that there's no way to save Picard's family. Putting either of them in a position to do so means compromising the entire rest of the plan -- and then an entire planet and an outpost die. The audience sees Picard deal with choosing his greater duty to all those lives over the ability to save his family.
We don't end with Kirk's death. Been there, done that, in the first reel. In the context of having a time machine, it doesn't even make sense.
Instead, we end with the
Enterprise dropping him off at Nimbus III, the so-called "Planet Of Galactic Peace."
It's grown in 80 years: it's not the pit that it once was. Paradise City has grown to be a spaceport. It retains an active criminal element: there's plenty of Romulan Ale smuggled through Paradise City.
But it's a specifc bar that's Kirk's destination. A bar with a "pool" table and an ancient, whithered, triple-breasted cat-woman tending bar. She greets Kirk with a grunt: "You again? I don't want no trouble like last time -- " Kirk waves her off.
Sharing a last drink with Kirk, Picard is shaken: when they got into port, he got a very routine message from his brother. Apparently, authorities received a bomb threat, of all things. On the day of the fire, bomb squads with scanners were tromping all over the Picard vineyard. Picard's brother complained bitterly about the crop damage.
Kirk admits that he cheated a little. The moment he got out of the Nexus, Kirk sent a message to an old friend on Earth.
Picard leaves Kirk at a table, never really getting an answer as to why this bar on this planet when the entire galaxy is waiting to honor him? Even the Klingons had posthumously inducted Kirk into their Panetheon of Heroes for saving their Chancellor's life.
Kirk shrugs and says, "I like the atmosphere."
As the camera follows Picard to the door, we see an unidentified man, more ancient than the cat-woman, hunched and bent over, walking only through advanced technology. He joins Kirk at the table and there's some back-slapping and hugging. The two are obviously old friends who've not seen each other in a long time. At least one of them, anyway ... it's all wibbly-wobbly ...
At the bar door, Picard glances back and sees the two. The old man calls out in a Southerly drawl:
"Don't tell him we're coming! I want to see the look on his face!"
Picard smiles, walks out the door. He stops on the street, taps his commbadge, and the camera slowly pulls back. Just as he dematerializes, the camera moves out over Paradise City. It continues into the desert, then into the sky and space. It passes the Enterprise as she breaks orbit and warps out, Nimbus III's two moons behind her.
Music swells, end credits roll ...
Dakota Smith
