This Side of Paradise and Pike
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Maybe he was asking Spock to learn whether Spock had similar experiences to his own.
But Spock forgot that they did, indeed, have a common frame of reference.
We know from "Once Upon a Planet" that there weren't any "folks" beyond the Caretaker himself, just a sentient computer with a construction/repair complex. Presumably its medical machines were designed to cope with the kind of injuries that visitors to the planet might sustain from their fantasies, as well as general illnesses in case some family brought their kid with a bad case of the space sniffles that would be serious for a different species without immunity. I'm not sure severe radiation-induced physical and neurological trauma would be within its capabilities to repair. I mean, my local garage can fix moderate damage or breakdowns to my car, but they couldn't rebuild it if it were totaled in a wreck. Bringing McCoy back to life was just a matter of patching a hole and jumpstarting his battery, basically; he hadn't been clinically dead long enough for significant brain trauma to set in. Pike's injuries were on a far more profound level.
Not really. He knows what it's like to have temporarily died and been revived, but that's not what he was asking. He was asking if Spock had any insights about the awareness of being dead, i.e. about the continued existence of the consciousness after death. Presumably McCoy didn't experience any such awareness during his brief, err, downtime. (Much like Neelix in "Mortal Coil," though Neelix was dead rather longer.)
And really, looked at rationally rather than metaphysically, the only awareness Spock could've had of "being dead" would presumably be the awareness of his katra inhabiting McCoy's mind and sharing his consciousness. So essentially they would have that experience in common, though Spock would've experienced it from the opposite angle -- of being the possessor rather than the possessed, as it were.
I don't think so, because there was originally no katra at all. Leonard Nimoy wanted to quit playing Spock and asked TWOK's makers to kill him off, so Spock's death was originally intended to be final. But Nimoy changed his mind because he enjoyed the experience, and test audiences found the original ending too depressing. So they did reshoots and added some bits to offer a note of hope. But the "Remember" mind-meld was just an ambiguous hint, and I don't think they'd decided yet how they'd follow up on it (although the way they eventually did it was essentially how I predicted they would after I saw TWOK, since it was pretty obvious).
Sure, but at the point where they added the mind-meld they could have originally intended for Kirk to be the recipient, and there were ways it could have been done. I don't have anything to suggest they ever considered having it be Kirk versus Bones, just wondering whether it was even on their radar as an option.
No. They didn't have time or money to do extensive reshoots, only to add a bit more material to the scene they'd already shot with Spock, McCoy, and Scott in engineering. So it had to be McCoy, since Kirk wasn't in the scene.
And again, at the time they shot it, they hadn't actually decided what the "remember" business would actually mean. They didn't even know whether there'd be a sequel. After all, they always say TWOK was the film that "saved" Trek, which tells us that its future was far from assured at the time the film was made. So they didn't have the whole arc plotted out ahead of time. They just offered an ambiguous ending that could work either as a sequel tag or as a sentimental coda to Spock's final mission.
I mean, really, for those of us who saw it in 1982, when we didn't know where things would lead in the next film, Spock's "Remember" simply played like an echo of his "Forget" in "Requiem for Methuselah." While the possibility occurred to many of us that it could be a hook for resurrecting Spock, that was by no means unambiguous at the time. For all we knew, maybe he was just reminding McCoy of the good times, or letting McCoy share Spock's memory of how he really felt about McCoy, Kirk, etc.
There was a video I watched recently (One of the episodes of The Captain's Summit) with Shatner, Nimoy, Stewart and Frakes discussing Star Trek, and Shatner insisted that Nimoy had already made a deal for Star Trek III by the time they filmed Spock's death and the "Remember" line, and Nimoy saying sarcastically, "yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, we already knew the whole plot," etc. But he explained that nothing had been worked out at all. Shatner kept at Nimoy with "But what would be the motivation of saying 'Remember?' You have to have a motivation. No one would say that without a motivation," implying, again, that they did know of Start Trek III or have something in mind. So I don't know. I've heard it both ways, in interviews I've read with Nimoy where he suggested he and his agent had done some negotiation before the film was finished, and now with this interview where he said nothing was worked out when he filmed the scene. But maybe he didn't remember or didn't want to say. But he did sound quite genuine in the Summit video where he said nothing had been worked out, even if Shatner thought it had been.
Yeah, but "both ways" is exactly the point. The flaw with asking "What was the filmmakers' plan?" is that usually the plan is to keep your options open, to set something up that can go more than one way, depending on how unpredictable factors play out in the future. You plant a seed that could set something up if you get lucky, or that could be a satisfactory ending if you don't get lucky. There's not supposed to be a single definite answer. The smart option is to be flexible.
That's the whole reason Spock said something vague like "Remember" rather than "I'm downloading a copy of my consciousness into your head now." They chose that word because it could've meant anything. I mean, really, why would he say that particular word in that context? It doesn't really fit. We just assume it does because we're used to hearing it and we know how the sequel played out. But what they settled on later is a clumsy fit at best with the word "Remember."
I think Leonard was actually asked to say something that would leave them an opening, and he chose to say, “Remember.”
That's where my 14 year old brain went when I saw it back then. And McCoy's follow up line "he's really not dead, as long as we remember him" felt like I was right.
However, I also couldn't accept they'd actually kill off Spock because the TV series used that cheat a few times for drama. So while my mom was in tears walking out of the theater, I just said "I wonder how they'll bring him back?" I just didn't want them to do the "Obi-Wan Kenobi" ghostly visions idea that David Gerrold postulated in his (I think) updated "World of Star Trek" book.
Flash forward two years later and I loved how the resurrection played out, but I had a hard time wrapping my brain around Spock's ability to do a delayed mind mild that didn't really kick in until however long later. In the end, I just said "eh Vulcans." But as resurrections go, it was satisfying and took an entire movie to get him in his body and a full second movie to get his head working correctly.
Yeah, that's always been unclear to me. Did he download a copy of his mind/memory into McCoy? If so, the resurrected Spock isn't really the original returned, but essentially a copy, with memories only extending to the moment of the meld itself. Alternatively, did he simply establish an open "carrier signal" between their brains that allowed his consciousness to transfer at the moment of his death?
Hmm... I've pretty much posited in my Trek novels that telepathy is a quantum-entanglement phenomenon, so yeah, I guess he could've established an open link that let his mind be in two places at once, essentially.
I assumed the meld only included Spock's memories up to the point at which he performed it.
What's more confusing to me is how Vorta clones 'inherit' the memories of their predecessors. Even if they 'download' at regular intervals (presumably they don't have an always-open connection), there'd still be some memory loss, but DS9 doesn't really seem to indicate that.
What's more confusing to me is how Vorta clones 'inherit' the memories of their predecessors. Even if they 'download' at regular intervals (presumably they don't have an always-open connection), there'd still be some memory loss, but DS9 doesn't really seem to indicate that.
When Spock starts getting his senses back at the end of TSFS, the first thing he remembers is the moment before his death, after the meld (and in reverse order).
Oh, right. "I have been and ever shall be your friend" and "Ship out of danger?"
Although it could be that he was sharing McCoy's memory of witnessing that conversation.
I was under ten years old when I saw TWOK in the theater, and everything about the ending (as best as I can recall, and maybe I'm biased by time) suggested to me that Spock would return...but also, at that age, the idea that he wouldn't return was simply inconceivable to me. Star Trek without Spock? What would that even be???
Turned out that two Star Trek films later I'd be in the theater watching it while my grandmother was nearing her own journey to the final frontier (the kids were very much sent to the theater as a distraction for them), and I might have had different thoughts about how inconcievable it was that life could continue without a person by that point in time. :|
...now I'm trying to imagine if I'd been seeing TWOK rather than TVH while my grandmother was nearing the end of her life, and I don't think I want to ponder that too deeply.
Turned out that two Star Trek films later I'd be in the theater watching it while my grandmother was nearing her own journey to the final frontier (the kids were very much sent to the theater as a distraction for them), and I might have had different thoughts about how inconcievable it was that life could continue without a person by that point in time. :|
...now I'm trying to imagine if I'd been seeing TWOK rather than TVH while my grandmother was nearing the end of her life, and I don't think I want to ponder that too deeply.
I don't see how that could be, since the reactor chamber was fitted with lead lined glass. That's just regulatory compliance. Transparent aluminum wouldn't cut it.
That's why he couldn't mind meld with Kirk, and it would certainly block a complete transference.
Is an established telepathic connection really blocked by physical barriers? Michael Burnham was able to communicate telepathically with Sarek over an astonishing distance.
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