All this Earth hate makes me want to join Terra Prime,
Earth knows what it did. Poor Pluto can't even talk about it.
Orci, Kurtzman and Lindelof should not Return.
- Thread starter Cara007
- Start date
Earth knows what it did. Poor Pluto can't even talk about it.
I'll give credit to ST09 in that Nero doesn't just wants to destroy Earth but rather every Federation planet, and he starts with Vulcan.
No, the writers and producers of "Space Seed" were idiots. They wrote the line about Khan being a Sikh, yet ignored the recommendations of DeForest Research about proper Sikh names and appearance (Khan and Noonien are not Sikh names and nothing about Khan's appearance says Sikh or even Indian).
I guess they figured the audience was too dumb to notice.
Sadly, they were right. Well, not necessarily dumb, but ignorant, if not blithely so.
And, unfortunately, things haven't significantly improved. Being too ignorant to notice applies not just to the American public of the mid-60's, but also to plenty of Star Trek fans over the years, as well as generally to Americans today.
It's decades later, and I'm assuming they could have found an actor who would have actually been Indian (or at least a very close visual match).Nerys Myk said:
I'm not saying they weren't. Saying Marla was an idiot is a possible in-universe explanation for her statements and actions.
According to Spock, there was much knowledge that was lost due to the wars (and presumably the breakdown of society; physical libraries would have remained intact only up to the point where people needed paper as fuel more than they wanted to preserve the knowledge in them).
I enjoy studying about the early Roman empire, which was around for a very long time. There were highly literate people in that society who wrote histories of their past and books about their contemporary society. Yet there's a great deal of knowledge that was lost due to fires, wars, earthquakes, and so on. Even today, with the advanced technologies we have for dating and analysis, there will always be some knowledge of that society that we will never know, and can only guess at.
The first two books make it plain that Khan was born in India, to an Indian mother.
That doesn't really amount to much when Earth is still the planet that Nero attacks and the crew manages to save. It's like giving a typical girlfriend kidnapping villain credit for saying "I'm going to kidnap the president, the Queen, the prime minister and all the leaders of the world!" Yeah, that's nice, but he still kidnaps your girlfriend and that's the main drive to stop him.
Also, anyone remember what Damon Lindelof said over at Collider?
“They’re in the 23rd century and these people are from Earth. The Earth needed to play more of a role in these movies, especially in the sense of giving the audience a degree of relatability. I think that in the same way that New York City becomes this anchor point for people in the Marvel movies; that’s Spidey’s stomping ground, that was the stomping ground for Tony Stark, that was the stomping ground for The Avengers, it’s New York. We wanted to do the same thing with Earth in the Star Trek movies.”
If Bob, Alex and Damon are close business buddies as they say they are (i.e. They can't stop saying how "brilliant" they are), I think we can all rest assured that Earth will be the center of attention in the next movie. And don't give me that "But they're on their five-year mission into deep space!" baloney. That was essentially the same promise as the last movie with the same mission statement, and all that did was set up a pre-title sequence where after we see the title, everyone is back on Earth.
Jeyl said:
Of course it always helps to think of Earth as America and the rest of the Federation as being its allies and client states, which is the basic analogy Trek was always tacitly built around. The anomaly is always headed for Earth for the same reason that flying saucers never invade Finland or Belgium.
Having said that:
Jeyl said:
An interesting thought experiment with Lindelof is to try to figure out which source or which focus group is behind statements like this, because it's hard to believe that he really believes them. (Though the analogy to Marvel movies explains a lot about the style of writing overall.) My best guess is that this angle focus-groups well in China, where themes of national defense -- and the use of Earth as an allegory with them -- would probably play well. If that's so, maybe we can look forward to the villain in the next movie being an art thief trying to steal Earth's precious historical treasures.
And yet it really is funny. How do films do well in the international market when they contain nary a reference to Earth? Does the number-one grossing SF movie of all time take place on Earth, or involve the heroes defending it like Spidey defends New York, instead of being out... I dunno, trekking somewheres? Does he think Abrams is going to set the next Star Wars trilogy on Earth? (And there's a thought... is he? Now that would be really something...
)
Star Trek and Into Darkness co-writer and producer Bob Orci read Greg Cox's Eugenics Wars novels before writing Into Darkness. Although he chose to ignore much of that Khan's backstory, Spock's mention in the movie that Khan's ongoing work included "exterminating those considered less than superior" is possibly a reference to Khan's endgame plan to kill all non-Augments with modified strep-A at the end of volume 2.Nerys Myk said:
And by defense, you of course mean Earth's defense, which in Star Trek Into Darkness is literally depicted as being nonexistent. It really must be asked if Earth could have survived Nero's attack with it's defense grids up when a crippled ship that is being dragged towards Earth by gravity alone all the way from the moon carrying a breach impending warp core could easily cause massive catastrophic damage. It almost feels like having the climax set at Earth was written in as a complete after thought and that the Vengeance and the Enterprise were originally supposed to be in orbit around a barren M-Class planet completely cut off from help. When you have both ships literally a moon's distance from Earth, Starfleet should have known about their presence, especially when communications on the Enterprise still worked and federation ships parked at the orbiting space dock could have detected the ships entering the system.
It simply could've been the Admiral Marcus ordered that no ships intervene in the conflict. The guy was the commander of Starfleet after all.
So Starfleet will just sit back and do nothing while a top secret ship that nobody in the Federation knows about armed to the teeth with weapons and firing on the flagship of the Federation while it's defenseless will just sit there and do nothing? Even when both ships are about to crash onto the planet? I think the Federation has a bigger problem with a lack of common sense than it does with officers hellbent on revenge.
Shhhhh! They don't like having the obvious answer pointed out.
See, the problem is that you just don't know how many allies Admiral Marcus has sprinkled throughout the upper echelons of Starfleet Command and how many loyal Captains and other officers are around.
Admiral Leyton from Homefront/Paradise Lost wasn't a one-man show either. It would be near impossible to pull off what Leyton or Marcus did without a Hell of a lot of support.
Hey, maybe Starfleet functions like the police force in LETHAL WEAPON.
Starfleet: "This is HQ, explain your presence."
Marcus: "It's me, Marcus. I have this under control."
Starfleet: "Okay, we'll let you handle it."
*moments later, both ships are falling towards earth*
Admiral #1: "Hey, shouldn't we do something about this?"
Admiral #2: "Nah, Marcus has it under control."
Don't be silly, of course it's not nonexistent.
They had Jim Kirk.
MakeshiftPython said:
Nailed it.
Last edited:
Earth being left defenseless is pretty standard Trek storytelling. You just have to pick a handwave that works for you. I go the feeling that when Marcus passes judgement on the Enterprise crew, he was putting on a show for the official record. So it's entirely possible that as far as the rest of the fleet goes: Kirk's in league with the terrorist. Marcus could have given them orders to stay out of the fight cause Kirk had some super weapon that only Marcus and his ship could deal with.
As for Vengenance being top secret. Marcus had a model of her on his desk. I'm not 100% certain that she was completely top secret beyond her modifications. The class might have been developed for some other use (example: Long range explorer) and Marcus hijacked the project to build his super ship.
This almost certainly has to be the case. There's no way they could've went from drawing board to working prototype in less than a year. Not on a ship that large and full of new technology.
Why not? They went from a transporter equation to a portable transporter unit that can send you from one solar system to another in the same amount of time.
With the transporter you already had a relationship between the programming and the technology. The simply miniaturized the technology.
We saw in the first film it took at least three-plus years to build the Enterprise and they looked to have the outer framework of the ship nearly complete.
Whole different ballgame. You're talking about building once piece of tech, that's really nothing much more than an upgrade to existing tech. Versus funding, then building an entire ship employing new engines, computers, flight dynamics, and weapons. Then make all the new stuff work and then work together, manufacture it, then put it all together on a newly built spaceframe.
Vengance's class, or at least the project that led to her, was probably not secret. What the ship could really do or was meant to do probably was.
See, I like to give credit to writers who actually try to justify why these ridiculous things happen, but I'm not going to give STID's writing trio credit for stuff they didn't even bother to put into the movie. Speculate all you want, but if there's nothing in the film that confirms your speculations, I'm going to conclude that they didn't put much thought into it. Marcus tells everyone to stay out of the fight? I'm not buying it. He's in a bigger, more powerful ship shooting at the flag ship of the Federation that isn't even fighting back. How can anyone look at that and not think "that ain't right". He needs to kill Kirk because he's allied with a terrorist? Well, why not try to arrest him? I doubt that every single member of his +1,000 crew are all in on it and deserve a swift execution.
If Marcus actually had that much hidden influence to stop anyone from interfering with his secret business even when he's making a show if it in front of Earth, why does he need to worry about anything at all? Why not let Kirk bring Khan back to Earth and tell his followers to kill them the moment they arrive on Earth? Why is he in such a hurry to destroy the Enterprise when he can sit back and let his loyal officers deal with Kirk and Khan?
Similar threads
