Good heavens! I... I was not expecting this to be the last chapter. I thought there would be at least Voyager and then What We're Going to Do About Voyager and the Wrap Up.
But no! It's all one and done here!
Chapter Twenty-Eight - Thataway
Voyager 6 is apparently uniquely famous
because it slipped into a black hole. No, a "time continuum". In any event, it went from being a normal space probe to very far away and possibly even long ago. All five of the Starfleet officers know about it. Even Ilia.
“I shot an arrow into the air . . . ” said McCoy.
This is a line that should have been in the film.
It was hinted at during the Spock Walk and it is re-iterated here: The Machine Planet that Voyager encountered may have been super advanced but they were still just mucking out their old programming from the people that built them.
Here Ilia comes to life. It turns out that she has always been alive. (Scary.) I like it, I think it adds motivation and stakes (they're fighting for Ilia's soul) but I'm not sure it would be necessary or easy to communicate on screen. This movie wanders enough. (Is Ilia consulted on moving on to a higher plane?)
“Ilia” looked, nodded immediately. “Yes, of course, it . . . it . . . Misinformation is forbidden, Kirk-unit!” It was suddenly the probe again—cold, mechanical.
That's one hell of a bout of denial Vejur has going on there.
Vejur still expects a machine . . . it probably plans something similar to what occurs in our ship’s transporter chamber, except that two forms will be reduced to energy . . . ”
I don't like how literal this is. Just saying.
The book is missing what the film has: Kirk (and Spock) realizing what Vejur would gain from joining with a human. Here they simply figure out what Vejur
wants to do. They never get to the next step where this might be an answer.
I think there is a line during either the Spock Walk or the Vejur chapter where it's said that Vejur is "stuck" here. Which is kind of what Spock says during this scene in the movie. That Vejur has to evolve to another plane because it already knows everything. (The fact that it only just found out that it has been running through the carbon units of the Galaxy like a scythe seems to be a rather big gap in its knowledge but we're skipping over that. What
else doesn't it know?)
Maybe I've just been living with the line for 45 years. Maybe it's actually kind of trite. But when Decker says "I want this. As much as you wanted the
Enterprise I want this," the comparison makes it all make perfect sense. (Not that exact line in the book.)
Kirk became aware that they were also hearing beauty—
Well. That's just Jerry, isn't it?
I was thinking though that a great "Wow finish, narrow escape" would have been for the Voyager complex to start coming apart as it does in the film but have Our Heroes beam away to safety. It could have been what the transporter had been saved up for this whole movie. But even before I read them describe the merge as literally as a transporter phenomenon I wondered if the two special effects, the Meld and the transporter, would have been too similar and would compete. Too much visual information. (I just want the transporter to be good again.)
Kirk found himself feeling very comfortable as he settled himself back into the center seat. He was realizing that there was a certain shrewd and sometimes ruthless commanding admiral down there, who right now would be unable to deny him anything—even permanent command of the Enterprise if Kirk demanded it. Well, that suited former Admiral James Tiberius Kirk fine. He did not intend to let Heihachiro Nogura get off this hook.
Yeah. Kirk's not going back.
At first, there were the old familiar star patterns. And then the quantum shift happened; the star mass congealed in front of them and they were in hyperspace. He relaxed back and began thinking about where he would take her first.
(Hyperspace! Ding! Eleven!)
Well. This has been a hoot! One month to the day from the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
I have no idea when I read this. It was not long after the movie. Probably after Christmas vacation. But well before that summer. I know I did
not get the soundtrack right away (although I did get The Black Hole). And I never got any TMP toys. (Nobody else did, either!)
But I'm guessing probably around this time of year was when I read it.
Wow, Star Trek, The Black Hole, Buck Rogers would have still been on television. We're just five months away from The Empire Strikes Back. It was a good time to be a nerdy kid.
Is it weird that I can't even imagine the Kirk we see in TMP making a remark like that?
A little. Kirk is pretty standard issue Kirk by the time Ilia shows up.