Relics: Saw it again
- Thread starter EnriqueH
- Start date
I think the revamping of those scenes was to address a couple of sfx issues in the original:
1) Conveying the size: In the original you can clearly see the horizon and it makes the sphere look about as big as the death star. And really at that distance there shouldn't be any curvature visible, but then that might confuse people or something. Anyway, in the remaster the horizon fades out, suggesting the structure goes on "forever".
2) The light source: There really shouldn't be much if any lighting since there's no sun, but obviously you can't show scenes like that. So the darkening was imo an attempt to address that, and make it look different than just orbiting a planet.
Keep in mind it was originally aired in the early 90s. People didn't have large, ultra-crisp tvs like they do now, so the imagery had be bright, stand out, and not really get bogged down in detail. Today they can use a lot more visual subtlety. The remaster ups the detail while still being faithful to the original effects. I've had mixed feelings with many remasters but I think this episode was done very well.
1) Conveying the size: In the original you can clearly see the horizon and it makes the sphere look about as big as the death star. And really at that distance there shouldn't be any curvature visible, but then that might confuse people or something. Anyway, in the remaster the horizon fades out, suggesting the structure goes on "forever".
2) The light source: There really shouldn't be much if any lighting since there's no sun, but obviously you can't show scenes like that. So the darkening was imo an attempt to address that, and make it look different than just orbiting a planet.
Keep in mind it was originally aired in the early 90s. People didn't have large, ultra-crisp tvs like they do now, so the imagery had be bright, stand out, and not really get bogged down in detail. Today they can use a lot more visual subtlety. The remaster ups the detail while still being faithful to the original effects. I've had mixed feelings with many remasters but I think this episode was done very well.
^ I can buy that. 
It's just that showing them side-by-side, as RAMA did earlier, actually accentuates both the positives and the negatives of the restoration.
The left hand picture has more visibility, but far less definition. The right hand picture is sharper and more detailed, but is (quite starkly) shrouded in darkness when compared directly with the left hand picture.
I can certainly appreciate the compromise between intention vs execution, however.
It's just that showing them side-by-side, as RAMA did earlier, actually accentuates both the positives and the negatives of the restoration.The left hand picture has more visibility, but far less definition. The right hand picture is sharper and more detailed, but is (quite starkly) shrouded in darkness when compared directly with the left hand picture.
I can certainly appreciate the compromise between intention vs execution, however.
As a result the BD image is more realistic looking, though.
It's hard if not impossible to convey the size of a sphere as curvature is essentially a function of distance.
A few days removed from seeing the episode, I'm not sure that they overplayed the "old" card.
Scotty himself says he's old.
But I think that's a minor point. More than anything, I think Scotty is lost.
He's on his way to retirement when he finds himself in the future with much of his engineering knowledge obsolete and his friends even older or dead.
Scotty himself says he's old.
But I think that's a minor point. More than anything, I think Scotty is lost.
He's on his way to retirement when he finds himself in the future with much of his engineering knowledge obsolete and his friends even older or dead.
Makes me wonder if Spock still has a starship. I can think of no better place for Scotty to be, even if it's a private or ambassadorial craft
I wonder if Scotty ever found out that Spock & McCoy are still around, or that Kirk had returned from the Nexus (forgiving that he seemingly didn't recall having witnessed Kirk's loss on the Ent-B, for whatever reason, even though he fully recollected some random lad named Franklin)
Hey, someone had to bring it up.
I wonder if Scotty ever found out that Spock & McCoy are still around, or that Kirk had returned from the Nexus (forgiving that he seemingly didn't recall having witnessed Kirk's loss on the Ent-B, for whatever reason, even though he fully recollected some random lad named Franklin)
Hey, someone had to bring it up.
The stranger thing is that Scotty thinks the Enterprise is an "old girl" in "mothballs"...
It doesn't work well if we assume Scotty thinks he's been in the transporter for a few months: the E-B was already out and about, and would obviously be the Enterprise that this Riker guy is referring to. And it doesn't work well if we assume Scotty already realizes it has been years or decades (this might be obvious from what happened to Franklin).
On the other hand, I have no difficulty accepting that "I bet Jim Kirk himself" is the new generic expression for "seems God lent me a hand".
Timo Saloniemi
It doesn't work well if we assume Scotty thinks he's been in the transporter for a few months: the E-B was already out and about, and would obviously be the Enterprise that this Riker guy is referring to. And it doesn't work well if we assume Scotty already realizes it has been years or decades (this might be obvious from what happened to Franklin).
On the other hand, I have no difficulty accepting that "I bet Jim Kirk himself" is the new generic expression for "seems God lent me a hand".
Timo Saloniemi
Makes me wonder if Spock still has a starship. I can think of no better place for Scotty to be, even if it's a private or ambassadorial craft
I wonder if Scotty ever found out that Spock & McCoy are still around, or that Kirk had returned from the Nexus (forgiving that he seemingly didn't recall having witnessed Kirk's loss on the Ent-B, for whatever reason, even though he fully recollected some random lad named Franklin)
Hey, someone had to bring it up.
From his perspective, Franklin is the last person he saw before being put in transporter stasis, IE minutes ago. I hope Scotty's memory span is longer than that.
I never thought of it that way that Soctty was using her Kirk line as sort of "it took divine intervention for this to work."
We have to give Scotty a lot of forgiveness for what he says and does once "beamed in." He did just spend almost 80 years in a transporter buffer with a tiny bit of degradation. So he's maybe not all there.
Franklin was someone who served on the Jenolan and him and Scotty developed something of a friendship as Scotty rode the ship to the destination. I think Franklin was a steward of some sort.
We have to give Scotty a lot of forgiveness for what he says and does once "beamed in." He did just spend almost 80 years in a transporter buffer with a tiny bit of degradation. So he's maybe not all there.
Franklin was someone who served on the Jenolan and him and Scotty developed something of a friendship as Scotty rode the ship to the destination. I think Franklin was a steward of some sort.
It's not strange, it's just a continuity error. Spock was supposed to be on the E-B before they changed it to Scotty after Nimoy shot it down. Taking the episode in the context it came out in 1992, Scotty's ship crashed well before there was a E-B in production, hence why he assumed that it had to be the E-A with Kirk because he couldn't imagine a new Enterprise being launched in such a short time (but again, he's not thinking about how long he was in the buffer, he still thinks he's in 2294).
He probably never imagined being in the buffer for more than a few months before being rescued.
Yeah, it's just strange show-internally. In the real world, it's not so much a matter of Scotty originally being written as being off the E-B, but of the whole E-B thing not having been written yet.
That's the other weird thing. Why would a transport headed for an established colony hit a snag nobody else had hit yet - and would not hit again for almost a century?
If the Jenol*n was taking a rare shortcut, then it might be decades until somebody else did; if she didn't warn anybody of taking the shortcut, then help might never arrive.
If she was establishing a new route, though, then the response to her disappearance would be an immediate assumption that the new route was not safe, and the dispatching of a well-equipped rescue force, both to check out for survivors and to secure the route for further travel.
It doesn't seem as if the latter would have been true. Was the former? Possibly Scotty was making creative use of existing Starfleet supply runs, and pulling his considerable weight in making a minor course change where agreeable to all participants. But he would have known he had sealed his own fate, then, and could not expect rescue in the near future.
Timo Saloniemi
Yeah, the continuity error is with Generations, one could say that "Relics" already established Scotty as leaving on the Jenol*n before there ever was an Enterprise-B.
I don't regret the fact that Scotty is there in Generations, but it was a perfectly avoidable problem. Generations co-writer was the sole writer of "Relics", after all; he changed the character to Scotty knowing full well it ignored his own earlier script.
I don't regret the fact that Scotty is there in Generations, but it was a perfectly avoidable problem. Generations co-writer was the sole writer of "Relics", after all; he changed the character to Scotty knowing full well it ignored his own earlier script.
There's another thing. Even now, we can detect planets orbiting stars light years away. A Dyson sphere is so big and it's the 24th century for crying out loud! It should be detectable half a quadrant away!
doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
I would tend to agree that no follow-up on the Dyson Sphere in "Relics" was unfortunate.
But this episode kind of "suffers" from the opposite problem that plagued Enterprise's "These Are The Voyages" in that here, the Dyson Sphere is effectively a MacGuffin and the episode's true focus is right where it should be - on Scotty.
It's a fabulous episode that truly honors the character and TOS while at the same time moving him forward in to the TNG era and helps develop Geordi a little bit better beyond the loathesome "He's bad with women" plots or being used because of his VISOR. It's a splendid script and deserves its place as one of TNG's best.
I do know there was a cut scene where Scotty talks to Troi about his adjusting to the 24th century, as mentioned in Larry Nemecek's Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, pp. 219:
I'd have loved to see one of Scotty's further adventures after this episode, even if it meant he wound up on DS9, but I'm ok with this being his final chronological appearance on screen.
For those interested, the novels do plenty with Scotty in the 24th century too.
But this episode kind of "suffers" from the opposite problem that plagued Enterprise's "These Are The Voyages" in that here, the Dyson Sphere is effectively a MacGuffin and the episode's true focus is right where it should be - on Scotty.
It's a fabulous episode that truly honors the character and TOS while at the same time moving him forward in to the TNG era and helps develop Geordi a little bit better beyond the loathesome "He's bad with women" plots or being used because of his VISOR. It's a splendid script and deserves its place as one of TNG's best.
I do know there was a cut scene where Scotty talks to Troi about his adjusting to the 24th century, as mentioned in Larry Nemecek's Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion, pp. 219:
I'd have loved to see one of Scotty's further adventures after this episode, even if it meant he wound up on DS9, but I'm ok with this being his final chronological appearance on screen.
For those interested, the novels do plenty with Scotty in the 24th century too.
But none of the methods we use today would work on a solid Dyson sphere.
All the methods depend on observing the star and divining the existence of the planet out of that. But the Dyson sphere obscures the star. So we can't observe any occultations (because there's only one, and it's permanent!), we can't observe any wobble (because even if the Dyson sphere were transparent, a symmetric sphere wouldn't cause the star to wobble), and we can't observe any deviations from the usual emission spectrum (because the only spectrum being emitted is the nearly undetectable infrared leaking from the sphere, and at best might make us mistake the star-and-sphere combo for a brown dwarf star).
We don't know why the Dyson sphere here causes a gravitic anomaly that brings transport ships out of warp. It's just a lump of mass, not particularly big in comparison with regular stars. But somehow it has gravity inside (and no, it doesn't come from rotation, for various reasons); perhaps this artificial gravity is anomalous enough to have that effect on ships warping nearby. But artificial gravity in Trek doesn't reach far; on starship decks, it seems to die out before it reaches the next deck! So it wouldn't be observable from afar.
Timo Saloniemi
There is a very simple way to observe the Dyson sphere, by the gravitational effect of the star itself on the neighboring star systems. If we can detect a black hole in another galaxy, surely an occulted star in our own Quadrant, IE a small fraction of that distance, shouldn't be much of a challenge to TWENTY FOURTH CENTURY science, should it?
doubleohfive
Fleet Admiral
There tend to be these kinds of minor mistakes in a lot of Ron Moore's scripts. Though I doubt it was something he, Braga and Berman weren't aware of. The Generations script originally was supposed to feature Kirk, Spock and McCoy in the prologue. When Nimoy and Kelley passed on the film, it went to the others. When they signed Doohan, it was likely brushed under the rug to facilitate the film, which had a lot riding on it and hardly worth breaking their backs over one throwaway line in an episode that had aired two years prior.
The aforementioned continuity error with Scotty between "Relics" and Generations (which I've seen explained away by way of Scotty being disoriented after re-materializing after being in the buffer for so long).
Another error like this in the episode -- the Enterprise beaming Geordi and Scotty away at the last second despite the Jenolen's shields still being up.
Yet another (just off the top of my head) is the admiral at the end of DS9's "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?" when the admiral makes some comment about Khan "two hundred years ago" - which Ron Moore sheepishly admitted was because he had Khan's line "Two hundred years ago on Earth, I was a prince!" stuck in his head, despite the fact that DS9 took place nearly a hundred years after The Wrath of Khan.
I don't really mind these glitches; Ron Moore has brushed them off as honest mistakes but also very minor ones not worth getting upset over. That's how I prefer to look at them.
