Never faced death?

[Timo]

Timo appears predisposed to reject any evidence contrary to the assertion in TWOK.

The "Kirk never contemplated suicide via self-destruct" argument is a separate one, and there isn't a shred of evidence for him actually intending to go through with it in any of the TOS episodes. Contrary evidence abounds.

While the argument is separate, it certainly paints Kirk as a person who is very concerned about his own mortality, and also in quite a bit of denial about it.

If the academy simulator was meant to have Kirk face death, then Kirk faced death twice the first two times he took the KM test.

And he was supposed to learn from it, so Starfleet allowed him to keep on trying. Big mistake - success the third time around negated any lessons potentially learned from the first two.

The argument here appears confused about a key fact: it's not about whether Kirk has faced death (be it in a Bergmanesque chess game or less literally), it's about whether Kirk feels he has faced death. There are times in Kirk's career where he might admit to having done so; ST2 is not one of those times.

What I can't figure out is how this insight into Kirk's personality is supposed to make him "shallow" when the cartoon figure from TOS is supposed to be "complex" for all the death he walks over, without ever turning back to watch and contemplate...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Kemaiku]

Kirk faced death in every episode of TOS excepting maybe the tribble episode.

I think being neck deep in a pile of dead tribbles still counts.

 

[Timo]

And what if there had not been dead tribbles behind that hatch? Ton upon ton of quadrotriticale falling upon you would really ruin your day...

Also, McCoy would say that Kirk faces death every day he uses the transporter, while Scotty would admit Kirk faces death every day when ordering warp drive to be engaged, and Spock would readily quote the odds of Kirk facing death in the form of alien VDs. But "risk is their business" and all that.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Timo appears predisposed to reject any evidence contrary to the assertion in TWOK.

I think what he's doing is reconciling the evidence. When there's an inconsistency, one shouldn't just throw up ones hands and say "fuck it, one of them must be wrong." It's better to see if both can be right.

I think it's clear it was a bit of a retcon designed to make the movie have a more interesting character arc. That doesn't mean they can't be reconciled.

 

[Kemaiku]

Spock: The Kobayashi Maru scenario frequently wreaks havoc on students and equipment. As I recall you took the test three times yourself. Your final solution was, shall we say, unique?

Kirk: It had the virtue of never having been tried.

Ah, nevermind, I see you edited your post.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

Yeah, I remembered about a minute later.

 

[Warped9]

And what if there had not been dead tribbles behind that hatch? Ton upon ton of quadrotriticale falling upon you would really ruin your day...

Timo Saloniemi

That is something of a WTF moment. Kirk obviously opened that storage door with no expectation that something would be raining down on him. He evidently felt safe doing so. So the Tribbles ate the wheat containers as well as the wheat itself? How exactly was that wheat stored to allow for a downward facing access hatch?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Two words: Broad Strokes. They deliberately tweaked Kirk's backstory for the purposes of their story. Just like "The Alternative Factor" ignores antimatter being starship fuel and gives it universe-destroying properties. Continuity is fun, but it's ok to ignore parts, or tweak it every now and then.

YMMV, of course. "Never facing death" never bothered me, but Kirk becoming a Klingon-hater in STVI did.

 

[Anwar]

Especially considering he had no ill-will towards them in the prior movie.

 

[The Old Mixer]

Kirk's line was certainly an exaggeration and always struck me as such...but it works on a "meta" level in underscoring the impact of Spock's death. All of the other examples one can bring up from TOS, while some of them certainly should have had a similar personal impact, were in actuality deaths of one-episode wonders.

 

[Timo]

How exactly was that wheat stored to allow for a downward facing access hatch?

Now that would be what the audience would expect of grain silos. They tend to be big funnels with a hatch at the bottom, and since the station features gravity on most decks, the silo might also have it and the wheat would pour down...

(...But into what? The corridor doesn't look like it could receive grain carts - odd doorway shapes, carpeting etc. instead of industrial-strength flooring or rails or whatnot - or have them travel to anywhere relevant. And wouldn't carts be somewhat anachronistic? Except when you want to torture and humiliate your slave workers, as on Terok Nor!)

That minor detail aside, the verisimilitude is there. But this carries the consequence of Kirk looking like an idiot to the audience, which knows better than to stand beneath the bottom hatch of a grain silo when opening it.

We could excuse Kirk if we assume he read a surface level meter first (or at least trusted that such a meter would sound an alarm if there was reason for it), and that meter indicated an empty silo because it wasn't any good at reading fluffy tribbles. Or then the surface was expected to be level with the lower hatch, and mass readings confirmed this, yet the tribbles amounted to more volume than the grain they ate so the surface was actually higher. But that would place Kirk atop the silo, not at the bottom. And he is atop the silo, or there would be a lot more tribbles falling on him. So the verisimilitude breaks down already.

I guess our best bet is that this is a dedicated observation station, and behind those hatches lies not the main silo but some sampling lock thereof. Perhaps there would be a small amount of grain behind the lower hatch in the normal case, and mere machinery behind the upper ones - but we know tribbles are good at getting into machinery.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[ZapBrannigan]

How exactly was that wheat stored to allow for a downward facing access hatch?

Now that would be what the audience would expect of grain silos. They tend to be big funnels with a hatch at the bottom, and since the station features gravity on most decks, the silo might also have it and the wheat would pour down...

(...But into what? The corridor doesn't look like it could receive grain carts - odd doorway shapes, carpeting etc. instead of industrial-strength flooring or rails or whatnot - or have them travel to anywhere relevant. And wouldn't carts be somewhat anachronistic? Except when you want to torture and humiliate your slave workers, as on Terok Nor!)

That minor detail aside, the verisimilitude is there. But this carries the consequence of Kirk looking like an idiot to the audience, which knows better than to stand beneath the bottom hatch of a grain silo when opening it.

We could excuse Kirk if we assume he read a surface level meter first (or at least trusted that such a meter would sound an alarm if there was reason for it), and that meter indicated an empty silo because it wasn't any good at reading fluffy tribbles. Or then the surface was expected to be level with the lower hatch, and mass readings confirmed this, yet the tribbles amounted to more volume than the grain they ate so the surface was actually higher. But that would place Kirk atop the silo, not at the bottom. And he is atop the silo, or there would be a lot more tribbles falling on him. So the verisimilitude breaks down already.

I guess our best bet is that this is a dedicated observation station, and behind those hatches lies not the main silo but some sampling lock thereof. Perhaps there would be a small amount of grain behind the lower hatch in the normal case, and mere machinery behind the upper ones - but we know tribbles are good at getting into machinery.

Timo Saloniemi

That strikes me as very sound technical thinking-- not normally a requirement among Star Trek fans. I especially liked the "sampling lock" idea.

 

[urbandefault]

Of course Kirk had faced death before. They key phrase is "not like this."