^I tend to imagine Bruce Greenwood when I read Pike stories these days, but otherwise I still envision the TOS cast. Still, when I look at Pine and Quinto, I have no trouble seeing them as Kirk and Spock.
Into Darkness and the novelverse [SPOILERS]
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
- Start date
It says a lot for that happen, considering Bruce Greenwood's limited time in the role. I really wish we could get some Greenwood!Pike novels or a game, but we'll be lucky if we get a oneshot comic.
Well, as of now, he's played Pike in twice as many productions as Jeffrey Hunter did. Though his combined screentime in the role is probably somewhat less.
Did anybody notice the similarities of the film with the DS9 novel Abyss?. In Abyss, Section 31 recruit Locken (who is genetically engineered) but he turns against them.
^Seems like a natural thing for S31 to do in either timeline, since they're out for any advantage and don't care too much about laws and ethics. It's a better resonance between timelines than some of the, err, more familiar moments in the film's third act.
There were similarities with the novel Dreadnought as well, but all coincidental I'm sure...
At this point, so many different Star Trek stories have been told that just about any story is likely to bear some similarity to a previous Trek story.
^The issue isn't whether the technology exists at all, it's whether the Federation has it in a usable form.
How about the TMP "Dick Tracy" communicators. There was that one scene where Uhura and Chekov are on Kirk's wall screen, but I seem to remember Kirk and Decker using their communicators to talk to the bridge and other officers.
But I also found that the movie really drew heavily on Diane Carey's "Dreadnought!" Novel.
Plus with Admiral Marcus, because he was played by the same actor who played the Terra Prime leader, I wonder if the two characters are related (imagine, David Marcus' great-great-grandfather was the leader of Terra Prime).
I definitely got that vibe as well. I wonder if one or more of the writers have read the novel?
Since he's from India (and played by a Spanish-Mexican) didn't Khan always have a Caucasian appearance?
Cute, but I still would have preferred a person of color or at least a person with darker skin. I thought Cumberbatch did solid in the acting department, but he wasn't Khan to me, in appearance or attitude.
All that being said, this debate about Khan is just one example of how I feel Into Darkness falls short as a film. It's relies too much on fans to fill in the blanks. Granted it's something many of us love to do, but it's a sign that the film has problems standing on its own without that assist.
There are debates raging about Khan's blood or why they couldn't use another person in one of the canisters to save Kirk, why was Admiral Marcus so open about Section 31, was it or was it not Praxis, Carol Marcus's British accent, etc. I wish some of this stuff had been explained or explained more thoroughly in the film and not left up for people to speculate. Believe me even if it had been explained I'm sure we would've come up with something to nitpick. But the things I listed above I don't think are nitpicks, I think they are things that distract from the film and the story they are trying to tell. And many of them could've been solved with a bit of dialogue.
Right on the tail of the Boston Marathon bombing? Nah, that would have been box office suicide.
You wanna take away fannish speculation?
That's our whole reason for going to "Star Trek" movies!
True, but JJ's stuff all seems to be like that - the first film at first seemed full of plot holes to me but with the exception of a couple of very large coincidences, it does hang together with a bit of thought.
As long as it doesn't ruin the flow of the movie, I just don't think that it matters to the vast majority of the cinema going public...
MASSIVE SPOILERS, m'kay? Watch the movie first. Alrighty then...
Some random thoughts about the new movie and how it may or may not affect the novelverse. Feel free to add your own. Should the novels be influenced by the new movie? Or would you prefer it be ignored althogether?
-Transwarp beaming (a technology from the primeverse's 2387) can teleport a person from Earth all the way to Kronos and possibly further, although as we saw in the last movie, not without risk. This has the potential to hugely affect the novelverse. At the very least, it means Scotty could rematerialize just about anywhere after beaming off the exploding USS Challenger in Indistinguishable From Magic. If it's ignored it would be a shame, IMO.
-23rd century Earth! I'd buy a book that has Spock stuck in ground traffic on his way to a lecture at Starfleet Academy. It's not actually much different to the 23rd century Earth described in Star Trek Academy: Collision Course. More future-Earth based Treks, please!
-We saw more of Kronos, although it appeared to be undergoing a post-Praxis apocalypse. They certainly build big in Martok's hometown! And we saw a few D-4 Birds of Prey.
-In the film, communication throughout Federation space was instantaneous. Kirk phones Scotty (in a club in San Francisco) from the Klingon border. Since the novelverse is still going with the idea that space is vast and messages can take awhile to get from A to B, I expect this to be ignored.
-Ditto the speed-of-plot travel around the galaxy. The novelverse has Vesta-class ships for that!
-Section 31 seems to have taken on a far greater role following the Narada's arrival. They had a giant weapons R&D facility under the Kelvin memorial archive in London and along with Starfleet built a kilometer-and-a-half long deathship in orbit of Jupiter. Most likely totally irrelevant to the novelverse, unless Alex Marcus and the lower-key S31-prime crop up in a 23rd century novel.
-It's worth pointing out that according to DC comics' "The Star Crossed" Carol Marcus served in Starfleet for a few years.
-The movie seems to confirm a branching timeline in 2233. Care was taken to keep Khan's backstory consistent with canon (ethnicity aside, which was already wonky after Wrath of Khan), and there were models of the Phoenix, Ringship Enterprise, NX-Alpha and Enterprise NX-01 on a desk in Admiral Marcus' office.
-Spock's mention that Khan's goals included "the extermination of all those not considered superior" (or words to that effect) sounded like a reference to Khan's plan to use the modified strep-A to exterminate all regular humans in Greg Cox's The Eugenics Wars, Volume Two.
Anything else that may be of relevance to the novels?
The Novels should ignore the whole thing. That's what I'm doing
Roberto Orci's explanation over on TrekMovie is the same one I pretty much intuited: that McCoy only knew for sure that Khan's blood had the regenerative power, and had no basis to assume that the others' would as well. I mean, since they are genetically engineered, it's possible that they could have various different genetic enhancements rather than all being the same. McCoy would've been a pretty inept scientist to speculate beyond the evidence like that.
He intended to sacrifice Kirk to the Klingons to start a war, so he probably didn't expect Kirk to survive to pass on the information anyway.
Easy enough to surmise that the Klingons accelerated their fleet building and energy production in response to the Narada's attack (one or both), leading Praxis to blow up sooner.
The easiest of all to explain: She was just raised in England in this timeline. Orci has confirmed that as well (specifically, she was raised in London).
But to new viewers, these details wouldn't have meant anything. New or casual viewers wouldn't have had any reason to be puzzled about Section 31 not being more secret or a Klingon moon being shattered in 2259. It would've been a distraction from the story to stop and say "Hey, Trek fans, here's why this is different from what it was before."
Sure, a daughter having a different accent from her father could seem like something in need of an explanation, but it's pretty easy to deduce just from what we know: the father worked with a secret branch of his organization that had a facility in London, so that probably means he spent much of his career there and raised his daughter there. Children having different accents from their parents because of where they were raised is a common enough phenomenon in real life that it doesn't really require dialogue to explain. (In fact, they actually filmed a scene where Carol explained she was raised in London, but cut it because it was nonessential and got in the way of the pacing.)
Ohh, they're definitely nitpicks. Heck, even I almost missed the glimpse of Praxis, since it was so insignificant to the story, just a bit of space scenery. The only one of the above questions that's more than a trivial detail is the one about Khan's blood. That could've used another line to make it clearer.
Huh? First off, they didn't know that bombing would happen when they cast the role last year. And second, the suspected bombers were of Chechen and Avar parentage -- Caucasians in the most literal geographical sense, from the region of the Caucasus Mountains. They're as light-skinned as you or I am. Also they're Muslims, and though some people mistakenly think that Sikhism is an offshoot of Islam, it's actually a distinct faith.
^Honestly I'm not sure. I'd have to see the movie again.
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