Question, is Scotty a murderer?

[Crazy Eddie]

We can't tell whether it's Marcus collapsing the warp field at the exact second, or Sulu deciding that enough is enough and the warp field must be dropped lest they all blow sky-high.

It's neither. Marcus shot a chunk out of the starboard nacelle and Enterprise went into a flat spin and dropped out of warp very much out of control.

It's not so easy to actually control a vehicle's movement at that kind of high speed, especially when somebody's shooting at you. If Sulu was a good enough helmsman to pull that off, he would have been good enough not to get hit in the first place.

 

[Smellmet]

Naah. We can't tell whether it's Marcus collapsing the warp field at the exact second, or Sulu deciding that enough is enough and the warp field must be dropped lest they all blow sky-high. And if we want to explain precision, we better go by the latter interpretation, because if Marcus wanted precision, he'd choose another time and place for it.

Timo Saloniemi

I'll give you your first point, granted but this is just ridiculous speculation with zero screen time evidence to even remotely back it up.

 

[Vandervecken]

Naturally, that would depend on who is doing the accusing: being a soldier and killing in order to accomplish your mission doesn't get you off the hook on murder charges unless the person you killed belongs to a nation your army beat to submission so that the nation dare not press charges.

But who would accuse Scotty? Marcus might, for sheer shits and giggles, moments before he phasered the poor engineer to oblivion. But Marcus would never write an official report on those particular events. At most, he'd write a report summarily declaring the late Kirk and his whole best-forgotten crew terrorists, baby-eating rapists and whatnot - but this would not touch upon what they really did.

Timo Saloniemi

Don't know about that Timo; Nuremburg, for example, could have gone a lot farther by that reckoning. Only 24 prosecuted and you must admit there was a whole there there with this lot beyond prosecuting a war.

 

[Timo]

No army would ever want to prosecute a fellow army for murder! Why dig the ground from under your very own wobbly feet?

"War crimes" exist only because nobody wants to call war itself a crime, out of fear of getting prosecuted for waging it. But this is a convention, not a formal concept of law: the fact that murder factually takes place is ignored rather than formally facilitated.

I'll give you your first point, granted but this is just ridiculous speculation with zero screen time evidence to even remotely back it up.

The rationale here is that we know squat about how "forcing out of warp" really works, yet we do know the dramatic motivations of the heroes and the villains, and we have this extremely unlikely ultimate result of the ship being almost where both Marcus and Kirk might want her, yet still not in the exact place either would prefer. So we could and IMHO should wiggle the fictional mechanics in order to match the simpler-to-grasp dramatics.

Marcus might want to kill Kirk in view of Earth audiences if he fears Kirk has already managed to send messages to Earth exposing the Admiral's evil plans. It won't do to just kill Kirk off screen then - Marcus has to show Kirk is an evil terrorist who has sent false messages. Staging a play near (but not too near!) Earth where Marcus has all the lines and Kirk acts gagged and bound might be Marcus' only hope of achieving that.

Kirk has a much better motivation for wanting to be near Earth. He knows he has not managed to send any messages: physically reachign Earth is his only hope of doing so.

So, which one succeeds more and fails less when the ship ends up next to the Moon? I think Kirk does. His motivation is clear, Marcus' is jumbled at best. And if Kirk succeeds, it must be through Marcus' failure to fully control the events.

This then simply becomes an exercise of seeing Kirk in control during the warp chase. Not more in control than Marcus - that is not required. Only in some sort of "not total pushover" sort of control.

And we see that very thing: Marcus fires, and fires a lot, but cannot force the hero ship out of warp until at a location better suited to Kirk's purposes than his. It's not as if Marcus needs to fire just once at a moment of his choosing: he makes a considerable and prolonged effort. And in light of the above, he only "succeeds" after a fashion: Sulu was already at the destination when Marcus' hits produced a decisive result. So perhaps it was a requirement for that result that Sulu be slowing down? (Say, perhaps fatally damaging a nacelle is very difficult if the nacelle is generating a strong warp field?)

After all, anything else would bring us right back to the "incredible astronomical coincidence" model, and IMHO credibility is preferable.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Smellmet]

After all, anything else would bring us right back to the "incredible astronomical coincidence" model, and IMHO credibility is preferable.

Timo Saloniemi

That's the point though - the scene doesn't have credibility. You can clearly see Marcus's ship's weapons knock the enterprise out of warp. The impact of the shot on the nacelle sends the enterprise into a spin, and out of the warp field. Whether we claim to not know about warp mechanics is irrelevant - this is what the film is depicting, pure and simple. There's no deliberation on the destination on either side - it's a battle. Marcus didn't know if the enterprise would even fire back, a it happens she never got a chance.

The bottom line is the scene is written poorly - anything else is pure off screen speculation to try and make it fit into any kind of sense.

 

[Timo]

Well, that's what we do here for a living. Most of Trek isn't quality entertainment as such, but it's great fun trying to see it as an integrated alternate reality where stuff makes sense. And this is surprisingly easy exactly because Trek isn't an integrated reality: it has gaps big enough to drive any size of bullshit rationalization through.

We seem to agree that Marcus couldn't know when and where his attempts to stop Kirk's ship would succeed. Sulu, OTOH, would be quite keen on ending up on Earth orbit or somewhere close by - and when he so visibly does, it would be nice to credit him with it. Sure, the ship may have been falling apart from around him, but something he did (wiggling the isophasic doodad, whatever) allowed her to fall apart at a moment roughly of his choosing. Doing more of it would have made him overshoot; doing less would have given Marcus his victory at a truly random location.

Say, we know two-nacelled ships can fly at warp with one nacelle, as per a certain ENT example. Sulu would have known where to yield - but had it been twenty more seconds to the Sol system, we can argue he would have made it and still stayed within the confines of Trek "rules".

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Smellmet]

We'll have to just agree to disagree. I cannot accept that Sulu had any say when the enterprise dropped out of warp, it all happened so quickly (which is another problem I have with the scene - I would have like the enterprise to have got the chance to at least get a few shots back instead of the customary beating, but that's another discussion), they were fighting for their lives before they even knew what to do.

I get that you're amusing yourself by 'filling in the blanks' for your own personal head canon, but you're describing something that simply isn't depicted on the screen in any way, shape, or form.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Doesn't the Vengeance crash into San Francisco because Khan deliberately steered it that way? I always thought he was actively trying to destroy the city, or at least Starfleet Command.

 

[Timo]

Khan explicitly says "Set destination, SF HQ". Instead of asking supposedly pertinent questions such as "Parking this starship on SF HQ lawn will result in massive casualties, confirm/abort?", the ship just says "Engines compromised, cannot guarantee destination", which probably goes to show how evil she is.

So, that the ship mows down part of San Francisco is an accident. What she was intended to do was to mow down another part of San Francisco, namely the SF HQ.

What remains unclear is whether Khan, too, was falling helplessly towards Earth while Kirk was kicking the warp core into submission, or whether Khan was chasing after Kirk on a still somewhat functional starship but, realizing that Kirk had managed to stop the fall of the Enterprise, and that the Vengeance could not do the same, quickly reset his ramming target as SF HQ.

The very fact that Khan misses slamming into Kirk's ship by only a hair's breadth suggests to me the latter. He wouldn't be anywhere near if his fall were equally uncontrolled!

Timo Saloniemi

 

[The Wormhole]

Doesn't the Vengeance crash into San Francisco because Khan deliberately steered it that way? I always thought he was actively trying to destroy the city, or at least Starfleet Command.

Yes, exactly. The scene starts off with Vengeance adrift in Lunar orbit. On the bridge, Khan accesses the navigation systems. Paraphrasing, but the dialogue exchange goes roughly like this:
Computer: "Please state desired destination."
Khan: "Starfleet Command, San Francisco, Earth."
Computer: "Warning due to damage to navigation systems, accuracy can not be guaranteed."
Khan: "Just take me there!"
Vengeance then proceeds to fly directly into San Francisco, literally.

 

[Timo]

Uh, nope, not exactly - Khan only yells those commands when his ship is falling past Kirk's already stablized vessel at cloudtop level.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Smellmet]

Doesn't the Vengeance crash into San Francisco because Khan deliberately steered it that way? I always thought he was actively trying to destroy the city, or at least Starfleet Command.

He doesn't issue any commands to head there until the ship has plummeted well into earth's atmosphere, using what systems were still functional at that time. As far as the movie shows - the ship was doomed to crash on earth regardless.

 

[Timo]

...Again, if we mix real world physics into this, there's no way the ship could "passively" crash that way. And even if there's some Trek-specific reason why the trip from the Moon to Earth takes mere minutes, and applies to both starships alike, it's basically impossible that the two would "passively" end up piercing the cloud cover at the same spot, seeing how Kirk's ship tumbled like a leaf and Khan's dove like a dart.

But if we drop "passively" at least for the latter aspect, it makes great sense for Khan to almost hit Kirk: surely that would be his primary goal in life at the time, what with Marcus already dead and Kirk the one supposedly directly responsible for the deaths of his 72 best pals. SF HQ would be a mere consolation prize.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Smellmet]

...Again, if we mix real world physics into this, there's no way the ship could "passively" crash that way. And even if there's some Trek-specific reason why the trip from the Moon to Earth takes mere minutes, and applies to both starships alike, it's basically impossible that the two would "passively" end up piercing the cloud cover at the same spot, seeing how Kirk's ship tumbled like a leaf and Khan's dove like a dart.

But if we drop "passively" at least for the latter aspect, it makes great sense for Khan to almost hit Kirk: surely that would be his primary goal in life at the time, what with Marcus already dead and Kirk the one supposedly directly responsible for the deaths of his 72 best pals. SF HQ would be a mere consolation prize.

Timo Saloniemi

Why not include this into the narrative then? One line of dialogue, 5 seconds tops is all it would have taken. Since they were so keen at this point of the movie to hammer home how eeeevil he is, why leave a thread dangling like that? Again, the film make zero attempt to show this or even hint that this is the case. It's boom, then next scene narrowly missing enterprise.

There's nothing more at play here than this being another sequence just like the warp chase scene, written to look 'cool' and dramatic at the expense of coherent storytelling - an Abrams hallmark, just like in ST09 with Spock seeing Vulcan being consumed by the red matter from the planet's surface despite it being to far away to see (a stupid error JJ would repeat in TFA with the Starkiller base firing scene).

For all we know Khan might have sat and dined out on the crushed brains out Marcus's head before appearing on the viewscreen with a phaser at Kirk's head. Doesn't mean jack if the film doesn't remotely hint at it.

 

[Crazy Eddie]

The rationale here is that we know squat about how "forcing out of warp" really works, yet we do know the dramatic motivations of the heroes and the villains, and we have this extremely unlikely ultimate result of the ship being almost where both Marcus and Kirk might want her, yet still not in the exact place either would prefer. So we could and IMHO should wiggle the fictional mechanics in order to match the simpler-to-grasp dramatics.

Or we accept that the ship just happened to come out of warp at that particular location instead of injecting ad hoc explanations into that scene that aren't neccesary OR consistent with the story?

He doesn't issue any commands to head there until the ship has plummeted well into earth's atmosphere, using what systems were still functional at that time. As far as the movie shows - the ship was doomed to crash on earth regardless.

The movie leaves it vague enough that Khan could easily have been trying to hit the Enterprise as a final act of revenge and the Enterprise crew simply failed to notice it since they were, you know, FALLING TO THEIR DEATHS. Not revealing this until a few minutes later would be a good way of preserving the surprise when Vengeance goes screaming by and narrowly misses them.

 

[Smellmet]

The movie leaves it vague enough that Khan could easily have been trying to hit the Enterprise as a final act of revenge and the Enterprise crew simply failed to notice it since they were, you know, FALLING TO THEIR DEATHS. Not revealing this until a few minutes later would be a good way of preserving the surprise when Vengeance goes screaming by and narrowly misses them.

... which is also inserting an ad hoc explanation for what is shown on screen.

Sod it. Scotty is not a murderer.

 

[Pauln6]

I think they're all guilty of negligent homicide (or manslaughter under English law).

The security guard was making a lawful arrest of an unlawful trespasser.

Kirk promoted an ensign with 6 month's post graduation experience as a navigator to be his chief engineer.

The crew apparently managed to get the warp drive, impulse drive, and thrusters off line and were so busy saving their own skins that they didn't even try to use emergency power to use a tractor beam to shift the trajectory of Khan's ship slightly so it ditched into the ocean and/or the same for their own ship for that matter.

Obviously, they're not as negligent as Starfleet Command who don't seem to have any method of monitoring or controlling malfunctioning ships over heavily populated areas, even when that area is also the command centre of Starfleet.

So yeah, gross negligent homicide all round.

 

[The Wormhole]

The security guard was making a lawful arrest of an unlawful trespasser.

Considering they were on a warship which belonged to an illegal and criminal organization, it's hard to defend the action as a "lawful arrest."

 

[Pauln6]

Considering they were on a warship which belonged to an illegal and criminal organization, it's hard to defend the action as a "lawful arrest."

We can make assumptions about the criminality of Marcus but it doesn't automatically follow that every member of his crew was a criminal. It's not as if Kirk asks the permission of his security guards before making command decisions. Even assuming that the security guard knew that his mission was illegal, it was a Starfleet Vessel, the security guard was empowered to make such an arrest by Starfleet regulations, Scotty was not a member of the crew and, as such, was trespassing on said vessel, an offence for which one could be arrested, ergo the security guard was making a lawful arrest. ;-p

Of course, part of the stupidity of STiD is the way the characters opt for half-assed, dangerous so-called plans that are very likely to result in serious injury or death, just because they look cool. I'm sure the nerds could come up with a lot of safer plans as well as reasons why those safer plans would not work. I'd be interested to see if any of the reasons why those safer plans would not work would also be sufficient to foil Kirk and Khan's plan...

 

[The Wormhole]

We can make assumptions about the criminality of Marcus but it doesn't automatically follow that every member of his crew was a criminal. It's not as if Kirk asks the permission of his security guards before making command decisions. Even assuming that the security guard knew that his mission was illegal, it was a Starfleet Vessel, the security guard was empowered to make such an arrest by Starfleet regulations, Scotty was not a member of the crew and, as such, was trespassing on said vessel, an offence for which one could be arrested, ergo the security guard was making a lawful arrest. ;-p

Marcus belongs to Section 31, and the Vengeance was built and crewed by Section 31. Section 31 is itself a criminal organization, making everyone serving aboard the ship a criminal. Criminals can not "lawfully arrest" someone representing a legitimate government service who has boarded their ship. It really is that simple.