Kirk drift—misremembering a character…

[blssdwlf]

No, Scotty disabled a ship of the line [Excelsior], reducing it's effective and Starfleet's combat effectiveness.

KIRK: The Excelsior, ready for trial runs.​

Scotty did not reduce Starfleet's combat effectiveness as the Excelsior was not in service.

Spoiler: SNW Spoiler

And if Starfleet was canning everyone who disobeyed a direct order, Spock would be out already in S2E1 by your standards. So TOS and SNW apparently has that in common

 

[fireproof78]

KIRK: The Excelsior, ready for trial runs.​

Scotty did not reduce Starfleet's combat effectiveness as the Excelsior was not in service.

Spoiler: SNW Spoiler

And if Starfleet was canning everyone who disobeyed a direct order, Spock would be out already in S2E1 by your standards. So TOS and SNW apparently has that in common

Fair point.

As to the spoilers, yes I am aware and yes it's is quite annoying.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

What about McCoy's grumpiness? He can also be charming, but it seems like his bad mood and sarcasm are his most well-known traits.

 

[Warped9]

What about McCoy's grumpiness? He can also be charming, but it seems like his bad mood and sarcasm are his most well-known traits.

McCoy was not always grumpy, but that was drifted into his default demeanor.

 

[Batai]

Think of all the times Kirk was possessed or impersonated by insane people in TOS, including Janice Lester, "Lord" Garth, and his own primitive animal half. Or putting on an act with Spock to deceive the Romulans. Much of Kirk's persona is misremembered today because of a single image of his panic-stricken face as Dr. Lester loses her battle to stay in his body.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I suppose between space, Kirk's (foolhardy?) risk taking, and Spock's infuriating logic, McCoy had plenty to complain about.

 

[Warped9]

On the issue of risk. TMP illustrated the difference between Kirk and a more cautious approach as exampled by Decker. Kirk understood they were running against the clock wherein his experience and intuition led him to decisions that moved them forward to understand what they were dealing with and its resolution. Decker holding back until further information was had wasn’t really an option. They couldn’t just wait for something to reveal itself—they had to be proactive.

This is also where Kirk’s earlier intuition, that he was the better candidate than Decker for the task at hand, and despite Kirk’s self-serving agenda, came into play. When it came down to it Kirk was right on all counts.

TMP actually made a creatively interesting choice, but one that irked many fans. It put TOS’ lead characters into a situation fans did not foresee—promoted and planet bound—and then putting them back to what we had hoped to see from the beginning. A big problem, though, is the rationale given in the TMP novelization for how the characters end up where they are is not present in the film—understandably because it would have slowed the beginning of the movie. That said an alternative approach could have been to include a few lines somewhere in the film (between Kirk and McCoy) giving us some background on how the characters got to where they were at the beginning of the film.

 

[fireproof78]

Kirk as mission commander and flag officer would serve the same purpose. No need for Decker drama.

 

[Warped9]

Kirk as mission commander and flag officer would serve the same purpose. No meed for Decker drama.

Starfleet evidently doesn’t run like contemporary navies despite the similarities.

Fans wanted to see Kirk as Captain again, not as an advisor. Also competing opinions on what action to take could be a potentially problematic distraction?

But Robert Wise could have infused more Kirk/Decker drama similar to what was done in Run Silent, Run Deep, the film Wise directed twenty years earlier.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Think of all the times Kirk was possessed or impersonated by insane people in TOS, including Janice Lester, "Lord" Garth, and his own primitive animal half. Or putting on an act with Spock to deceive the Romulans. Much of Kirk's persona is misremembered today because of a single image of his panic-stricken face as Dr. Lester loses her battle to stay in his body.

Also, neighing Kirk in "Plato's Stepchildren."

 

[Greg Cox]

Kirk as mission commander and flag officer would serve the same purpose. No meed for Decker drama.

But . . . but that movie needed more drama, not less.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

But . . . but that movie needed more drama, not less.

I think TMP needed the Kirk and Spock we remembered, and sooner than the end of the film. Grumpy Spock doesn't quite work.

And for Kirk, it's not just that the script undermined his heroic essence with the bumbling, it's that Shatner forgot how to play the guy. TV Kirk was a soldier, he had a smooth, self-assured strength about him. There was a sense of military discipline in his body language.

But for TMP, Shatner brought in some effete, almost dainty mannerisms like an affluent Canadian living in Malibu. He never thought of himself as a character actor, and I think TMP came at a point in his life when Star Trek really needed one.

 

[T'Bonz]

TMP was interesting until the fly-past of the Big-E. After that, meh. Grumpy Spock was just the crap icing on the crap cake.

 

[Warped9]

The problem (for some) with the TMP E reveal is it isn’t relevant anymore—the context is gone and is lost on contemporary viewers.

In 1979 the reveal was a loving salute to the redesigned Enterprise after ten years of reruns. And that unlike most sci-fi then, since and now where sci-fi hardware is treated as disposable the Enterprise was treated much like a character unto itself. All that is long gone—and after numerous films and television series the subsequent versions of the ship were also treated as disposable and easily replaced.

 

[M'Sharak]

In 1979 the reveal was...

... a beautifully-photographed and intentionally-overlong "Oooo, just look at all the detail!" sequence designed to introduce "an almost totally new Enterprise" without mentioning that the bloated "refit" was needed primarily because there was no way they'd ever have been able to make the original design work convincingly on a large screen.

 

[blssdwlf]

... a beautifully-photographed and intentionally-overlong "Oooo, just look at all the detail!" sequence designed to introduce "an almost totally new Enterprise" without mentioning that the bloated "refit" was needed primarily because there was no way they'd ever have been able to make the original design work convincingly on a large screen.

I do wonder if with the current level of VFX and computing power if the original design could work on a large screen...

 

[M'Sharak]

I do wonder if with the current level of VFX and computing power if the original design could work on a large screen...

It would certainly acquire a lot more surface detail -- the huge increase in both resolution and screen size would demand that.

I strongly suspect, though, that even a concerted attempt to adhere as closely as possible to the original design would also involve a substantial amount of modification to render it structurally convincing. What was capable of selling the idea effectively on a 13" or 19" screen at 1960s resolution and broadcast image quality wouldn't for one second pass inspection on theater-sized screens and film-quality picture resolutions.

 

[Warped9]

The TMP refit is no more structurally convincing than the TOS E to earthbound contemporary sensibilities.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

The TMP refit is no more structurally convincing than the TOS E to earthbound contemporary sensibilities.

@M'Sharak's absolutely correct. To have been successful as a motion picture model, it would have been necessary for a TOS Enterprise model to have had detail that was nonexistent on the television models, even on the eleven-footer. Such detail would have counted as an embellishment, even if one preferred to think of it as an interpolation or extrapolation.

But that's not the end of it. For the model to have been considered a cohesive whole, likely the addition of the detail would have suggested, if not necessitated, modifications to the shape of the model, however minor, and it's unreasonable to assume that those modifications would under no circumstances have counted as unnoticeable, especially to the die-hard fan.

It would certainly acquire a lot more surface detail -- the huge increase in both resolution and screen size would demand that.

I strongly suspect, though, that even a concerted attempt to adhere as closely as possible to the original design would also involve a substantial amount of modification to render it structurally convincing. What was capable of selling the idea effectively on a 13" or 19" screen at 1960s resolution and broadcast image quality wouldn't for one second pass inspection on theater-sized screens and film-quality picture resolutions.

 

[Warped9]

@M'Sharak's absolutely correct. To have been successful as a motion picture model, it would have been necessary for a TOS Enterprise model to have had detail that was nonexistent on the television models, even on the eleven-footer. Such detail would have counted as an embellishment, even if one preferred to think of it as an interpolation or extrapolation.

But that's not the end of it. For the model to have been considered a cohesive whole, likely the addition of the detail would have suggested, if not necessitated, modifications to the shape of the model, however minor, and it's unreasonable to assume that those modifications would under no circumstances have counted as unnoticeable, especially to the die-hard fan.

Disagree. The TOS E design could easily have been updated without going to the extremes they did with the refit design.