TMP Deleted Decker/Ilia Engineering Scene

[CoveTom]

This popped up out of the blue in my YouTube recommendations today. In all the years I've been a fan of TMP and have read and watched material about it, I have never seen this deleted scene between Decker and Ilia in engineering. I have seen the reconstructed sickbay portion with Kirk and McCoy, but I never knew the engineering portion existed.

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Personally, I can understand why the decision was made to cut this. I'm not sure that it really does anything to move the plot forward, and pretty much everything that happens is also covered elsewhere in the film. Still, I love to see new bits from the film after all these years.

Actually, come to think of it, I know we hear Decker talk about V'Ger "learning all that is learnable" toward the end of the film, but I'm not sure there's anyplace else in the film where we get confirmation from Ilia that those are V'Ger's instructions from the creator.

(Apologies if this has been discussed before, but a quick search did not turn up any results.)

 

[korblborp]

lul at scotty

 

[Grant]

That scene was included in the STTMP Blu-ray/UHD Director's Cut that came out in 2022.as a bonus feature.
Also, the quick last-minute cuts to the movie were not made with much thought -- if they had been they wouldn't have left so much good stuff out that had to be added back later for the director's cut. It's well documented when they added in big chunks of FX footage the simply took out large chunks of dialogue scenes. Probably the only reason this scene wasn't added in to the ABC TV cut was the fact that they didn't have all the audio for it.

 

[Orac]

I watched that then the algorithm fed me this one:

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Typical for an american movie that the V'ger probe is confronted by a white security guard and a black security guard and the black guard gets vaporized.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Scotty's line about showing the probe the inside of a scrap compactor is horrible on many levels. I'm glad at least that line got cut. The rest of the Scotty's dialog is worthless.

Decker's question regarding what programmed Vejur is the only piece of dialog that adds anything not presented elsewhere, however even it can at least be easily inferred from everything else already present.

The engineering set was lovely, although the limits of the forced perspective reaction chamber were showing.

So, yeah, on balance, the decision to cut the whole scene was more than reasonable.

 

[CoveTom]

Scotty's line about showing the probe the inside of a scrap compactor is horrible on many levels. I'm glad at least that line got cut. The rest of the Scotty's dialog is worthless.

Really? I thought that was very much in line with his TOS character and some of the lines he had in the series. It seemed very much appropriate for Scotty to me.

Decker's question regarding what programmed Vejur is the only piece of dialog that adds anything not presented elsewhere, however even it can at least be easily inferred from everything else already present.

I agree. I think the dialogue added a little, but not much.

The engineering set was lovely, although the limits of the forced perspective reaction chamber were showing.

It had its limits, but I still find the engineering set to be extremely impressive. It's a shame it went away after TWOK.

 

[korblborp]

tbf, it's not the first time an entity with unknown or even overtly hostile intentions has abducted (at the least) and duplicated a crewmember of the Enterprise. and it feels in character to me, as he strikes me as practical but not particularly highminded. i could well imagine him saying similar to lore or moriarty.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Has no time passed since the events of the original series? Has Scotty not learned anything after once being literally killed by a powerful space probe? Does he not appreciate their peril in the current situation, not to mention that facing Earth?

Saying that the probe belongs in a scrap compactor would have worked far better, at least, if he were to direct the remark instead to one of his fellow engineers. There are plenty of them around. His smart mouth could still be in character, without him needlessly and pointlessly saying something more likely to provoke the powerful robot.

On the gripping hand, for all he should know, maybe Vejur would analyze Scotty to find out what he meant by his remark the way it analyzed Ilia. Then the Enterprise could be dealing with a twofer of robotic probes and doing so without its chief engineer!

YMMV, and clearly does.

 

[Maurice]

I watched that then the algorithm fed me this one:

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Typical for an american movie that the V'ger probe is confronted by a white security guard and a black security guard and the black guard gets vaporized.

That's a crap partial reconstruction of that bit. The action was that the guard (Phillips) who drew his phaser fired at the probe and it shot back.

 

[flandry84]

Seeing that during the denouement Kirk and co. seemed to immediately recognise V’ger as an old Earth probe,had it been a human instead of a Deltan absorbed and remade as a probe,V’ger would have gleaned its own origins from the start.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Seeing that during the denouement Kirk and co. seemed to immediately recognise V’ger as an old Earth probe,had it been a human instead of a Deltan absorbed and remade as a probe,V’ger would have gleaned its own origins from the start.

The denouement occurs only after Kirk wipes the smudge off the letters and reads the whole thing. The letters were there the whole time, under the smudge. Ilia could read the letters not covered up. Surely the real Ilia would have known that there were letters under the smudge that also needed to be read. The machine intelligence could not even reason that much out, despite having glommed everything it could from Ilia. It referred to itself as V'ger, reading the letters not covered up, but not to itself as Voyager. So, I don't think so.

 

[flandry84]

Not what I meant.Too specific.
The guys recognised on sight the thing as an old Earth probe.
So therefore they are still teaching old Earth history in schools,probably even going on trips to the Air&space museum.
Therefore had V’ger mind probed any human member of the crew it would have seen itself(or facsimiles)in the persons mind.

 

[CorporalCaptain]

Not what I meant.Too specific.
The guys recognised on sight the thing as an old Earth probe.
So therefore they are still teaching old Earth history in schools,probably even going on trips to the Air&space museum.
Therefore had V’ger mind probed any human member of the crew it would have seen itself(or facsimiles)in the persons mind.

So, the fact that Ilia would have recognized the English on it written in Latin letters isn't enough to realize it's a machine that had been originally launched from Earth? How else would the machine have known to call itself V'ger, unless it was using Ilia's knowledge? And if it wasn't Ilia's knowledge, where did the knowledge of how to pronounce its own name come from? From a human aboard Epsilon IX? Well, there's your human, already scanned and digested, but still no dice.

 

[drt]

The funny thing is if the Ilia Probe just called it "Voyager" instead of "V'ger", everyone would have just assumed it had given itself a rhetorical name, nobody would have thought it was the Voyager probe.

 

[David cgc]

The engineering set was lovely, although the limits of the forced perspective reaction chamber were showing.

The long, flowing camera take was so unlike most of the live-action cinematography in the film that when I saw it on the blu-ray for the first time, the subconscious experience felt more like looking at one of Donny's reconstructions than vintage '70s footage.

 

[Riley]

I watched that then the algorithm fed me this one:

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Typical for an american movie that the V'ger probe is confronted by a white security guard and a black security guard and the black guard gets vaporized.

It's quite revelatory when someone sees racism everywhere, especially where there isn't actual racism.

 

[Orac]

It's quite revelatory when someone sees racism everywhere, especially where there isn't actual racism.

Wait.. are you saying that my belief that there is racism in american movies is a delusion?

I hope you're right.

Or perhaps you are implying my perceived racism is revealing my own implicit racism?

If so, I agree wholeheartedly.

Could you please clarify, so I don't have to speculate?

 

[Grant]

That's TV Scotty. It doesn't fit with how the crew was acting in TMP

 

[Maurice]

It's quite revelatory when someone sees racism everywhere, especially where there isn't actual racism.

It's observing a pattern demonstrated in other media that seems to fit this scene, since said scene isn't properly reconstructed to show the context of why that guard got shot.