Yeah, well, that's your opinion, and mine, too, but still not in the spirit of Trek. I myself wouldn't have given Kruge a hand when he was about to fall off that cliff, yet Kirk did. Kirk even wanted to board the ship and save Khan's crew after Enterprise disabled the Reliant. So phasers set to kill is the VERY LAST option in Star Trek. And it's sad what they did in the new movie. At the very end Kirk was kind of executing Nero, and Spock agreed with him. That's bad.
Don't think too hard about the logic of Trek overall. Little things like this have been in the back of my mind with Trek for years, but you need to put them aside since they're so well established in the universe. It never made sense to me in the original series (even as a kid) that Kirk and Spock both went on landing party missions (one of them sure, but not both). It also never made sense that they'd go into potential fire fights or dangerous situations and not wear some type of body armor, or all have some type of medical kits on them and melee weapons. Yet it happened over and over. The way I saw it, this just followed tradition.
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Logic can be cold sometimes. Nero had been imprisoned before, escaped, and caused untold detestation. He was too dangerous to be allowed to live.
I agree in principle, however, when you get down to the nitty gritty of it - phasers do a lot of things. They can fire in beams or pulses. All different colors. All kinds of different beam intensities... including several settings that kill without "vaporizing".
What's that human expression? 'Shoot to kill'.
Sorry, couldn't resist.
The only reason Kirk wanted then stuned is because....They all owed him money.
I thought the stun setting was able to put Romulans out for a long time, based on evidence we saw of the stun's effects on Vulcans and Romulans in the other series...
Star Trek has always promoted stun first. Even when Kirk and Spock made their assault on Kor's compound on Organia in TOS, they shot the guards on stun. Kirk said they would kill "if necessary", and there, they were hopelessly outnumbered, yet still shot to stun.
I admired Star Trek's reluctance for killing - that's why I watched it as a child. It was one of the only shows where the heroes showed as much mercy as they could even to their enemies.
Don't call me "Mister", please, cause you ain't my captain.
