If you love the Enterprise…

On the surface, that annoys me because it exposes the filmmakers' total lack of concern for Star Trek's source material. The classic cast films were made by people who didn't care about consistency. You can really see it in the art direction: each Star Trek film until Generations looked like something they pulled together on the fly. Meanwhile, the Star Wars movies that I don't even like looked like a cohesive universe.

But "Klingons having a cloaked bird of prey and a neutral zone" turns out to be very defensible, no thanks to the filmmakers, because those are things that can evolve over time, and years had passed since the TV series. If anybody has a cloaking device, the Klingons would want one. It was a logical development.

 

The Enterprise Incident gave us the theory or idea that Klingons and Romulans were allies against the Federation. But the other theory is that that stole Klingon technology. The real reason was that the producers were so happy with the Klingon spaceship design that they decided to implement it in every conceivable chance they got plus also they had lost the Bird of Prey model from Balance of Terror for further usage!
I like to think that the Klingons and Romulans had started an alliance and began to trade technology with the Klingons acquiring cloaking devices while the Romulans got state of the art ships in their defiance of the Federation pushing them back beyond their borders!
JB

 

Mytran that's true yes, but TAS is still after TOS as such. so the Klingons adapted cloaking technology from the Romulans under their pact as we believe and the Romulans continued to use Klingon designed ships in the cartoon as well!
JB

 

Yes and in The Undiscovered Country we learned more about the Klingon Neutral Zone which we had not known of in the original series. The tv episodes had Federation and Klingon ships regularly cruising through undeclared space together, sometimes in battle, or one or the other hiding in planetary orbit or in asteroid fields to avoid fighting if one or the other was on secretive missions or the like as in A Private Little War for instance!
JB

 

My head 'cannnnnon' says that tensions between the Klingons and the UFP increased between TOS and the movies, so that the Neutral Zone became more like the one between the Federation and the Romulan Star Empire.

Kor

 

Yes very possibly, Kor. So Kang and his crew going back to Qo'nos and explaining how Klingons and humans uniting against a common enemy meant nothing to their Chancellor!!! Whether that was Gorkon or his immediate predecessor we don't know!
JB

 

It wasn't that they were happy about it per se, but rather spent a lot of money to get the model constructed; so the word from the Paramount execs was: "Use it as much as possible because we need to get our money's worth out of it."

 

Correct on every count, but it depends on how you look at it. TOS was constantly re-inventing itself with every episode because, despite how much pre-production planning went into it, something new was always needed. Why not use the shuttles to rescue the ground crew in "The Enemy Within"? The simple answer is that they hadn't been invented by the writers yet, and it would have deflated the story.

I frown at completely re-inventing Star Trek. Granted, design changes were required for ST:TMP, as things are quite different on the Big Screen. Evening news sets had to be completely rebuilt with the introduction of HDTV. What passed muster in SD would not hold up with HD cameras. (If you'd seen any of those old sets in person, you know what I mean.)

I hated the pajama uniforms in ST: TMP, and I had gotten over the "Vulcan ear" warp engines by the time TWOK rolled around. Overall, ST:TMP was a dud, while TWOK succeeded all around. Were the uniforms ideal? No, but they looked both military, and more 1700s/1800s, minus the funny hats. The story integrated well with TOS (follow up on Khan, and was Carol Marcus the "blonde lab technician" Gary Mitchell aimed at Kirk?) For me, things went downhill after that, but that's my problem. I know that all the later spin-offs are popular with fans.

Meanwhile, that "cohesive universe" in Star Wars struck me as boring. That franchise appeared to me to be parodying itself and telling the same story over and over.

 

I think the shuttlecraft were an existing idea when “The Enemy Within” was in production, but they simply didn’t have the shuttlecraft and hangar deck built yet.

TMP was far from a dud and TWOK is a fun flick that bears little scrutiny. The uniforms were garbage and made zero sense. One might not like the TMP uniforms, but at least they were evolutionarily logical from what TOS had already established.

 

Well, isn't that the difference between the two set ups of the worlds? Star Wars is the monomyth, interweaving elements of Western and Eastern mythmaking with repetitive themes, and the cycle of good vs. evil again and again. The world doesn't move because it's not meant as any future prediction of humanity's future. One could easily reframe Star Wars as a fantasy style movie because the tech is not the important feature. It's set dressing.

Star Trek uses tech a different way. It's meant to take what we have currently (as in, 60s current understanding of tech if talking TOS, 70s if talking TMP, 80s with TNG, etc.) and extrapolate from their understanding of technology. It's not just an imagined fantasy period but also what our humans will do with future tech. I love TOS and the tech as presented but it still is something that I don't mind updates too because even my technological understanding ten years ago is outdated. It's crazy.

 

So ... we just saw a docking port opening and shutting repeatedly with no context?

 

If I was doing it right, YES.

 

Going back to Romulans vs. Klingons in TSFS, Wrath of Khan had the same problem. All the spoken details (Neutral Zone, Gamma Hydra) are Romulan. But the ships and the name recognition are Klingons. The only places where Klingons have a neutral zone are in Meyer movies, right? And Meyer probably knew it better than Nimoy because he had just watched all of the episodes and was mostly taking Carol Marcus from The Deadly Years.

 

Carol Marcus is not in “The Deadly Years.” Janet Wallace is the character in that episode. And if Meyers had watched the episodes then he should have known there was no Klingon Neutral Zone.

 

I recall back in the day there was a fanon explanation that being attacked by Klingons within the Romulan Neutral Zone was supposed to be one of the disorienting aspects of the test.

 

The disorienting aspect of the test was that Kobayashi Maru was all a trap. There was no ship to be rescued. It was an enemy ploy. (Note how Uhura "suddenly" lost all communication when the enemy ships appeared, and how 3 cruisers happened to be right there.) That's why Kirk's ability to rescue a non-existent ship was such a surprise. The instructors probably needed a stiff drink after that one. A real Hornblower.

 

No. But Marcus is Wallace in nearly all but name. And all of the details of the Neutral Zone that we get match with Deadly Years. And Meyer (and others?) have said that Meyer watched all the episodes and I don't have cause to disbelieve him,

I'm not giving Meyer credit for this (or taking away) but I wonder if those ships were ever wrtten as Romulan? Until someone pointed out or Meyer realized that "We're using Klingon footage from TMP as a cost cutting measure and even though it makes sense for those to be Romulans we're asking the audience to not only know who the Romulans are but that they fly the same ships we saw in the last movie." I'm sure from a continuity point he didn't give a rat's. But it's like he put "In the 23rd Century" at the start because he said his dad wouldn't know that. At the very least he had a really good feel for "Not every butt in the seats has memorized 78 episodes of this TV show."

Did Hornblower ever cheat? His own side, anyway? (Been a long time since I read the books.)

 

Well, he greatly underestimated fans.