The "legitimacy" of a criticism of NuTrek has ZILCH to do with whether you can find some precedent for something vaguely more-or-less similar in old Trek. Nothing. Zip. Zero. Nada.
It has everything to do with it. Two wrongs may not make a right, but at least pointing out that Trek has done it before counters the "Trek used to be so much better" that some people are claiming.
Exactly.
@
BigJake: One doesn't have to dig deep into the ass end of TOS
Trek, among "The Alternative Factor" or "Wink of an Eye", to find examples of
Trek not being scientific. Examples are all over the place. Here are three examples from high-profile episodes.
- In "The Naked Time", the Enterprise started spiraling down, to burn up in the atmosphere of Psi 2000 in a matter of minutes, as soon as the engines lose power.
- In "Balance of Terror", the Romulans are able to invade Federation space with a ship that has only "simple impulse" power (motivating certain sectors of hardcore fans to become apologists and speculate that "impulse" doesn't really mean sub-light as TMoST p. 191 says and one would otherwise naturally assume by the suggestiveness of the name, but rather that it has an FTL capability
).
- Given the results of Starfish Prime, it is extremely unlikely that a nuclear warhead launched from the continental US and exploding shortly after takeoff at an altitude of only 104 miles would have gone generally unnoticed, as posited in "Assignment: Earth". No, there would have been extensive damage to electronics, even to electronics of the era, not to mention that the telltale flash should have been visible, and people would instantly think "duck and cover" as they'd been trained in school.
It's just a question of how critical one thinks it's appropriate to be in the criticism of
Star Trek's use of real-world science. This isn't even getting into the question of how consistent the fictional science is shown to be.
Now, this:
If you think that nuTrek is really the worse offender when it comes to scientific wonkiness, then I can only assume that there must be something in nuTrek that doesn't allow the wonkiness to be covered up in your mind the way it was in the earlier incarnations.
... is actually to my eyes sort of a macro-scale example of b), though admittedly it provides a segue to something more interesting. Of course NuTrek is a worse offender when it comes to scientific wonkiness, because
it is designed to be. Orci and Kaufman and Abrams were not and are not uneducated enough to think you can blow up a galaxy with a supernova; such "mistakes" are deliberate call-outs to the madcap scientific illiteracy of the pre-Trek pulps that inspired "Captain Proton." (EDIT: Sorry, I can see I'm repeating myself here, as I made this same point on the "figleaf" thread I linked above.)
The relevant question is not
can one dredge some episode of Trek somewhere that committed a similarly absurd sin (it can be managed with especially bad outings like "The Alternative Factor"), or
can you establish that Trek routinely committed this kind of sin, whatever other handwaving it engaged in (you probably can't, though someone will doubtless try). The question you have to ask yourself is simply "do you like your Trek to make an attempt at getting the science right?" If you do, you probably won't be super-bullish on NuTrek, if it's no big then you will, and the deliberately pulp touches will even seem fun and clever (as no doubt they were meant to seem). That question is best asked by simply looking at NuTrek on its own merits.
To be fair, though, in STXI, the supernova isn't said to threaten to
blow up the whole galaxy or run over it with a shock wave. Romulus is the only noteworthy planet that is shown to be directly threatened by the physical explosion. The threat to the rest of the galaxy is vague and unnamed. It could be anything from plunging the whole galaxy into war, because of (figurative) fallout from the destruction of Romulus, to the contamination of biospheres all across the Federation, or some combination of war, ill effects, and ill effects causing civilizations to go to war.
Let's use our brains here. If the shock wave alone had been the physical threat to the whole galaxy, then why is it so imperative to save Romulus in particular? To clarify, if the whole galaxy were going to fall automatically anyway, what is so "unthinkable" about Romulus itself falling
unexpectedly? Sure, Spock of the future was interested in Reunification and he loved Romulus. But why does Romulus falling get center stage in the narrative? There must be a missing subtext. The destruction of Romulus alone must have been the
trigger to an overriding threat to the galaxy. In other words, the Romulans must have made an ultimatum that the film would have been better served by including.
Is the mind-meld portion of STXI poorly written? Yes, it is. Although in at least one earlier draft (namely the one dated November, 2007, which is available
here) it read better, because the narrative Spock Prime gave nuKirk wasn't so tightly compressed, the larger problem is that the supernova is a MacGuffin, just as red matter is. I'll return to this and discussion of the missing subtext below, because I think it is actually very important.
As for how damaging a real supernova would be to an individual planet, well,
it depends, on what type it is and how close it is. Now, as cringeworthy as it is*, since we already know of
at least two types of supernovae in real life, with various subtypes and causal mechanisms, if none of them
goes boom-y enough (i.e., if ~100 foe isn't enough energy at whatever distance to do the kind of damage desired for plot), we can always postulate a type III supernova, unknown to our science but known in
Star Trek's, say,
due to its fictional periodic table** and capable of doing whatever the plot requires. I mean, be honest, when they said "supernova", was the first question that came to your mind to wonder whether they meant type Ia or II-P? I'm going to guess, "no."
* - Given the subtypes, and what's still being learned about supernovae, there's actually a limit to how cringeworthy it is to postulate other monsters in
Star Trek's universe that could plausibly be designated as "supernovae".
** - You gotta wonder what kind of supernova would result from the explosion of a massive star that had substantial quantities of
tricobalt in its core.
Now, about the missing subtext. In my view, STXI would have been better served by more explicitly characterizing exactly what beef it was that Nero had with Spock, Vulcan, and Earth. The November, 2007 draft I cited above has mention during the mind-meld that Nero believed that Vulcan allowed Romulus to die. In the theatrical film, Nero discusses this during his interrogation of Pike, but the allegation that Vulcan and the Federation with premeditation schemed to take advantage of the catastrophe to rid themselves of the Romulans is lost and overshadowed by Nero's grief for the loss of his wife. What's missing in the theatrical film are clear connections for why it would be plausible for Nero to blame the Federation for his losses; instead he just comes off as a madman.
Avenging what he considers to be a malicious act of
premeditated genocide against the Romulan people during which he suffered devastating personal losses is better drama with more interesting and clearly conceived characters than having everything driven by a natural disaster of fantasy proportions.
Put it that way, and at least to me, the whole thing becomes clearer. It explains why his crew would go along with him, and it even explains why they would wait 25 years to try to capture the red matter*** and proceed forward with singular and specific purpose. It isn't just to create a new version of the galaxy in which Romulus is supreme, they actually think that the Vulcans and the rest of the Federation have it in for the Romulans, because the whole crew believes they witnessed the Federation deliberately drag its heels and let Romulus be destroyed.
*** - Another reading of
red matter might simply be
materiel, the material of war.
In fairness, the element of an accusation of premeditated genocide is in fact in the theatrical release of STXI, but I don't believe that the point was made clearly enough.
Clearer character motivation would have been an ample fig leaf for any scientific wonkiness, by making it not about the scientific phenomenon at all, but rather about alleged genocide of the Romulan people and Nero's reaction to that perceived injustice and his devastating personal losses. In focusing too much on the supernova, black holes, lightening storms in space, red matter, and blowing things up, not in and of itself bad but crucially
at the expense of jettisoning key elements of the discussion of why Nero and crew would feel compelled to go to the lengths they did, STXI committed a sin explicitly prohibited in the TOS
Star Trek Writers/Directors Guide, the third revision dated April 17, 1967 from which I quote:
TOS Writers Guide said:
Tell your story about people, not about science and gadgetry.
Locutus has said a lot, and I agree generally with what he said. However, at least one specific thing he said warrants special attention, which echoes what
Belz... said so concisely.
And as I've pointed out more than once, this is often the unintentional side-effect of the kind of continuity tailgunning that's routinely employed to defend this or that NuTrek trope: in order to put NuTrek on an equal footing (and therefore legitimize it as Real Trek or something, is I gather supposed to be the idea) it frequently requires pretending the old shows and movies were worse than they were, and running into problems trying to defend those stances because they so often depend on false analogies.
It's not about making prior Trek look worse, it's just acknowledging that the things people are complaining about now are nothing new, despite their attempts at making this out to be an unprecedented abomination before the gods of science, which of course feeds the misplaced idea that nuTrek is objectively worse than old Trek. If people limited themselves to subjective declarations that nuTrek sucks, I wouldn't have an objection. It's when they try and compare and "objectively" quantify why it pales next to its Prime Universe counterparts that people mention that it's the same shit, different day.
That's absolutely right, and it's why the red matter, the supernova, the black holes, and all the other elements of fantasy are, in and of themselves, ultimately irrelevant as criticisms.
They can't be the main problem, assuming there is one. Instead, as I've been saying, any major problem must be in the rest of the film in which these elements are embedded, and I've actually taken the time to point specifically to what some of those problems are.
The strength of TOS was always more in its character drama than in its scientific expressions. In TOS, the characters sold wonky science time and time again. That's a tribute to the writers, actors, directors, and really all aspects of production. Sure, I'd've liked it better, if the science fiction had been harder, but that's beside the particular point here.
Finally, it's also very much worth mentioning that the issue of trust between the Federation and Romulus is important in the climactic scene largely under discussion in this thread, where Kirk is thinking of how saving Nero might have a bearing on making peace with Romulus. In my opinion, the film would have been better served by elevating the possibility of conflict between the Federation and the Romulans, both at the time of the film's events and in a possible future as a result of a supernova, to a role at least central enough to more clearly define what the stakes were, as opposed to what, in my view, came across as just a few throwaway lines.
]
Dude, that would be almost cute if I had started the continuity-tailgunning tangent about Genesis, but you've got BillJ to thank for that. I simply pointed out that the analogy which had already been brought up looked false to me. (And I have no problem with doing so, since such analogies are frequently false and frequently unwittingly denigrate their subjects in being false, and the Genesis one continues to look that way for my money... but in the larger sense I would just rather this distraction tactic didn't come up.)
