Matt Decker IS Will’s father
- Thread starter EnriqueH
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I actually think 23rd century Starfleet is quite small. An awful lot of their crew end up dead (you can count the number of characters all throughout Trek history stated to have two living parents on one hand despite everyone being relatively young) and in TUC there was talk of 'mothballing' Starfleet's military arm when hostilities with the Klingons was resolved, which suggests that most members take care of their own territories.
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I don’t see anything wrong with that. Particularly since Kirk “love instructed” an entire galaxy of alien women.
Enh, I dunno. Saavik doesn't act like a typical Vulcan, at least not as played by Kirstie Alley. "Damn," the hissing intake of breath when she sees poor Peter's burns, jumping when Kirk breaks the glass on the cargo container, tears at Spock's funeral, changing her hairstyle, much of her dialogue . . . I'm pretty sure something else was going on there and we weren't supposed to think she was a full-blooded Vulcan. Now, Robin Curtis's portrayal was Vulcan to a T. V?
I know a lot of folks say that and use it to "prove" Saavik is not really a Vulcan. She's just young and has not mastered her emotions like the other Vulcans we'd already met in ST to that time. Her showing of emotion or volatility does not mean she cannot be a "Full Vulcan" by any means. IMO, the logic-based/"emotionless" schtick practiced by most Vulcans is a cultural artifact, and not based in any sort of racial/biological factors.
Don't forget that the Saavik thing is a filmed and deleted scene from TWOK. The only reason that it's not on-screen evidence is that it was cut for time.
Well, when it gets put back into the film I'll revisit my opinion. Until then it's apocryphal at best.
A large number, sure, but not the entire audience. It's just a basic part of competent writing that you don't assume your audience already knows something, that you make your work accessible to everyone, whether they have prior familiarity or not.
Anyway, a large part of movie box office comes from casual viewers, from people who aren't necessarily fans of a franchise but are just looking for something to do on date night or are there to see an actor they like or were dragged there by their kids or whatever. You need to take the whole audience into account, not just the fanbase.
(Indeed, many movie adaptations of TV series take this too far, changing the style and tone of the series to fit some stock movie formula and thereby alienating the fanbase. Studios do this because they expect the existing fanbase to be the minority of the potential audience. This leads to disastrously wrongheaded remakes like Wild Wild West and My Favorite Martian, but sometimes to movies like The Fugitive and the Mission: Impossible films, which are excellent action thrillers but based on series that were nothing of the sort.)
My impression is that it wasn't cut for time, it was cut for not making any damn sense. Saying Saavik was more emotional because she was half-Romulan is preposterous for two reasons. One, Vulcan emotional control is learned, not genetic; intrinsically, they're far more emotional than humans or most other species, which is why they need such tight control to begin with. And two, Romulans are Vulcan. Genetically, biologically, they're the exact same species, with only a paltry two millennia of genetic drift separating them. So there's no reason being half-Romulan would make Saavik more emotional. Fortunately the filmmakers realized in time how silly that was and cut it out. (And Vonda McIntyre, who wrote the novelization, realized the problem too, so she came up with the backstory that Saavik grew up feral on an abandoned Romulan colony, so that she never learned Vulcan discipline in childhood -- thus her greater emotionalism was a function of environment, not heredity.)
Yes. The Kirk parents that we saw in ST09 very much fit what I'd imagined Kirk's parents to be. (It also helped that they were largely drawn from what had been done with Kirk's parents in the novels.)
Will Decker outright says in TMP that Kirk recommended him to take over the Enterprise.
I'd check scenes from "Obsession", where Kirk is talking to Ensign Garrovick about his father.
She acts fairly emotional throughout TWOK, starting with the "Damn" in her opening scene to her openly weeping at Spock's funeral. Obviously something was going on there.
Yeah. The original screenplay explained early on why Saavik was acting differently than a typical Vulcan. I just wish they'd included that information somewhere else than just that one scene.
It seems obvious to me that Spock was largely talking about the cultural mixture between Romulan and Vulcan, not solely the biological combination. Romulans had no cultural taboo against showing emotions. Therefore, if Saavik was initially raised in the Romulan tradition, she wouldn't have that taboo, either. I think those lines were cut for just the reason that Former Lurker theorized, to tighten up the scene, not because of any logic problems. I mean, if they were cutting stuff for story logic, they probably would've adjusted the Reliant not noticing the missing planet in the Ceti Alpha system, too.
More evidence that The Changeling and The Doomsday Machine plots were used to construct the movie! 
JB
JB
Yes. The Kirk parents that we saw in ST09 very much fit what I'd imagined Kirk's parents to be. (It also helped that they were largely drawn from what had been done with Kirk's parents in the novels.)
Will Decker outright says in TMP that Kirk recommended him to take over the Enterprise.
I'd check scenes from "Obsession", where Kirk is talking to Ensign Garrovick about his father.
She acts fairly emotional throughout TWOK, starting with the "Damn" in her opening scene to her openly weeping at Spock's funeral. Obviously something was going on there.
Yeah. The original screenplay explained early on why Saavik was acting differently than a typical Vulcan. I just wish they'd included that information somewhere else than just that one scene.
It seems obvious to me that Spock was largely talking about the cultural mixture between Romulan and Vulcan, not solely the biological combination. Romulans had no cultural taboo against showing emotions. Therefore, if Saavik was initially raised in the Romulan tradition, she wouldn't have that taboo, either. I think those lines were cut for just the reason that Former Lurker theorized, to tighten up the scene, not because of any logic problems. I mean, if they were cutting stuff for story logic, they probably would've adjusted the Reliant not noticing the missing planet in the Ceti Alpha system, too.
Now that I think about it: It would’ve been so cool to have had Saavik involved in Unification.
If we use the actor's birthdates to compare the character ages, Matt Decker would have been 19 when Will Decker was born. Big but, TMP would have to be set in 2277 for Will Decker to be 30 years old. Certainly doable. If set in 2273, then I doubt Will would be a Captain at 26, and not doable. That or Matt Decker was older than Windom's real age, say about 50 instead of 44 which was his real age. Maybe Matt experienced some time dilation during his space career is another explanation.
I discussed their ages in my answer to this question: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/que...hat-will-decker-is-on-board-the-uss-discovery
I discuss whether it is chronologically possible for Carol Marcus to be the "little blonde lab technician" in my answer to this question: https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/140090/was-carol-marcus-the-little-blonde-lab-technician
If I remember correctly, in "The Apple":
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And in "Obsession":
And maybe others. Of course the visuals would be TOS but the the voices would be ok to insert in a fan edit of TMP..
For some reason I can't get Star Trek Script Search to work, but if you can you might be able to find some dialog.
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Same. I don't feel that it's particularly "small universe syndrome" either, I can see Kirk supporting Will after the events of the Doomsday Machine, it would be in character for him.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't Romulans depicted as a different species in TOS. Spock thought the Romulans were an offshoot in Balance of Terror. Chekov located Spock in The Enterprise Incident via sensor because of differences in DNA. Romulans and Vulcans were almost identical. His human DNA wasn't mentioned. I think the depiction changed in TNG.
Not quite
Off shoot doesn't have to mean a different species. More of a cultural off shoot than a genetic one. I don't think there was enough time between when the Romulans left Vulcan to have that much of a genetic difference.The Enterprise Incident said:
They never said "species." As Nerys says, "offshoot" doesn't automatically suggest that.
Chekov said there was "just a slight difference" in readings, which for all we know could be a function of environment rather than genetics -- maybe there's a higher ratio of carbon-14 in the food and air on Romulus compared to Vulcan, and thus in the Romulans' bones and tissues. Not everything in biology is DNA, despite what "The Terratin Incident" claimed.
But the fact that Spock and the Commander were so sexually simpatico and even had the same finger-foreplay rituals suggests their populations couldn't have diverged that long ago or changed that much.
And this is secondary. The fundamental point is that Vulcan emotional control is not biological but learned, so the tendency of many Trek writers to assume that pure Vulcans are automatically less emotional than hybrids is nonsensical and kind of racist, mistaking a cultural trait for a genetic one. We're lucky that the makers of TWOK realized in time how foolish it would've been to go that route with Saavik.
Apart from Carol Marcus, the little blond lab technician could be Janet Wallace.
Well, after all, Roddenberry's theme lyrics for TOS mention that we'll find in star-clustered reaches, love, strange love, that a star woman teaches.
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