Close enough. (Off-Topic)

by Quirel, Tuesday, December 10, 2013, 00:55 (4008 days ago) @ Ragashingo

What's wrong with The Wrath of Khan??

Khan was a great villain in the original series, so they decided to bring him back. He would be an Ahab-figure, so bent upon the destruction of Kirk that he could no longer assess his situation rationally. Meanwhile, the crew of the Enterprise are late into their careers, and Kirk is especially feeling obsolete.

Great, great idea. I love some of the themes and ideas behind this movie, I just think the execution was lousy. Sit for a moment, and think of the coincidences that they set up in order for the above to take place.

-Ceti Alpha VI has to explode. No big deal, happens all the time in science fiction.
-Ceti Alpha VI explodes hard enough to shift the orbit of Ceti Alpha V.
-Without stripping V's atmosphere off.
-Federation sensors, keen enough to spot microbes from orbit, cannot detect the missing sixth planet. Or the cloud of hot debris it should have left behind.
-Or the difference between a patch of microbial life and an enclave of superhumans.
-Or the presence of a mind-controlling grub, the only other species to survive the blast.
-Meanwhile, at the exact same time, Kirk lets himself be talked into captaining the Enterprise one last time.
-When arriving at the location of a research station that appears to be in distress, Kirk lets his guard down to a ship that is acting shady as Hell, which lets Khan get the jump on him. Uhura is the only one (besides the audience) that sees this coming.

The above, and several other elements, struck me as an incredibly contrived way to get Kirk and Khan fighting each other.

And as far as science fiction goes, I'm not sure how I feel about the Genesis Device. Sure, Star Trek is on the gooey-soft end of the sci-fi hardness scale, but the explicit division of 'living' and 'dead' life is a canard that I've gotten tired of. And it also strains credulity that only three people in existence can see potential for weaponizing it. And when Scotty learns about Genesis, he is apparently so overcome with existential despair that he can't even begin to coherently explain why a terraforming superweapon is going to upset the balance of power.

And I want to talk about how stupid the 3D Space Maneuver was, but that'll have to wait for another day.

You'll need a better example than Firefly. One would think all the horrible things done to that show (episodes out of order, horrible marketing, etc) had much more to do with its demise than anything Start Trek related.

Firefly was screwed over because executives didn't think it would have an audience. I'm trying to imagine a world where Star Trek didn't peter out with Voyager and Enterprise, and maybe created the audience to support more science fiction shows.

And yes, I do need better examples, but I'm too strung out to think of them.

Eh? I enjoyed both of the new Trek films. They were very different, and had a problem here or there, but they weren't mind numbingly stupid or anything... well except for magic death curing blood...

OK. How about this. I realize that Star Trek has been absolutely terrible about sensibly applying the in-universe technology*, but how stupid do the characters have to be to not realize that they can just beam warheads after Khan with the same teleporter technology he used to escape to Qo'noS?

* Number of times that a replicator has been used to make replacement organs or ship parts: 0.
Number of times that a replicator has been used to make "Tea. Earl Gray. Hot.": Too many.

I have my own problems with Star Trek. I think it should have aspired to bigger grander story telling. I think it for far too long limited itself in what it could do to its characters, to how much they could change or grow. I think in some ways the Star Trek universe itself is somewhat broken and at odds with telling good stories since it starts with most basic problems from money to disease already solved.

Personally, I think that the biggest problem with Star Trek is that many of the series followed a "Wagon Train to the stars" approach. Sure, this gives you endless potential for stories about the USS Enterprise running into negative space wedgies or making nice with the local primitives. However, this shifts focus to civilizations which will only appear in that one episode, and there's insufficient time to explore an alien culture.

Star Trek would be better served with a series that spends time fleshing out what Federation life is like, and how it's different from modern life. So, maybe a series about the Federation intervening on a dying planet, and helping a more primitive civilization set up a colony on a new world.

Also: Star Trek writers would have to treat technology as more than a convenient plot device.