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When Trek insults our intelligence

But there may be times when it isn't functioning or when there are other circumstances involved, such as the 'personalization' thing....some cultures might be offended by communication being filtered through a machine....and such.
Unless she's a savant like Sato, Uhura and most linguists would have a slow going of it trying to decipher an unknown language from scratch. The Federation must employ entire teams of first contact specialists who would do a better job of it than the communications officer on a Starship.
 
Unless she's a savant like Sato, Uhura and most linguists would have a slow going of it trying to decipher an unknown language from scratch. The Federation must employ entire teams of first contact specialists who would do a better job of it than the communications officer on a Starship.

My thought was that by the time of TUC, Uhura would have had the time to follow the work of those others and would have by then learned the language.

Diplomacy alone would have meant learning each others' language. Machine translations can miss important nuances and I'm not even going into A. I. because the Universal Translator concept never mentioned anything like that.
 
My thought was that by the time of TUC, Uhura would have had the time to follow the work of those others and would have by then learned the language.

Diplomacy alone would have meant learning each others' language. Machine translations can miss important nuances and I'm not even going into A. I. because the Universal Translator concept never mentioned anything like that.
Yes, but the point is, it take a very long time and would be done by experts
 
Yes, but the point is, it take a very long time and would be done by experts

With the necessity of diplomatic interactions and such, it might not take so very long. Both sides would also actively pursue each other's language for surveillance and intelligence reasons. So, the experts begin immediately but others may quickly follow and learn as well.
 
With the necessity of diplomatic interactions and such, it might not take so very long. Both sides would also actively pursue each other's language for surveillance and intelligence reasons. So, the experts begin immediately but others may quickly follow and learn as well.
Usually in real life there are translators who speak both languages. I'm sure Marco Polo didn't speak much Chinese and Columbus couldn't be bother to learn Arawak.
 
Usually in real life there are translators who speak both languages.

Yes and those are some of the experts that get things started. I didn't mean to imply that Uhura was out on the front line with languages. I felt she would learn over time as the opportunity presented itself.
 
Abrahms movies for me.

I know its a controversial position to take but here goes.... again

Its not a reboot, it's a divergent timeline which is supposedly only what? 25 years from the divergent point.

Yet I'm supposed to buy that starfleet has in just 25 years "militarized" due to the naradas attack resulting in the connie being a dreadnaught that's bigger than a galaxy class ship.

Jeez in 80 years when we meet the dominion thats just gonna be a curbstomp in our favour when our super star destroyer sized oddesy goes through the wormhole and their ships havent changed at all.

There was NO need to upscale the ships whatsoever, the only time you'd even know was in their engineering dept which looked rubbish.

I forgive it though cos its just a big dumb action movie
Lets be realistic here, there are threads that go into great detail on how the decks as shown on TOS, TOS films, TNG, etc can not fit the size of ships as given by the producers of the show.

Then of course how many decks did the refit have in Final Frontier? How big is the Defiant, Space Dock, or the Klingon Bird of Prey's (really there are many, many ships that we can discuss).

Scale on Trek HAS never been accurate between either actual sets, on screen identification or special FX scenes. Period. Hell we can't even get series to have accurate scale within the same show, heck sometimes even the same episode.

No only bringing up the JJ verse films isn't a rational point, when it has existed for the run of the entire franchise. It should equally bother you in every aspect of the franchise's run.
 
No only bringing up the JJ verse films isn't a rational point, when it has existed for the run of the entire franchise. It should equally bother you in every aspect of the franchise's run.


But it won't, because as is customary, we hold elements of the franchise we don't like to a completely different standard than those elements we do like in order to rationalize and justify our opinions.
 
I'm wondering where something like 'poetic license' might come into all of this.

Consider the following example. They wanted to show the D at space dock, it would have been prohibitively expensive to build a new space dock model, so they re-used the one they had on hand. It should perhaps not be taken as literally what happened, but as representative of....thus a type of poetic license. That explanation could work to explain a lot in Trek. Colorful metaphors. :hugegrin:

SpaceDock2.jpg


SpaceDock1.jpg
 
I'm wondering where something like 'poetic license' might come into all of this.

Consider the following example. They wanted to show the D at space dock, it would have been prohibitively expensive to build a new space dock model, so they re-used the one they had on hand. It should perhaps not be taken as literally what happened, but as representative of....thus a type of poetic license. That explanation could work to explain a lot in Trek. Colorful metaphors. :hugegrin:

SpaceDock2.jpg


SpaceDock1.jpg

Man, those shots are still sexy today aren't they?
 
Man, those shots are still sexy today aren't they?

Yeah, this segment still remains one of the best in all of science fiction film, in my opinion, music and dialogue and all. It's perhaps only second to the flip side, when they steal the Enterprise. :D

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Back in TOS, McCoy was going to have a full-grown daughter in an episode called "Joanna" (the title of which always makes me think of the song). But Fred Freiberger stupidly decided McCoy shouldn't have a full-grown daughter because he thought McCoy should be the same age as Kirk and Spock. So the episode became "The Way to Eden".

I would've liked to have seen McCoy have a hippie daughter who Chekov had a romance with. It would've put interactions between McCoy and Chekov in a new light. "You made my poor, sweet little girl so upset she joined a goddamned hippie commune! Drugs, sex, and who knows whatever else! All because of you. And, to top of it all off, you work closely with Spock! That green-blooded Vulcan's been contaminating your mind! You'd best watch your step, commie... All you need is love? I'll show you what you need."
 
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No only bringing up the JJ verse films isn't a rational point, when it has existed for the run of the entire franchise. It should equally bother you in every aspect of the franchise's run.
Unfortunately, it doesn't and never has. It's a cognitive bias for focusing on the positives of the things that are liked, and sensitive to all the negatives of things that are not liked.
 
To be fair, the "fact" that Uhura was "deep into linguistics" is mostly fanon and had NOT been established at the time they made TUC. It's a neat idea, but it was NEVER actually stated on the original TV series. She was an accomplished expert on communications technology, like the chief radio operator on a military submarine, but the widespread assumption that she was also a super-linguist didn't become "canon" until the reboot movies.

Yeah, sure, you can make the case that it would be valuable for a Starfleet communications officer to be fluent in Klingon, but never once on TOS was she actually shown to be fluent in Klingon, Romulan, or whatever. That was a fan theory that somehow became taken for granted, kinda like the false notion that Spock was the first Vulcan in Starfleet, etc.

So the movie was not in error in that respect.
The idea Uhura was linguist was from the unmade Phase II series, to expand Uhura's role. It was used in loads of novels through the 80's and 90's (Diane Duane's earlier Trek works for example, which were set in a Phase II-ish world)

So technically it wasn't canon until ST'09 (I legit cheered when Uhura said "Let me speak Klingon!" in Into Darkness), but it had been in the Trekkie consciousness for near 20 years by the time of TUC.
 
Every single person involved is trying to make the best Star Trek they can. Why wouldn't they? What possible motive would there be to spend multi-millions on "insulting our intelligence"?
It's probably more accurate to say that a lot of people involved are trying to make the most marketable and profitable Star Trek they can. That's by no means the same as the best. It means trying to attract the broadest possible audience, which means dumbing some things down, which unavoidably will insult the intelligence of some viewers. It's the age-old tension between art and commerce; nothing wrong with pointing it out. it's certainly been an issue for Trek since literally before day one, given the infamous network complaints that the first pilot was "too cerebral."

(Also, intentions aside, some of the people involved just aren't necessarily that smart themselves. That's always worth remembering.)
 
When they say they can't do X in one episode but a few episodes later they can do it without explanation. Even worse is when a few episodes later they can't do the same X again.
 
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