'Star Trek Into Darkness' Preview: Prepare To Cry

MTV ^ | January 22, 2013 | Josh Wigler

[discostu]

I find it more really Star Trek than all of Voyager and most of the old canon movies. It’s fun, that’s really Star Trek.

[discostu]

While that would probably be a great movie it’ll be hard to structure. The whole Khan revolution heavily predates any place we’ve actually had stories except for a couple of time travel plots. It’s pre-TOS, pre-Enterprise, even pre-First Contact. So unless they’re going to send the Enterprise back in time where’s the hook? Where are the characters we know? And you have the additional problem of the audience is probably going to root for Khan (because he’s cool), and Khan has to lose. That’s a tough story to write.

[discostu]

They couldn’t remake WOK, in the timeline they’re either before the first episode of TOS or just about to hit the first episode. Kahn hasn’t even been found yet, much less dumped on a planet to get to have wrath.

[Boogieman]

Obviously, they needed to retrieve some humpback whales to help them defeat this new menace to the Federation!

[Boogieman]

Yes, I know that, I just think they wanted to remake it, but obviously they can’t exactly do that.

[discostu]

A lot of the fan community talked about it, but I don’t think anybody from inside the studio ever mentioned it. And with good reason, it would be a trap. Part of the whole point of blowing up the old timeline and starting from scratch was to free themselves from all that canon. If they made JJST-2 a remake of ST-2 they lose all that freedom. Now I do think they want to mine the structure of it, but that’s just being smart. WOK was the best movie of the original 10, it’s a good blue print for how to tell a good story with these characters. There’s a lot of WOK flavor in JJST-1 (naval battle structure, very personal conflict, Kirk the warrior), which is a lot of why the movie was as successful and enjoyable as it was.

[Nepeta]

I find it more really Star Trek than all of Voyager and most of the old canon movies. It’s fun, that’s really Star Trek.

I found the first Faux Trek movie absurd and the canon characters unrecognizable--with good reason, because the guy who hatched out that abomination said he never went back to to review the original characters. Hence the disconnect.

Somewhere I read that each age gets the Star Trek it deserves. The original ST was about a meritocracy, with a starship crewed with the best of the best. The Faux Trek movie advanced Kirk-the-Hatching to captain in the kind of wish fulfillment adolescent fantasy I expect from Mercedes Lackey. Faux Trek is the perfect Star Trek for the Entitled to Everything generation.

[discostu]

The first Star Trek was fun.
TNG was the UN in space.
DS9 was dark but had some pretty good drama.
Voyager sucked.
Enterprise had a lot of promise but never fulfilled.
And JJ Trek is once again fun.

If each age gets the Trek we deserve I wanna know what we finally did right. It ain’t Faux Trek, it’s REAL Trek, actually entertaining, adventurous, and enjoyable. I feel sad for the whiny fans who feel the need to complain about it. You’ve missed the point on Trek for 45 years.

[EveningStar]

I find Sylar to be a credible Spock. Unfortunately, his public admission to being a homosexual will kill off any storylines of relationships with women.

It was established in the first film that Spock and Uhura have a romantic relationship, remember?

Also, Uhura appears at least 4 times in the trailer for the new movie, so I'm guessing that the relationship is present here too.

[Jonty30]

And I’m saying that, since his admission of homosexuality, there should be no further exploration of relationships with women for him.

[who knows what evil?]

...now the comic industry has introduced ‘former Enterprise Captain Robert April’ into the mix...

[EveningStar]

Robert April was the captain in the initial development stages of Star Trek.

[Nepeta]

If each age gets the Trek we deserve I wanna know what we finally did right. It ain’t Faux Trek, it’s REAL Trek, actually entertaining, adventurous, and enjoyable. I feel sad for the whiny fans who feel the need to complain about it. You’ve missed the point on Trek for 45 years.

I guess it depends on what you consider heroic. I really only liked the original and Enterprise. I don't find the Faux Trek characters admirable or heroic; it rather reminded me of the episode in which the originals were all grasping, impulsive, and ultimately shallow.

I'm not into shallow, not even in my space opera, which is why I loathe Star Bores.

I think I understood the point of Star Trek from the beginning--and I did watch from the very first broadcast. That was an optimistic view of the future, not only of human harmony, but of human curiosity driven to explore. It's a very American view of the future--at least of America circa 1966, an idealized meritocracy. (Take a look at the crew of the Seaview during the same time period.) Humankind ventured out into the universe, not to conquer, not to make an empire--but to explore, sometimes with alien species.

It wasn't about geewhiz special effects and it wasn't about Mercedes Lackey-esque fantasy silliness about some young kid Being Born So Special they get where they are on the strength of being born that way. (That ain't American.) It was about working hard to chase a dream, and getting there if you were good enough and worked hard enough.

I think I understood Star Trek pretty well.

It would have been far more honest to rename the characters and the universe and go from there. Calling Faux Trek Star Trek is bait and switch, and I'm not fooled.

[discostu]

See I think you missed a lot. For one thing there was certainly a lot of Being Born So Special. TOS established the idea that the Enterprise has what’s often referred to by fen as “the god crew”, everybody is absolutely positively the best at their position, Kirk is the youngest captain, Scotty hotwires the Enterprise to out perform all other Constitution class vessels, Bones cures incurable diseases in days, they always out perform. It’s the nature of Trek, continued in every show, that crew is always better than any other crew that encountered the same problem.

And no Trek really isn’t about working hard to chase dreams. It’s about a society where technology has solved all the material problems, so now the people get to do whatever they want. Ever wonder what the majority of society does in the Federation? Mostly it seems to be nothing. They have replicators, they don’t need jobs. Sure some of them chase dreams, because they don’t need jobs, nothing much else to do when the replicators provide all.

Trek is ultimately a pretty shallow show. Yeah they hooked some messages in a few episodes. But even those are pat mimeographs about societal problems people have been complaining about for ever, with a little cheap makeup. Their attempts not to be shallow show the shallowness, that’s why the best episodes are the fun one like Tribbles and Shore Leave.

There’s no bait and switch. You fooled yourself, a lot of Trek fans do, they focus on eps like Last Battlefield and completely forget the joy of “brain brain and brain what is brain”. It’s real Trek, fun and crazy with the god crew, and maybe a moral lesson in there somewhere.

[Nepeta]

And no Trek really isn’t about working hard to chase dreams. It’s about a society where technology has solved all the material problems, so now the people get to do whatever they want. Ever wonder what the majority of society does in the Federation? Mostly it seems to be nothing. They have replicators, they don’t need jobs. Sure some of them chase dreams, because they don’t need jobs, nothing much else to do when the replicators provide all.

This works if your understanding of science is limited to technology as a magic black box: wishes in, product out.

It doesn't work that way. It never did. It never will.

Behind everything there are legions of people who make things work. Designers. Engineers. Repair techs. And things do break down.

People have to be trained to do these things.

Just consider the western flush toilet, and all the support it requires--plumbers, waste treatment, microbiologists, heavy construction, ceramic specialists.

I think there will be plenty to do. The Magic Black Box does not exist.

[discostu]

Magic black boxes don’t exist in reality. But they do in Star Trek. The first time in the show the replicators weren’t bottomless pits of plenty was Voyager. Sure things break, but that’s the glory of replicators, you can replicate new parts, heck they probably have big replicators to replicate entire small replicators. According to the tech manual Trek toilets feed into the replicator system, raw material. Of course even if they didn’t, they have phasers that can disintegrate stuff, don’t need plumbing then.

And let’s not even get into the implications of transporters, a magic black box so magical Rodenberry didn’t even want it, but they didn’t have enough money to build a shuttle set.

[Nepeta]

Magic black boxes don’t exist in reality. But they do in Star Trek. The first time in the show the replicators weren’t bottomless pits of plenty was Voyager. Sure things break, but that’s the glory of replicators, you can replicate new parts, heck they probably have big replicators to replicate entire small replicators. According to the tech manual Trek toilets feed into the replicator system, raw material. Of course even if they didn’t, they have phasers that can disintegrate stuff, don’t need plumbing then.

And let’s not even get into the implications of transporters, a magic black box so magical Rodenberry didn’t even want it, but they didn’t have enough money to build a shuttle set.

One of the primary rules of writing sf and fantasy is that everything doesn't go.

Many people don't accept this, even after it is pointed out to them, but every top flight writer knows that you can change some aspects of a created universe, but once you have established those changes you must strictly follow the consequences and you cannot change your mind part way through.

Gene Roddenberry was not a science fiction genius (look at his credits prior to Star Trek) but he was a competent writer. I don't recall anything in the OS that said life generally was as portrayed on the starships; we are in fact told repeatedly about farming colonies and mining colonies--people doing real work, with no magic black boxes in sight. I don't recall non-Star Fleet types sitting around and drooling. Roddenberry knew better than to create a universe of pointless people. Very likely if you want apple pie in this universe, except for starships serving in remote places, someone has to first grow an apple and someone else has to grow some wheat. Why else would there be agricultural colonies?

For example,ya gotta have dilithium crystals. You cannot wish them into existence.

By the way, the physics of transporting is being worked on now.

Listen, go off and enjoy flashing lights and shiny things. I dislike Faux Trek intensely because I dislike shallow action movies intensely.

[tanknetter]

They couldn’t remake WOK, in the timeline they’re either before the first episode of TOS or just about to hit the first episode. Kahn hasn’t even been found yet, much less dumped on a planet to get to have wrath.

The way you have a good Khan story is to start with the premise that in "Star Trek", Nero had a LOT of time (25 years) to plant all sorts of little grenades as backups in case Old Spock didn't come through the black hole with the Red Matter.

This would include doing a historical data dump on the Klingons, Romulans, and whoever else would see Kirk and crew as THE threat that needed to be eliminated. Remember that Nero knew who Kirk was ... was pretty freaked out by seeing "NCC-1701" emblazoned on the ship as it confronted him.

So in the new timeline someone (maybe a lot of someones) knows that Khan is pretty much the guy who came the closest to taking Kirk, etc, out of the picture permanently. So they find him, revive him, let him know what happened, give him a ship and send him off on his merry way.

The thing to bear in mind about the new timeline is that a BUNCH of stuff from the old timeline is still in motion and will still happen. The Planet Eater. V'Ger. The Whale Probe. The explosion of that Klingon moon. Not to mention all the stuff from all the other series (like, for instance, The Dominion has already been through the wormhole and in the Alpha Quadrant covertly for 200-300 years at this point - what do you think THEY do if they get their hands on a history of what's going to happen to them about 90 years down the road?).

Assuming that Old Spock hasn't said "screw the Prime Directive" and been mind-melding with anyone/everyone to disperse what he knows about the future, a heck of a lot of people would know that taking out Kirk/Co. is the key to taking out the Federation.

[mdmathis6]

They have been completely mum as to who Peter Weller is going to characterize...I’ve seen some references on line to a photo shot of a bald character with electronics on his face and head. I think we’ll see a few interesting surprises! Abrams may have put a “bad robot”(name of his Production company/snicker smirk) into his movie!

Borg? maybe!

The Cumberbatch character may be a Star Fleet section 31 or Temporal agent gone wrong!

[mdmathis6]

FAAAABUlous Speed, Mr. Sulu!