| 1 | [[foldercontrol]] |
| 2 | |
| 3 | [[folder: "Sir, I have not had the opportunity to tell you about your son."]] |
| 4 | * Why not? You've been on Vulcan for three months, Saavik. It just seems odd that in all that time, David's name never came up. Unless she was off doing other things on Vulcan (visiting family, [[InJoke preparing to change her name to Valeris]], etc.) but the implication is that she's been there the whole time helping to repair the Klingon ship and possibly bonding with Spock. |
| 5 | ** Saavik is perhaps not being completely honest. She did have opportunity, but she put it off until the crew was ready to leave because it would be a difficult subject for her. In the ''Star Trek III'' novelization she and David became lovers before they left for Genesis. |
| 6 | ** As the only survivor from the ''Grissom'' she has probably been in numerous debriefings with Starfleet Command on the matter, not to mention the Vulcan Science Academy likely had some questions for her after she watched a dead Vulcan come back to life and hyperage into Leonard Nimoy. Adding to it her being the only non-mutinous Starfleet officer on the planet, she may have been ordered to stay away from the others. |
| 7 | [[/folder]] |
| 8 | |
| 9 | [[folder: High-energy...''photons''?]] |
| 10 | * Spock tells Kirk that to re-crystallize the dilithium in the Bird-of-Prey's warp reactor, they need to collect "high-energy photons" from a nuclear reactor, calling them a "toxic side effect" of fission reaction. Except that the actual danger from nuclear reactors (and nuclear waste) is not photons at all, but is instead ionizing radiation. |
| 11 | ** Plus, high-energy photons are used to generate lasers, and have absolutely nothing to do with nuclear fission reactors. |
| 12 | *** While lasers are involved with some forms of ''fusion'' reaction, the reactors aboard nuclear naval ships are all ''fission''-based. |
| 13 | ** It's possible that Spock meant either alpha particles, beta particles, or high-energy neutrons; ''none'' of which are photons. |
| 14 | ** They also could've been "collecting" gamma rays (high energy electromagnetic radiation, quantized as photons). Gamma rays are the only thing likely to penetrate a nuclear reactor's shielding. How you "collect" gamma radiation, though, is anyone's guess... |
| 15 | [[/folder]] |
| 16 | |
| 17 | [[folder: The bus passengers applauding Spock nerve pinching the punk]] |
| 18 | * We of course know what Spock did, but the passengers don’t. Seems like they would suspect he did something far more sinister like, you know, shanking? |
| 19 | ** The music was so irritating that even if that did happen, everyone watching was fine with it. |
| 20 | ** Considering Spock was wearing a robe and a headband similar to a hachimaki, they likely assumed he was a martial artist and performed a nerve hold on the punk. |
| 21 | [[/folder]] |
| 22 | |
| 23 | [[folder: Familiarity with 20th century language]] |
| 24 | * When Kirk passes the $100 to the crew, he tells them not to "splurge." If there's no money in the 23rd century, how would he be familiar with a term that means "to spend money excessively"? Maybe he learned it from books and movies from the period, but then why would he assume the others would recognize the term? |
| 25 | ** If we accept that money no longer exists, money metaphors seem to have survived (Kirk saying "You've earned your pay," etc.), so maybe this is such a case. |
| 26 | *** But the concept of splurging would probably be hard to understand for those who have never lived in a world with money. |
| 27 | *** TOS seems to take place during the social transition phase where money is becoming less important and more steadily devalued. The crew have all used money in the past, buying tribbles and such like for example, and [=McCoy=] used money to try and bribe the proto-Ferengi guy in the previous movie, so they know the concept and the basics, just it seems like it is something slipping out of daily use in social terms over the time period from the start of TOS to being almost unused within the Federation by the start of TNG. It isn't that there is no money in the 23rdC it is it is getting used less and less. Certainly far less than is used in the late 20thC. |
| 28 | ** One sense of the word "splurge" concerns indulgence in general, not necessarily the free spending of money. Perhaps that sense of the word survived. After all, even if they don't use money, the people of the future must still be familiar with the concept of having a limited resource and having to expend it with care. |
| 29 | ** Obviously several episodes of the original series made references to money. Harry Mudd and Cyrano Jones are just two examples. Add in that the main characters have traveled to a multitude of worlds at various stages of socio-economic development, including several near duplicates of Earth. |
| 30 | ** Maybe he picked it up after reading all that Harold Robbins and Jaqueline Susann type literature... |
| 31 | [[/folder]] |
| 32 | |
| 33 | [[folder: Come back home for your trial. You know, whenever...]] |
| 34 | * So Kirk and Co. have been hanging out on Vulcan since the conclusion of the last movie, fiddling with the Klingon ship and deciding what to do about, you know, the court martial waiting for them back on Earth. But why did Starfleet Command let them kick back and come back in their own sweet time? Why not send a starship or two to pick up these fugitives and haul them back post haste? |
| 35 | ** The Vulcans gave the crew asylum, meaning that Starfleet couldn't just come kicking down the door to arrest them. Also, with the sudden replacement of Morrow with Cartwright and the political drama going on in the Federation Council, it's possible that there was a lot of stuff happening back on Earth as fallout from the previous movie and getting back a group who were, for the time being, content to stay on an allied planet where they could be kept track of, was a lower priority. |
| 36 | *** So Vulcan, a member OF the Federation, can offer asylum FROM the Federation? Isn't that like the state of Georgia refusing to turn over an AWOL Army officer to the military police? |
| 37 | *** This exact thing has been occurring recently with sanctuary cities and the like. And with your example, if a state did refuse, what then? It’s highly unlikely the military police would attempt to forcibly take the person. |
| 38 | *** We simply don't have enough information on what the Vulcan and Federation legal codes permit and don't permit. The Federation is of course less like the US and more like the EU with a commonly funded defense force, so it would depend on the treaties invoked on joining and how much sovereignty they each possessed. The low priority on pushing the matter until the diplomatic row with the Klingons (and presumably other powers too) is sorted out seems more likely. |
| 39 | *** Vulcan does have an ambassador on Earth, despite both planets being members of the Federation. |
| 40 | *** I've always wondered if maybe the members of the Federation Council are called ambassadors. That would explain Vulcan's having an 'ambassador' on Earth, and why Sarek seems to be implied to have a seat on that body. |
| 41 | *** The expanded universe does call the members of the Council councillors. Worth noticing thought that actually in real life some states inside the US may deny extradition of prisoners to other states if they worry for the prisoners well being and/or is against the state's law the kind o punishment the prisoner may receive (for example, extradition from a non-capital punishment state to another one). |
| 42 | *** And this scenario may be less analogous to a fugitive fleeing from one US state to another than from one country to another. Even if they're both signatories to international treaties concerning the extradition of criminals, there're many scenarios where the host country will refuse to extradite, at least not right away (for famous examples, think of Roman Polanski or Julian Assange). |
| 43 | |
| 44 | ** The Feds would likely be quite happy if Kirk and company never left Vulcan. There’s already the political firestorm of Genesis. The Klingon claim that it was a doomsday weapon built by Kirk’s son and that Kirk test detonated the Genesis torpedo himself isn’t quite true, but it’s remarkably plausible. To third parties, which seems more likely? That a very well seasoned Admiral was nearly defeated by a centuries out of date man with an inferior vessel (Reliant) who then detonated Genesis out of spite, while any rational person would do what Joachim advised? (Keep the device and run.) Frankly, the Klingon account is so much more plausible, probably lots of Starfleet suspect it to be true, and the rest a smokescreen. |
| 45 | |
| 46 | ** Other source material suggests that Starfleet allowed Kirk and crew to stay on Vulcan while they learned as much as they could about their stolen bird-of-prey, hinting that it might help them get some measure of leniency. |
| 47 | * A related question is, why is it so important that they limp to Earth under their own power rather than getting a Vulcan escort? I can see why they might not want to surrender to Starfleet, bad optics there (though in essence they are surrendering to the Federation's justice but don't want to start out from a position of weakness), but wouldn't returning to Earth on a Vulcan ship be a powerful sign that Vulcan is in their corner on this matter? |
| 48 | ** That might actually be a good reason ''not'' to travel on a Vulcan ship or with a Vulcan escort. Vulcan has already stuck their collective neck out pretty far, and Kirk might want to spare the planet any further backlash from his actions. |
| 49 | [[/folder]] |
| 50 | |
| 51 | [[folder: Of course he's a Russkie...]] |
| 52 | * It seems implausible that ''nobody'' knew that it probably wasn't a good idea to send Chekov, a Russian, hunting for "nuclear wessels" in America 1986. I've seen the explanation that they wouldn't have that information on a Klingon ship, but don't they teach history in the future? Somebody should've known this. |
| 53 | ** This movie runs on RuleOfFunny. If they didn't send Chekov, it wouldn't have worked. |
| 54 | *** Even if they were ignorant of 20th century politics, why didn't they sent their engineer to do an engineering task? RuleOfFunny. |
| 55 | *** Their engineer had a higher-priority engineering task to do. And they didn't have any redshirts to send. |
| 56 | ** Unless you're a history buff, how much do you know about a conflict from 200 years in the past? Plus, these people [[FishOutOfTemporalWater are from a time]] where, on Planet Earth, ''all'' races and cultures are respected, and where a North American can pass a Russian in the street and not bat an eyelash when he asks where something is. The ''Enterprise'' crew had little to no preparation for time spent in the 20th Century, save for Kirk's quick debriefing speech. |
| 57 | *** Doesn't really hold water. One of the questions Spock was being asked in his testing/memory/logic courses back on Vulcan was "Identify the political and historical events that occurred on Earth in the year 1987: CORRECT!" |
| 58 | *** I am no history buff but I am well aware that early in the 19th century the Napoleonic Wars were going on, so I certainly would avoid sending a french speaking time traveller to certain nations where he would be in trouble. Certainly, I would expect the Enterprise crew to have at least the same level of awareness of major historical conflicts. |
| 59 | ** Aside from the above response (did Spock really have that question?), they might have known the Cold War was mid-20th century and just got the end date messed up or been unfamiliar with the exact situations. I mean, if you traveled back to the American Revolutionary War era and had a crew member with a Dutch accent, would you know which side to keep them away from? Or how about a Mohawk crew member? [[note]]You'd keep them the Dutch away from the British (they were on America's side) and keep the Mohawk away from the Americans (they fought on the British side[[/note]]. |
| 60 | *** Given that the USSR dissolved in 1991, a mere half-decade after the time they'd landed in, getting the end date messed up is actually a fairly plausible mistake. |
| 61 | ** Well we can overlook some minor conflicts of the past, but something like a Cold War couldn't be forgotten completely. Even if they didn't know much about it, they should've known who were the main antagonists. And while they respect all cultures, they have rather exaggerated view of how "extremely primitive and paranoid culture" XX century is. If anything I'd expect them to overreact and don't even let Chekov to leave the ship. |
| 62 | ** Given the lack of knowledge that many have concerning large-scale conflicts such as UsefulNotes/WorldWarI, which was less than 100 years ago, it's not entirely unbelievable that a conflict that produced very few comparative casualties would be overlooked in the history books, especially since it was more of a political pissing contest than a real war. |
| 63 | *** Except for the fact that Kirk explicitly explains in one TOS episode that his decision to aid one faction in a conflict on a primitive planet where the Klingons are aiding their rivals is to maintain the "balance of power" like in the "brushfire wars of the 20th century". Kirk at least knows about the Korean War, he should know about the Cold War. |
| 64 | *** Kirk says "the brushfire wars of the 20th century", he doesn't say "the Korea and Vietnam conflicts, of which I am well aware of the numerous events, political nuances, and all their participants and exactly what dates their interactions occurred upon". One can have a general idea of something without going into detail. Even history buffs, aficionados, and experts tend to exaggerate or layer their own biases over actual historical events... it's no stretch to imagine Kirk thinking "Hm, we're sending a Russian to ask about nuclear items during... I ''guess'' the Cold War's going on right now, isn't it? Eh, probably won't be '''that''' big of a deal, people might give him funny looks but eventually someone will try to help." |
| 65 | ** That seems to be the case: [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration Picard]] later appears incredulous at the idea that a decades-long conflict could be caused by something as silly as rival economic systems, while [[Series/StarTrekVoyager Tom Paris]], allegedly an expert on the twentieth century, believes that the KGB was still around in the 1990s. |
| 66 | *** Paris was off by ''five years'' (remember, the KGB was disbanded in late 1991, the episode in question took place in 1996). Hardly comparable to Picard’s belief, especially considering that a century is still a long time to be a hobbyist expert of. |
| 67 | ** Its also worth noting the Enterprise crew's perspective of 1986 is from the far side of a [[WorldWarIII catastrophic nuclear war]]. Assuming that significant records weren't just flat-out destroyed in the process, its entirely possible that "contemporary" understanding of the Cold War is muddled at best. |
| 68 | ** As a point of interest, in the canon Star Trek universe, the USSR still existed in some form until at least the 23rd century. The starship Tsiolkovsky's dedication plaque, as seen in [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration TNG]] episode ''The Naked Now'', proudly proclaimed that the vessel was constructed at the "Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR, Earth." The Baikonur Cosmodrome is a real facility located in Kazakhstan. |
| 69 | *** That, or the Soviet Union re-incorporated sometime between now and then. In fairness to the franchise, it looks like it begins a clear divergence from our time sometime around the 1960s. By the 1990s, of course, we have the Eugenics Wars, Khan, and sleeper ships. |
| 70 | *** The USSR pretty clearly exists at least in the 23rd century, given Chekov's and ''Star Trek IV'''s references to Leningrad, and Chekov attributing a well-known legend to Minsk (which is in modern-day Belarus). |
| 71 | *** Chekov could still attribute it to Minsk, and Leningrad still exists in Russia today (as the name of a province, i.e. "oblast"). |
| 72 | *** It could also be a coincidence. Who's to say there wasn't a later polity in the region called the "United States of Sino-Russia" or the like? |
| 73 | ** Honestly, isn't "they just didn't think of it" reason enough? |
| 74 | ** Anybody being caught on that nuclear vessel would have been in a lot of trouble, regardless of race or nationality. You've got a captain, first officer, medical officer, comms officer, helmsman, engineer, and security officer. They sent the helmsman to pilot the helicopter, the engineer to get the tank, and the security officer to infiltrate the military ship. |
| 75 | *** This explanation has always made the most sense. Chekov was caught in the reactor spaces. An actual sailor posted to that ship who didn't belong in the reactor spaces would have been in exactly as much trouble. |
| 76 | ** The question seemed more focused on how Chekov and Uhura were asking random people on the street. It's not clear how much the crew thought through this, but there surely were Russians in SF at the time as it's a very international city, so that's no biggie. Nobody would expect an actual Soviet agent to search for nuclear wessels in this matter, so it's likely they would be dismissed as kooks, which is exactly how it went down. |
| 77 | [[/folder]] |
| 78 | |
| 79 | [[folder: Time-travel nightmare]] |
| 80 | * What is with that weird scene where Kirk/the whole crew? have delusions/nightmares/dreams during the time warp? What's it supposed to mean? |
| 81 | ** [[ItWasAllJustADream It Was All Just A]] [[BigLippedAlligatorMoment BLAM]]. |
| 82 | ** It was this troper's belief that the scene is Kirk (or one of the other crew members) DreamingOfThingsToCome. |
| 83 | ** It's something from an episode of the series, I believe. The slingshot effect causes people to enter a sort of dream state for a time. It's even referenced in some of the novels and such that came later as a factor in just how far you can go back in time... you actually spend a certain amount of time in the dream state relative to how far back you're going, so it would be impossible to go back to, say, the Jurassic period without everyone dying of dehydration and starvation in the dream state. |
| 84 | ** Listen carefully to what they say. The characters say all of these lines later on in the film. Somehow during their time travel, they get a glimpse of what they are about to experience in the twentieth century. |
| 85 | [[/folder]] |
| 86 | |
| 87 | [[folder:"Directed" at the oceans]] |
| 88 | * When they're watching the President's warning about the Probe, the President says that, along with all the other things occurring, the Probe is vaporizing the oceans. A few minutes later, during the discussion about who the Probe is trying to communicate with, Spock says "The President did say it was ''directed'' at Earth's oceans", which he didn't say and seems to require a bit of gymnastics to conclude considering the Probe's screwing up all of the planet. |
| 89 | ** Further, why does the Probe's attempts to communicate with ocean-dwelling lifeforms vaporize said oceans? |
| 90 | *** I can speak to that. The Probe was going to Earth to determine why it had lost contact with the whales. When its suspicion about the whales' extinction was confirmed, it started ''deliberately'' vaporizing the oceans to end all life on Earth, and eventually help it start anew. (So says the novelization). Spock, in the movie proper, ''does'' surmise that the Probe has come to determine why it lost contact. |
| 91 | *** When one has to resort to consulting a novelization to clarify plot details, that does not speak well of the film. If that is indeed the Probe's motivation, one is forced to wonder: is the presence of two humpback whales so much better than none? |
| 92 | *** That's addressed in the novelization too. The probe ''does'' decide that George and Gracie are better than nothing, but takes some convincing. |
| 93 | *** So Spock kinda dropped the ball on that one. He sees no evidence that their intentions are hostile, yet vaporizing the oceans isn't going to be doing anything good for life on Earth and the novelization explicitly states its intentions are hostile. |
| 94 | *** The probe doesn't view humans as intelligent life, so it's not being hostile per se. From its perspective, its merely wiping out a species of dangerous predators that have killed off a group that was trying to live their lives peacefully. |
| 95 | *** Yeah but the whales are *already dead* and killing humans wouldn't bring them back. So what's the point of vaporizing the oceans? Revenge? Doesn't sound very rational or intelligent to me. |
| 96 | *** Then the Probe aliens are just deluded. Humans have starships and computers and Genesis Devices (in theory). While they may not consider humans intelligent life compared to them, there's absolutely no way they can reason that ''whales'' are intelligent beings but humans are not. |
| 97 | ** Novelization aside, I always just assumed that it was automated and when it couldn't contact the whales it ramped up the power on the transmitter to full and kept looking, uncomprehending of the damage. |
| 98 | *** One more vote for that explanation. The movie works better if the probe is merely uncaring, not outright hostile. Especially since the hostile probe implies whales would commit genocide on humans if they could get away with it. |
| 99 | ** There was a sequel novel, ''Probe'', dealing with the Probe's origins. The makers were a telekinetic race of super-dolphins that were big enough to made earthly Blue Whales look like mice. They once shared their world with "mites" - humanoids - but the humanoids were wiped out in a chance meteor collision, what they referred to as the Winnowing. They considered it their mission to track, encourage, and protect other forms of life like them, i.e., cetaceans. One day, however, the Borg came to visit their system. There was a tremendous fight, where they held off the Borg from their planet - but the Borg still won by snuffing out the system's sun. They had just enough time to construct lifeboats, then departed in all directions, never to be heard from again. At the same time, the Probe also encountered the Borg - it ''won'' that fight, but the result was badly damaged memory, and it was unable to return to help its creators. It's an artifact of an apparently extinct race, from a different time, carrying on the only programming still intact within it. |
| 100 | *** To sum all of this up, Spock makes a deduction based on a baseless "fact" to get the plot moving, and they either didn't realize it or just hoped viewers would miss it. |
| 101 | *** Spock sees that the beam is aimed at the water. He has the computer translate the noise it's making to mimic what it would sound like if heard underwater. I don't see how that's "baseless", it's a pretty basic deduction. |
| 102 | [[/folder]] |
| 103 | |
| 104 | [[folder:Only whales are important to the Probe?]] |
| 105 | * So if the Whale Probe decides HumansAreEvil and is going to exterminate us (or at least the ones on Earth) for bringing about the extinction of humpback whales, why does it decide the best way to do that is to blot out the sun and thereby kill nearly everything else on the planet too? There are dolphins on the Enterprise-D so they surely existed in the 23rd century and they're roughly as intelligent as humpbacks. So what makes humpback whales so special that their extinction automatically forfeits the lives of every other creature at that intelligence level? |
| 106 | ** Perhaps aliens, who made that probe, are whales themselves. And they are speciesists. So, naturally whales are special... to them. |
| 107 | *** See above. They were indeed Leviathan-sized dolphins, but exactly how specieist they were remains open to interpretation, since all land life on their planet was wiped out. The Probe, on the other hand, is pretty blatantly hostile, when the cetaceans it was assigned to shepherd actually call out to it for help... |
| 108 | *** There are indeed alien whales. And dolphins! Look up the TNG novel ''Dark Mirror'', they're called the Cetaceans, obviously enough. |
| 109 | ** I'm curious where this viewpoint that the probe is obviously malevolent that seems to be getting pushed so hard lately on here is even coming from. When I saw this movie as a young kid it seemed pretty obvious to me that the probe's damage to human technology and human environment was purely incidental. At no point does it go out of its way to attack, or specifically target human civilization. It goes from Point A to Point B and initiates its communication sequence, it never changes its behavior when being approached or brushing past humans, it's pretty obviously just an automated communications device that just so happens to really fuck things up for us. The assumption of malevolence seems, to borrow the phraseology of the franchise in question, illogical. |
| 110 | *** I think that's the concept; it's an alien intelligence the motivations of which cannot be known or ascribed any sort of morality. It is also reasonable to say, however, that this attempt at communication ''sucks.'' It's like if a walkie-talkie also ignited the oxygen between its source and its recipient. |
| 111 | *** But this particular method of communication would also be harmful to whales. They are known to be very sensitive to sound and they need to breathe air. So it's not like they could hide in the deep ocean indefinitely to escape the turmoil near the surface. Plus, sound carries much better through water than through air. This would be like standing next to a rocket launch for the whales! This was like burning down somebody's house because they didn't answer your phone calls and you decided to trying flushing them out! |
| 112 | *** The ExpandedUniverse novel ''Probe'' has a fairly decent AuthorsSavingThrow: At some point prior to arriving in Federation space, the Probe had a run in with the Borg. It either beat them or simply got away, but the damage sustained in the battle left it with a corrupted memory core. |
| 113 | [[/folder]] |
| 114 | |
| 115 | [[folder:Unfamiliar with San Francisco? Didn't you go to the Academy?]] |
| 116 | * In the famous scene with Uhura and Chekov trying to find where Alameda is, one thing strikes me as especially odd. Starfleet Academy is in San Francisco, the cadets live on campus, it takes the same amount of time to graduate as a contemporary university, which means every single one of the crew has lived in San Francisco for around 4 years and ''none'' of them know where Alameda Island is. |
| 117 | ** Good point; that is odd. It could be that the future sees Alameda renamed or landscaped out of existence. |
| 118 | ** In their own time, getting from place to place in San Francisco probably involves advanced public-transportation systems that don't exist at the time they're visiting. Even if they know the approximate ''position'' of Alameda, they wouldn't necessarily have a clue how to ''get'' there via the archaic methods available to them. |
| 119 | *** Alternately, Alameda Island could have been flooded over, the waterway between it and land filled in, or something else catastrophic could have happened to render Alameda Island nonexistent at some point prior to when the Enterprise crew went to the Academy. |
| 120 | ** Not living in the area myself, I couldn't say how vital Alameda is to just the average person, but isn't it possible that none of them had any real reason to go there during their stay at the Academy? It is a four year course, but it's a very ''intense'' four year course, and apparently many cadets spend some of the last year off-planet either on working assignment on starships or on off-planet facilities like Utopia Planetia. Also one could assume that it's something like what occurs in other cities with famous landmarks... people who actually live there don't really think to go until someone they know visits and wants to go. |
| 121 | *** True. It's easy to spend a lifetime in Seattle and never really have cause to visit Mercer Island. For example. |
| 122 | ** For existing in-universe evidence, Uhura apparently spent her off-hours [[Film/StarTrek2009 all the way over in]] ''[[Film/StarTrek2009 Iowa]]'', and Chekov (a fully-rated starship navigator, mind you) got lost ''again'' in [[Film/StarTrekVTheFinalFrontier the very next film]]. |
| 123 | *** This. O'Brien was looking at property in Western Russia when he was going to be working at the Academy in San Francisco despite it being halfway across the globe. Transporter's basically mean physical distance is irrelevant and you can pop into another country thousands of miles away as easily as getting on the bus to go downtown. It's possible the crew spent their downtime at the Academy singing karaoke in Tokyo, or climbing Mt. Everest and never explored the greater city of San Francisco. |
| 124 | ** Another simple explanation is that it had been renamed in the 300 year interval. |
| 125 | [[/folder]] |
| 126 | |
| 127 | [[folder: Where'd Saavik go?]] |
| 128 | * Where'd Saavik go? She was a big character in III so where did she go? |
| 129 | ** She hadn't participated in the theft of the Enterprise, simply left stranded on Genesis after the destruction of the Grissom, so she wasn't going to be on trial, and thus, didn't need to return to Earth with Kirk and company. Why she doesn't go along anyway as a character witness or just for moral support is anyone's guess, but, building off of the fact that her status in Starfleet wasn't in question, she may have received new orders from Starfleet to be assigned somewhere and couldn't go with them. |
| 130 | ** Out-of-universe, it's reported that the inclusion of Saavik added too many variables to the sequences in 1986 San Francisco - another pair of ears to hide, among other things. One of the ideas in the original screenplay was that she was pregnant with Spock's child after helping him with pon farr in the previous movie. This was removed given behind the scenes discomfort at the idea, but the scenes were filmed, so it could potentially be left to the viewer to decide. |
| 131 | ** She ''is'' in the film, at the beginning saying goodbye to Spock then watching the HMS ''Bounty'' leave. Either she's pregnant and staying on Vulcan (the original intent, cut as noted above), waiting for reassignment by Starfleet, or just taking some shore leave on Vulcan. |
| 132 | *** Given her participation in Spock's resurrection on the Genesis Planet, it's possible she's been assigned to the Vulcan Science Academy as part of research into fal-tor-pan. |
| 133 | [[/folder]] |
| 134 | |
| 135 | [[folder:Morality of the probe]] |
| 136 | * Why does nobody in the film seem to feel like bringing up that the whale probe personifies that absolute worst traits of humanity and treat like it's above our morality? |
| 137 | ** The morality of the probe isn't really at issue in the movie. This thing has, without even trying, completely overwhelmed Earth's defenses and is effortlessly destroying the planet's biosphere. The only thing the characters can do is to figure out what the probe wants, try to give it to the thing, and hope it goes away before everyone dies. Starfleet can debate ethics after all the water drains back in the ocean and they've buried their dead. |
| 138 | ** What good would that have done? Ok, we've discussed it's morality, now let's go back to trying not to drown or starve or suffocate! Alternatively, bringing up the fact that the probe is doing to humans what 20th century humans did to the whales would have made the movie even MORE Anvilicious than it already was. |
| 139 | ** It's a machine, or is at least assumed to be. Presumably it was simply assumed what the probe was doing was simply based on faulty programming (the whales are not answering, and the probe's own internal logic means it is going to keep on trying, overlooking the consequences it was never designed to take into account). Alternatively, as an alien artifact of unknown and barely-explainable origin, the probe's designers could work on a system of BlueAndOrangeMorality. |
| 140 | [[/folder]] |
| 141 | |
| 142 | [[folder:Common frame of reference]] |
| 143 | * I brought this up on the fridge page, but its a question that probably goes better here. Bones asks Spock what it feels like to have died, and Spock replies that he can't explain the experience to someone who hasn't been through it[[note]] [=McCoy=] actually ''did'' die once in the series, but let's not get bogged down in details[[/note]]. Should Spock know how it feels to be dead, though? Forgive the flimsy computer analogy, but Spock uploaded his katra into [=McCoy=]'s brain before his sacrifice, so if he remembers anything between that and the point his katra was downloaded back into his body, it should be memories he shares with Bones. Spock's body went through a second infancy, so it seems like the body wouldn't have retained any memories of the event--though to be fair, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Vulcans can recall their infancy with perfect clarity--so, if anything, shouldn't Spock be able to describe his experience to [=McCoy=] because they have the exact same frame of reference for the event? |
| 144 | ** It could be argued that, as the disembodied consciousness occupying [=McCoy=]'s body rather than being the one who was sharing his body with a disembodied consciousness but otherwise still present as 'him', Spock might have a slightly different perspective on events than [=McCoy=]. |
| 145 | ** I always assumed it was just Spock trying to politely give Bones the brush off and Bones just reacting as he normally did when he recognized he was about to be given the Vulcan runaround. |
| 146 | ** A lot of people that have near-death experiences say that the experience was difficult to describe. Factor in that Spock himself was still trying to understand what had happened, odds are that he was trying to say "I don't want to talk about it." Bones, being his doctor and his friend, was both curious about the experience and wanting to ensure that Spock would be able to function properly on their trip back to Earth (remember, he had voiced concerns about having Spock back on the bridge). |
| 147 | * So Spock says he needs "a common frame of reference to talk about death" with [=McCoy=]. Okay, [=McCoy=] remind him about that time you were killed on the amusement park planet by the Black Knight and his lance and that you were brought back to life by the Caretaker (not ''that'' one). That should give Spock as much common frame of reference as he needs as both of them have died and come back to talk about it! |
| 148 | ** Never mind the fact that Scotty also came from the dead (in "The Changeling"). |
| 149 | * At the end of ''Search for Spock'' the regenerated Spock remembers a conversation he had with Kirk ''after'' he melded with [=McCoy=]. That would indicate that his katra is ''not'' just a copy of memories up to the point it was copied to someone else, and that Spock probably ''does'' remember dying. |
| 150 | * Bones may have been behaving as a doctor there, not just the friendly chit chat it appears, basically to see how Spock is doing. Spock SHOULD have remembered Bones had died. Bones had earlier expressed concern about Spock being back at his station. |
| 151 | [[/folder]] |
| 152 | |
| 153 | [[folder:Transparent aluminum for whale tank]] |
| 154 | * Ummm...why did the aluminum have to be transparent? |
| 155 | ** Scotty was just trading the formula for transparent aluminum for material made of polymers. Not sure why they felt they needed to go with a transparent material at all, though. They weren't building an aquarium, they were building a holding tank that they were only going to use as long as it took to get back to the 23[[superscript:rd]] century. Any strong, light, waterproof, mostly non-toxic material would have worked just fine--and probably could have been scavenged from construction sites if need be. |
| 156 | *** They needed to hold 100 tons of whales + water. You're not going to do that with garbage scavenged from wherever. The tank had to be engineered and built to specifications, the easiest way to do that was to get the right materials was to trade for them. |
| 157 | ** You don't put living specimens in a tank with no light, and they must be observable to monitor their health and safety. Putting them in a simple aluminum tank would have been cruel, and dangerous. |
| 158 | *** It wouldn't be ideal, but it was going to be a very short trip. You'll notice that even after most of the ship was under water, the emergency lighting was still working, suggesting that they were were water-resistant. Presumably this was also true in the cargo hold, so it should be bright enough to accommodate them temporarily. I'd also assume that the internal sensors would be able to monitor George and Gracie's vital signs enough to assure their well-being. |
| 159 | *** George and Gracie weren't merely cargo, they were the two creatures that they needed to happily tell the Probe to get lost. Shove in a sealed box for a scary time travel trip and you've just drastically increased the chance of them either telling the Probe to frag the humans or just gibber at it in terror (and then it frags the humans on its own). Not a smart move there. |
| 160 | ** The weight. Polymers are lighter than metals, and they were pushing their luck as it was having 100 tons of whale and water in the cargo bay. |
| 161 | * The final tank used to transport the whales isn't made of transparent aluminum - it's made of 20th century polymers which Scotty traded for the formula for transparent aluminum. As both Scotty and the guy at the factory admit, it will take years to develop transparent aluminum from the molecular formula, and they don't have time to wait for that. |
| 162 | [[/folder]] |
| 163 | |
| 164 | [[folder:Responding in gibberish]] |
| 165 | * Supposedly, they could transmit humpback whale-esque sounds to the probe, but it would just be gibberish, not real communication. For one thing, it's still worth a try. For another, they must have some recording of actual humpback songs to compare the probe noise to, otherwise they wouldn't be able to positively say "yes, the probe is making humpback sounds", so why not transmit those recordings? And for a third, why not transmit the probe's own songs back to it? |
| 166 | ** To answer the last part of that: The Probe would then proceed to reply, much like a miffed six-year-old, "Stop ''copying'' me!!" |
| 167 | ** As far as playing taped recordings, while it might a partial solution, there'd be other problems: The difference between a live voice and a copy, and that a recording would not be able to interact with whatever the probe is saying. Anyone who's had to deal with a lengthy recording on the phone knows the futility of that. |
| 168 | ** Was it ever established why universal translators didn't work with the probe? Kirk & Company quickly worked out that the probe was broadcasting a language, and Uhura was even able to filter the recording through the computer so that they could hear what the transmission would sound like underwater. We've seen the UT work with less, and it's even been able to translate the languages of all manner of computers and robots, so it seems the issue should have been at least HandWaved away. |
| 169 | *** The universal translators work by finding commonalities between languages... it listens to someone speaking, does its best to figure out syntax and structure from other, similarly structured languages, and then translates it. If the whale-song language was sufficiently different from the majority/all other languages in its databanks, and the probe wasn't giving them enough to work with or was referring to concepts in ways that were sufficiently different from the programmers' understanding, it wouldn't work. Simple as that. |
| 170 | *** Wouldn't somebody already have tried translating whale language from recordings? Yes, they're extinct, but I find it hard to believe that nobody decided to find out their meaning for curiosity's sake. Like interpreting cuneiform engravings. |
| 171 | *** All attempts to read Egyptian hieroglyphics failed until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, allowing translation of Hieratic script by comparing to Greek, and then translation of the hieroglyphics by comparing to Hieratic. If the whale language were alien enough, all the recordings in the world wouldn't help without a metaphorical Rosetta Stone to establish common meaning. |
| 172 | [[/folder]] |
| 173 | |
| 174 | [[folder:Chekov's gun]] |
| 175 | * Did he just leave it on the nuclear wessel? Wouldn't that change the past? It seems like the sort of thing that would have shown up again much later. |
| 176 | ** Yeah, that was a major concern in ''[[Recap/StarTrekS2E17APieceOfTheAction A Piece of the Action]]'', and it seems like something that should have been a major concern, here. Scotty's already created one weird StableTimeLoop this movie, so who knows what sort of crazy new technologies could spring from a misplaced phaser in, say, thirty years or s-- ''[[http://www.voanews.com/content/us-navy-successfully-tests-new-laser-weapon-in-persian-gulf/2555025.html Wait a minute...]]'' |
| 177 | ** They don't seem to realize it's a real gun. It doesn't work when Chekov tries to use it because of the radiation or what not, and they think he's some random crazy Russian, so they probably don't examine it too closely. |
| 178 | ** It's arguable at best. Probably the worst thing would be messing with it an accidentally vaporizing it. From a technology standpoint there are actually probably too many steps in between to have a frame of reference. It's why the communicator issue in "A Piece of the Action" probably wouldn't have been an issue. Note how they said in that episode that the Iotians were at the beginning of industrialization when the Horizon left the book a century before and were at 1920's level when the Enterprise arrived. That actually roughly fits with Earth with Iotia only being maybe a decade or two ahead. |
| 179 | * Chekov left his phaser, communicator, and identification onboard the USS ''Enterprise''... that is, the "nuclear wessel". |
| 180 | ** Chekov's phaser didn't work, the identification was laughed off as a fake, and the communicator useless to anyone without 23rd Century or later communicators to talk to. They were most likely tossed aside as useless props owned by a Commie agent. Conversely, given the StableTimeLoop that seems to happen with Scotty giving away transparent aluminum, the tech from Chekov's "props" could be used to found the technology Cochrane would need to build his warp drive. |
| 181 | *** They were seized by TheMenInBlack and taken to {{Area 51}}. |
| 182 | *** In the Khan novels by Greg Cox they WERE taken to Area 51. Roberta Lincoln acting on behalf of Gary Seven promptly beamed in and replaced them with non-functional replicas. |
| 183 | *** Clarified in the novelization, where Chekov grabbed his things before leaving the ship, and threw them into the water before he was captured again. |
| 184 | *** That is, unfortunately, directly contradicted by the film, in which Chekov tosses the phaser at one of his FBI interrogators as a distraction while he bolts from the room. |
| 185 | *** And good thing, too, as The Original Series establishes that communicators are ''not'' useless without another communicator near -- or more accurately, you can't use them as a tool, but you ''can'' reverse-engineer certain basic 23d century Federation technologies from them (even from a less developed starting point then that of the 1980s-era USA). |
| 186 | *** Wait a minute, during this timeframe, would Federation communicators even work with a Klingon ship? They were at war with each other. Or are they powerful enough transmitters to not require a ship or satellite relay? The movie mentions replacing the food packs, not rebuilding the communication system. |
| 187 | *** They're actually using Klingon communicators. Slightly redesigned between movies, but if you look they've got the Electric shaver looking mouthpieces Kruge and his crew used instead of the usual Starfleet flip open communicators. Presumably the Bird of Prey had several in its supplies and they just used those. |
| 188 | ** They didn't discuss it, but they probably deemed it not feasible to find and retrieve what Chekov left behind. That would be a major mission itself and initially Chekov can't even tell them what happened. Most likely they just assumed they were silly props and stored them somewhere without a second thought. |
| 189 | [[/folder]] |
| 190 | |
| 191 | [[folder:Security footage]] |
| 192 | * At the beginning of the movie, the Klingon Ambassador is showing footage of the Enterprise being destroyed from the last movie. How did anyone get it? The Enterprise blew up and there weren't any cameras above Genesis. |
| 193 | ** There was a Klingon Bird-of-Prey watching the whole thing from right next to the ''Enterprise''. The internal shots of the Klingons on the bridge may have come from a final log buoy/flight recorder launched from the ''Enterprise'' or from the Klingon's own recording gear transmitting back to their ship before they all blew up. |
| 194 | *** That Klingon Bird of Prey was commandeered by Kirk and company, who subsequently went into exile. So did they send the footage, even though it would incriminate them against the Klingons or did the Federation take the footage without taking the people wanted for crimes to stand trial? |
| 195 | *** Yes, they presumably did send it along to the Federation, no doubt along with other details proving they had acquired the Bird-of-Prey, which Kirk is clearly planning to turn over to Starfleet. The footage incriminates the Klingons as much as it does Kirk. |
| 196 | *** Alternatively, maybe the Klingons were live-streaming video to their home base as the events occurred, just so that they would know what happened if something went wrong. |
| 197 | *** Yes, they were guilty and fully planned on pleading guilty. Outside their personal loyalty to each other, they are otherwise loyal Starfleet officers and would have supplied footage of a Klingon incursion. |
| 198 | [[/folder]] |
| 199 | |
| 200 | [[folder: What Happened to the Maltz?]] |
| 201 | * On a similar note, whatever happened to the Klingon, Maltz, that they took captive? |
| 202 | ** As for what happened to Maltz, the ''Klingon Dictionary'' credits him as being instrumental in creating the book and assisting the Federation in translation work. Alternately, the novelization of ''Star Trek III'' says he committed suicide. He also apparently appears in the ''Genesis Wave'' book series in the ''Next Generation'' time frame, where he regains his honor with a HeroicSacrifice. |
| 203 | ** Concerning Maltz showing up later, how did he leave? If someone from the Federation picked him up to return him to the Klingons as a peace offering, shouldn't they also have escorted Kirk and co. to face trial. |
| 204 | ** The Klingon ambassador doesn't say "give us back our officer!" during his rant against Kirk, so presumably Maltz's fate (whatever it was) had already been resolved before the beginning of the movie. If you buy the ''Klingon Dictionary'' explanation, then he asked for asylum and didn't leave Vulcan, at least for a while. |
| 205 | * So what happened to Maltz from ''Film/{{Star Trek III|The Search for Spock}}''? Surely if the Federation sent a ship to pick up a Klingon prisoner, they would have picked up Kirk and company as well. Did Maltz spend the entirety of ''Star Trek IV'' in the bird-of-prey's brig? |
| 206 | ** Dropped him off in a Vulcan prison, or at the Klingon embassy on Vulcan, most likely. |
| 207 | ** Given the Klingon [[ProudWarriorRace mentality]] it doesn't seem likely that Klingon birds-of-prey would be equipped with dedicated holding cells--Maltz might have spent time in some sort of high-security closet. |
| 208 | ** Maybe they left him on Vulcan. |
| 209 | ** The film mentions that Sarek's diplomatic powers are what's keeping the Federation from just arresting Kirk and company. Odds are he wouldn't have been inclined to offer Maltz the same protection. |
| 210 | *** In the {{Novelization}}, we learn Maltz committed suicide. |
| 211 | *** However, the ExpandedUniverse has Maltz still alive in [[Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration the 24th century]]. |
| 212 | *** One storyline of the movie before Eddie Murphy left the project had Maltz escape into 20th Century earth while Kirk and crew are off to find some whales. Murphy would have run into him, thereby bringing him into the story. |
| 213 | *** He was going to be taken to Earth as a prisoner but when they time traveled he was taken along. He then escaped the BOP's brig, got cosmetic surgery, changed his name to Dan Fielding and went to law school. The rest is quite literally history. |
| 214 | [[/folder]] |
| 215 | |
| 216 | [[folder: Scotty's uniform]] |
| 217 | * Most of the crew is wearing the same clothes as they were in the last movie, which makes sense since they weren't able to bring extra clothes. But in the last movie, Scotty was wearing a suede jacket over a gold turtleneck, this being a casual dress uniform for captains and above. However, in the beginning of this movie, he's wearing the suede jacket, which he mostly discards except for meeting the aluminum guy, over a white turtleneck and black engineering vest. These are shown to be Starfleet uniforms since he wears them in the following movies, so how did he get the other uniforms? Not to mention that in Star Trek III, the jacket had captain's rank insignia, since he was just promoted, but here the jacket has commander's rank insignia, as does his standard uniform seen at the end. The standard uniform can be explained because in the last movie, he was never seen wearing it after being told of his promotion, so he probably didn't have it changed, but why did the insignia change on the casual uniform? |
| 218 | ** Scotty probably wasn't comfortable about the promotion to Captain of Engineering, since it was on the ''Excelsior'' and he only stayed on long enough to sabotage that ship. So when he re-programmed a Vulcan replicator to give him a current, more comfortable working uniform while he worked on the ''Bounty'' he also chose to give himself Commander's insignia. |
| 219 | ** It's been suggested elsewhere that Scotty may have been expecting his promotion to be nullified due to his part in the theft of the Enterprise but because Kirk was the only one "punished" he kept his rank. Perhaps he didn't have time to change insignia between the trial scene and the new Enterprise scene (although Kirk was able to change his insignia from admiral to captain). |
| 220 | *** Kirk did indeed change his insignia to captain before he got the Enterprise-A, but didn't change his jacket, retaining the gold piping around the black border... so his uniform was still wrong as well. |
| 221 | ** I thought it was stranger that they were wearing the same exact clothes after being on Vulcan for months. No stores or whatever? |
| 222 | *** Vulcan has laundromats. It's only logical. |
| 223 | *** Chekov actually does have a somewhat different outfit between films. |
| 224 | [[/folder]] |
| 225 | |
| 226 | [[folder: Where's Carol Marcus?]] |
| 227 | * While the obvious answer is that they couldn't get the actress to come back, what in-universe reason is there for Carol Marcus not to have shown up at the Klingon ambassador's presentation? Even if she was still mourning David's death, wouldn't she want to see that Kirk not be persecuted by the Klingons for his part in the death of the people who killed their son? Plus, you think she would have something to say about the device that she and her son created to solve problems like overcrowding and hunger being accused of being a weapon to destroy the Klingon's, especially considering David's staunchly anti-military view. |
| 228 | ** Carol may well blame Kirk for David's death, not the Klingons. Despite his anti-military views, David ran off with Starfleet as soon as he found out who his father was, and that's essentially what killed him. |
| 229 | *** Technically, Kirk was only marginally connected to David's death. First off, David was performing a scientific evaluation of Genesis. The events of the Wrath of Khan didn't necessarily change his anti-militaristic views as much as it made him realize that there was more to Starfleet than he thought. Then the Klingons showed up and destroyed the Grissom for reasons completely unrelated to Kirk. David and company had already been captured by the Klingons by the time Kirk had arrived at Genesis for completely unrelated reasons. You could argue that David being killed was done to get Kirk to surrender, but even then Kirk doesn't have much fault for it, because one, the Klingons didn't know David's relationship to Kirk, and two, they didn't even choose him to be the one to be killed. It was implied that they were going for Saavik and then David interfered and got himself killed. Carol may initially irrational blame Kirk in her grief, but when you look back at the situation, which Carol would have had three months to do, the blame can't be solely laid at Kirk's feet, and in any case, the Klingons were the ones who did the deed. |
| 230 | *** Still, one might think she would have something to say about the Klingon's claims of the Genesis planet being a secret base to annihilate the Klingons. |
| 231 | *** Could be that it was deemed safer to let the Klingon bluster about this magic weapon that can instantly terraform planets than to reveal that such a thing really existed and the Federation knew about it. |
| 232 | *** That was just bluster by the Klingon ambassador. It didn't need a rebuttal because everyone knew it was just bluster. |
| 233 | ** Another possibility: she's a reclusive BrokenBird after having suffered a HeroicBSOD from the events of the previous film. Her son is dead, what could have been the crowning acheivement of her scientific career a dismal failure; the mental stress it has put her under could have lead her to suffer a breakdown and retreat from society. |
| 234 | *** This is indeed how the novelizations of the films treat her. |
| 235 | [[/folder]] |
| 236 | |
| 237 | [[folder: Timeline issues]] |
| 238 | * According to sources, Star Trek II and III both take place in 2285, while the present-day sections of Star Trek IV, for the crew, take place in 2286. The Wrath of Khan takes place around Kirk's birthday, which is March 22. The Search for Spock takes place at most a few weeks later and the Voyage Home is set three months after the Search for Spock. How could it be 2286 already when Wrath of Khan which was in March, possibly to April 2285, only took place a little over three months earlier? |
| 239 | ** Nothing in the movies themselves pin down the dates that accurately, so the external "sources" must be simply wrong. |
| 240 | *** Memory Alpha gave those dates, but where they got those dates isn't clear, so it could be a mistake. |
| 241 | *** Memory Alpha obtained those dates based on Gillian's line about 300 years of catching up, and this is also the basis that semi-official sources like the Star Trek Encyclopedia and [=StarTrek.com=] use. It is clarified in the background info section on MA that this is an approximation, and the date could be anywhere in the mid-to-late 2280s. |
| 242 | [[/folder]] |
| 243 | |
| 244 | [[folder: Nobody notices Kirk's drowning?]] |
| 245 | * After Kirk frees the whales from the sinking ship, he swims up to the surface and promptly starts drowning in the stormy sea. We see him bobbing up and down, coughing and gasping as Spock reaches for him. Then the screen switches to Uhura, Chekov, and Sulu staring in the opposite direction as Uhura says, "Do you see them?" meaning the whales. Did they really not notice the Captain drowning? It seems like they must have seen him to expect the whales to be free. This seems like terrible timing for this line--it makes it seem like these crew members don't care that Kirk is drowning in front of them. |
| 246 | ** Maybe they know that he's the hero, so there's no way Kirk is going to drown. He even took his red shirt off before he dived in. The whales, on the other hand, are the movie's McGuffin. |
| 247 | ** It's probably an overstatement to say that Kirk is drowning. He's having a little difficulty (mostly with trying to get his breath after going without for too long) but he's managing. What's more, Spock already has things well in hand, and from where Uhura is standing, there's really nothing she can do to help. |
| 248 | [[/folder]] |
| 249 | |
| 250 | [[folder:Is This Even the Same ship?]] |
| 251 | * If you compare the bridge of the Klingon ''Bird of Prey'' in ''Star Trek III'' to the one in this film, they look totally different. In ''III'' the command chair was on a platform surrounded by a pit with the rest of the bridge crew down in it with their backs to the captain, and its main view screen was pretty small. In this movie, the command chair is on roughly the same level as the other work stations, some of them are behind the captain's chair and facing the view screen, and the main view screen is much larger. Did they rebuild the whole bridge while on Vulcan? And if they did, why didn't they change all the displays to English or Vulcan rather than Klingon? |
| 252 | ** Maybe it was a secondary control room? |
| 253 | *** Which would only raise [[VoodooShark the questions]]: "why are they using a secondary control room instead of the bridge Kruge used?" and "Why does a small scout ship with a crew of twelve have two separate control rooms with radically different layouts?" |
| 254 | ** At the start of the movie Scotty says he's been fixing and altering stuff all the time they've been on Vulcan. He remodeled the Klingon bridge to better fit his tastes, obviously. Probably a lot of stuff go yanked out and sent off to the Vulcan Science Academy to reverse engineer and study, then Scotty used more familiar stuff to plug up the holes and alter the layout to how he liked it. It is probably a lot easier to do that with late 23rdC tech. |
| 255 | *** Scotty complains about the text being written in Klingon. If he remodeled the bridge, wouldn't he have also changed the text? |
| 256 | *** And if Scotty remodeled the bridge so completely on Vulcan, shouldn't the new bridge use Vulcan components, rather than Klingon? |
| 257 | *** RuleOfDrama, RuleOfFunny, and time restraints. |
| 258 | [[/folder]] |
| 259 | |
| 260 | [[folder: Is Klingon Gear Better?]] |
| 261 | * Why does the crew use Klingon phasers and communicators throughout the movie? Okay, so they're on a Klingon ship and there were presumably Klingon phasers and communicators in the ship's armory, but Kirk brought at least one Starfleet phaser when he beamed on board at the end of ''III'', and they were on Vulcan for months, which gave them plenty of time to restock with gear they were more familiar with. Perhaps Klingon gear is just better than Starfleet or Vulcan issue? |
| 262 | ** Given that they were planning on turning themselves in, they probably weren't planning on needing personal weaponry. When the need arose, they just used what they had at their disposal. |
| 263 | [[/folder]] |
| 264 | |
| 265 | [[folder: Didn't you die too?]] |
| 266 | * Spock tells [=McCoy=] that he cannot discuss what it was like being dead unless the other person in the conversation has a similar frame of reference, i.e. has been dead themselves. Everyone seems to be forgetting that 2 members of the crew '''have''' been dead before: [=McCoy=] died on the Shore Leave planet, and Scotty was killed by the Nomad probe! |
| 267 | ** Except that the manner of Spock's death; the transfer and re-insertion of his Katra into a rejuvenated body is a kind of death-resurrection experience that only a Vulcan can possibly have. |
| 268 | ** ''Should'' Spock know how it feels to be dead at all? Forgive the flimsy computer analogy, but Spock uploaded his katra into [=McCoy=]'s brain before his sacrifice, so if he remembers anything between that and the point his katra was downloaded back into his body, it should be memories he shares with Bones. Spock's body went through a second infancy, so it seems like the body wouldn't have retained any memories of the event--though to be fair, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that Vulcans can recall their infancy with perfect clarity--so, if anything, Spock should be able to describe his experience to [=McCoy=] because they have the exact same frame of reference for the event. |
| 269 | *** At the end of the last movie Spock remembers a conversation he had with Kirk after he melded with [=McCoy=], so he ''does'' have memories of events that happened after the meld. Yes that probably includes his death. |
| 270 | [[/folder]] |
| 271 | |
| 272 | [[folder: What Eugenics War?]] |
| 273 | * Kirk tells Gillian that she might have a chance at a longer life if she stayed on Earth, rather than travel to the future in a spaceship that might not make it in one piece. In the ''Trek'' universe, the Eugenics Wars started in 1992. She's probably damn lucky she went forward in time. |
| 274 | ** Not necessarily. An episode from Voyager had the crew time travel to the 1990s U.S. and it seemed to be pretty okay. It's implied, but [[GreatOffscreenWar not shown]] that the Eugenics Wars were largely confined to Asia and Africa. |
| 275 | ** Greg Cox' Khan novels state that Khan ruled very much behind the scenes. Even though it looked like the various Asian governments were still in power, Khan actually controlled them through charisma, blackmail and threat of death. He only directly ruled India. |
| 276 | ** All of that is Retcon. Contrast Spock's original description of the Eugenics Wars from "Space Seed". |
| 277 | -->'''Spock:''' Your Earth was on the verge of a dark ages. Whole populations were being bombed out of existence. |
| 278 | ** Even if she was guaranteed to die from a war in 1992, six years is still far longer than the six minutes it could take to die in a risky time leap (though I do like the eugenics war as an explanation as to why Kirk didn't force her off the ship as soon as the whales were secured. What if she had been as integral to the timeline as that one pilot in the original series? A massive freaking war possibly killing her is, well, it's an imperfect excuse but an excuse nonetheless when the movie provides none other than But the Whales!). |
| 279 | [[/folder]] |
| 280 | |
| 281 | [[folder: Transparent Aluminum]] |
| 282 | * The guy at the factory said that they could build the whale tank with six inch thick plexiglass. And, what many people seem to overlook is that that's exactly what they did do. They traded the Transparent Aluminum formula for the materials they needed. They only had $100 in cash to begin with after all, so they bartered with information. |
| 283 | ** And while we're at it, it's not like it's a major issue with the timeline, either. Sulu commented that they were 'a number of years too early' when Scotty thought of using transparent aluminum, and Dr. Nichols himself said 'it'd take years just to figure out the dynamics of this matrix,' in reference to the information Scotty gave him. It seems that this and other elements of this movie were the 'correct' course of events, forming a StableTimeLoop. |
| 284 | ** Supposedly, the scenes of Spock testing his knowledge at the beginning of the film originally showed that Dr. Nichols did in fact invent Transparent Aluminum, but that particular bit of the scene was cut for the final film. |
| 285 | *** The novelization has Scotty recognizing Nichols' name and even fanboying a bit. He clarified to [=McCoy=] that Nichols did indeed invent the thing. |
| 286 | [[/folder]] |
| 287 | |
| 288 | [[folder: Why Not Bring Everyone We Like Back to the Future?]] |
| 289 | * Since its now been established that its perfectly fine to take a 20th Century person back to the 23rd....might there be some OTHER reason Spock insisted so strongly "Edith Keeler MUST die"? |
| 290 | ** Edith Keeler was from the 1930s, where the most advanced technology was nowhere near space travel or time travel. Her entire life was devoted to caring for the men that came into the shelter. Gillian was from the 1980s, which would be a slightly easier transition culturally. Her entire life was given over to caring for George and Gracie. Besides, who's to say that the Guardian would have ''let'' them bring back Edith Keeler? (And yes, I got the HoYay implications of your post. I'm just not a Kirk/Spock shipper.) |
| 291 | ** The Federation has established rules for dealing with time travel and people stranded thereby. One of them is that people from the past who come forward in time need to stay forward in time unless their absence in the past causes catastrophic consequences. Edith Keeler just "disappearing" rather than dying might have had greater consequences than some whale biologist who was already a bit of an overemotional flake (what? she ''is'') disappearing. |
| 292 | *** The thing to consider is not just that the person in question is dead/missing but how the people who knew them react and how that will affect them and the people who know them. Sometimes it makes no relevant difference, other times the changes are more obvious. If Gillain wasn't particularly social then her disappearance will cause minimal change. |
| 293 | ** The Guardian in The City on the Edge of Forever didn't appear to have, or give, an option to bring someone back who hadn't gone through. It automatically brought back [=McCoy=], Spock, and Kirk once Keeler's death restored the timeline. So, to save Edith Keeler, they'd have to do another warp jump and beam her out, preferably when no one was watching. (And then cause a minor time ripple about a missing woman who is never found...) |
| 294 | ** Speaking of time travel and a missing woman who is never found, one might feel sorry for Gillian's boss. We know that she decided to go forward in time with Kirk so that she could teach people about whales and lived happily ever after. All he knows is that he made the decision to send the whales off early in hopes of making the parting easier on her... and she screamed at him, slapped him, stormed off, and drove away. Her empty truck was found in Golden Gate Park and her body was never recovered. |
| 295 | ** Unlike Edith Keeler, Gillian made the choice to jump on board the bird of prey, almost literally, and there was little time to deal with the details of dropping her off - as we see, George and Gracie were already targeted by whalers by the time the crew found them. Additionally, in the 23rd century, there are no experts in humpback whales, given that they're an extinct species. She'd already invited herself along for the ride and, practically speaking, the Federation directly needed her expertise, especially in terms of caring for a newborn humpback whale. So it's not necessarily "perfectly fine" to take her from 1986 to 2286, but considering the fact that Kirk and company didn't really have the time to drop her back off and the Federation had no other expert available, not to mention the fact that, under the circumstances, Gillian would probably need to be pried away from them with a tractor beam, the Federation made the best of the situation. |
| 296 | [[/folder]] |
| 297 | |
| 298 | [[folder: No Body Count?]] |
| 299 | * This film is famously the only Trek movie to have no body count. . .so don't think too hard about just how badly that probe was messing with Earth's weather. |
| 300 | ** And it couldn't have been great for pacemakers. |
| 301 | *** Did you not pay attention to all the ranting during the medical scenes? The very concept of a pacemaker in the 23rd century would have made Bones hit the roof. |
| 302 | *** It was meant facetiously. I was trying to communicate the idea that a catastrophic power outage on a planet that is so heavily dependent on technology probably caused some deaths. |
| 303 | *** That would depend. With such advanced technology they may not have people who are dependent on constant care anymore so it would simply be a matter of if anyone was mortally wounded during that period. |
| 304 | *** Even Captain Picard has an artificial heart. |
| 305 | *** The headlines that day read, "Catastrophic Power Loss Worldwide" with the subtitle "Every Hovercraft And Aircraft Luckily In For Repairs." |
| 306 | *** Wouldn't it be likely someone on the planet would have been in the middle of transporting? |
| 307 | *** No, because they knew ahead of time that the probe was coming, and they knew ahead of time what it was likely to do. While it was still much more intense than they'd been expecting, they were probably able to take precautions beforehand, and even then it's not like everything shut off like a light switch being flipped, some of the stuff is still working right up until the probe's answered. |
| 308 | [[/folder]] |
| 309 | |
| 310 | [[folder: You grew a new kidney?]] |
| 311 | * Anyone else out there think that the old woman in the hospital is in for a lifetime of tests and probes as the medical establishment tries to figure out how she grew a new kidney (and how they can replicate the miracle). |
| 312 | ** Only if she wants to be. Voluntary and Informed consent is pretty important. |
| 313 | *** In America perhaps. However bear in mind that the Middle East is a scant few years away from the eugenics wars. What if someone thinks that spontaneously generating organs might be ''very'' useful for their augmented army? We do know from Film/StarTrekIntoDarkness that Khan has incredible levels of regeneration which the Prime augments should logically also possess as they were engineered before Nero's incursion. Who knows how the team working on the augments developed that technology? A trace residue from a miracle drug from the future perhaps? And heck, its not even as if the America of the Star Trek universe is that squeaky clean anyway considering that the Bill Gates of this world is Henry Starling - AKA the guy who lives to make money ripping off the future and is perfectly willing to lie, kidnap and murder in the process. |
| 314 | *** On a related note, how, if in the 23rd century, Bones can carry around a pill that “grows new kidneys” in his bag, that in the 24th century they apparently couldn’t use the same (or the 100 years more advanced version) if that same pill to... give Geordi real eyes or regenerate Picard’s heart? Or even regenerate Worf’s spine without all the dangerous surgery in “Ethics”? There’s also the stuff like Tuvok’s replaced elbow (“Blood Fever”) or Neelix losing his lungs (“Phage”). Ok Neelix was a hitherto unknown alien, but the EMH should have know about the miracle pill and tried to adapt to! |
| 315 | *** Maybe it only regenerates kidneys, not eye or hearts or spines. |
| 316 | *** I always interpreted the scene as that she didn't get a new kidney regrown, but her existing one got repaired from the pill she took. She just interpreted it as being given a new kidney because she wasn't a medical professional, but a supremely thankful old lady. Best guess, a targeted stem cell package with a cell metabolism booster, which replaced the dead or malfunctioning kidney cells rapidly. |
| 317 | ** There would be some interest in her case, but she can decide if she wants to cooperate or not. However, if there wasn't some pretty evident cause, it would likely be quickly classified as a medical mystery for the books and forgotten. There are multitude of weird medical one-offs. |
| 318 | *** In fact, there's a very good chance it would just be written off as a misdiagnosis: Her nephrologist ''thought'' she had end-stage renal disease, but it turned out to be something else. There's no shortage of things that might cause acute kidney failure, and she just unexpectedly recovered from one of them. It would be hard to explain exactly how she regained ''full'' kidney function so suddenly, but as you say, sometimes weird stuff just happens in medicine. |
| 319 | ** One big problem with that whole story arc, from a medical standpoint: How quickly the diagnosis was made. As Kirk & Co. flee the hospital with a revived Chekov, the doctors remark that the kidney is "fully functional." Using 1986 technology, the only way to know if a kidney is "fully functional" would be to do a blood test that measures kidney function renal function panel, which measures BUN, Creatinine, and estimated GFR, and probably an electrolyte panel as well to see how wonky her electrolytes were. But from the timeline in the movie, the time between when [=McCoy=] gave her the pill and when the doctors remarked the kidney was fully functional was maaaaaaybe 30-45 minutes, if you push it. Best-case scenario in a non-emergent situation, it's going to take at least 20-30 minutes for a nurse to draw the blood, send it to the lab, and for the lab to send a result back to the doctors. So that gives you, at maximum, 13-24 minutes of a fully functional kidney (assuming the kidney took about 1-2 minutes after she took the pill to fully grow/repair itself, and assuming the nurse drew the blood at the latest moment possible). Kidney dialysis for ESRD patients is typically done three times per week, and thus their immediate pre-dialysis labs are going to be pretty wonky; less than 30 minutes of kidney function is not going to be enough time to restore BUN, Creatinine, and electrolyte levels to a point where doctors can definitively say that the kidney is "fully functional." |
| 320 | [[/folder]] |
| 321 | |
| 322 | [[folder: All right, they kind of exterminated us all, but we'll save the apes]] |
| 323 | * Considering all the crap we've put in the ocean, and that the whales' endangerment is kinda our fault, why would George and Gracie talking to the probe make things any better? "Well, they hunted us, caused all kinds of pollution, and apparently have driven us totally to extinction 'cause they had to ''go back in time and kidnap us'' to have someone to talk to you. Other than that, we're fine." Once whoever sent the probe found out to what happened to their pals, a RoaringRampageOfRevenge seems in order, especially when they realized all they had to do to accomplish it was ''leave the probe running.'' If anything, it'd be an ironic punishment. "See what happens when you carelessly put your crap in environment someone's kinda using? Suck on that, ape-boys!" |
| 324 | ** They seemed to get along decently with Spock during his mental discussion with them (they informed him Gracie was pregnant, after all), so evidently these particular humpback whales aren't all ''that'' angry with human-seeming people. Also, George and Gracie likely wouldn't have the full image of just how poorly humans were treating their species, seeing as they'd spend so much of their life in captivity (rather than being out hunted in the polluted waters alongside their gradually-driven-to-extinction kin). |
| 325 | ** Spock *asked* the whales to help and they said yes (I take issue with you saying "kidnapped"). Why would they have lied to him? Of course if the whales said no, Kirk might have taken them anyway and caused the scenario you mentioned, but that didn't come up. |
| 326 | *** Plus maybe the whales don't think punishing billions of innocent people (plus possibly lots of other animals as well) isn't a smart idea. |
| 327 | ** The ExpandedUniverse novel ''Probe'' actually dealt with this. Short version: the Probe's programming didn't cover what to do in cases where the aliens it was trying to contact weren't there but then all of a sudden two of them were. It decided to leave Earth alone for now but come back in a few years to see how the situation had progressed (in the meanwhile, the Enterprise crew managed to make contact with the Probe and convince it humanity and the Federation were okay). |
| 328 | ** Simple idea: Neither they nor the probe thought about potential punishment for humanity in any capacity. "Hey are you alive?" - "Yes" - "Okay thanks bye!" may have been the entirety of their conversation with the probe. We don't know the specifics of Spock's conversation with them, but I have my doubts that whales are able to grasp the concept of ''time travel'', so even that could have been along the lines of "Can we bring you somewhere else, then you tell someone you're there, and make sure we all survive?" as those are all things that whales could know about (Moving from place to place, talk to/greet someone or something, survival of other animals). |
| 329 | [[/folder]] |
| 330 | |
| 331 | [[folder: Where does the air go?]] |
| 332 | * When the whales and their surrounding water are beamed aboard into the containment tank...where did the oxygen in the tank go? |
| 333 | ** The same place the air in the transporter room goes when someone beams in. Presumably the transporter creates a forcefield that starts in the middle and expands to form a cylinder the size of the incoming cylinder. The missing air is replaced by the air being beamed aboard with the traveler. |
| 334 | [[/folder]] |
| 335 | |
| 336 | [[folder: How fast is Warp drive on the Bird of Prey (BoP)?]] |
| 337 | * The BoP ''goes to warp'' just after beaming up the whales, then Kirk and Gillian chat for several minutes, and then when the power begins to drop off, the BoP is ''only now'' leaving the Earth's atmosphere? At just Warp 1 (the speed of light), they should've been at least halfway to the Sun. How fast was the BoP ''really'' going? |
| 338 | [[/folder]] |
| 339 | |
| 340 | [[folder: Breakaway speed]] |
| 341 | * Kirk asks if they can make "breakaway speed" (the speed it takes to escape the gravitational pull of a large space body while flying past it), and Spock replies that he "cannot even guarantee we will escape the sun's gravity! I shall attempt to compensate by altering our trajectory." Which is...what you do to acheive breakaway speed. Were Spock and Sulu just gonna...plunge straight toward the Sun and, hope for the best? |
| 342 | ** Probably less "plunging straight toward the Sun," and more "pitching down slightly." The sun is pretty big and they have a ''looong'' way to travel. Over that distance, they could pick up some significant speed just by nosing down a couple of degrees. |
| 343 | [[/folder]] |
| 344 | |
| 345 | [[folder: Sound through space?]] |
| 346 | * How did the probe ever expect to hear the whales ''from space''? (Then, how did it hear them?) |
| 347 | ** Presumably the same way any space ship in ST does. They scan the ocean for high-pitched tones (whale song). |
| 348 | ** The 23rd century has tricorders that scan many signals/frequencies/what-have-you from large distances, and the Probe is definitely many centuries ahead of them in power + sophistication... no doubt it just picks up their songs as signals, which can easily be picked up across space (no need for 'hearing' as we understand it). Apparently they weren't in any hurry though, with that same Probe merely traveling at impulse speeds. |
| 349 | *** Signals/frequencies are still electromagnetic waves and even at that they can't travel indefinitely through interstellar space as other radiation sources will interfere eventually. Whale singing is sound. Sound requires a medium (water, air) to travel through and the signal rapidly gets weaker the further from the source. Wind and even other animals swimming would dissipate the sound waves of whales singing quickly Unless there's a subspace transmitter or wormhole in the oceans, it wouldn't work. |
| 350 | *** Maybe there's a subspace component to whalesong that we can't yet detect? |
| 351 | ** Uhura is able to pick up whalesong from George and Gracie while the ''Bounty'' is flying over the Pacific. So it seems that there is in fact some component of whalesong that can be read by 23rd-century technology. |
| 352 | *** They were within the atmosphere at that point. While still unlikely, some advanced microphone like the one that picked up everyone's heartbeats in Courtmartial might exist. That still wouldn't extend to space. |
| 353 | *** It doesn't have to be much more advanced than current technology, really. In principle, a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_microphone laser microphone]] would work just fine from orbit. |
| 354 | ** Might have something to do with that bigass beam of energy it's sending right down into the ocean where the whales are making the sound. Small hunch. |
| 355 | ** Admittedly, considering Star Trek's [=MO=] involves SpaceIsNoisy, the souce can be confusing. As far as getting it into the water, I figure the probe was shooting of a ton of EM energy intended to physically move the water to reproduce the whalesong, and the disruption of power was a result of the "spray" of the EM emissions. |
| 356 | [[/folder]] |
| 357 | |
| 358 | [[folder: Why entire whales rather than just a message?]] |
| 359 | * Why didn't Kirk transmit the alien probe's message to the whales from the 21st century, record their response, and then take their response back to the 23rd century and transmit it to the probe? Why did they need to bring the whales back at all? It can't be for conservation/repopulation reasons, because even the most basic biology student could tell Kirk about the concept of a genetic bottleneck. |
| 360 | ** OK, so he goes back and records the whales' response to the probe. Then the probe asks a follow-up question. What then? |
| 361 | ** Also, the probe knocks out primary power and propulsion to any ship. There's no guarantee that the Bird of Prey could have played the message. |
| 362 | ** Spock explains that the Universal Translator can't understand whale song, and like mentioned above, there's going to be more than 1 question the probe has when the whales answer. They need a native speaker to tell the probe to screw off, so they bring back 2 in hopes of repopulating whales to prevent this from happening again. |
| 363 | ** Kirk also tells Gillian that he wants the whales to "repopulate the species." Granted, that's pretty obviously him dodging a much longer and scarier story, but there's also the fact that some incredibly advanced alien race sent this probe specifically to talk to humpback whales, so even if cheating it with a recording would work, it would probably only be a temporary solution. Kirk has the opportunity to bring a species back from extinction, and apparently a ''sapient'' species at that. He's not going to turn that down (see above for possibilities how the whales could survive as a species in the 23rd Century). |
| 364 | ** A genetic bottleneck might be a problem that 23rd century genetics can work around. They've successfully created Vulcan/Human hybrids, after all. |
| 365 | *** The novelization stated they had plenty of genetic samples of humpback whales to repopulate the species via cloning in the 23rd century. The problem was there were none to teach the clones HOW to be humpback whales and therefore the language. |
| 366 | *** The novelization has been evoked many times on his page. It's almost as Vonda [=MacIntyre=] set it upon herself to take all of the unexplained and nonsensical parts of the screenplay and "correct" them (sometimes flat out changing plot points to accomplish it). Or maybe just elements of the screenplay that didn't make it to the final cut? |
| 367 | *** A little of both. It isn't just in Trek, but with any movie that is being novelised the writers get advance copies of the script (as well as access to the writer and-or director) so they can get the novel out as close to the screen date as possible. Even the most dense script, however, is not going to contain enough material to make a full length novel on its own. The novelist is faced with either pulling subplots out of thin air in order to pad it out, or to go looking for opportunities and gaps in the script itself to flesh out events and characterisation and iron out any little potential plot holes or inconsistencies. It is hard to know which is which; we know that the Sulu plot in the book ''was'' in the script but they had problems with the child actor, as was a bigger role for Saavik which got cut for pacing, but apart from that we just do not know. |
| 368 | [[/folder]] |
| 369 | |
| 370 | [[folder: Beaming up the whales]] |
| 371 | * When they are about to beam up the whales, Scotty expresses concern that the Bird of Prey’s transporters might not handle beaming the combined weight/mass or two humpback whales plus enough water to fill the tank. Yet he never suggests to beam in the water first, then the whales, significantly decreasing the strain on the transporter. |
| 372 | ** Two separate beamings of large amounts of weight might take more power than doing it all at once, and Scotty knows that they're trying to build up as much power reserve as possible for the coming time travel. Also, it might be trickier to beam whales into water already present in the tank than it would be to beam water and whales together all at once, since the transporter usually only beams people into air. |
| 373 | ** Disaster would result if they ended up miscalculating and the displacement of the whales' weight exceeded the tolerance of the aquarium. |
| 374 | ** Beaming up George and Gracie with the water they were already in would also be less disruptive to them. And they wanted to treat them well. |
| 375 | [[/folder]] |
| 376 | |
| 377 | [[folder:Scotty's an Old-School Mac Guy?]] |
| 378 | * In Star Trek IV, how does Scotty get the computer to work so quickly? It has to be explained to him that it doesn't have a human-language-parsing voice interface like he's used to, but once he's told that the I/O is via keyboard, he not only figures out the interface with no difficulty at all, but manages to construct a 3D graphic on a Mac ''without touching the mouse''. |
| 379 | ** TNG offers a truly shocking blink if you miss explanation as to just how Scotty might have come by those mad keyboard skills. In the Enterprise's computer core, the interface isn't one of the standard 24th century touch screens. It's a CRT monitor and a standard keyboard (although the keyboard looks slightly high tech by today's standards and probably looked more futuristic back when the episode aired in 1989). So, even in the 24th century where every command function on the bridge is controlled by touch panels, at the heart of the computer controlling it all is a terminal that seems to deliberately be intensely old school. I wouldn't be surprised if the damn thing has bios and a command prompt. |
| 380 | *** That is most likely absolutely the case. Look at modern computers: We have your standard extremely user friendly, efficient, multi-purpose home PC's and Mac's that literally anyone of any age and any training can use; and we have huge, rugged, ugly machines with bulky buttons and flashing lights that tend to be found in hazardous or industrial environments and designed to fulfill one or two set tasks. There is no real reason why this would change by the 24th century; especially since in-universe the NX-01 Enterprise of the 22nd was still using keyboards (albeit of a different design) and it would make sense that the ship that helped found the Federation and contained a revolutionary warp engine would have been something Scotty would have studied at some point. |
| 381 | *** Scotty is still unfamiliar with the then-contemporary Mac OS, and using the keyboard in that way surely involves the use of a number of keystrokes/keyboard shortcuts that would not be obvious to a system newbie, even one as otherwise technically skilled as Scotty. |
| 382 | ** There are some people who can pull off something akin to Scotty's performance today. Place a veteran [=AutoCAD=] user in front of a computer, and they will create a fully functional model without touching the mouse at all. It's all a matter of knowing which keyboard commands to use. |
| 383 | ** Transparent Aluminum is a known substance that exists today, and he was sitting at a computer at a chemical plant. Its possible all Scotty did was enter a chemical formula the computer recognized, and it pulled up a schematic on its own. The whole point of presenting it the way Scotty did was for the 'wow'-factor: "Suppose I could show you a material that would do the same job but only had to be one inch thick?" What Scotty "sold" them was not simply a chemical formula but a process for how to create it in very large sizes and also at an industrial scale. Such a process would have taken a lot more than a few moments of frantic typing, especially including a lot of theory-discussion for how to adapt the process to 20th century technology. |
| 384 | [[/folder]] |
| 385 | |
| 386 | [[folder:Not familiar with profanity?]] |
| 387 | * Even Kirk gets it wrong when someone calls him a dumbass. "Double dumbass on you!"? is kind of lame. Spock acts like he hasn't heard mild swearing before. We only heard it once in TOS in the famous closing line of ''The City on the Edge of Forever'': "Let's get the hell out of here". The assumption has always been that they have been speaking the same English that we speak in contemporary times. And in the movie era, they were allowed to use stronger language more freely, within reason keeping it rated PG. Bones has always been the one whom is envisioned to swear like a sailor (despite his supposed SouthernGentleman image). And it's likely that Spock has heard it offscreen in their long association. ''Star Trek: Discovery'' has also shown that our four letter words are alive and well in the future. |
| 388 | ** They don't say nobody ever uses profanity in the 23rd century, just that it's pervasive in the 20th century in a way that's not the case later. Also, all the Star Trek movies up to that point had never featured more than mild profanity--if I'm not mistaken, IV was the first one to feature the word "shit." |
| 389 | [[/folder]] |
| 390 | |
| 391 | [[folder:"Acceleration is no longer a constant"]] |
| 392 | * Spock says that the time-warp computations are a lot more complicated now that the whales are on board because acceleration is no longer a constant. Why? One presumes that Scotty adjusted the inertial dampener to account for the whale tank. Furthermore, the whole point of warp drive is that the ship is being surrounded by a warp field that makes the standard laws of physics irrelevant. Is Spock implying that the whales are so massive that the minute motion of the ship's center of gravity is now large enough to need an additional algorithm, one that he must now program with gimmick factors that must be estimated? |
| 393 | ** He may be saying just that. The addition of 100 tons of water and living creatures will certainly change the center of gravity, and inertial dampers on a Klingon fighter of all things are probably not up to the task of compensating for the added mass. Besides that, water sloshes. Although hydrodynamic formulas may be able to estimate the motion of the water, there's no way to predict the movement of the whales. Just moving around would change the [=CoG=], in ways that might be inconsequential except when you're trying to make a time jump around the sun. |
| 394 | [[/folder]] |
| 395 | |
| 396 | [[folder:What nationality were the whalers? And how legal is what they're doing?]] |
| 397 | * They seem to be speaking some non-English language I can't place. Also, I'm not sure which countries hadn't signed up to the [=IWC=] test ban which would already have been in place in what is clearly 1986? (At least in our reality: Star Trek is presumably already a de facto AlternateTimeline by this point...) |
| 398 | [[/folder]] |
| 399 | |
| 400 | [[folder:Why slingshot?]] |
| 401 | * Okay, I can understand that some kind of TechnoBabble might be necessary to explain how one can loop around the sun at warp speeds to propel oneself back in time, but why the need for such a dangerous procedure to go forward in time? Why not just use the impulse engines to travel at a sublight speed that would be high enough for time dilation to occur, and then simply let 300 years pass for the earth while only a few minutes pass for Admiral Kirk and the gang on board the Klingon ship? |
| 402 | ** There's a number of reasons why this would be impossible, impractical, or downright dangerous: |
| 403 | ## Extreme time dilation like that only occurs very, very close to the speed of light. To give you a sense of how fast you would need to go, going at 1 cm/second below the speed of light would make the 300-year journey pass in about 21 ''hours''. No canon sources indicate that impulse can be pushed this far. |
| 404 | ## The closer you get the speed of light, the more massive your ship becomes. For our 21-hour journey, the bird of prey would be around 120,000 times as massive as it was before. Again, it seems unlikely that the ship could provide the kind of power needed. |
| 405 | ## During the journey, the ''HMS Bounty'' would be part of the past, thus increasing the risk of further contaminating the timeline. |
| 406 | ** Also, from an out-of-universe perspective, it cuts out the need for extra time to explain to the audience how the ship gets back to the present. With the slingshot maneuver, the audience already knows how this works at this point in the movie. |
| 407 | ** It is {{Canon}} to ''Star Trek'' that Starships have "Relativistic Compensator[s]" in them to prevent dilation being an issue at sublight speeds. Scotty is already working miracles just keeping ''Bounty'' together at all, maybe even he can't work out a way to disconnect it safely or quickly enough to be of use here? |
| 408 | [[/folder]] |
| 409 | |
| 410 | [[folder:How did George and Gracie know what to answer to the Probe?]] |
| 411 | * How exactly did George and Gracie know what to say to the probe to get it to peacefully leave? Had they themselves spoken with it before in the 20th century? |
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