And I still say that if the dialogue or imagery indicates something that makes no logical sense, it's better to reinterpret it in a way that does rather than be slavishly literal.
Nothing about that statement seems overly dramatic or off kilter to you? Are you really saying that if you don't understand something you see, then you just deny it and imagine something different happened?
More power to you, but there's nothing indicating anything other than what we are plainly being shown, whatever speculation you have is simply a fanboy hand wave.
There's nothing in ST:TMP indicating that the corridor in front of the engine room is anything other than what it appears, but if you compare it to the plans for the ship, that corridor runs several times farther forward than can physically fit inside the ship. The rec room set can't physically fit inside the saucer either. Then there's the TOS shuttlecraft whose roof is substantially higher inside than outside, and the
Delta Flyer which is considerably more spacious inside than outside. So either we assume they have dimensionally transcendental Time Lord technology in Starfleet, or we dismiss the explicit visual evidence and assume it's misleading.
Or what about Flint's mansion looking exactly like the fortress on Rigel VII right down to the landscape and skyscape, or the visible wires controlling the Sylvia and Korob puppets in "Catspaw," or dozens of alien races in TNG using exactly the same shuttlecraft interior or the same blinky-light equipment rented from Modern Props, or the Romulan holoship in ENT being essentially the same design as the "chaotic space" aliens' ship from VGR: "The Fight?" Or what about the uncanny resemblance between Brunt, Weyoun, and Shran, or the uncanny lack of resemblance between Saavik in TWOK and Saavik in TSFS?
In short, there is no shortage of instances in
Star Trek past where it is necessary to take what we're shown figuratively because it can't be literally true. Why is that suddenly being treated as something shocking and unprecedented when applied to this film?
But one more time, What about this scene doesn't make logical sense to you again?
The only way the scene of Spock seeing Vulcan in the sky of Delta Vega, subtending a fairly wide angle, could've occurred literally as shown is if Delta Vega is closer to Vulcan than our own Moon is to the Earth. That's simple geometry. But as Spock told Uhura in "The Man Trap," "Vulcan has no moon." Even if we assume that the images of a huge body in Vulcan's sky in "Yesteryear" and the pre-Director's Edition version of TMP are accurate and are depicting a companion planet (generally called T'Khut or T'Kuht in fandom and tie-ins), those showed a rocky world, in TMP's case a very volcanically active world, not an icy one like this. So either Vulcan had two full-sized companion planets -- which would be an unsustainable configuration -- or Delta Vega is too far from Vulcan for the image we were shown to be literal. It is quite simply an impossibility as shown.
And given that it occurred within a mind meld, we have a perfectly handy explanation: it wasn't what literally happened but a mental interpretation of it. Maybe it was Kirk's mind using a visual metaphor for Spock's psionic experience of Vulcan's destruction, since he has no psionic sense of his own and couldn't possibly experience Spock's perceptions by any means other than analogy.
I do remain curious how a cadet, however awesome, would be given command of the Federation flagship. Even if he had been promoted to Captain in some way during the crisis that had to stick, I still would expect them not to give him the Enterprise.
Christopher, William, other authors - can you think of a way to justify that? If you were to write a book taking place after this, would you just ignore it, or make an attempt to explain how something like that had occurred?
I think it would be a question worth addressing. Let's just say I have some thoughts on the subject.
