Would Star Trek II Work Without The Reset?

[Riley]

From what I've read and heard from Nick Meyer over the years, his intent (as well as the studio's) was to put as much distance between TWOK and TMP as possible. Though I don't think either have ever said so explicitly, it seems that they intended TWOK as a soft reboot of sorts.

This is most evident in the retread of Kirk's storyline from TMP, this time with the addition of Kirk's aging.

The more I've thought about it over the years, the retread of Kirk yearning for command really bothers me. I say this is a lifelong fan of TOS and the TOS films. It bugs me because I believe the movie works just as well without it, perhaps even better.

Saavik can still take the Kobayashi Maru with Kirk and crew present. They're back on Earth for a few weeks and Kirk volunteers his crew to help train Spock's protégé. Kirk and crew went on another five year mission after TMP and then another and he's still a captain. There are plenty of people who can do what an admiral does, but only one James T. Kirk. Starfleet dispatches the Enterprise to investigate Regula I after he receives the message from Carol. The rest of the film happens as it did before, and there can even be some exploration of Kirk feeling his age. However, he was only fifty in TWOK, which seems young to me in the advanced future of the 23rd century.

I feel that Meyer's ego (and perhaps his own mid-life crisis?) led him to write Kirk as having given up command yet again and moping about his age. I just don't think it works narratively nor as a characterization choice for James T. Kirk.

Go ahead, set phasers on kill because of my "hot take."

 

[fireproof78]

feel that Meyer's ego (and perhaps his own mid-life crisis?) led him to write Kirk as having given up command yet again and moping about his age. I just don't think it works narratively nor as a characterization choice for James T. Kirk.

How much is that Meyer and how much is that the 8 drafts he had to rework?

 

[Firebird]

How much is that Meyer and how much is that the 8 drafts he had to rework?

Having read many of the drafts, that element was already there and predated Meyer's tenure on the film.

So, that portion of Riley's take isn't hot, it's completely baseless.

 

[fireproof78]

Having read many of the drafts, that element was already there and predated Meyer's tenure on the film.

So, that portion of Riley's take isn't hot, it's completely baseless.

As I suspected. I am not a fan of the aging plotline or the birthday aspect but I didn't think that was all Meyer.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

Wasn't Carol Marcus supposed to be Janet Wallace in the early drafts; and the system the Enterprise is supposedly entering during the Kobayashi Maru test is Gamma Hydra.
That's two nods to the 'Deadly Years' right there.
So, the themes about aging were right there from the beginning.

 

[mb22]

Plus, the fact that Meyer was only 36-37 when TWOK was made. A bit early for a mid-life crisis, IMO.

 

[Lord Garth]

Birthdays, especially birthdays ending in 0, make people think about what they're doing, especially if they're not where they want to be. I know the Star Trek Chronology has him at 52, but it plays like he's turning 50. Either way, the point about the birthday stands.

I'm not bothered by it and never was. McCoy even tells Kirk he's not really old. He feels it because he's depressed. He feels "young" by the end of the movie.

Kirk losing his command again: I don't take issue with it. Mainly because he's an Admiral, not a Captain. Which adds to his being fixated on commanding the Enterprise. It's a character flaw (I mean that in a good way!) because Starfleet wants him to do more for them and he just wants the Enterprise, no matter what. So, in a way, it's continuing Kirk's storyline from TMP. He wants the Enterprise and only the Enterprise. Period.

He likes having the Enterprise be a Cadet ship instead of being out there exploring, because it's a way for him to be near the Enterprise. Spock being Captain is even better (for him) because he knows Spock won't push back if a situation pops up where he has to take command again. "It's an obsession", McCoy pointed out in TMP. "You used this emergency to the Enterprise back!" he also points out. And then Kirk asks him, "And I intend to keep her?" basically admitting his intentions in the form of a question to make it sound as if he doesn't intend to keep the Enterprise even though he really does.

And what happens in TWOK? Kirk has the Enterprise near him. The dialogue strongly implies it's his choice to have it be a training ship. McCoy asks Kirk, "Jim, wouldn't be an easier to just put an experienced crew back on the ship?" which signals to me that Kirk has the power to do something about it. And he's choosing to keep the Enterprise close to him. So, it's his way of working around Starfleet Command in order to keep the Enterprise. And then the emergency on Regula One comes up and he takes command again. He tells Spock that he can command the ship, but I think he knows full well that Spock will decline and tell him to take command.

A large part of these early movies is Kirk's unhealthy obsession with the Enterprise. And it helps that there's such a large time-gap between TMP and TWOK. Because if Kirk did have a second five-year mission, then Starfleet can say, "Okay. We did what you wanted. We gave you another five-year mission! Now it's time you give something back! We gave you what you wanted, and now you have to give us something that we want."

Did the writers of TWOK have all of that in mind? No. They thought, "We want to deal with the passage of time by putting Kirk in a different situation." They also probably thought, "We want to get as far away from TMP as possible, but the first movie was onto something with Kirk being an Admiral, so we'll use that for our own purposes."

I'd have been fine with Kirk staying in command of the Enterprise the entire time. After TMP, it only really affects the first act of TWOK. From after that point on, for the rest of their movies, Kirk's commanding the Enterprise crew anyway. But I can see why they did what they did. I think it adds to TWOK.

 

[CoveTom]

From what I've read and heard from Nick Meyer over the years, his intent (as well as the studio's) was to put as much distance between TWOK and TMP as possible. Though I don't think either have ever said so explicitly, it seems that they intended TWOK as a soft reboot of sorts.

Aside from the fact that terms like "soft reboot" didn't exist back then, I have heard nothing from either Nick Meyer or Harve Bennett to suggest that. In fact, Nick Meyer has gone on record in his memoir as saying that he is not one to trash TMP and that he believes it was important for enabling what came after.

This is most evident in the retread of Kirk's storyline from TMP, this time with the addition of Kirk's aging.

The more I've thought about it over the years, the retread of Kirk yearning for command really bothers me. I say this is a lifelong fan of TOS and the TOS films. It bugs me because I believe the movie works just as well without it, perhaps even better.

I don't see anything about Kirk's story in TWOK as being a retread of TMP. In TMP, Kirk had been promoted and was just chafing at being stuck in a desk job. That's it. There was no concern about aging, no feeling that he was old and worn out. In fact, Kirk believed that he was a better choice to confront V'Ger than Decker, and his crew believed that as well. TWOK, although it peripherally deals with Kirk having been promoted again, is about something entirely different for his character -- reaching middle age and feeling that he is now old and useless.

Saavik can still take the Kobayashi Maru with Kirk and crew present. They're back on Earth for a few weeks and Kirk volunteers his crew to help train Spock's protégé. Kirk and crew went on another five year mission after TMP and then another and he's still a captain. There are plenty of people who can do what an admiral does, but only one James T. Kirk. Starfleet dispatches the Enterprise to investigate Regula I after he receives the message from Carol. The rest of the film happens as it did before, and there can even be some exploration of Kirk feeling his age. However, he was only fifty in TWOK, which seems young to me in the advanced future of the 23rd century.

Ugh. No. Please, no. I hate the deification of Kirk. In TOS, and even to a large extent during the movies, Kirk was just one captain among many. A good captain, sure, but not some mythical legend. The character works better that way.

I feel that Meyer's ego (and perhaps his own mid-life crisis?) led him to write Kirk as having given up command yet again and moping about his age. I just don't think it works narratively nor as a characterization choice for James T. Kirk.

Meyer was 36 when he wrote the screenplay for TWOK. Not really old enough to be having a mid-life crisis. In addition, Meyer's screenplay brought together story elements and plot points from five other drafts. He wrote all of the dialogue, but the story points were pretty much from other writers.

 

[Dukhat]

All we know for sure was that Harve Bennett thought TMP was a boring film. There's no indication that he or Meyer wanted to pretend it never existed. At worst, they just wanted to distance their new film from it chronologically. The mention of Kirk not having seen Khan for 15 years implies at least an 8 year gap between TMP and TWOK, more than enough time for all the uniform changes, reassignments, and for Kirk to start feeling his age.

 

[James Cole]

Did the writers of TWOK have all of that in mind? No. They thought, "We want to deal with the passage of time by putting Kirk in a different situation." They also probably thought, "We want to get as far away from TMP as possible, but the first movie was onto something with Kirk being an Admiral, so we'll use that for our own purposes."

An interesting aspect of both Nicholas Meyer-directed TOS films that just hit me is that they each took "time jumps" to reset the setting to correspond to the IRL distance from TOS.

For TMP's roughly intended setting to match real time, it would have needed to be produced around when TAS was.

Whether TWOK is set in 2283, 2284, or 2285, 1982 is "close enough" to for the production timeline to correspond to the in-universe timeline.

The first run DC comics run notwithstanding, TSFS is set weeks after TWOK, TVH three months after that, and finally TFF could be several weeks to a few months after TVH. So seven years in production timeline covers roughly a year in-universe.

And then the 1991 release TUC is likely set in 2292 or 2293.

TMP has always felt far removed from the rest of the TOS films, but I never realized just how much of a corresponding book-end TUC was, especially when looking at the films themselves and not how the Star Trek Chronology arbitrarily stretched them out.

 

[Grant]

I was never happy with Spock's death/resurrection and the Enterprise destruction/replacement and their Vulcan exile causing the crazy time compression where Treks 2-5 were mere months apart. The actors age 7 years but their characters are at a standstill.
Trek 5 made a huge error in making the Enterprise a lemon and therefore they had to make it very close time-wise to part 4.
If they wanted a skeleton crew they just could have stated the crew was spread across the globe on leave and the transporter was going thru an upgrade (to keep intact the "can't beam down or up" from Nimbus/Sha-ka-ree plot point).
I always thought that after TWOK they should have done a series of TV movies with the crew and Saavik and David and then have them find out Spock was alive on Genesis (growing at a fast but not super fast rate to age into Nimoy's age). Then they could do a Search for Spock as a big movie event. And in the meantime the old and new cast could have had some much needed development.

 

[Dukhat]

I was never happy with Spock's death/resurrection and the Enterprise destruction/replacement and their Vulcan exile causing the crazy time compression where Treks 2-5 were mere months apart. The actors age 7 years but their characters are at a standstill.

To be fair, the aging was barely noticeable.

 

[DarrenTR1970]

To be fair, the aging was barely noticeable.

I think the actors look pretty consistent age wise in II-IV
However, IMO, whether it was the makeup, the lighting, or a combination of the two, the actors looked visibly older in STV.

 

[Dukhat]

I think the actors look pretty consistent age wise in II-IV
However, IMO, whether it was the makeup, the lighting, or a combination of the two, the actors looked visibly older in STV.

It didn't help that they were all actually acting like old men.

 

[FormerLurker]

I've long believed, right or wrong, that II-IV took about 3-4 months, and V was at least 6 months later.

 

[Mres_was_framed!]

Assuming that there is supposed to be a second five year mission after TMP, it would have put Kirk in a position that may have contributed to how he was feeling: Had he stayed on Earth, he would have had the position called "Chief of Starfleet Operations" (sounds prestigious), but now after five years serving as a captain again, he is not in that role. It was easy for him to give up the prestigious position when he had the ship, but now that he does not have the ship, it seems that he feels like he is out of the place he should be.

 

[CoveTom]

I've long believed, right or wrong, that II-IV took about 3-4 months, and V was at least 6 months later.

That all seems reasonable to me. TFF clearly took place relatively soon after TVH, but you also have to remember that the bridge of the Enterprise-A in TFF looked nothing like it did at the end of TVH, so clearly Scotty had to have time to do some renovations.

My assumption would be that at the end of TVH they took the ship out on a shakedown cruise, maybe went on a couple of missions, and then discovered it had some serious issues. So they came back to Earth for Scotty to work on them, and toward the end of that process is when the events of TFF take place. I think 6 months could be a reasonable time frame for all of that.