We will leave Q out of it then. I thought of that as a way to explain why nothing at all worked. No one but Spock should think of inverse phasing. They went to the well too often with the lines.
I think just a run of bad luck or just no successful solutions is good enough and more tragic. Decker does everything right but still loses. The ultimate no win scenario. They practically remade the actual episode from another direction. There's a great story to be told about the Comstellation's final hours. They just didn't tell that one.
Sadly this film demonstrates the main issue with fanfilms as films, in that fans mostly just recycle what they've seen before, so the scripts tend to be a lot of cut and paste and not much in terms of story. But then, what do we expect from amateurs having fun?
The episode I would be trying to remake here is Windom’s “Five Characters In Search of an Exit.” —only he’s all alone….you never see him beam anyone down. That’s been done hours ago. Now is only madness…and the voices pleading with him long after the planet itself crumbled.
You could maybe get some mileage out of making Decker a captain who got used to his one-in-a-million gambits paying off, but finally running out of luck. He then has to fall back on an inner strength that, it turns out, he doesn't possess. Facing something he's never faced before, catastrophic failure, breaks him. The Decker we see in the "The Doomsday Machine" is a guy who see's one last chance to win, and in winning, re-establish the sense of self that he has lost.
I really have to question the logic of beaming the entire crew down to a planet as they are watching this machine . . . eat the planets.
@Maurice is the only person I've seen articulate a plausible scenario, and it's not implied by the dialog in "The Doomsday Machine" (although it is consistent with it).
The problem with even Maurice's scenario is that it isn't plausible either. If the ship has power then it can either escape or fight and in both cases there would be zero reason to drop off the very crew you would need to either fix the ship to escape or fix the ship to fight. The scenario to abandon ship would make sense only if it was believed that immediate death would result if the crew stayed on the ship. One scenario would be if the Constellation was heavily damaged and didn't have enough power to avoid crashing into the 3rd planet but still had enough power to beam the crew down. Once the crew beamed down the DDM comes along and destroys the planet leaving the Constellation to relatively safely drift through the debris field instead of crashing into the planet. The DDM ignores the Constellation because her power pods had long been destroyed. Had Decker and crew waited a bit longer before abandoning ship they might've all survived. How the Constellation got to that point would be interesting. YMMV...
The only time we see a kamikaze plan is when Decker does his shuttle kamikaze attack. No kamikaze plan before that. Your Mileage Obviously Varies.
Spock relieves threatens to relieve Decker of command on the basis that his plan to attack the machine is attempted suicide, so that time Decker had a kamakazi plan as well. Spock actually relieves Decker only after Kirk orders him to.
Nope. Spock threatens to relieve Decker on those grounds, but Decker backs off. Spock only relieves Decker when Kirk gives him a direct order to do so.
Decker's plan on the Enterprise was considered suicidal by Spock and crew but Decker didn't see it that way as his intent was to destroy the DDM. If it were a suicide run Decker wouldn't of backed off when Spock calls him out on it. It is only when he loses the command of the Enterprise that he gets desperate and resorts to a kamikaze run with the shuttle. IMHO. But going back to when Decker was on the Constellation - he states, "I made a mistake then. We were too far away. This time I'm going to hit it with full phasers at point-blank range." His dialogue never puts the Constellation in a situation that sounded suicidal like moving the ship to point-blank range to attack.
Yes, well, we were at first discussing alternate scenarios, how it could have made sense to beam down his crew. The dialog in the episode said that the Constellation had been hit and lost power. But @Maurice's scenario involved other assumptions, specifically that Decker intended to lure the machine away. You said that didn't make sense, unless Decker knew the crew might die. Then, I asserted that Decker had intended a kamakazi run. We saw him issue the order to continue to attack without veering off after the ship had been caught in a tractor beam and was being pulled inside. It doesn't mean that Decker was intending to carry out a suicidal attack initially when he assumed command of the Enterprise; I agree it didn't seem like he was. But by that point he had total target fixation. So, getting back to what started this discussion, I think it would make sense to beam down the crew if Decker believed he could lure the machine away and he thought that by doing so the ship would eventually be destroyed. In other words, if Decker thought it would be a suicide mission. What @Maurice said was that what could ruin his plan would be that the machine would lose interest in the pursuit and go back to feed on the planet.
Yeah the problem goes back to if the Constellation could lure the DDM away then it is mobile. And if it is mobile then there is no reason to drop off the entire crew onto the 3rd planet since they had already observed other star systems that were destroyed and it would've been a matter of time before the DDM finished off the planets in L-374. What would've been the end goal of luring the DDM away to eat the Constellation* knowing that it wouldn't hurt the DDM and it would just resume munching on planets? *Decker wouldn't of known to rig the impulse engines to blow up at this point.
From what was said in and implied by the episode, life support was down to low power. The crew couldn't survive aboard the ship. It very well could have been a no-win scenario. I agree, but I think he might have had the idea by the time he'd stolen the shuttle.
DECKER: We tried to contact Starfleet. No one heard. No one! We couldn't run. KIRK: What happened to your crew? DECKER: Oh, I had to beam them down. We were dead. No power, our phasers useless. Decker's line about "no power" is vague since the transporter had clearly had power to beam ~429 people down to a planet (that's 72 beam downs if you assume six people at a time). The ship clearly had life support and transporter power. How did they even get close enough to planet three to beam down? The whole scenario doesn't wash as written. You have to assume Decker's either leaving out details or engaging in hyperbole.