Exactly my feelings. Death can be rather cheap drama at times. Also, since when is the fate of a main character ever really in question?
Drama arises primarily from conflict, and you can have conflict without death.
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Pike in Through the Valley of the Shadows
- Thread starter MrShinzoff
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Drama arises primarily from conflict, and you can have conflict without death.
Good spotting!
Can we still interpret the scenes shown as somehow being snippets of a broader whole that does match "The Menagerie"? Might be we join the action only some time after the fateful rupture takes place; Pike may indeed have rushed into that engine room from elsewhere, and already ushered or dragged out quite a few cadets before the cameras start rolling. Sure, the computer says "radiation leak detected" after the scene begins, but it could have been saying that for several minutes already...
Timo Saloniemi
Editing changed things somewhat. I've seen a BTS clip of Pike doing a fireman carry on a cadet to get them out of the burning engine room in that scene but in the final edit, it's just BANG! and he's fucked.I'm not sure what's going on, but it's at least interesting that Mendez's description in "The Menagerie" that Pike "went in bringing out all those kids that were still alive" [sic] doesn't jibe with the future shown in "Through the Valley of Shadows." Pike has no time to rescue anybody, much less go in and bring people out, besides issuing one verbal order to go and physically trying to save one person in the compartment he was already in to begin with but apparently failing.
It's either a sloppy adaptation, or perhaps the intention is that, when the future finally arrives, Pike, having been forewarned by knowledge of the coming accident, starts saving cadets before it's too late to do anything. It isn't exactly clear, though.
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The Q and Picard death episode was a great cheaply made death centered story. The conflict was the past. It made for a unique way to tackle such a boring topic.
That's pretty cool. But I really suspect it's more than merely editing, because the computer states a countdown of four seconds until lock down, and there's no way to imagine a fireman carry of anybody in that time frame in the setting we saw. Ergo there was a writing change at some point too, even if it was just in what the computer was to say.
At this point, I should probably also confess that my suggestion that maybe Pike starts rescuing people early when the real thing is happening doesn't really make sense, unless starting early involves changing the way the computer isolates compartments, but it's basically the corner that everything gets painted into, given that Pike is apparently given only a four-second warning.
I really don't understand why it has to be staged so urgently. It gives Pike time to try to save only one person, which he fails at, and otherwise it reduces the event to something that happens to Pike. Instead of getting to sacrifice to save some number of cadets, which is implied by the original TOS dialog, his heroism is transferred to saving the trillions in DISCO at the cost of just having to live out this accident without getting to save anybody else. TOS painted him as a hero for sacrificing his health to save some cadets, as many that were still alive in fact. That's not at all what we're shown in DISCO.
I'm not sure how the four-second warning is a problem. It could easily have been preceded by a one-minute warning and a five-minute warning.
TOS tells us about Pike going in because of a baffle plate rupture. This need not be related to the kaboom we see in DSC - that is, the actual onset of the events need not be included in the DSC scene at all, and may precede them by quite a bit.
What we see would be compatible with, say, an engineering mishap that initially looks harmless but immediately sends the experienced (or forewarned?) Pike down from the bridge to warn the cadets that they really, really need to follow procedure here. Pike does his heroic rescuing while there's radiation there but while no telltale explosions are going off yet; he's doomed at that point already. And then he tries to save one final cadet and gets locked in with the corpses.
Perhaps the cadets were in fact thinking this was a harmless drill? DSC does reveal that a dedicated "training exercise" was in progress, and was only aborted because of the radiation leak. It's quite plausible that the computer initially failed to add the crucial "training exercise aborted" bit to its warnings, as the decision to abort might have been the on-the-spot instructor's, or even Pike's, rather than the computer's.
The other option indeed is that the forewarning from this vision radically changed Pike's behavior during the actual incident. No doubt he would be on his toes every time this cadet he had seen in the vision went anywhere near the engine room. Heck, perhaps he tried to avoid the disaster altogether by perfectly logically telling said cadet all about it beforehand, which is the exact reason why she stayed behind trying to fix things even though procedure and common sense would have stopped her from doing that otherwise... The time crystals might be notorious for creating predestination loops where other types of time travel allow for the breaking of said.
Timo Saloniemi
TOS tells us about Pike going in because of a baffle plate rupture. This need not be related to the kaboom we see in DSC - that is, the actual onset of the events need not be included in the DSC scene at all, and may precede them by quite a bit.
What we see would be compatible with, say, an engineering mishap that initially looks harmless but immediately sends the experienced (or forewarned?) Pike down from the bridge to warn the cadets that they really, really need to follow procedure here. Pike does his heroic rescuing while there's radiation there but while no telltale explosions are going off yet; he's doomed at that point already. And then he tries to save one final cadet and gets locked in with the corpses.
Perhaps the cadets were in fact thinking this was a harmless drill? DSC does reveal that a dedicated "training exercise" was in progress, and was only aborted because of the radiation leak. It's quite plausible that the computer initially failed to add the crucial "training exercise aborted" bit to its warnings, as the decision to abort might have been the on-the-spot instructor's, or even Pike's, rather than the computer's.
The other option indeed is that the forewarning from this vision radically changed Pike's behavior during the actual incident. No doubt he would be on his toes every time this cadet he had seen in the vision went anywhere near the engine room. Heck, perhaps he tried to avoid the disaster altogether by perfectly logically telling said cadet all about it beforehand, which is the exact reason why she stayed behind trying to fix things even though procedure and common sense would have stopped her from doing that otherwise... The time crystals might be notorious for creating predestination loops where other types of time travel allow for the breaking of said.
Timo Saloniemi
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