In Star Trek Beyond. Crew Survival

[Timo]

In his pep talk, Kirk appeared to dismiss the advanced hardware of his ship and instead declare his expert crew the unique asset that allowed him to brave the Rubble Nebula. He didn't really explicate Sulu, but we could well read this into those lines.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[David cgc]

More likely the Enterprise was carrying it's full compliment. The Enterprise's survivors could have been spread over a large area of the planet, out of Krall's immediate reach, but also out of Kirk's. When Kirk left in the Franklin, there were likely many Enterprise crew still on the planet.

All indications were that the Swarm grabbed every escape pod (and turbocar) that escaped the ship. The only people who escaped custody were Scotty (who was hidden in a weapon the Swarm was already set to avoid), Spock and McCoy (who were captured, but were able to commandeer the Swarm ship that got them, and Kirk, Chekov, and Kalara, who ejected from the saucer after the Swarm had broken off rather than burn up with the wreckage of the ship (if they'd left a few moments earlier, they would've been grabbed like Sulu).

 

[Tenacity]

So, whatever the Enterprise's compliment was at the beginning of the attack, the relatively small number of Starfleet we saw on the planet were the total number of survivors?

 

[fireproof78]

So, whatever the Enterprise's compliment was at the beginning of the attack, the relatively small number of Starfleet we saw on the planet were the total number of survivors?

I doubt it.

 

[Tenacity]

^ So do I.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Instead they beamed up the elder council (at least those who didn't get crushed by giant statues), and basically flipped everyone else off....

Probably some Vulcan evacuation protocol...they don't have time to argue the morality and ethics of it all. (Though if this were a TOS episode and you subbed out the Vulcans with an alien of the week...time would magically slow down to allow them to do so. Or they'd take precious time they didn't really have.)

 

[Timo]

Fleeing from Vulcan ought to have been impossible till the very last moment...

1) When Nero was drilling, he couldn't let any ships take off lest they destroy his vulnerable drill.
2) Even before that, he could not let anybody fly outside the range of his jamming and issue a genuine call for help.
3) Leaving Vulcan should not occur to the Vulcans anyway - how could they know they were in danger, with Nero jamming the comms, and with the "seismic disturbances" almost unnoticeable by local standards?

The initial call for help was obviously faked by Nero, to lure in the ships that defended Earth. When the call went out, there were no seismic disturbances yet, as Nero had not started drilling yet.

We don't know how Nero prevented Vulcan ships from flying. He had little in the way of weapons, and he was anchored low on one side of the planet, with the horizons stopping him from affecting the rest of the planet much (but not hindering Vulcans in any way). Yet somehow Nero succeeded...

Evacuation could only begin right around the time Spock saved the Elders. At that point, Nero had stopped jamming, and had apparently fled altogether. But now Spock was anchored over one spot of the planet - the hind end of nowhere where the Elders hid (close to the drilling site and the Sarek mansion, since Amanda was there, too). He could do little but tell the rest of the Vulcans to evacuate themselves.

Which they probably did, to the best of their ability. Surely they had more ships and transporters than Spock did! But getting them to believe leaving was a good idea would take time...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[lawman]

You are applying much more logic to the plot of ST09 than its actual writers ever did...

 

[Timo]

Yet funnily we end up in the same spot. Such as finding it plausible that few Vulcans survived, or that the heroes were not to blame...

It's not a bad movie. And not particularly illogical or contradictory or even at odds with preceding Star Trek, despite possible appearances. Nor is Beyond, amazingly enough. (Now if we could just shed this Curse of Even-Numbered Movies...)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[David cgc]

It's not a bad movie. And not particularly illogical or contradictory or even at odds with preceding Star Trek, despite possible appearances. Nor is Beyond, amazingly enough. (Now if we could just shed this Curse of Even-Numbered Movies...)

There is the theory that Galaxy Quest "counted" for the purposes of the vengeful spirit that laid this curse upon the Star Trek franchise, so Nemesis was actually the eleventh movie, and so on from there.

 

[Rahul]

Fleeing from Vulcan ought to have been impossible till the very last moment...

1) When Nero was drilling, he couldn't let any ships take off lest they destroy his vulnerable drill.
2) Even before that, he could not let anybody fly outside the range of his jamming and issue a genuine call for help.
3) Leaving Vulcan should not occur to the Vulcans anyway - how could they know they were in danger, with Nero jamming the comms, and with the "seismic disturbances" almost unnoticeable by local standards?

The initial call for help was obviously faked by Nero, to lure in the ships that defended Earth. When the call went out, there were no seismic disturbances yet, as Nero had not started drilling yet.

We don't know how Nero prevented Vulcan ships from flying. He had little in the way of weapons, and he was anchored low on one side of the planet, with the horizons stopping him from affecting the rest of the planet much (but not hindering Vulcans in any way). Yet somehow Nero succeeded...

Evacuation could only begin right around the time Spock saved the Elders. At that point, Nero had stopped jamming, and had apparently fled altogether. But now Spock was anchored over one spot of the planet - the hind end of nowhere where the Elders hid (close to the drilling site and the Sarek mansion, since Amanda was there, too). He could do little but tell the rest of the Vulcans to evacuate themselves.

Which they probably did, to the best of their ability. Surely they had more ships and transporters than Spock did! But getting them to believe leaving was a good idea would take time...

Timo Saloniemi

Except that the Enterprise was near-by the whole time, and had the ability to beam people aboard up until the moment the planet was completely swallowed by the black hole (though Chekhov DID have problems accounting for the gravitational waves while beaming up Kirk and Sulu).

In fact, when I first saw the movie in the cinema, I actually assumed the ship was chock-full with Vulcans during the Spock-Sarek scene and the finale, and I just missed it because it was probably just a small sentence passed by.

Imagine my surprise, when I rewatched it and realised - no. They actually didn't save anybody apart from the council. They just looked down from orbit, all their ressources at hand. And didn't even try to save some civilians. They just beamed up their own people, and called it a day. I was pretty...grumpy about that. It didn't really fit wit the rest of the tone of the movie.

But I think it was generally a bad idea to have such a fun, playfull movie, and then suddenly include the holocaust of an entire species, just to treat is a regular plot point, give Spock and Uhura a reason to rekindle, and then move on and never, ever show any real-world consequences such a tragedy would have. It's like if Indiana Jones suddenly drove through Auschwitz, only for the rest of the movie to continue as if that never happened. Yeah, theoretically that happened at the same time. But it would tonally be waaay of for that kind of movie.

If they left the destruction of Vulcan out of it, I would have liked ST09 much more as a movie. Not just because of canon issues (and the whole split timeline debacle). But I generally don't like graticious mass deaths without consequences in my funny entertaining movies. I have the same problem with many modern superhero movies.

 

[Timo]

As regards the range of options open to Spock at that time, the writers have established a set of limitations for the transporter - largely unwittingly, through omissions, but still in a consistent manner.

A key feature of the Federation transporter, preserved in Abramsverse, is getting blocked by things between A and B. Sheer bedrock is one of those things - even without unobtainium in it, between two kilometers of it (TNG "Bloodlines") and a couple of hundred ("Return to Tomorrow") prevents transporting. This means the transporter is blocked by the horizon.

How far the horizon is depends on how high the starship hovers ("orbits", in the aeroplane sense) above the spot, then. Nero was practically kissing the surface. Pike parked his starship in a spot to match. And that spot was apparently in the middle of nowhere in Vulcan terms, so that no small craft would ascend to challenge Nero's extremely vulnerable drill - nicely befitting the idea of Sarek's mansion being where the local weirdos with their ancient fighting arenas hide from the reasonable folks, and where a rebellious kid can take a midnight walk across the most desolate desert of the planet.

Making the transporter reach other Vulcans once Nero's drill stopped jamming things would require Spock to raise the ship to a higher position, then (and he could never hope to reach most of the globe anyway, not being at liberty to leave the area of the Sarek mansion, aka the Doomsday Bunker of the Elders as per the presence of Sarek and Amanda there).

It's like if Indiana Jones suddenly drove through Auschwitz, only for the rest of the movie to continue as if that never happened. Yeah, theoretically that happened at the same time. But it would tonally be waaay of for that kind of movie.

Hmm. To nitpick, at the time the Joneses were taking their motorbike tour over the alps and getting Hitler's autograph, the Nazis were a bunch of goose-stepping clowns whose greatest claim to atrocity was their dress sense. And this no doubt was not by accident: the makers of the movie would be thinking in the very terms of harmless youthful fun in the long summers before the one during which everybody had to grow up.

This doesn't work in the Trek context, where we are deprived of the knowledge that things will get much worse in the immediate future anyway and the loss of a few zillion is peanuts. Doubly so in the Abramsverse, where any knowledge of the fictional future would be negated by the changing of timelines! But we do know the Trek universe in every timeline is a dark place, where entire star systems can wink out at random and the death of billions is but a setup for forty-five minutes or so of suspense, with no particular consequences. The loss of Vulcan doesn't appear much different from the loss of, say, Maluria... Except for one of the regulars being a Vulcan but none being Malurian,

Timo Saloniemi

 

[fireproof78]

Except that the Enterprise was near-by the whole time, and had the ability to beam people aboard up until the moment the planet was completely swallowed by the black hole (though Chekhov DID have problems accounting for the gravitational waves while beaming up Kirk and Sulu).

In fact, when I first saw the movie in the cinema, I actually assumed the ship was chock-full with Vulcans during the Spock-Sarek scene and the finale, and I just missed it because it was probably just a small sentence passed by.

Imagine my surprise, when I rewatched it and realised - no. They actually didn't save anybody apart from the council. They just looked down from orbit, all their ressources at hand. And didn't even try to save some civilians. They just beamed up their own people, and called it a day. I was pretty...grumpy about that. It didn't really fit wit the rest of the tone of the movie.

But I think it was generally a bad idea to have such a fun, playfull movie, and then suddenly include the holocaust of an entire species, just to treat is a regular plot point, give Spock and Uhura a reason to rekindle, and then move on and never, ever show any real-world consequences such a tragedy would have. It's like if Indiana Jones suddenly drove through Auschwitz, only for the rest of the movie to continue as if that never happened. Yeah, theoretically that happened at the same time. But it would tonally be waaay of for that kind of movie.

If they left the destruction of Vulcan out of it, I would have liked ST09 much more as a movie. Not just because of canon issues (and the whole split timeline debacle). But I generally don't like graticious mass deaths without consequences in my funny entertaining movies. I have the same problem with many modern superhero movies.

And how many people were killed by Nomad again? Living largely ignorant of the consequences has been a staple of Trek for some time.

 

[Rahul]

And how many people were killed by Nomad again? Living largely ignorant of the consequences has been a staple of Trek for some time.

Star Trek has more than 700 hours of television. You will find a negative example for everything.
That doesn't mean the movies aren't beholden to a different standard. Just because Star Trek used bad science in an episode of Voyager once, doesn't mean I'll excuse the continued use of bad science in modern movies.

"Nomad" is clearly an example of early installment weirdness, where they were still figuring out the scope of the Star Trek universe. Annhilation of entire planets (and, say, using Warp to travel outside the galaxy or back in time) became used much more sparingly later on.

Just because an episode from the 60's was jovial about a thing that deserved more gravitas is not an excuse to repeat this mistake ad nauseum. It's purely "whataboutism".

 

[fireproof78]

Star Trek has more than 700 hours of television. You will find a negative example for everything.
That doesn't mean the movies aren't beholden to a different standard. Just because Star Trek used bad science in an episode of Voyager once, doesn't mean I'll excuse the continued use of bad science in modern movies.

"Nomad" is clearly an example of early installment weirdness, where they were still figuring out the scope of the Star Trek universe. Annhilation of entire planets (and, say, using Warp to travel outside the galaxy or back in time) became used much more sparingly later on.

Just because an episode from the 60's was jovial about a thing that deserved more gravitas is not an excuse to repeat this mistake ad nauseum. It's purely "whataboutism".

Not so much as an excuse as an awareness that this thing has been a part of Star Trek, and, largely, contemporary cinema as well. l'm not trying to excuse it but its something that I see as being a part of the tapestry a little bit.