It's not difficult to rationalize at all. I'd say more, because it's bloody obvious when you think about it, but that's story idea territory, y'know?
Is the Movie Adaption Out Yet
- Thread starter Dave Scarpa
- Start date
I'd say he would have said that hadn't Sarek been on the bridge to call Spock back.
I absolutely agree here with William Leisner. The whole thing could have been prevented had they just added a small "4 years later" sign during that last promotion scene (and made small rewrites when Spock applied for 1st officer). That would also have explained why Pike's in a wheelchair (he left the Narada walking, albeit with assistance, after all).
A couple of questions about the novelization to help me decide whether to buy it or not:
Is there any explanation for Spock's... well, let's call it rather strange decision to throw Kirk out an airlock? Above that "he needed to learn a lesson"-thing from the film? That lapse in judgment on Spock's side seriously annoyed me - and the circumstances of his mother's loss don't explain that.
Or why Delta Vega, which is said to be on the edge of the galaxy (Where no man has gone before), is relatively close to Vulcan? Enterprise wasn't yet at warp when Kirk got thrown out...
And all that Rura Penthe-stuff... was this anywhere mentioned in the movie (and expanded on in the book)? I've only seen it once yet, but all I can remember was Nero's attack on those 47 Klingon ships, but nothing about Nero (or Spock Prime) being on Rura Penthe.
Yes, there's an explanation given, and it worked for me.
Not so much on this, but I believe it's been stated by the film's creators that they just wanted to give the planet a familiar name.
This isn't included in the novelization.
Erm... okay... of all the dozens of planets, Delta Vega's the one planet they thought of?
So, this was addressed in that/those Countdown-comic(s) - are there more than one? Well, if so, I'll just have to hope it gets explained somewhere else since I absolutely hate comics...
Yes, he could barely walk, but moving around like that probably worsened the neurological damage the Centaurian slug had caused to his spinal column. Hence the wheelchair.
The novel doesn't address it, although it does say that Delta Vega is in a different system from Vulcan and that the Enterprise briefly dropped out of warp to eject Kirk.
Spock Prime was never on Rura Penthe. He didn't arrive in the 23rd century until just after Nero's escape from RP. Indeed, that was implicitly what prompted Nero's escape: because the time of Spock's arrival was nearing. (That was the gist of his "The wait is over" line that was in all the trailers but cut from the film.)
It was the name of a planet in the second pilot, the episode that introduced Kirk for the first time. They wanted to pay homage to Trek's beginnings.
And since Delta Vega is hardly a legitimate Bayer designation, I don't see why there couldn't be more than one planet with that name.
Countdown takes place entirely in the 24th century, ending with Nero and Spock Prime falling down the rabbit hole. Nero's experiences between the Kelvin incident and the main body of the film will be told in an upcoming IDW miniseries called Nero.
That's one explanation, and I figured something like that from Nero's "introduction" of those slugs. But then I thought simply judging from the name that that was supposed to be the same kind of "slug"/bug/whatever Chekov and the Reliant's captain were submitted to by Khan... which would rather serve his purpose of getting those codes from Pike (which he clearly did). But that kind of bug didn't cause any paralysis - and Chekov was under its influence longer, I suppose, than Pike.
So, if it's just a second kind of nasty Centaurian slug, I can live with that... but then again, it's like the thing with the name Delta Vega. Nods to continuity/inside knowledge is all good, but it should come without having to twist everything around that it finally fits together.
Edit after looking it up again because those bugs wouldn't leave me in peace - woops, my mistake for mixing up planets and slugs and infering continuity-nods where there're none. Note to self: Ceti isn't the same as Centauri...
Again, all well and good - but that's a bit too much twisting around for my taste.
Okay - I never saw any of the trailers.
Perhaps then, Nero will become more than a one-dimensional bad guy. That "Hi Christopher"-line was majorly cringeworthy. Perhaps many of his scenes which were supposed to shed some light on him and make the crowd more sympathetic towards his pain were edited out (I mean, TPTB can't expect their audience to have read Countdown) - but I couldn't feel *anything* for him.
Last edited:
Hm. To me, that line helped give him dimension. It was exactly the opposite of what a cliched one-dimensional evil enemy would say. Instead of an operatic villain making grandiose pronouncements, he was just a blue-collar guy who was really pissed off about what happened to his wife and kid and his whole planet. I found it refreshing. It humanized him, if you'll pardon the expression.
Yeah, definitely. I've seen so many people complaining about that, and it just confuses me because that was far and away my favorite moment of the character's.
I'm with you guys here. I thought it was kinda weird at first, but then I realized that he was baisically just some guy, and not a big badass military commander like most Trek villains we're used to. In fact, that was one of the few things that I thought made him unique.
Out of all the ways they could have used real naval tradition, I think I would rather have had them use a real promotion scheme. Not fresh-faced Cadet straight to Captain.
Remember what I said about an Annapolis graduate going straight to command of an aircraft carrier? You wouldn't think that was realistic, would you? Or a West Point grad being immediately promoted to General? Not so realistic there either, is it?
Don't tell me that Kirk is the only officer left in Starfleet who is qualified. Starfleet has thousands upon thousands of officers. Only a fraction thereof were killed. There's got to be dozens if not hundreds of viable candidates.
Perhaps. But there's always hope of a retcon.
At the very end, I felt sorry for Nero. The music for that scene was just fantastic, and the expression of defeat and sorrow on his face before he closed his eyes at the end was really something to tug at the heartstrings.
He may have been a bastard who got carried away with his revenge, but he had been a regular Joe who just wanted to provide for the woman he loved and the child that they would have had. Seems to me he just flipped out.
He may have been a bastard who got carried away with his revenge, but he had been a regular Joe who just wanted to provide for the woman he loved and the child that they would have had. Seems to me he just flipped out.
I didn't expect him to make any grand speeches about the rightousness of what he's doing but I kept asking myself why make that kind of greeting with that aloof casual attitude - it just "hangs" there without any context and made Nero look even more unhinged. I think I'd have less problems with such a sentence had it been directed at Kirk or nuSpock who were after all the ones he was waiting for (especially of course Spock).
But then again, that wasn't the only line that didn't quite work for me. Another was Spock's famous "I have been..." I knew it was coming, but then it was delivered as some sort of BTW that I thought, "Erm, that was it?". Perhaps Spock Prime should have said that as good-bye when he beamed Kirk and Scotty to the Enterprise, not as some casual introduction to a person who'd think Spock's nuts.
I have not read the novel, but it is the same as the movie where Kirk is promnoted to Captain in 2258?
^Yes.
From Memory Alpha, Roberto Orci is reported to have said: "We moved the planet to suit our purposes. The familiarity of the name seemed more important as an Easter egg, than a new name with no importance."
I'd just take it as an homage to "Where No Man Has Gone Before" (where Spock also wanted someone marooned on a planet called Delta Vega) and leave it at that.
That was one of the best lines in the whole film. The audiences I saw loved that line, and it was the only time Nero really showed any personality beyond "Must kill for revenge."
No. But, to be fair, I don't think there's ever been a United States Naval Academy cadet who managed to nearly single-handedly save Washington, D.C., from complete destruction at the hands of the captain of a rogue vessel with a nuclear warhead (which would be the real-world equivalent of a Starfleet Academy cadet stopping an alien ship from destroying the Federation capital planet).
He just met his best friend who has been dead for sixteen years (and this after having previously thought Kirk was dead for sixty-eight years). He was obviously more concerned with taking the opportunity to show his best friend some affection for the first time in eighty-four years than he was with what people would think of him.
BTW, has it occurred to anyone that "Delta Vega" might just be the Starfleet designation for T'Khut's moon?
I believe that the novel Spock's World establishes that Vulcan is a mostly-desert world as a result of damage it sustained from a solar flare; am I recalling correctly? Given that, is it not possible that Vulcan is not hot so much because of its placement near the Vulcan star as because of previous environmental damage and geological activity, and that therefore T'Khut's moon could be at least partially glaciated?
