Why is McCoy still on the bridge in VI?

[Timo]

...'Course, Chekov was given a plot reason to saunter to said location at a key plot moment. McCoy sort of preemptively ended up in his respective nonsensical location.

Also, curse you for consuming three of my very expensive minutes watching your avatar and getting all hypnotized.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Winterwind]

I only spent a minute watching the avatar but I kept waiting for a ship, or something, to appear. Nothing ever did.

 

[Knight Templar]

At McCoy's age and level of experience, it is very unlikely that he would be doing hands on emergency room medicine anyway.

Ever been to a modern big city ER and seen the person in charge of the ER for that shift? I have. Do they ever get their hands dirty with a patient? Very rarely. Mostly when there is a huge backlog of patients and no one else is available. Mainly they stay free and allocate resources and available for consultation as needed.

 

[Timo]

Would the Enterprise be staffed anywhere close to usual standards, though? We already saw McCoy operate on Gorkon, without assistance. And Spock appeared to wear no fewer than three hats: XO, Science Officer and diplomatic envoy. The whole mission to escort the Chancellor might have been conducted with what amounts to a light skeleton crew...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Captrek]

Also, curse you for consuming three of my very expensive minutes watching your avatar and getting all hypnotized.

Hah. I hope it was worth the money.

I only spent a minute watching the avatar but I kept waiting for a ship, or something, to appear. Nothing ever did.

Thanks. I'm pathetically insecure and always appreciate compliments, even on something as meaningless as my avatar.

Seriously.

 

[Borjis]

Because Chang was actually right, McCoy was a complete piss head by this point and so drunk at the climax of the film he actually thought he was in sickbay.

 

[Aldo]

Here's a better question:

The crew is racing against time to stop the President from being assassinated. After their battle with Chang they have only minutes (or even seconds) before the shot is fired...and yet the only people to beam down is the Senior Crew. Most of which were on the bridge?

Ok ok, I know the real reason for this, so the whole cast could be together in the finale, but it doesn't make sense in the context of the film.

 

[Timo]

In order to save the President, our heroes or their underlings have to defeat the very measures in place to protect the President. On the other hand, the people in charge of the measures are hoping to see the President die. All sorts of funny things can happen in a race where both sides desperately want to lose...

Beaming down at or anywhere near the conference should be impossible - but Cartwright would want to make it possible for his assassin to beam out, after being spotted and mistaken for a Klingon, but before being captured or killed and exposed for a human. So Kirk and pals could beam down, either because Cartwright left a permanent hole in the defenses, or because Valeris gave them the means to get Cartwright's folks to open a hole for them.

Why not send redshirts, though? Well, given the rate things were going, any one of them could have walked to the President, said "Captain Kirk sent me - there is a threat to your person, Sir", and blown his head off. Kirk could trust himself, sort of trust McCoy and Spock, and had little hope left if he couldn't trust Scotty, Uhura and Chekov. He could always send the redshirts to stop Cartwright's troops elsewhere in the compound.

Incidentally, given how much Valeris knew of the overall cabal, it should be logical to assume she knew some key details of the assassination plan, such as "assassin will be perched behind this window here" and "this code will open the shields to transport" - necessary details for our heroes to achieve what they did. But given this, we must also assume that Valeris perfectly well knew the location of the conference, and that Spock accepted her lie solely because he felt he could and should not dig out the truth, not with the methods at his disposal.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Knight Templar]

^Good point Timo.

I always figured that Kirk beamed down with only the people he knew he could trust. After all, the crew of the Enterprise had already shown to have at least three members of the conspiracy aboard (Valeris and the two shooters). Who is to say there could not have been more?

Now you could argue that Spock's forced mind meld should've gotten all the details from Valeris's mind, but some groups are highly compartmentalized. Valeris did not know the summit meeting was on Khitomer. She might not have known if more conspirators were aboard the Enterprise either.

 

[Aldo]

Ok, good points all. Convinced me

 

[Search4]

What's always annoyed me... there are many delegates at this location... they all came in ships... and none of THEM attempt to stop the Enterprise? Just the cloaked Chang/Klingon ship?

Imagine a similar scenario today and there would be awesome security that could not easily be circumvented.

 

[Knight Templar]

What's always annoyed me... there are many delegates at this location... they all came in ships... and none of THEM attempt to stop the Enterprise? Just the cloaked Chang/Klingon ship?

Imagine a similar scenario today and there would be awesome security that could not easily be circumvented.

I figured that due to the highly secretive nature of the peace conference (and Gorkon's assassination) that all sides wanted to attrack as little attention to it as possible. So they avoided sending full sized starships. Or even had starships drop the delegates off and then travel to another location to give false indications as to where it was being held.

I also thought it would be very nice to have a scene that showed the Klingon and Federation delegations landing in small starships escorted by fighters.

Remember, even the U.S. president doesn't go to summit meetings by aircraft carrier.

 

[Timo]

Or if he did, the opposing superpower would demand that the carrier be withdrawn to beyond the range of her aircraft for the duration of the meeting, so that there won't be nukes raining on the opposing leader.

The Trek universe isn't quite like ours today in this respect: delegates would probably indeed be arriving in their equivalent of battleships, because smaller ships of the required range and speed simply wouldn't exist at the time - much like in the heyday of sailing ships, or indeed in WWI still. And since the meeting would bring together at least three groups that possessed battleships and hated each other's guts, there'd quite probably be a nice parade of arriving, offloading and departing warships there...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Knight Templar]

Note, is is also possible that there were Klingon and Federation starships in low orbit around Khitomer.

The battle between the Enterprise, the Bird of Prey, and later the Excelsior was apparently some distance from Khitomer, beyond transporter range which puts it something on the order of more than 30,000 kilometers.

These starships would not go running to help the Enterprise any more than American Secret Service Agents do not leave the vicinity of the president even if other agents or other innocent people in the vicinity, are being shot

 

[Gagarin]

I would think it's because he had just spent a week (?) on a mining planet prison freezing after being charged with the assassination of a head of state. "I'm in no damn mood or condition to be handling triage"...

 

[CaptainMatt]

I seem to remember TOS episodes where McCoy hung out on the bridge with seemingly nothing pressing to do in sickbay, so it's not that much of a stretch.