You're moving the goalposts. You wrote, in part…
The screenshots make clear they are either passing the planet or in orbit before they even spot the BOP, not approaching.
I do agree with the contrivances, and there's also a clashing of ideas. When Kirk steals the Enterprise and outruns the Excelsior, it's done in such a triumphant way that it's as if Kirk is showing that there's still plenty of fight in the old girl, after being told the ship is too old and past its prime. But then they got shot by the BoP, and all that build up just rapidly deflates like an balloon zipping about. "Oh well, guess we gotta blow her up!"
It's why I'm not as fond of the stealing of the Enterprise scene. In total isolation, it's nice, but in context knowing what comes later, it feels empty. Which is too bad, because James Horner was killing it!
It's why I'm not as fond of the stealing of the Enterprise scene. In total isolation, it's nice, but in context knowing what comes later, it feels empty. Which is too bad, because James Horner was killing it!
Whatever. Jesus. I'm not seriously arguing this. It was an intellectual musing at most.
Star Trek gives us nice visuals. It doesn't give us hard SF or a realistic physics model. And that's okay. I'd rather have the pretty visuals.
They weren’t planning to fight Starfleet. They were making a break for it and trying to grab Spock, presumably before anybody intercepted them. I don’t see Kirk being willing to fire on Starfleet ships, they weren’t expecting anyone else to be after them, and (as we saw in TVH) they eventually expected to face the music.
EDIT: And The Search for Spock, coming out in 1984, very much followed Star Wars space physics, so that’s all you need for the ship falling out of the sky. The novelization has the ship’s destruction as an instant blaze-into-a-star, which makes more sense.
Kirk was, I'm 100% certain, relying on the fact that he's the most persuasive man in Starfleet. Okay, he didn't convince his boss to let him break a bunch of rules, but that's one of the few times he's ever failed a Charisma check. David would probably back him up and Esteban is surely an easier mark than Morrow.
I agree that TSFS goes out of its way to say the Enterprise is in fine shape, in order to make the line about retiring her hit harder. But the script also goes out of its way to make it clear that it's only Scotty's magic that's letting a crew of five fly her. There's no way this not-even-a-skeleton-crew could fight her. There's no-one in Engineering, there's no-one in the Phaser control rooms, there's no-one downstairs to lift the gratings off the torpedo conveyors and load torpedoes. The movie is very upfront about acknowledging that five people is really not enough to operate the ship and it's only because all of them are Starfleet's best that they were even able to go fly in a straight line. At no point does the audience think that fighting back against Kruge is an option.
The Fellowship departed Rivendell with more of a plan than Kirk had when he departed Spacedock with the stolen Enterprise.
If Kruge doesn't go to Genesis, if Grissom survives...
Kirk didn't go to Genesis expecting to find a living Spock. He went to Genesis to recover a body he had consigned to the deep. Estaban and crew discovering a feral, living child Spock might actually help Kirk deal with Estaban. That would be an interesting conversation, because Estaban would know that Spock was alive while Kirk thought (because he'd have no reason to expect otherwise) Spock was dead.
The final cut does some slight-of-hand reordering scenes and trimming all the lines about the goal being to inter Spock's mind and remove it from McCoy's brain, and the corpse being a somewhat ancillary requirement, so it feels like Kirk's goal from the start was always to bring Spock back to life. I wonder if they would've made the change explicit if it was made nowadays, when reshoots after primary production in response to test screenings and seeing how the edit comes together are more normalized.
Eh. Even Styles says as Kirk flies away at warp that Kirk will be in for a surprise when the Excelsior hits transwarp. Except it doesn't. Because Kirk knew it couldn't.
Why would it be less functional than we saw it at the end of TWOK?
Absolutely this. The whole first part of the movie is setting up the Enterprise to show up the shiny new Excelsior, to prove that just because something is a little old doesn't mean you necessarily put it out to pasture. I mean, hell, that was literally the entire point of Kirk's character arc in TWOK! By the end of that film, he is rejuvenated and you feel that he and the Enterprise are heading out on more missions. Spock even does the damn narration about this being the continuing journeys of the Starship Enterprise.
And then they blow it up. For no good reason.
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