When do a photon Torpedoes first appear?

[J.T.B.]

Well, the 'inside the ship' sound from the series was kind of a whoosh, like the torpedo leaving the tube would sound on a submarine,

A friend used to call it the "torpedo flush" sound.

 

[Green Shirt]

Why does a studio let an actor come up with a premise and/or write? Isn't that what writers are for?

People think they have something interesting to say, its an ego thing. Same as the popular thing nowadays that series stars are "producers" of their shows. The real producers must be laughing their asses off.

 

[Lance]

The problem, IMHO, with TFF is that Shatner is not a particularly good WRITER. He has never truly "gotten" Star Trek, and seemed unable to capture that in the story. Instead, he found a topic that intrigued him and tried to shoehorn it into the Star Trek premise.

Interesting you should say that, because I've always felt the complete opposite: that Shatner totally gets Star Trek to the very core of his being, but that in writing the story for TFF he was working to a much earlier brief.

"The Enterprise gets hijacked by a goofy alien, who forces the ship to cross a great barrier, on the other side of which they discover a malevolent force claiming to be a God whom Captain Kirk then tries to confuse into submission using illogical logic" is a string of dispariate elements that we saw ad nauseum in multiple TOS episodes.

Where TFF gets it so very wrong is that Star Trek had moved beyond that kind of pulp idea by 1989. So, it feels like an unfortunate throw-back to all that crazy shit that TOS used to do all the time back in the sixties, but just couldn't get away with anymore in the eighties.

I've never once doubted that, in crafting the above story, Shatner completely got what Star Trek was... his thinking was just twenty years out of date.

 

[CoveTom]

Well, Shatner, despite what his detractors say, didn't write STV. He came up with a premise, or even a detailed plot, that was given to David Loughery, who then wrote the script.

True, he didn't actually write the screenplay. That wasn't what I meant. But he did conceive of the original premise, was heavily involved with Harve Bennett and David Loughery in developing the specifics of the story, and then dictated his entire version of the story into a tape recorder and had it transcribed during the writer's strike that delayed Loughery's work. So even though he wasn't responsible for every line of dialogue, I think it's wrong to lay the writing all on Loughery.

It was Loughery that didn't get the characters, and Shatner who, as a first time director who didn't know how to budget his own time, didn't do the research necessary into the characters and settings to be able to properly present the story. Shatner himself is not very good at dialog, but he has a skilled imagination, and can come up with some compelling stories.

Why would Shatner, who at the time of TFF had been doing Star Trek off and on for over 20 years, need to do research into the characters? Shouldn't he know them pretty well by now from having played opposite them for 79 episodes 4 feature films?

 

[FormerLurker]

You weren't listening to the other actors about that, were you?

 

[CoveTom]

^ I am not talking about his relationships with the other actors, I am talking about his knowledge of the characters. And regardless of what any of the actors say, by that point in Trek's history, Shatner should have absorbed enough to understand what each of the main and primary supporting characters are supposed to be about.

Further, I dismiss a great deal of what the supporting actors have to say, because I chalk much of it up to sour grapes. The two actors who were on more or less equal footing with Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley, have never had a negative thing to say about the man.

It is always the "gang of four" supporting actors who do. And, frankly, I think most of their criticism truly stems from the fact that they WERE rather minor supporting characters, at least in TOS itself. It wasn't that Shatner kept denying them screen time, as they have told the tale. It was that the roles of Uhura and Sulu and Chekov and (to a lesser extent) Scott were not particularly crucial to the show.

Sometimes they had a significant role to play, sometimes they didn't. But the fact remains that you could station someone else at communications or the helm, and it didn't affect the plot. Remove Kirk, Spock, or McCoy, and you alter the fundamentals of the show.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Further, I dismiss a great deal of what the supporting actors have to say, because I chalk much of it up to sour grapes. The two actors who were on more or less equal footing with Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley, have never had a negative thing to say about the man.

It is always the "gang of four" supporting actors who do. And, frankly, I think most of their criticism truly stems from the fact that they WERE rather minor supporting characters, at least in TOS itself. It wasn't that Shatner kept denying them screen time, as they have told the tale. It was that the roles of Uhura and Sulu and Chekov and (to a lesser extent) Scott were not particularly crucial to the show.

Sometimes they had a significant role to play, sometimes they didn't. But the fact remains that you could station someone else at communications or the helm, and it didn't affect the plot. Remove Kirk, Spock, or McCoy, and you alter the fundamentals of the show.

Trek post of the year.