Motivation and Bad Guys
- Thread starter Jetboogieman
- Start date
If you Google "krall is Trump", you will find many articles where Simon Pegg equates the two.
I am someone with mental health issues. I didn't find anything insulting about it. I've done and said things that make no sense to 'normal' people, my family and loves ones struggling sometimes to understand, while a lot of it seemed so rational and normal to me.
I'm not equating mental health and supervillainy. I'm pointing out the irrational motives in Shinzon for example (he wants to destroy Earth as some kind of revenge against all pampered humans for his shitty life as a forgotten Picard clone in Reman mines) are similar to those I've seen in people with a variety of mental health issues.
He was using the ultramodern Magellan probes Starfleet launched to chart the Necro Cloud.
Yes, and it's lampshaded in the movie several times.
He didn't want to destroy Yorktown, he wanted it intact to use as a staging area to attack the Federation. He wanted Yorktown purged of all life - and for that he needed the Abronath bioweapon.
He didn't lose it, he upgraded to the mining facility. And it was flyable after Jaylah spent X number of years repairing it with parts of other crashed vessels.
The cliff part was to trick the ship's antigravs into firing, or something along those lines.
He's mad that humans have allied with the people he fought against and thought humanity was stronger alone. I've no idea what his longterm plans were, but the resources of Yorktown he could have done quite a lot.
Sorry to hear that you have suffered from mental illness Mage. I just think that equating mental illness to villains like the ones in the trek movies is a fallacy. I don't think that immoral and unethical behaviours can be automatically labelled or attributed to mental illness or personality disorder. There's an interesting debate, probably for another forum about whether Hitler, Stalin, Ghengis Khan, or any other evil man from history is actually evil, or can their actions be explained by illness? In any event, it seems I misunderstood King Daniels comment on this emotive subject.
King Daniel, thank you for your post, I had not considered (or paid enough attention, in the case of the Magellan probes) many of the convincing explanations that you provide. I maintain that dropping the ship off a cliff is most implausible, but Star Trek has long become science fantasy rather than science fiction with regards to things like this. I'm currently watching The Expanse and am very much enjoying how much real world science there is in the series.
I enjoyed Beyond for what it was, a fun popcorn flick. I truly hope that the next movie eschews the tired trope of the baddie out for revenge. It worked for TWOK, but I'd like to see an alternative motivation for a change. As much as I dislike Generations, the film at its heart presents an interesting situation, with three men thinking about, and/or seeking out immortality in completely different ways.
King Daniel, thank you for your post, I had not considered (or paid enough attention, in the case of the Magellan probes) many of the convincing explanations that you provide. I maintain that dropping the ship off a cliff is most implausible, but Star Trek has long become science fantasy rather than science fiction with regards to things like this. I'm currently watching The Expanse and am very much enjoying how much real world science there is in the series.
I enjoyed Beyond for what it was, a fun popcorn flick. I truly hope that the next movie eschews the tired trope of the baddie out for revenge. It worked for TWOK, but I'd like to see an alternative motivation for a change. As much as I dislike Generations, the film at its heart presents an interesting situation, with three men thinking about, and/or seeking out immortality in completely different ways.
He didn't lose it, he intentionally abandoned it.
It was right where he left it.
Indeed, she's sitting level on a mountaintop, and is in a flyable condition. The problem wasn't that Balt Edison would have been stuck with an irrepairable ship (or at least he never suggests anything of the sort in his logs), the problem was that he was hopelessly lost and stuck inside an unnavigable rubble reef.
Now, spaceships he had galore. But a way out of the reef? Theoretically, he only found one when the Magellan probes came. In practice, he could probably have forced his way out without them, but his logs reveal he was already more motivated by revenge than rescue at the point where he abandoned his old ship. By that time, he had already discovered a vast army he could command, and all he needed now was a cleverly evil plan for using it.
That's the technicalities. The central thing here supposedly is that Edison is surviving by eating alive other sapients, from alien species (although he may have eaten his own crew before stumbling onto other edible crash victims). Surely that would be hard on anybody's mental health - and triply so for a bitter xenophobe who now is slowly turning into alien scum himself!
Indeed, it never was anything else - it's not as if warp drives or transporters would be grounded in science (even if fans have found ways to pretend there are connections to modern science, unknown at the time of the introduction of those fantasy concepts).
Dropping the ship off the cliff is accompanied with surprisingly straightforward dialogue to the effect that the ship simply needs velocity in order to make the "stabilizers" provide "lift" - that is, she needs wind under the wings. Yes, yes, she has engines that should allow her to hover over a black hole or take off vertically from a neutron star, but for a rare once they might not be vectorable for vertical thrust much, meaning Sulu has to point the bow up first. And if that calls for aerodynamic lift, then dropping off the cliff will happen, unless Sulu can gun the engines into a near-horizontal superstart.
Which is what he ought to be capable of doing, but this is an old ship...
Timo Saloniemi
Now, spaceships he had galore. But a way out of the reef? Theoretically, he only found one when the Magellan probes came. In practice, he could probably have forced his way out without them, but his logs reveal he was already more motivated by revenge than rescue at the point where he abandoned his old ship. By that time, he had already discovered a vast army he could command, and all he needed now was a cleverly evil plan for using it.
That's the technicalities. The central thing here supposedly is that Edison is surviving by eating alive other sapients, from alien species (although he may have eaten his own crew before stumbling onto other edible crash victims). Surely that would be hard on anybody's mental health - and triply so for a bitter xenophobe who now is slowly turning into alien scum himself!
Indeed, it never was anything else - it's not as if warp drives or transporters would be grounded in science (even if fans have found ways to pretend there are connections to modern science, unknown at the time of the introduction of those fantasy concepts).
Dropping the ship off the cliff is accompanied with surprisingly straightforward dialogue to the effect that the ship simply needs velocity in order to make the "stabilizers" provide "lift" - that is, she needs wind under the wings. Yes, yes, she has engines that should allow her to hover over a black hole or take off vertically from a neutron star, but for a rare once they might not be vectorable for vertical thrust much, meaning Sulu has to point the bow up first. And if that calls for aerodynamic lift, then dropping off the cliff will happen, unless Sulu can gun the engines into a near-horizontal superstart.
Which is what he ought to be capable of doing, but this is an old ship...
Timo Saloniemi
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These questions were answered already, but I'll make a few more points..
2) It is convenient, true. In my review of the film, I mention Macguffins and I generally don't have problems with them if they are used well. My other impression is that the mission on Teenax took place fairly close in deep space to the outer edge frontier and Yorktown. So that object Krall was looking for was out there nearby, just lost. All sort of in the same "neighborhood" to a warp drive vessel.
3) Not only did Krall want Yorktown intact, I think he wanted to make a statement. He makes a comment about all the aliens on Yorktown holding hands. He wants to break that unity.
4) This was answered twice, and well. Jaylah spent decades fixing it with crashed spaceship parts, and the crew had to figure a way to give it extra lift before accelerating it at the right point.
5) Actually no, inciting a war wouldn't have satisfied Krall, he wanted to make a point to the Federation but also do the deed himself.
I answered this question in response to the OP. I can elaborate: Krall went along with the conversion from military to Starfleet command at the dawn of the UFP. Being abandoned (in his words) and finding alien tech--as well as the atrocities he commits while using it--have disturbed him to the point that he uses that crux point in his life, ie: feeling uncomfortable with befriending aliens he's fought and had comrades die against as a reason to attack the Federation. He's since seen information from the UFP probes he's captured and seen what it has grown into. By that point, twisted as he is, he didn't want to just leave, he planned for revenge.
I also pointed out that some people agree with Krall..that human beings are only a measure of their conflict, that we only grow with war and struggle. In fact, this feeling comes up a lot when discussing STNG, or DS9...that the "comfy" humans of Gene's 24th century are too peaceful. Lots of 21st-century tv viewers can't get past the idea of social evolution and that we actually change as time goes by.
RAMA
Ditto, and thank you.
Let's not forget that it's no coincidence that Krall learns of the object just when he needs it for launching his attack. Instead, Krall launching his attack is the direct consequence of the object being found - until now, Krall has been idly waiting. Had the missing half of the abornath not been found, he would still be waiting two centuries later, in all probability.
The abornath appears to belong to the culture that had the mine on Altamid, so it makes sense that its all components be in the general vicinity. Moreover, it would make sense for other such stuff from the Ancients to be around - it just happens that the components to this particular weapon are found first, allowing Krall to finally proceed. Had the missing half of the abornath not been found, perhaps the missing two-thirds of the bebornath or the entire cebornath would have come to the attention of Krall, with the same results.
No starship would be launched to Altamid unless she carried the weapon Krall desired. After all, the "rescue mission" is all Krall's own devising, and would not have taken place at random any time soon, even if the new navigation capabilities of Enterprise style ships made it theoretically possible to explore the rubble nebula. All the UFP knows is that the nebula eats probes like candy and isn't healthy at all (an impression Krall might reinforce via disinformation fed through the captured Magellan probe), and certainly doesn't contain anything of interest (ditto).
Plus, despite what was discussed above, it's still to a degree a matter of Krall seeing nails when handed a hammer. Krall wants both shock-and-awe and a good demonstration of his newfound alienness or non-UFPness, and an unconventional attack will suit his purposes better than a conventional one there.
Except Edison himself should be the much better expert of fixing the ship, which didn't appear particularly broken in the first place. So we have to figure out why Edison didn't even try. And a good reason for that is him realizing that a starship will do him no good at all, what with him being lost and blocked by a wall of floating rocks.
Timo Saloniemi
Right, but also the matter of him not spending decades to slowly acquire parts he needed. He went mental years before that.
Jaylah was scavenging the parts and effecting the repairs while trying to avoid a vast drone army. Edison could have been doing the same with the help of that army.
Except of course he did go mental years before Jaylah started her work - as evidenced by Jaylah escaping from the clutches of an already transformed Krall. But Edison could still have repaired his ship long before Jaylah entered the picture, assuming he didn't need a crucial spare that fell from the skies at some point after his descent to deep madness.
One wonders - did all those ships fall because Krall sent his drones to bring them down? Or was Altamid a ship magnet of some sort, and the same factors that caused those ships to crash were behind the original Franklin crash? Except apparently the Franklin didn't really crash, as she was both level and structurally intact (and no crash is mentioned in dialogue).
Timo Saloniemi
Except of course he did go mental years before Jaylah started her work - as evidenced by Jaylah escaping from the clutches of an already transformed Krall. But Edison could still have repaired his ship long before Jaylah entered the picture, assuming he didn't need a crucial spare that fell from the skies at some point after his descent to deep madness.
One wonders - did all those ships fall because Krall sent his drones to bring them down? Or was Altamid a ship magnet of some sort, and the same factors that caused those ships to crash were behind the original Franklin crash? Except apparently the Franklin didn't really crash, as she was both level and structurally intact (and no crash is mentioned in dialogue).
Timo Saloniemi
I assumed it was a TMP-style one created by an imbalance in the experimental warp 4 engines.
We can't rule out it being both - perhaps ships that create wormholes in warp engine mishaps end up at Altamid more probably than not?
Krall downing visitor ships warrants closer examination in any case. Why is he doing that? Supposedly because he can't eat the Ancient drones, so he needs new humanoids in order to live forever. How did he learn that in the first place? He probably had to eat some of his own crew first - as a scenario where he abstractly discovers that the life-sucking is necessary but abstains until getting alien visitors is highly unlikely unless Edison could somehow count on there being visitors. But how could there be visitors unless the place was a ship magnet? Supposedly, navigating through that rubble reef was a real chore, so few would volunteer.
Then again, rumors about Ancient riches might circulate, drawing in adventurers of all sorts. The reason Jaylah's family came there was never made clear, and the story of the survivor who came to Yorktown was a fabrication; perhaps stranded graverobbers are the leading population group on Altamid, right after the drones.
Timo Saloniemi
Krall downing visitor ships warrants closer examination in any case. Why is he doing that? Supposedly because he can't eat the Ancient drones, so he needs new humanoids in order to live forever. How did he learn that in the first place? He probably had to eat some of his own crew first - as a scenario where he abstractly discovers that the life-sucking is necessary but abstains until getting alien visitors is highly unlikely unless Edison could somehow count on there being visitors. But how could there be visitors unless the place was a ship magnet? Supposedly, navigating through that rubble reef was a real chore, so few would volunteer.
Then again, rumors about Ancient riches might circulate, drawing in adventurers of all sorts. The reason Jaylah's family came there was never made clear, and the story of the survivor who came to Yorktown was a fabrication; perhaps stranded graverobbers are the leading population group on Altamid, right after the drones.
Timo Saloniemi
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