TMP's Transporter Accident on Loop is the Stuff of Nightmares

I get what they were going for and have no problem with the scene in theory, but it had some things going seriously against it. One, as Pauln6 pointed out above, there is no need for the transporter to "pull" people to its pad, transporters on Earth or in orbit could "push" them to wherever they want (Kirk's earlier question of why the Enterprise transporters don't work, necessitating the shuttlepod ride, doesn't really make sense). Two, Kirk taking over the controls is just insufferably dumb. Three, it had probably the worst line readings in the whole movie ("They're forming," "Oh my god," and "Enterprise... what we got back...").

BTW one of Robert Wise's earlier movies set aboard a ship, The Sand Pebbles, has a scene where a man is killed by the machinery while doing an engine repair. It is very important to the story and is well done; there is some blood but nothing too gory. First seeing the movie in my late teens I never thought of it as disturbing, but an aunt who saw it as a child told me that was the one and only thing that she remembered about the movie, it had so frightened her.

 

I think cosmic horror of the Lovecraftian type would be a perfect fit. Deep space is a scary place.

Kor

 

Eh, maybe...though Trek has not treated space as much of a scary place so I'm not convinced of the fit. However, and I should have been more specific, I loathe body horror and the transporter accident is definitely that so no thank to close ups.

 

TOS had more of a sense of deep space as a lonely, bleak place where you could encounter horrors such giant microbes and ancient unstoppable doomsday machines. I would have liked to have seen more of that kind of stuff.
I'm not big on mangled bodies, either, though. That includes the bloody corpses that Khan left strung up on Regula I.

Kor

 

This reminds me, a lot of kids in elementary school around that time saw the PG Invasion of the Body Snatchers (I, age 9, was not allowed to) which was really scary and gory. The Black Hole, also PG, had a lot of haunted-house-type scares, but also had a really violent killing scene.

 

Yeah that was what I first thought of when discussing this topic. And I haven't revisited Black Hole for both that scene as well as Maximillian's weird performance.

 

Maximilian the robot or Maximilian Schell?

 

This guy.

 

Yeah he could be quite strange, and also a damn good actor. My elementary school friend called him "Maximilian Schedule."

 

I love the gothic feel to the Black Hole. I think the soundtrack is probably in my top ten. TMP is certainly closer in scope and feel to that than any other Trek.

When I have finished my TMP edit I will probably go Back to my TMP / Black Hole / B5 / Dr Who cross over comic....

 

I don't think the transporter problem "necessitates" the ride. Rather, Kirk beams directly to Scotty to (seemingly) gripe about the transporters, and Scotty then placates Kirk by giving him the scenic ride.

The men are saying volumes with their actions, often in contradiction with their words. Kirk needed to go to Scotty, not because this was the way to get to the ship, but because he needed to go to Scotty - for trivial engineering complaints, and for the all-important mental support from trusted old friend at this crucial hour.

It's a bit like Picard in "Booby Trap" or "In Theory": it's not as if he'd be the most competent pilot, but the buck stops at his desk, and if (and in this case when) people are going to die, it's his duty to do the killing. Although Picard and Kirk probably approach their duty from the opposite ends of the humility curve.

At best, I can pretend the voice at the other end wasn't human, and Rand was in deep shock...

....That one also ends with the Captain being dragged by forces much more powerful than him to the very belly of the beast, and ultimately to a suicidal shore foray, where nothing much is accomplished. Nice that in TMP, the villain of the piece solves everything on its own!

Timo Saloniemi

 

And in a rated G movie, woohoo! (I wish that old emoticon of a smiley holding a "woohoo!" sign up and down and roving left and right was still available...) But "Beneath the Planet of the Apes" was rated G and did a lot more shocking things too, not merely the face mask scene.

TMP was trying to appeal to a darker and truer sci-fi genre, with epic scale, using realism within its own environment, and not just be "western in space" or an outright horror flick. It's a bizarre mixture, but it's at least in just one scene. The question was finally answered, that of "What happens if these things malfunction?" Of course, who was asking, was it necessary, if it was then how far does one take it? And they had just enough of a balance to sell a suggestion that what returned in HQ was something nobody would actually want to describe in any detail, though in all fairness anyone driving will often pass by various squirrels, raccoons, deer, or other things with guts splattered all around. Just without feral cats eating at those meat-byproducts.

 

Transporter loop is what kept Scotty alive til TNG’s time though isn’t it?

I look at it as another plot macguffin

 

I couldn't had imagine what the results a transporter accident could look like in TMP until I saw David Cronenberg's "The Fly".

 

^pretty much

 

I think the thing that always bothered me about the transporter accident is that its an incredible effective scene that feels like it was used as a means for incredibly flimsy ends. There's plenty of other moments which show Kirk's unfamiliarity with the refit Enterprise and various other ways the ship could have been without certain key officers in the rush to deal with the probe, thus no need to bump off Sonak to allow Spock.

Now if there had been an officer or two that we got somewhat familiar with who needed to use the transporter but suffered the accident circa act II due to V'ger's interference with the ship? Then it could have been a real gut punch scene that further sold the danger of the situation and escalated the absolute need for real communication with the probe. They've lost Ilia, and now two more crewman have been killed in nightmarish fashion by V'Ger. How many other functions of the ship are at risk and can Kirk really afford to bluff against an entity capable of that?

Granted killing off slightly more notable red shirts isn't exactly groundbreaking but it feels like it would give such a horrifying moment a bit more gravity within the story.

 

I don't know. It was specifically Kirk's impatience with wanting to reach V'Ger and deal with the threat as soon as possible (or, as it turns out, unpossible -- minus Spock) that caused the transporter malfunction and led to Commander Sonak's grizzly end. He bossed Sonak into reporting to him in one hour.

Similarly, Kirk aggressively demands of Scotty, "We need warp speed NOW!" -- when the ship isn't ready for warp, thus causing the wormhole incident, which nearly destroys the ship and kills everyone aboard. Afterward, he barks at Decker to "stop... competing" with him, only to be told by McCoy that he's the one competing and acting adversarial.

These moments that Kirk's ego provokes are almost Lynchian in their weirdness. They do a lot to symbolically highlight Kirk's own psychological imbalance. When his psyche is better aligned with "reality", the Enterprise and its systems begin to fare much better, allowing the cloud threat to be apprehended and dealt with in an appropriate manner.

 

I guess to me the latter two points completely work in highlighting Kirk's flaws within the story and giving them the appropriate weight. The former though is such a horrifying moment that Kirk is largely responsible for, and yet it ultimately feels like it doesn't really mean all that much in the grand scheme of things. Yeah there have been red shirts killed in the line or duty on TOS that one could put the blame on the Captain for indirectly, but this is clear case of his errors costing lives that (as noted by others) gets ignored via the comedy of Bones paranoia about not liking the transporter.

Preston (and likely other cadets) dying didn't necessarily dominate Kirk's character in Wrath of Khan but it did feel like it disturbed him with a bit more lingering effects than Sonak and Ciana deaths did. That might be part of my story preference for that film over TMP's, I don't know.

 

I'll grant you that it's a little offputting that Kirk only mentions Ilia and Decker as casualties, and then corrects himself and says they should be listed as "missing", at the end of the movie. Technically, if the transporter accident is included, the V'Ger mission produced more casualties than those, owed to Kirk's earlier recklessness.

There is some interesting symmetry, at least, between Sonak and that unidentified female officer being mangled in the transporter beam in the first half of the film, and then Decker and Ilia becoming absorbed/patterned by V'Ger in the second half. The progression of these incidents goes as follows: transporter room (bowels of Enterprise), command bridge (brain of Enterprise), V'Ger temple (external to Enterprise).

In the end, what happens? All are essentially reduced to data patterns: a male and female, and then another male and female, with a Kirk troika watching or interfering in both cases (or almost interfering in the latter, but being restrained and relenting).