What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

[Tallguy]

I totally agree. That should have been it for all the characters... They go off into the sunset. Certainly gives authors a lot of options after that.

In the early Blish novelizations there are forewords by a retired Captain Kirk. (Right? I don't have copies on hand.)

 

[Christopher]

In the early Blish novelizations there are forewords by a retired Captain Kirk. (Right? I don't have copies on hand.)

I don't recall that. Maybe you're thinking of Alan Dean Foster's TAS novelizations, which open with the notation:

Logs of the Starship Enterprise
Stardates [xxxx-xxxx] Inclusive

James T. Kirk, Capt., USSC, FS, ret.
Commanding

transcribed by
Alan Dean Foster

At the Galactic Historical Archives
on S. Monicus I
Stardate [xxxx.x]

For the curator: JLR​

("S. Monicus I" was a reference to Santa Monica, CA, where Foster was living at the time. JLR is Foster's editor on the series, Judy Lynn del Rey.)

 

[Tallguy]

I'm thinking specifically of Charlie X where a retired James Kirk says that the biggest trouble he ever had was a teenage boy named Charlie Evans.

Kind of like how the initial batch of Captain's Logs were written as if Kirk wrote them down after the fact with full knowledge of what had happened in hindsight.

 

[Christopher]

I'm thinking specifically of Charlie X where a retired James Kirk says that the biggest trouble he ever had was a teenage boy named Charlie Evans.

Checking the book, I see that wasn't a foreword, just the opening paragraph of that particular story -- although that was the first story in the collection.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Makes me think of the "chapter arguments" in my own novel (which range from a few words to provide context, to naked info-dumps, to Biblical quotes).

The novelization of TMP does have a few pages of "Admiral Kirk's Preface" (I would argue that it should have been billed as a foreword).

 

[CoveTom]

I always thought it was a bit odd that they made Koloth a stoic swordsman on DS9 when he came off a bit sleezy on TOS. Guess things change over 100 years.

As for Kirk, I think there is no way to write a good death scene for the character. You can make it as heroic as possible and it will be fine. But it won’t feel right because Kirk is one of those characters that you expect to find a way to survive, to cheat death. So it will get written off as “he fell off a bridge” or “yeah, some jerk shot him in the back”. Even dying in battle on the bridge of the Enterprise (ala Picard in Yesterdays Enterprise)…eh…maybe more fitting but still….

That’s why I’ve always thought his fate should have been left ambiguous. The final word on the character should have been his log entry at the end of TUC.

I can't possibly agree with this more.

I know Terry Matalas gets a lot of grief around here, but after Picard season 3 aired and we find that all of the main TNG characters survive, he was asked about that and he said (I'm paraphrasing), "I don't know why people want to kill off their heroes." I agree with that. Of course, sometimes there is good reason for a character to die. However, this is a fictional world and, in most cases, I think it's better to not have a specific ending for a character. Having the last thing we see of the TNG characters be them sitting around a poker table is fine with me.

The ending of TUC was the absolute perfect sendoff to the TOS cast, and I think it should have been left as such. And if Generations had been strictly a TNG movie, instead of an attempt at a crossover, it would have been a better movie as a result anyway.

 

[Christopher]

And if Generations had been strictly a TNG movie, instead of an attempt at a crossover, it would have been a better movie as a result anyway.

Perhaps, but the logic of the crossover approach was understandable. Not everyone watches everything; there were plenty of moviegoers who were fans of the TOS movies but had never watched TNG. So it made sense to begin the TNG movie series with a passing of the torch from the original crew, though there probably could have been better ways to achieve that.

In some ways, though, GEN fell short as an introduction of TNG to a new audience, because it was made right after the series ended by the same creative people, so it fell into a lot of the same old habits. For instance, we didn't get a clear establishing shot of the Enterprise-D until relatively late in the film -- we opened in the holodeck, then stayed in interior scenes, and the first exterior shot was only a partial rear view, while the second was a distant action shot. So they didn't really establish a clear enough sense of place for novice viewers.