Just ReWatched Generations and this bugged me...

Whilst watching the closing fight scenes towards the end of the movie, I noticed something dumb.

Once the main bridge had been shot in two, the 'control panel' was on the other side, and the missile launch pad hidden from view. As the Nexus was coming over the top of the mountain, what was the need for Kirk and Picard to want to bother getting the control panel?

Soran was not in sight, the panel was on the other side of the bridge, and as Kirk found out, there would be no way that Soran could have got the control switch, rematerialised the missile, got off the falling bridge, gone round to the missile, gone past Picard and Kirk and fired it into space in the time available and without the pair of them stopping him.

My point is that I hate Kirk's death full stop, but could accept it if all of the actions lead on from each other for a reason. In this case, he jumped for that switch for no reason, as long as the missile was 'invisible' there is no danger, hence Kirk's death is pointless.

Anyone else spot this or any other stupid oversights from the writers?

 

Sorry mods, you will want to move this to The Movies forum, sorry for misplaced thread!

 

Aside from the whole dumb movie?

You know, like, if you can step out of the nexus at any point in time, why not cause Soran's mother to have a miscarriage? The end.

 

Or that the Enterprise got taken out by a 20-year-old Bird of Prey!!!

 

But then Soran would have never been there to cause you to enter the nexus to do that...

It's one of those headaches when dealing with time travel.

 

Aside from the many errors, oversights, and headaches caused by the writers in this movie... I believe your argument is based on a false assumption.

Based on my understanding, or at least my interpretation. Soran didnt need the control pad, he has already set his plan in motion, by setting the missile on a timer and cloaking it. Once he did that he was done, and only need to keep the Captains from preventing it from go off.

Thats why he shot at Kirk as he was making his way across the bridge to get to the control pad that would have decloaked the missile. Soran didnt care about the control pad anymore, he just didnt want the captains to get. And the reason he ran to the missile after it had decloaked was to make sure picard hadnt done anything.

I base this on the fact that if Soran did indeed still need the control pad he wouldnt have shot at/destroyed the bridge while the pad was on it. And on the belief that it didnt appear that Picard did anything else to the missile beside lock the clamps inplace preventing the missile from leaving when it was fired.

 

Indeed. Being cloaked was apparently the ideal state for the launch pad, and would in no way have interfered with the automated launch.

One just wonders if the cloak only hid the pad (as out heroes rather baselessly assumed) or perhaps would have hidden the rocket in flight as well - in which case Worf would have had absolutely no hope of shooting it down even in the best case scenario!

Timo Saloniemi

 

I doubt it, unless the probe had a separate cloak of its own but that really seems impractical and cloaking devices seem to be fairly large from what we've seen of them and I doubt Soran would have worried about that very much. I'm sure he knew the odds of shooting the probe down as well as Worf did when he calculated them.

 

Yes, I agree. We were clearly shown that the missile was on a timed countdown. The only reason Soran cloaked the missile was to prevent Picard (and subsequently Kirk) from being able to shut down the preprogrammed launch -- since he couldn't operate a control panel he couldn't see. If anything, destroying the remote control was in Soran's best interests.

There is one stupid thing about this scene, but it's not that. It's the fact that the characters instantaneously see the sun go out just seconds after the missile's launched -- even though it should take several minutes for the light to travel that distance. (It takes an average of 8.3 minutes for light to get from the Sun to Earth, and since this was an Earthlike planet around a yellow star, it would've had to be a similar distance away.) But then, there's a similar problem with the whole premise, namely that the supernovae have an instantaneous gravitational effect on things light-years away, even though gravity only propagates at the speed of light.

 

If memory serves, it is accurate though with what you would see. I'm sure that the travel time would have just been cut out for dramatic purposes and that it just skipped ahead a few minutes (depending on exactly how far Veridian III was from the sun) and went straight to the explosion cause standing around waiting for the explosion to happen would have really been quite boring.

But then, you probably already knew that.

 

Indeed. And what would you expect from two elderly men who had just finished a physically demanding yet inconclusive fight and were quite winded? One of them had just reached the goal of his entire life (or what had been his goal for some 80 years, at least) and only needed to stand on a platform and wait. Another had failed in his attempt to save half a billion people. Neither of the two would be inclined to do much else besides stand, breathe heavily, and wait, for those 5-10 minutes it would take for the darkness to catch up with them....

It's perfectly possible to assume that those boring minutes were indeed cut!

Timo Saloniemi

 

Hard to believe, though, that Picard wouldn't have made some attempt to find a self-destruct control for the missile. Unless we assume the missile made a warp jump to get to the sun in seconds, rather than taking minutes or hours to get there at sublight.

 

What gets me about Generation is that after Soran has won and has made it back into the nexus, Picard can now somehow change all this and reset everything and go against Soran's wishes while he is actually in the Nexus.

Strange one that one, still with Generations your better just grabbing a big bag of popcorn and switching off, save all those headaches...

 

Not strange, just ironic. Soran intended to enter the Nexus alone. The fact that Picard was in position to get swept into it as well was a snag in Soran's plans, one that proved fatal to them.

 

But if the nexus can be anything you want it to be how can it be for Picard but not for Soran, what gives Picard the ability to reset what Soran has already done, because Soran is already in the nexus's so how can Picards wishes to reset everything supersede Sorans wishes to be in the Nexus...

 

The movie doens't make that claim at all, Data said that the ribbon passes close to Veridan III so it must've been in the same system when the rocket went off destroying the Amargosa star only ensure that the ribbon would enter the system close enough to Veridan III. I'm sure that Soran had been charting the gravitational forces needed to bring the ribbon to a planet where he could just step into it.

 

You're talking about two different things. Within the Nexus, you can create whatever illusory reality you want to perceive. But what Picard and Kirk did was to actually leave the Nexus into actual reality, just at an earlier time. Soran would've been lost in his own subjective reality and would've been unaware of the presence of Picard and Kirk, so he would've had no idea they were plotting to leave the Nexus and stop him.

 

How does causing a supernova change the gravity from the star appreciably? Soran didn't "delete" the star, he just caused it to collapse (and the outer layers to expand at a sublight velocity).