The Undiscovered Country...

[David cgc]

The only good Romulan is a dead Romulan, too, except perhaps in their introductory episode (where only Spock and a Starfleet guest star support this view).

Don't forget Starfleet itself. Spock cites what is literally institutional racism in his report; "Earth believes the Romulans to be warlike, cruel, and treacherous." Even when Kirk calls out Styles for "bigotry," it's only because it's pointed at Spock. McCoy is the only one to say their impressions of the Romulans might be outdated or even totally inaccurate, but he folds pretty quickly.

 

[Timo]

Good point. Although once again, the theme seems to be that lack of information and communication means that we start out with racism and hatred, and there's a slow process of improvement there. It's just that since this repeats every time we deal with a villain, we essentially have a big reset button that restores the full racism for each such episode. (And never mind that the Romulans only got one further episode, where their backstabbing ways were reintroduced, and then a guest appearance where they had no opportunity to gain our sympathies - again because of lack of communication.)

Timo Saloniemi

 

[CoveTom]

No race is monolithic. Well, except the Borg.

They are in Star Trek.

Huh? I thought Kor, Koloth and Kang were quite well "nuanced".

Really? I think you could take Kor and Kang and swap the episodes they were in and not even have to change a single line. Koloth was written into a "comedy episode," so he was played a little bit more light-hearted, but even then, I don't think you'd have any trouble dropping Kor or Kang into that role as written.

 

[gottacook]

I think you could take Kor and Kang and swap the episodes they were in and not even have to change a single line.

Really? Kor was oily, whereas Kang was brusque. Admittedly this may have been, to some extent, attributable to casting rather than differences in script; Michael Ansara had been very brusque, and appropriately so, as Harlan Ellison's "Soldier" in The Outer Limits several years earlier.

I've always admired the decision to cast John Colicos as Kor, the first Klingon commander to be introduced to viewers - an excellent performance.

But this is getting way off topic - in my opinion there's always room for a Shakespeare-spouting Klingon, and I'm glad that today I can go to YouTube and hear Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy in its original language.

In fact my only real problem with TUC (which I first saw during premiere week in '91) is that digital clock above the bridge viewscreen - didn't anyone realize that, whatever story function was served by its presence, it would look incredibly antiquated within a few years?

 

[CoveTom]

In fact my only real problem with TUC (which I first saw during premiere week in '91) is that digital clock above the bridge viewscreen - didn't anyone realize that, whatever story function was served by its presence, it would look incredibly antiquated within a few years?

Nicholas Meyer seemed particularly obsessed with adding touches to the sets that would make them antiquated at the time the movie came out, let alone many years later. On TWOK, his appetite to change the set design was held back both by the budgetary restrictions and by Harve Bennett. On TUC, he ran rather hog wild, particularly where the bridge was concerned.

 

[SchwEnt]

Why would a digital clock be antiquated?
Stardates are given in digital format, why would a digital chronometer not be appropriate in TUC?

Traditional analog two-hand clock faces are hundreds of years old, and we still use them today. Is that antiquated?

Should the TUC bridge chronometer be "super-futuristic" just for the sake of "super-futuristic"? If some basic form works well for a basic function, why not use it? Like buttons and shoelaces and such. Old-fashioned and antiquated, but still in use today. Would a digital clock not be similar in TUC?

 

[gottacook]

I wasn't referring to the presence of the digital clock, but to the appearance of the numerals themselves - formed from three (or fewer) little horizontal bars and four (or fewer) vertical bars, just like LCD readouts on the first handheld calculators in the 1970s. Today only the cheapest displays use such a crude way to form numerals, and nicer-looking displays were likely already available in the '90s.

If the script called for a viewscreen clock, the production designers could have tried harder; they could have chosen from among many other numeral designs that aren't needlessly "futuristic." Their choice smacks of expediency, not unlike the laser parlor in Logan's Run that had a Bang + Olufsen tangential-tonearm phonograph mounted on the wall as part of a control panel.

Forgive me for being sensitive to such things - another unpleasant reminder of the early '90s to me is Futura Extra Bold Condensed font, the use of which made the otherwise inventive credit sequence of Watchmen (the only part of the movie I've seen) so damn ugly.

 

[tighr]

Perhaps they will view digital monochromatic displays as quaint in the future, much the same way we still have grandfather clocks. Bones did get Kirk those bifocals as a gift in TWOK.

 

[plynch]

Perhaps they will view digital monochromatic displays as quaint in the future, much the same way we still have grandfather clocks. Bones did get Kirk those bifocals as a gift in TWOK.

If it's quaint, you might get an old friend troubled by aging a 1980s digital clock as a gift, but starfleet wouldn't install one on the big E's bridge. The current carrier, Enterprise, doesn't have 1939 BigBen alarm clocks bolted to its bridge stations.

What a goofy analogy. It's late here. You see what I mean though?

It's a small point though. Hair styles, costumes, bridge controls can all look dated in a few years. It's extremely unlikely we'll venture forth to the stars in warp-navy ships. The whole concept is dated to the golden age of scifi as resurrected and channelled by the great bird.

 

[CoveTom]

It's extremely unlikely we'll venture forth to the stars in warp-navy ships. The whole concept is dated to the golden age of scifi as resurrected and channelled by the great bird.

To be fair, "extremely unlikely" based on what? We humans always love to make predictions about the future, and we're always wrong, particularly in the area of technology. We always look through the prism of what is today and have a hard time seeing what will be tomorrow.

So who is to say that the controls of the starships of tomorrow won't look like the bridge of the TOS Enterprise, or the Enterprise-D, or whatever. They're just about as likely to look like that as anything else we can postulate today.

 

[plynch]

It's extremely unlikely we'll venture forth to the stars in warp-navy ships. The whole concept is dated to the golden age of scifi as resurrected and channelled by the great bird.

To be fair, "extremely unlikely" based on what? We humans always love to make predictions about the future, and we're always wrong, particularly in the area of technology. We always look through the prism of what is today and have a hard time seeing what will be tomorrow.

So who is to say that the controls of the starships of tomorrow won't look like the bridge of the TOS Enterprise, or the Enterprise-D, or whatever. They're just about as likely to look like that as anything else we can postulate today.

Based on the exponential growth in knowledge and computing knowledge and manipulation of matter that is now and is to come also. I didn't mean we won't be interested. We won't need to: as we are co-intelligent/conscious with the universe, all "things" are known. I'm trusting futurist Ray Kurzweil that a few decades from now, existence is unimaginable to us, just as the device I'm holding in my hands to communicate with people I don't know would have been unimaginable to cavemen.

On topic, no two ways about it, that clock looks dated, seriously. They should have a 1980s woodgrain Mr. Coffee in the kitchen scene. "Who's to say coffee makers 300 years from now won't look like that?"

Be well.

 

[Uxi]

No race is monolithic. Well, except the Borg.

They are in Star Trek.

Huh? I thought Kor, Koloth and Kang were quite well "nuanced".

Really? I think you could take Kor and Kang and swap the episodes they were in and not even have to change a single line. Koloth was written into a "comedy episode," so he was played a little bit more light-hearted, but even then, I don't think you'd have any trouble dropping Kor or Kang into that role as written.

Eh, I think you could swap Kor and Koloth but Kang was clearly deeper. I take Kor and Koloth to be much like Kruge as backstabbing black hearted bastards without a semblance of 'honor.' Kang, though, I think you could turn your back on for at least a second without expecting a knife to go into it.

WRT Kirk, the context of his character in TUC from the novelization (and thus likely an earlier draft of the screenplay) is supposed to be on the severe injury of Carol and that the Klingons had been raiding border worlds for some period of time before the events of the movie. I think just having her mentioned as being killed would fully justify Kirk's rage, as well, but also think that's not quite necessary. Maybe David's birthday just passed or he had a dream of him or had just been thinking of him again. Would naturally make him dwell on it. People do that all the time. Get over it and bam, hits you again years later and you relive traumatic events again.

 

[Therin of Andor]

Kor was oily, whereas Kang was brusque. Admittedly this may have been, to some extent, attributable to casting rather than differences in script; Michael Ansara had been very brusque

Agreed. Of course, all three scripts were written for Kor, but John Colicos was unavailable for both "Tribbles" and "Dove". The fact that comedic foil Koloth and Kang (with wife Mara) ended up quite different in personality to Kor was a bonus of casting and script tweaking.

 

[David cgc]

I wasn't referring to the presence of the digital clock, but to the appearance of the numerals themselves - formed from three (or fewer) little horizontal bars and four (or fewer) vertical bars, just like LCD readouts on the first handheld calculators in the 1970s. Today only the cheapest displays use such a crude way to form numerals, and nicer-looking displays were likely already available in the '90s.

You could hand-wave it as being old technology for reliability reasons, and possibly usability as well. I can't remember off-hand, but it's possible the simplified shapes of a seven-segment display make the numerals more differentiated, so it's easier to read them from a distance or through smoke or whatever. Or the simplified shapes might make them look too similar, so you can't tell if you're looking at a curved number or a straight one.

I did a quick google, but I couldn't find anything that said one way or the other.

 

[BillJ]

^ That may very well be true, and it's not the presence of racism toward the Klingons that bothers me. It's the fact that never, in 79 episodes and 5 feature films of Star Trek, was this character trait present in any of the main characters, even to the smallest degree. It came completely out of left field, and then all of a sudden it seems as if the entire crew goes on some racist rant against the Klingons. Doesn't make sense, doesn't work for the established characters, and is a way too on-the-nose attempt to shoehorn a modern situation into a Trek allegory.

Balance of Terror and The Day of the Dove.

 

[Maurice]

WRT Kirk, the context of his character in TUC from the novelization (and thus likely an earlier draft of the screenplay) is supposed to be on the severe injury of Carol and that the Klingons had been raiding border worlds for some period of time before the events of the movie...

I'm fairly certain this is just an invention of the novelist. It doesn't jibe with anything I've read about the concepts for the film and the script.

 

[Harvey]

That doesn't sound like anything I've read about the movie, either. Didn't the earlier draft of the script (with the last round-up sequence) include a scene where Kirk and Carol were in bed together? That doesn't sound like she was supposed to be injured to me.

 

[Therin of Andor]

That doesn't sound like anything I've read about the movie, either. Didn't the earlier draft of the script (with the last round-up sequence) include a scene where Kirk and Carol were in bed together? That doesn't sound like she was supposed to be injured to me.

Correct. And Denny Martin Flinn then used his "last roundup" sequence from the earlier draft script of ST VI in the opening of his only ST novel, "The Fearful Summons". (Kirk in bed with Carol, Chekov playing cards with a cheating Betazoid, Scotty lecturering about Kruge's bird of prey, etc.)

JM Dillard crafted a Carol-gets-injured scene for the ST VI novelization.

 

[CoveTom]

Balance of Terror and The Day of the Dove.

"Balance of Terror" was, of course, a story about the Romulans. While it might be argued that it showed some racism, it did not establish a pattern of racism toward the Klingons. Even still, I'm not sure I would agree that it shows racism or bigotry, except in Mr. Stiles reactions to Spock after seeing the Romulans, which is immediately dealt with by Kirk.

As for "Day of the Dove," again, we're talking about dealings with a sworn enemy who may, at least by all appearances, have just committed an act of war against the Federation and wiped out an entire colony. Is it racism to be hostile toward them? Also, remember that the more extreme rants of the Enterprise crew were being instigated by the alien intruder. You could argue that it was only provoking the expression of feelings to begin with, but since it managed to have Chekov remember an imaginary brother, I'd also argue that all of the feelings being expressed could have been manufactured.

 

[gottacook]

Kor was oily, whereas Kang was brusque. Admittedly this may have been, to some extent, attributable to casting rather than differences in script; Michael Ansara had been very brusque

Agreed. Of course, all three scripts were written for Kor, but John Colicos was unavailable for both "Tribbles" and "Dove". The fact that comedic foil Koloth and Kang (with wife Mara) ended up quite different in personality to Kor was a bonus of casting and script tweaking.

Wow, I had no idea they had intended to bring Colicos back as Kor. However, as David Gerrold himself noted (with specific examples), "Tribbles" was rather hurriedly directed; Colicos as Kor in a comedy, if not well handled, might have (retrospectively) had a bad effect on fans' memory of Colicos' performance in "Errand of Mercy."