Eh. The whole "Kirk dying alone" thing doesn't bother me. Even if we want to accept that he truly did know he would die alone, I think you can make that work within the context of Generations. Sure, Picard was there when he died. But Kirk didn't know Picard. He was a stranger. Kirk had lost everyone dear to him, from his crew to his long lost love, and ended up dying on an uninhabited distant planet for a civilization of people he had never met, with only a lone stranger to be with him when he did. I think the ending of Generations can definitely qualify as "Kirk dying alone."
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
- Start date
Ummmm…
This explains well.
‘I knew it was going to rain’
‘I knew you’d be late’
‘I knew Christopher would end up being needlessly pedantic’
Etc.
Even with stinkers in the first season like 'Code of Honor'?
The biggest problem with "Code of Honor" is that they cast it in a way that made it racist. If they had cast it differently, and we were just talking about the story and the execution of the episode itself, I'd say it would fare better than much of what we ended up getting in season 7, yes.
Well, TSFS had much more--the actual point of the title--to explore after the fight on the Genesis planet, it was all character-driven.
Another example where the fight is not the actual end of the story, but being a character study, the final act is focused on Kirk's personal loss and maturity in how he would enter his friend's death in the official record.
A gut feeling is often argued to lean toward what is described as presentiment, or innate human ability to perceive actions or events (positive or negative) that have not yet occurred. To what degree and how its developed remains a debated topic, but something leads the more aware individuals to have this perception or gut feeling. In short, in relation to Kirk and his debated scene, it played into the larger themes of Kirk's beliefs about his destiny, and how its tied to his deep bond with his surrogate brothers--something that anyone actually watching what was clearly laid out in TOS (relationships and why Kirk believed what he's stated) understood, instead of attempting (not meaning you, Farscape One) to rip one of its core, longstanding character / universe development strengths away from it in some heartless, purely secularized (and frankly uninteresting) manner.
The fistfight is not the end of the story in Generations either. The end of the film consists of two major character moments. First, seeing Kirk's death and how he handles it, and the emotion of his "burial," followed by the very nice character actions between Picard and Riker where we see how Picard has come to terms with the emotions he was feeling at the beginning of the film.
Who is he supposed to be, Nostrildamus?
But James Kirk is not a human; he's a fictional character created by writers. A writer's job is to choose the characters' words in a way that communicates a certain thing to the audience. The writers of that scene chose the words in a way that implied Kirk had a metaphysical belief in precognition. It was not the best choice of words or ideas for that scene. Bending over backwards to try to rationalize it after the fact does not make it any better-written.
But why would anyone actually want to believe Kirk had some mystical psychic power to predict his own death? Not only is Star Trek a rationalist universe (at least in principle if not always in execution), but nothing else in the entire body of canonical writing about James T. Kirk has ever implied he had any kind of metaphysical ability. Even if we accept the premise that Kirk believed such a thing, it's totally bizarre to assume that belief was somehow factually accurate.
But then, fans often have this bizarre reflex of assuming every spoken word in a show or movie must be literally, factually true, as if no character ever made a mistake or lied or believed something false. I'll never understand that. Real people say false or inaccurate things all the time, intentionally or unintentionally, so why should we assume everything fictional characters say or believe is objectively true?
It's not just the casting that was the problem. As scripted, the Ligonians were based on stereotypes about feudal Japan, and the dialogue has lines comparing their culture to Ming China and Native American "counting coup" customs. And their wardrobe is like a spacey version of something from The King and I, maybe -- more Southeast Asian or Middle Eastern. I think they were scripted as reptilian aliens, but the director chose to cast them all as African-American and have them play it with stock "African" accents, adding a whole other layer of stereotypes to the mix. (Reportedly the director was actually fired late in the production because of his racial attitudes.) So really the episode is a melange of condescending, exoticizing Orientalist and tribalist cliches even aside from the casting.
Katharyn Powers did have a tendency to write anthropologically iffy alien-culture episodes. Her Stargate SG-1 episode “Emancipation” is probably the stupidest episode of that series and a serious case of Did Not Do the Research. It portrayed Mongol culture as sexist and keeping its women in seclusion, but women in horse-nomad cultures like the Mongols were actually far more equal than in sedentary cultures, and didn’t wear veils or live in purdah. And in cultures where women are veiled and sequestered, they don’t simultaneously wear plunging necklines!
Yes, he's a fictional character. A human fictional character written by, and this may surprise you... humans. (Unless Moore and Braga have some extraterrestrial lineage we're not aware of.)
Ergo, Kirk can be just as imprecise about what he says as any other... now, say it with me... human that's on this planet.
And I'm not the one saying Kirk has any precognition or belief in it. You're the one who keeps interpreting that line as precognition. I, and several others it appears, look at it as just another way of expressing his gut feeling.
To use another example mentioned, "I knew it was going to rain."
Or, "I knew you'd be late."
It's as simple as that. No need to twist that line into something more complicated.
Which is my point -- that human writers are fallible and we have the right to criticize their poor choices.
By that reckoning, Generations ends the same way. There is a fist fight and Picard "tells us what we have learned" before the end credits. They were setting up Picard's "battle with time" from before we had even heard of Soran.
There are more things going on in Generations. Picard's story is in parallel with the "mission of the week" that happens to doom the Enterprise and Captain Kirk. But there is only one thing going on in WNMHGB: They have to contain or stop Gary. Which Kirk does with a fist fight, a phaser, and a rock.
No.
