Spoilers TOS 44 Vulcan's Glory by D.C. Fontana Review Thread

[Christopher]

What Nimoy wanted in 1988-1989 weighed more than Fontana's memos on a different production in 1967-1968.

Also, there's a difference between a show staffer's guidelines for freelancers and what the people in charge of the show (or film series) are free to do. Generally "don't do this" guidelines are meant to deter freelancers or pitchers from offering up the umpteenth iteration of an overused trope and encourage them to come up with fresher ideas. But that doesn't mean the makers of the show will forbid themselves from using the trope if they have a good reason for it. For instance, when I was scheduled to pitch for Voyager's third season, the letter from Jeri Taylor that came with the pitch packet advised pitchers to avoid time travel ideas because they were already "overbooked" on those, probably referring to "Future's End" (and then we got "Before and After" later in the season). She also said they wanted to get away from stories about the quest for home and focus on just exploring the Delta Quadrant, but then they went and did "Scorpion" at the end of the season, completely reversing that policy.

A guideline in TOS against giving characters hitherto-unmentioned relatives seems like the same kind of thing, since that's low-hanging fruit as TV plots go. But it was most likely just to discourage freelancers from overusing the trope, not to prevent themselves from doing it, since Fontana herself gave us "Journey to Babel." No competent TV producer or story editor is ever going to impose an absolute ban against using an idea, because you never know when someone might come along with a really good, fresh approach to that idea. It's just to keep themselves from getting buried in the same obvious and cliched pitches over and over.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

For the record, the ending, with

Spoiler

the vault guard on duty being 1/8 Vulcan, whose great grandmother harbored a most illogical and un-Vulcan grudge, and who, along with most of his ancestors on that side of the family, was convinced that the lost gem was a glass fake, making him the absolute worst possible person for the geologist to have sweet-talked into releasing the stone, and the stone turning out to be real

and with

Spoiler

the young lovers kidnapped by the mutants winding up as the mutants' ambassadors

made all the tediousness and cringeworthiness of the early chapters worth it. Just not sufficiently worth it for me to change my vote calling it "average." (That vote was cast with the anticipation that Fontana would somehow make it worthwhile.)

 

[Therin of Andor]

Would it have worked? Yes, probably. But Nimoy believed it would have been out of character for Spock to ignore Kirk's order to shoot Sybok were Sybok anything but Spock's brother. What Nimoy wanted in 1988-1989 weighed more than Fontana's memos on a different production in 1967-1968.

Sure! But it was Shatner's concept for the script to include a Spock sibling. He had to sell it to Nimoy.

Interesting that Roddenberry objected not only to Sybok being a Spock sibling, but to McCoy mercy-killing his own father, a scene which turned out to be a very memorable one for De Kelley and his character, and many would say it redeemed the whole movie.

 

[Christopher]

Sure! But it was Shatner's concept for the script to include a Spock sibling. He had to sell it to Nimoy.

But he succeeded in selling it. That's the important part. Saying that an idea was good enough to convince a skeptic is a point in favor of the idea, not against it.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Interesting that Roddenberry objected not only to Sybok being a Spock sibling, but to McCoy mercy-killing his own father, a scene which turned out to be a very memorable one for De Kelley and his character, and many would say it redeemed the whole movie.

Roddenberry objecting to something the post-TMP movies did? Color me surprised.

 

[DrBeverly]

I really liked this book. I thought it was really well-written and I found Spock's investigation interesting and I was really engaged by his relationship with T'Pris and how that related back to his ongoing relationship with T'Pring. I preferred the early parts of the novel - Spock's return to Starfleet and to Vulcan, and his relationship with Sarek and Amanda - to the later parts, since I wasn't hugely invested in the Pike storyline.

It's an interesting choice to set this novel during the Pike timeline, since it would only really need a few tweaks for the majority of it to sit during the TOS period. Interesting that DC Fontana was able to get that choice through the editors at the time.

 

[Christopher]

It's an interesting choice to set this novel during the Pike timeline, since it would only really need a few tweaks for the majority of it to sit during the TOS period. Interesting that DC Fontana was able to get that choice through the editors at the time.

Why would you think Dave Stern, the editor at the time, would have resisted? There were plenty of books in that era that experimented with departures from the usual TOS format and time frame, like the Piper novels, The Romulan Way, and giant novels/hardcovers like Final Frontier and Spock's World. Vulcan's Glory came out just months after Spock's World and in the same year as The Lost Years, so a novel about Spock's first mission on the Enterprise fit right in.

Fontana's comments about the book in Voyages of the Imagination don't suggest that she met any kind of resistance from Stern. Stern asked her to pitch, she proposed Spock's first mission, and apparently it all went very smoothly (aside from problems saving the file to her new computer, but fortunately David Gerrold had taught her the importance of backing up her work).

 

[DrBeverly]

I suppose I was mainly thinking of the stories of how resistant Richard Arnold was to any kind of innovation in the novels. And I'm not especially familiar with that era of TOS novels, and didn't know there were so many departures from the usual format and timeframes.

 

[Christopher]

I suppose I was mainly thinking of the stories of how resistant Richard Arnold was to any kind of innovation in the novels.

I'd say that, thanks to the long lead time in publishing, Arnold's influence hadn't yet started to kick in by that point. It was later in '89 that we started to get those scare disclaimers on the copyright page saying that the books "are solely the author's interpretation" of Roddenberry's universe, because the books were too far along in production when Arnold came along for him to cancel or change them. And it was in '91-'92 that we got the books Arnold infamously had assigned to different authors for rewrites, A Flag Full of Stars and Probe.

Besides, who was going to tell D.C. Fontana she couldn't write a Trek story the way she wanted?

 

[Therin of Andor]

I suppose I was mainly thinking of the stories of how resistant Richard Arnold was to any kind of innovation in the novels. And I'm not especially familiar with that era of TOS novels, and didn't know there were so many departures from the usual format and timeframes.

Richard's influence came midway through Vonda McIntyre's work on the ST IV novelization (and until September 1991, so quite a few months/years of novel drafts and proposals after that time were affected). She essentially stops adding her own new material at one point in the ST IV book, ie. her reaction to RA's notes.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Besides, who was going to tell D.C. Fontana she couldn't write a Trek story the way she wanted?

Considering all the other shit he pulled with other Trek writers over the years, I 100% wouldn't put that past Richard Arnold.

And let's not forget that the reason D.C. Fontana was available to write Vulcan's Glory in the first place was because Roddenberry and Maizlish had been messing with her stories on TNG.

 

[Christopher]

^As I said, given the timing, the book was probably already in the works well before Arnold would've had the power to veto it. I'm saying I doubt anyone else would've felt entitled to shoot down D.C. Fontana's ideas about the universe and characters she played a key role in shaping.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

^As I said, given the timing, the book was probably already in the works well before Arnold would've had the power to veto it. I'm saying I doubt anyone else would've felt entitled to shoot down D.C. Fontana's ideas about the universe and characters she played a key role in shaping.

I understood what you were saying. I was speaking hypothetically.