Original Sins (or, My Grypes with TWOK!!)

[BigJake]

You need scripts adjusted to derive drama and tension from a more realistic interpretation of space, since obviously asteroid belts don't present actual massive collision hazards to a navigating ship and you can't actually hide in a nebula like a sailing ship can in a fog bank. Just write about different problems and with adjusted assumptions. Same way we write plenty of modern nautical adventures without the use of sea serpents or clashing rocks.

For example, in a more realistic SF universe, asteroids are far-flung separate destinations in their own rights* that could all have their own futuristic settlements and mining operations, so the kinds of stories that you used to only tell about planets could take place on them (and the possible restrictions of scale make it easier to keep those stories contained and comprehensible). The limitations of realism don't just offer disadvantages, they also offer story opportunities.

(* I believe this is actually part of the premise of the upcoming show The Expanse, isn't it?)

 

[Franklin]

Be that is it may I'm perfectly pleased that particular interpretation wasn't operating in 1982,

No he just went around silting the throats of scientists and lusting after a potential doomsday weapon 15 years after threatening to kill the Enterprise crew in a decompression chamber one by one and trying to use Kirk to prove he meant it.

Uh sorry, did you think I actually hadn't noticed that he Did Villainous Things? Do you think I'm saying he wasn't a villain? Are all villains the notional equivalent of Hitler to you or can you understand distinctions among different types?

Do you really believe Khan would know any moderation? Would Khan have lines not even he would cross? True, Khan may not have had a bloodlust that had to be slaked every day. He may not have killed for no real gain other than to satisfy a perverse ideology. But in his own cold, calculating way, if he believed killing ten, ten thousand, or ten million was necessary to achieve a goal he wanted to attain, he would do it. Right? Otherwise, why does he want the Genesis device? Why does he need a ship like the Vengeance? I believe he could kill millions without giving it a second thought and without the least bit of remorse. "Krazy Khan" in TWOK would be even more likely to do it.

 

[BigJake]

Do you really believe Khan would know any moderation? Would Khan have lines not even he would cross?

You should already know my answer to this, since I've said it several times. Yes, I believe Khan would have lines not even he would cross -- even the madman version (and no, saying this does not make him some kind of misunderstood good guy) -- and I also believe rewriting him as a mass murderer of planets would be uninteresting compared to the more personal struggle the film features, on which Meyer made the correct call. I don't know how many more ways I can say it than I've already done.

On the whole, for the "have him go off and threaten millions with Genesis" business, the plainest way I can put it was in this earlier post:

(And I mean really, at a certain level what you're describing is just stock moustache-twirler Because He's Evil behaviour. "Commander Cody, with you trapped in that nebula, now the universe will be powerless before my death ray!" It's Doctor Chaotica you need for that, not Khan. )

We can of course agree to disagree, but yes, I will remain perfectly happy that Meyer filmed his version of the character and not yours and his having done so will not be among my gripes. It's as simple as that. But not to worry, there are plenty more on which we can agree!

 

[SPCTRE]

Do you really believe Khan would know any moderation? Would Khan have lines not even he would cross?

Oh, he would respect some lines I'm sure.

 

[Franklin]

Do you really believe Khan would know any moderation? Would Khan have lines not even he would cross?

Oh, he would respect some lines I'm sure.

Meh. I bet he wouldn't hide his spoilers.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Yes, I believe Khan would have lines not even he would cross -- even the madman version

Like what?

 

[Hartzilla2007]

(* I believe this is actually part of the premise of the upcoming show The Expanse, isn't it?)

Spoiler: The expanse

Spoiler: Don't read if you really really don't want to be spolied

Until the Protomolecule pulls inertial damping out of its ass on Eros station during the big chase to Earth, and probably a whole host of alien magic super science tropes.

 

[Christopher]

But what's the alternative, that works in dramatic terms? Enter an asteroid field, and have a crewman say in ominous tones, "Our chances of being struck by an asteroid just increased to ... a billion to one."

I guess we need some new, more realistic space perils, like pulsars and black holes.

Maybe a protoplanetary disk of a forming star system, which would be thousands of times denser than the Main Asteroid Belt. The asteroids still wouldn't be visually as closely packed as in The Empire Strikes Back, but given the speeds at which they're traveling, there'd be a significant impact risk. Although you'd have to convey the danger more through dialogue than visuals. "The debris in this disk is moving so fast that it could punch us full of holes before we even saw it coming." Come to think of it, the shots in Interstellar where there were clumps of particulate debris coming at the screen could be along the right lines. There might well be such denser clumps, on the way toward forming asteroids and planets.

The rings of a Jovian planet like Saturn would be nearly as densely packed as your standard movie asteroid field -- maybe a kilometer of average separation between fist-sized to house-sized ice chunks, fairly roomy compared to TESB but still hazardous at any speed. The downside being that it's only a few hundred meters thick at most, so a ship would just have to move a tiny distance perpendicular to it and they'd be out of it completely. There's no reason to spend any time inside the rings unless one chose to, and carefully set one's course to stay within them. (And keep in mind that, contrary to the usual portrayal of planetary rings as "flat," the pull of gravity would be inward toward the planet, so really the rings would be vertically oriented from the perspective of a ship in orbit.)

The best equivalent to a Mutara-type nebula would be the actual upper atmosphere of a Jovian planet. It would be dense enough, parts of it would be opaque enough, and it would be very turbulent and stormy and have incredibly powerful lightning discharges to endanger the characters and scramble the sensors. If TWOK's writers had just made Mutara a Jovian planet instead of a nebula, they could've depicted essentially the same battle sequence and it would've been far more plausible. (And then the Genesis Planet could've been formed from the Jovian planet's solid core once the wave blew its hydrogen atmosphere away, again making far more sense of the whole thing.)

For example, in a more realistic SF universe, asteroids are far-flung separate destinations in their own rights* that could all have their own futuristic settlements and mining operations, so the kinds of stories that you used to only tell about planets could take place on them (and the possible restrictions of scale make it easier to keep those stories contained and comprehensible). The limitations of realism don't just offer disadvantages, they also offer story opportunities.

(* I believe this is actually part of the premise of the upcoming show The Expanse, isn't it?)

I think so. Also my novel Only Superhuman, which is set in a diverse Asteroid Belt civilization with different cultures/communities shaped by the conditions and orbits of the different asteroids they're associated with.

 

[BigJake]

Yes, I believe Khan would have lines not even he would cross -- even the madman version

Like what?

Stripes with plaid. Belt with suspenders.

Being mad doesn't make him a monster, after all.

 

[BigJake]

Having finally done my "in honour of Leonard" re-watch, in course of which I totally did not cry at any time, let's be clear, a couple of other gripes occurred to me.

"It was a mistake for you to accept promotion. Commanding a starship is your first, best destiny."
This really is in the "Original Sins" category -- the introduction of the idea that "accepting promotion" in Starfleet is optional. This would later lead to the absurdly static onscreen careers of Picard and Riker, despite its being implied from time to time that Starfleet really is the sort of dynamic organization that would leave such stick-in-the-muds behind. It also introduced the related idea that men like Picard or Kirk would uselessly gather dust in do-nothing positions at the Admiralty, which... you'd think the Admiralty would kind of want people with experience making the big decisions, but never mind.

More of a random gripe than an "original sin" per se:

"If we go by the book, like Lt. Saavik, hours would seem like days."
I'm not typically down with a lot of the complaining about Khan that goes on (as parts of this thread show) but here's one that I have to give to his critics: this line is Spock announcing, en clair, what his incredibly simplistic code is going to be. That it passes Khan by regardless doesn't really turn out to be very important, but this particularly detail is still kind of... annoying. Who was really supposed to be fooled by that transmission?

Movie was still awesome of course

 

[Ithekro]

Well Khan wouldn't know who Lt. Saavik is, so that would be a reference he might not catch. Also it has been some time since Khan encountered Spock, who was the one sparing with him mentally (in place of Kirk in Khan's mind). He might not notice the Vulcan's intent, as Vulcans do not lie (everyone knows that...even temporally displaced supermen that can quote Klingon proverbs even though he probably never seen a Klingon).

 

[BigJake]

Yeah, I mean: he doesn't know who Saavik is, he might somehow know about the "Vulcans don't lie" thing (maybe it turned up in the Enterprise's engineering schematics for some reason?) but you'd at least think the very odd phrasing would be a dead giveaway that something's up.

 

[eyeresist]

No-one in the audience got it (and anyone who says they did is a liar ).

 

[Christopher]

Well Khan wouldn't know who Lt. Saavik is, so that would be a reference he might not catch.

But that's not the relevant part. Take out the Saavik reference and the intent is still equally evident.

Also it has been some time since Khan encountered Spock, who was the one sparing with him mentally (in place of Kirk in Khan's mind). He might not notice the Vulcan's intent, as Vulcans do not lie (everyone knows that...even temporally displaced supermen that can quote Klingon proverbs even though he probably never seen a Klingon).

Vulcans don't wax poetic or get impatient either, so saying "hours could seem like days" is pretty anomalous and should raise some red flags. And the way Spock's voice overstresses "days" in the following sentences makes it even more obvious.

And it's not a Klingon proverb. It's a real-world human proverb, popularized by the 1782 novel Les Liaisons dangereuses. Nicholas Meyer had a running gag of having characters pretend that Earth expressions were of alien origin -- he did it twice in TUC with the "Vulcan proverb" about Nixon going to China and "Shakespeare in the original Klingon."

No-one in the audience got it (and anyone who says they did is a liar ).

But none of them were genetically engineered for superior intelligence. (As far as we know...)

 

[Franklin]

I have to say that Spock delivered the line so deliberately and it seemed such an odd thing to say, that a fair number of movie-goers (not just me) had to think it meant something. We may have not known exactly what, but something was up.

The sad thing is Saavik didn't get it. I'm inclined to believe McCoy did, because I don't remember him acting that surprised when Kirk pulled out the communicator. Though McCoy may have just felt an unconcerned vibe from Kirk and figured Kirk had something going.

 

[BigJake]

No-one in the audience got it (and anyone who says they did is a liar ).

I didn't get it the first time I saw the movie... but in my defense, I was like, eight.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Vulcans don't wax poetic or get impatient either, so saying "hours could seem like days" is pretty anomalous and should raise some red flags.

Khan surely knows Spock is half human. So if Spock engages in an occasional human expression, Khan might have written it off for that reason.

And even though Khan, being an augment, was made to have superior intelligence, there could still be a few things that he just doesn't know jackshit about. He's smart in most things, but not *everything*.

 

[FormerLurker]

The way I see it, there's intelligent, and there's smart. One can have the IQ(literally intellingent) of Einstein, and the functional mental agility(smart. or not) of drying dog feces. It doesn't matter how intelligent you are, if you don't use it.

 

[WarpFactorZ]

There's always the possibility that Spock was speaking with Kirk on a scrambled channel for the first part of their conversation to establish the "code," then opened it up to Reliant for the remainder of the report (from "The situation is grave, Admiral..." onward).

It also makes sense from the point of view that Reliant didn't intercept the communication to beam them up after 2 hours. If that was broadcast on an open frequency, then Khan would've been right on top of them (and also not shocked to learn Kirk was back on board when he was "laughing at the superior intellect.").

That would make a bit more sense in-universe, even though the line was delivered for the benefit of the audience.

 

[Brutal Strudel]

I have a gripe with a gripe: the Chekov thing. The Enterprise is a big ship. The events of "Space Seed" are not in real time--there's much we don't see. It's hardly a stretch to conclude that Chekov was already a crew member--perhaps part of the security detail assigned to Khan--but not yet a bridge officer.

His promotion to security chief in TMP makes this reading all the more plausible, of course.

(Apologies if this has been addressed already--haven't read the entire thread yet.)