Leaving The Captain's Chair: After The Fame

[Bry_Sinclair]

Janeway does have a plethora of questionable decisions

That was more just bad writing and no real sense of character development or joined up thinking across the series. She did still manage to get 150-ish people through the DQ with little support, which is an accomplishment in of itself. She may have flouted Starfleet regs, but under those circumstances then I think it would be understandable--it's not like they became mercenaries or pirates along the way.

 

[Prax]

If the Yamato hadn't shown the number on the hull, then I would've said that it carried both numbers. 1305-E would be the current, while the original registry could show up on Enterprise's screen, but since it was on the hull, that wouldn't make sense.

Then again, there's the strange idea introduced in Peak Performance that what is seen on the viewscreen is not actually a camera feed, but a cgi representation from the computer based on sensor data.

 

[Timo]

What's the difference? Camera feed would be preprocessed anyway, zoomed, brightened or dimmed, extra- and interpolated. Then there'd be overlaid information. Worf's "Romulan Warbird" would be but a different type of overlaid information, is all.

Again, we don't really see what's on the hull of the Yamato when she blows up. We can pretend to see the number (which is different from the one on the monitor), but then we can pretend to see the matte borders, too, even though we're actually supposed to do the exact opposite.

In turn, Riker does see what's on the hull in "Where Silence Has Lease" - he reads it out loud from said hull, and then uses that as evidence that the ship is the Yamato. That is, while we cannot see the registry, the angle of the ship is such that Riker the character should be able to see it; OTOH, it's debatable whether he could see the name, which is on much smaller font and at a shallower angle.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[velour]

I've always loved Kirk's end. His death in GEN had a big impact on me and I thought Shatner played it perfectly. His line "It was...fun" perfectly encapsulates that character and his life. It chokes me up every time.

I have mixed feelings about Kirk's demise in GEN.

I agree that his final words, "It was fun...", reflected the charismatic personality and life of the character. And, at least, it was fitting that Kirk went out heroically.

However, Kirk's simple memorial seemed almost like an afterthought. Kirk was the iconic captain that helped make ST a scifi pop culture phenomenon. As a fan of ST, I thought the character deserved better. Nobody from TOS was there to see him off. Just one solitary person was there, Picard. It was underwhelming.

The only other main TOS character who died onscreen in a ST movie was Spock. When Spock died, Spock got a memorial with pomp and circumstance. Nimoy/Spock even had the honor to voice the concluding, "Space, the final frontier..."

And the irony was that Spock came back to life. He got a big sendoff even though he eventually came back to life. Unless Shatner's Kirk appears in a future ST movie, GEN would be the last time for Shatner's Kirk.

I realize that GEN wasn't a TOS movie; nevertheless, I still think Kirk should have had a more fitting final tribute.

 

[Prax]

I wonder how often ships run into drifting torpedo capsules with dead bodies inside. There must be thousands out there(fictionally speaking.)

 

[Timo]

...Probably not quite as often as the nomads of Sahara trip on the wrought-iron crosses of Christian explorers buried on the spot in that desert?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[1001001]

I have mixed feelings about Kirk's demise in GEN.

I agree that his final words, "It was fun...", reflected the charismatic personality and life of the character. And, at least, it was fitting that Kirk went out heroically.

However, Kirk's simple memorial seemed almost like an afterthought. Kirk was the iconic captain that helped make ST a scifi pop culture phenomenon. As a fan of ST, I thought the character deserved better. Nobody from TOS was there to see him off. Just one solitary person was there, Picard. It was underwhelming.

The only other main TOS character who died onscreen in a ST movie was Spock. When Spock died, Spock got a memorial with pomp and circumstance. Nimoy/Spock even had the honor to voice the concluding, "Space, the final frontier..."

And the irony was that Spock came back to life. He got a big sendoff even though he eventually came back to life. Unless Shatner's Kirk appears in a future ST movie, GEN would be the last time for Shatner's Kirk.

I realize that GEN wasn't a TOS movie; nevertheless, I still think Kirk should have had a more fitting final tribute.

I agree 100%

His death was fine. Actually, it was pretty damn heroic. He gave up eternity in paradise to save 230 million people who will never know he even existed.

But to leave him there under a pile of rocks was bullshit. He should have had the funeral to end all funerals.

 

[Timo]

Kirk ain't under that pile. As edited, he fell down twice the height of that mountain, and then a ton of steel landed upon him. Picard could only barely haul himself halfway up that iron ladder once. There's zero chance he got the corpse to the mountaintop.

It's too small a pile for burial, too. At most, Picard might have hacked off Kirk's head and put that inside the pile.

The only real question here is, did Picard tell anybody about Kirk? His little pile could well go uncommented by the rescue shuttle team. The mess at the root of the mountain, less so. But Picard could tell the shuttle to fly him to his ship ASAP, giving the crew zero chance to scan the area for unexpected corpses. And heck, they'd expect corpses there anyway, as "Where is Soran?" would be their second question after their attempt at "Are you all right, Sir?" got an angry glare for response. That mound of ground meat under the steel? Soran's henchman, Picard shrugs.

By the time the Men in Black came to mop up the sites, all sorts of things could have happened to prevent identification of the late out-of-time star hero. He got ceremonies back in the 2290s already - Picard'd leave it at that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Balok's Decoy]

I agree 100%

His death was fine. Actually, it was pretty damn heroic. He gave up eternity in paradise to save 230 million people who will never know he even existed.

But to leave him there under a pile of rocks was bullshit. He should have had the funeral to end all funerals.

I can see why his burial can feel underwhelming but I saw it as rather beautiful in its simplicity. It's one man honoring a legend. Much more personal and intimate rather than the pomp and circumstance of a funeral at Starfleet, which no doubt happened later, we just didn't see it. I dunno. Kirk had this larger than life career. He was a living legend. And his death and funeral was attended and memorialized by his successor who himself would become a legend. It's kinda poetic.

 

[Prax]

...Probably not quite as often as the nomads of Sahara trip on the wrought-iron crosses of Christian explorers buried on the spot in that desert?

Timo Saloniemi

nomads may run into that occasionally, but they don't carry around sensor arrays.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Much more personal and intimate rather than the pomp and circumstance of a funeral at Starfleet, which no doubt happened later, we just didn't see it.

More likely it happened much earlier, in 2293 after everybody thought he died on the Enterprise-B. And yeah, we still didn't see it.

 

[Balok's Decoy]

More likely it happened much earlier, in 2293 after everybody thought he died on the Enterprise-B. And yeah, we still didn't see it.

Ah of course. Good point.

 

[Timo]

nomads may run into that occasionally, but they don't carry around sensor arrays.

Sure they do - they just call them eyes. The relative range is more or less the same.

Really, if those thousand coffins were orbiting Earth, nobody would notice. (Literally - they're black, and Starfleet would take care to make them invisible to radar to thwart basic CIWS!) There's a thread about bumping into others in space, and the odds really aren't worth mentioning. Heck, if Starfleet tried to block a spacelane from Alpha Beta II to Gamma Delta IX by sowing a hundred million of those things, they might well go unnoticed, too.

One wonders - is space burial the default, or a personal choice? Was Spock angry when finding out somebody had recovered his corpse and put it through all that Vulcan nonsense, when he had specifically requested for oblivion? It's not as if firing the coffins into space would be a practical requirement. As in "The Ship", even if the ship lacked freezers or stasis chambers, the cavader could simply be kept inside the torpedo casing indefinitely, and the casing likewise stored indefinitely. It's unlikely not to be utterly airtight, after all.

Timo Saloniemi