Star Trek: The Beginning SCRIPT online!
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
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I think it has to do with Surak’s teachings of non-violence in the Kir’Shara. The war does start only a couple of years after its discovery, and Vulcan under its new government would not want to participate in the conflict. Even applying force over a client state would be considered violence, which explains the complete dissolution of the High Command. The Vulcans became pretty toothless once it was brought to light. The realists were replaced with idealists.
Was he foreign policy? It was always interpreted that he was the leader of United Earth and “Minister” was a shortened form of Prime Minister.
That said, maybe the United Earth government has a President as its head of state ,while the Minister is head of government. And in addition to participating in formal functions, military power resides solely with the United Earth President. The Minister of Earth is responsible for everything else, including bringing a declaration of war to the United Earth President.
This script works well with PIC, in regards to explaining the absence of AI in Romulan society. If the Romulans relied on AI for the war in place of crew composites of admirals, captains, commanders and centurion on ships – waging a phony war of sorts - and then it failed them during the Battle of Cheron in a way that they never trusted AI again, it would explain a lot.
"Not bad" would be a kind assessment. Yeesh it's pretty horrible so far. (page 61) No military movie cliché left unturned. All the bad aspects of Trek'09 turned up to 11. And I like Trek'09.
There is at least precedent for this, the NX program test ships were manned.
Romulans having cloaking devices in the 2150's was established in ENT: "Minefield". It was a continuity error then, but IMHO the damage was done so they might as well have them here. Disco gave Klingons cloaks a decade before "Balance of Terror" also.
CBS have put a stop to fans filming unmade Trek scripts before, I think trying to make this would end the same way.
This whole thing should be solved by UE Starfleet placing quantum beacons on every outpost, colony starbase, starship, and homeworlds of the Coalition of Planets members to identify cloaked Romulan ships, as well as cloaked Suliban ships. Which forces the Romulans to abandon cloaking tech for a century to refine it, as the element of surprise has been ruined. It seems like the kind of tactical move the Romulans would make; like Picard said in “The Defector” “it’s always a game of chess with them.” The main problem is that this common-sense solution has never been established in canon, in Disco, Short Treks, the Kelvin films or anything else.
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Well, at the time this was written, that idea would make some sense. The recent Lower Decks episode "wej Duj" established that the Vulcans still have a fleet of starships that patrol outside Vulcan space and coordinate with Starfleet on some defense missions, but that of course hadn't been established when The Beginning was written.
I suppose I question the moral logic of deciding that you won't engage in violence even in self-defense but still joining a Federation full of others who will do violence to defend you, but it's not a continuity issue. *shrugs*
I mean, I don't think the Vulcan High Command pre-Syrannite Reformation was comprised of "realists." It was comprised of imperialists and neocolonialists.
Well, the only thing we saw him do was foreign policy in the form of organizing the Coalition of Planets; when he tried to issue orders Hoshi while she was in command of the NX-01, she refused them because she said he was not part of the United Earth Starfleet chain of command. And you don't generally address a Prime Minister as "Minister," because that's disrespectful -- they're not just members of the cabinet, they're the leaders of the cabinet; addressing them as "Minister" would be a bit like addressing a captain as "commander," or an admiral "captain," y'know? So while your interpretation is certainly legitimate, I don't share it (at least not during the episodes themselves).
For whatever it's worth, the post-finale ENT novels establish Nathan Samuels as being Prime Minister of United Earth but don't specify how long he has been P.M.; I tend to think he became P.M. shortly after "Terra Prime."
Yeah, that's how parliamentary republics work -- the President is the head of state, and the Prime Minister (sometimes called the Chancellor, or the Taoiseach, or the President of the Council of Ministers, or the President of the Government, or the State Minister -- there are a lot of different names for "Prime Minister" but they ultimately mean the same thing) is the head of government.
Well, in most parliamentary republics, the President is a mostly-ceremonial head of state whose job it is to be a nonpartisan figure of national unity, and all real policy decisions come from the Prime Minister and their cabinet.
But there are some parliamentary republics where the President has real power but shares it with the Prime Minister, called "semi-presidential" systems; France's constitution is set up this way, where the President must appoint a Prime Minister who has the support of the National Assembly and power is shared between the two. If they're from the same party, usually the President just ends up in charge and the P.M. is his right-hand man; if an opposition party has won the most seats in the National Assembly, the President may have to appoint a member of the opposition as P.M., and the end result there is usually that the President ends up running foreign policy while the P.M. ends up controlling domestic policy.
So yeah, it's possible that United Earth might have a semi-presidential system where the President ends up controlling foreign policy and the Prime Minister is handling domestic. I personally prefer the idea that the President is a ceremonial figure instead, but that's subjective.
It's not impossible that the United Earth head of government is entitled just "Minister," but it seems extremely implausible to me. I think it makes more sense to assume that Nathan Samuels was Foreign Minister during "Demons/Terra Prime." Maybe there was an election going on in the background that we didn't hear about canonically and he became Prime Minister right afterwards.
Well, PIC establishes that the Zhat Vash have been active a lot longer than that, but I think there's room to imagine that the Romulan taboo against A.I.s (and the Zhat Vash's covert influence over Romulan society) could wax and wane over the centuries.
That’s what the High Command would be considered as though in the eyes of those in the field of political science in real time in 2154/55, realists. And the Syrrannites would be called liberals or idealists. It would be historians that call the High Command neocolonialists, and the Syrrannites reformers.
There’s also the fact that language evolves. And political structures may have been reformed then. For all we know, there’s more than one Minister that’s the head of government; it might be modeled after the Swiss government, which has seven executives, and the President is a mostly ceremonial. Which is believable since United Earth came about through the European Hegemony. So, Hoshi referring to Samuels as "Minister" instead of “Prime Minister” isn’t necessarily incorrect.
While I'd agree that virtually every change was for the better (I'm surprised "Keep things together until I get back" "I always do" was originally meant for Kirk and Spock; it makes way more sense as a Scotty line, he's the one who was always left in command while Kirk, Spock, and Bones were down having adventures on some planet; I was sure it was added when the script was rewritten just to have Scotty and Chekov), I think having the Enterprise fight off the Romulans at the beginning would've added some punch to the movie where it had a bit of a lull after the prologue. Conversely, the extra action beats around the crashed saucer and fighting off the Klingon crew were too much, even putting aside the way the plot was resolved.
It was mainly interesting for the peak behind the curtain. The thesis statements of the movie being just randomly scattered throughout instead of being used as a button at the end of the story, Data's emotion chip plotline being completely backgrounded and never intersecting with the rest of the action aside from the pep-talk in Stellar Cartography (to the point where he'd installed it off-screen before the movie even started), no establishing scene for Guinan in the present-day aside from Soren clocking her in Ten Forward, they all are an interesting window on how a script develops.
Except everyone addressed Samuels as "Minister," not just Hoshi. People who were making a point of engaging in respectful formality were addressing him as "Minister." So it seems highly improbable to me that he was Prime Minister, at least at the time of the episode. (Again, nothing stopping us from assuming he became P.M. shortly after the episode, as in the ENT novels! I like to imagine that there was an election campaign going on during the episodes that everyone knew he was likely to win.)
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Oh, I dunno, I think plenty of people living at the time would have been happy to call the Vulcan High Command pre-2154 imperialists and neocolonialists. People living on Coridan and Earth were probably quite willing to identify Vulcan foreign policy as neocolonialist; those living in a hegemon's client states can sometimes see the power relations more clearly than those from a culture clouded by imperialist value systems.
As I said, it's certainly not impossible. But it seems like imagining a lot of extra developments to justify an a priori conclusion that isn't actually present in the text. I think it's much simpler to just assume that the United Earth official addressed as "minister" who was only seen exercising power over foreign relations was a Foreign Minister rather than a Prime Minister.
That is a possibility, although I feel it's important to bear in mind that it's a bit more complicated than that. To be specific, the Swiss Confederation does not have any one head of state or head of government; rather, the seven-member Federal Council serves as a collective head of state and head of government. The President of the Swiss Confederation is not actually the head of state; rather, they are the Federal Councillor who is serving a one-year term as, basically, the presiding officer of the Council. They're even more ceremonial, in other words, than most ceremonial presidents.
Anyway, this is certainly a possibility, but I think we should bear in mind that there's no canonical evidence for it; rather, it is a possibility that fits the canonical evidence.
Well, 1) the overwhelming majority of European states do not use the Swiss collective leadership model, and 2) Picard said the European Hegemony was "one of the first steps" towards a united world government, not that the U.E. government came about directly through the European Hegemony.
Well, sure, but if the U.E. government uses the Swiss model, then Samuels would not have been Prime Minister because there would be no Prime Minister.
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Well, I did say foolishly. T'Pau was a bit of a Syrannite zealot, and it seems reasonable that they may have gone too far in their reforms (as most religious revolutions do), trying to match something written by some rando 2000 years ago. The Romulan War and the subsequent Federation is probably what prompts Vulcan to look back on the self-defense aspect necessary for space travel.
I get it, this is a first draft, and Jendresen is more trying to translate his Band of Brothers experience into Star Trek rather than pay strict adherence to canon. Good job though with the Enterprise references, Admiral Gardner (sounding like he'd be played by John Mahon), and overall feel that this could still fit in the Star Trek universe with appropriate set design.
I was thinking about this again and was wondering who would play Tiberius Chase in 2006/2007. I thought for a second about a Hemsworth and then was like, "Oh we did that already." I also wonder what the UESN uniforms would look like. If they're pilots is it something more like Airforce jumpsuits or Galactica pilot uniforms.
I know it was always the Earth-Romulan War from "Balance of Terror" but I guess from a mention in the Chronology I started thinking it as a war where we teamed up with the Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites to go fight the Romulans and it was more just The Romulan War.
I know it was always the Earth-Romulan War from "Balance of Terror" but I guess from a mention in the Chronology I started thinking it as a war where we teamed up with the Vulcans, Andorians and Tellarites to go fight the Romulans and it was more just The Romulan War.
Dang. How did I miss this? Great find!
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