Headscratchers / Star Trek: The Motion Picture

The only transporters on Earth?

• The whole Teleporter Accident scene. Other than Rule of Drama and a chance to show off the new transporter FX (which would be changed in subsequent movies) the whole scene seemed illogical. If they were rushing to get the Enterprise ready to go, and the transporters were acting up, why not just use a transporter on Earth or a space station to beam people over to the ship? The whole point of the transporters is that only one side of the transport needs to be the pad (and this restriction would later be eliminated). In theory, another transporter could beam people to anywhere on the ship. Kirk's new officers could have literally been beamed directly to the bridge to report in! After all, it's not like Starfleet wouldn't have exact coordinates for something parked inside their own space dock.
  • The Original Series, including the movies, is a little inconsistent with whether a transporter is needed on both ends when beaming between ships. Note that when they beam to somewhere without a transporter they usually pick an open area with few obstacles in it. Beaming inside a ship is described as dangerous from time to time, so beaming right to the bridge would probably be considered reckless, especially if somebody just happens to be standing in the way. They do fix the transporters in time to beam McCoy aboard a short time later (probably Kirk told him about the transporter accident only after they beamed him aboard).
    • Except that in that case, wouldn't it be logical for the space dock to have its own transporter pads for both cargo and personnel? Since it exists for the purpose of doing major refits and/or construction of starships, one could assume that those ships would not have working transporters for extended periods of time while being worked on. So even if a pad were necessary (as opposed to beaming people directly into a large interior space on the ship like the rec room or the shuttle bay), there should have been working transporters on the space dock facility. Risking use of iffy transporters to beam people up to a ship undergoing refit smacks of No OSHA Compliance.
    • The spacedock does have its own pads. Kirk uses them when he beams up from Starfleet command. Then he and Scotty use a travel pod to fly over to the Enterprise (and all the way around it before docking - Scotty seems to be using the opportunity to show off the refitted ship to Kirk and the audience). Maybe only Admirals get to use the travel pod method, with everyone else forced to use the transporters.
  • I think Cleary forgot to make sure that the safeties were wired in first, which resulted in the sending of a false-positive regarding unit-functionality to the transporters.

How did the story originally end?

• Since this story began life as a pilot for a new Star Trek series, and Decker and Ilia were to survive the pilot and stay on as regulars in the series, How would the Phase 2 version of V'Ger been told (in Dr McCoy's words from ST 4) what to go do with itself?
  • Decker and Ilia survive and return in the episode treatment: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/In_Thy_Image
  • To elaborate a bit if you don't want to follow the link, Kirk proves that humans are the creator by repairing V'Ger's burned-out relay and V'Ger then goes off exploring further. There is no "joining with the creator". Ilia was being held captive rather than absorbed and is released.
• In an early draft, it was Spock who was supposed to have had an affair with Ilia some years before. They reunited when he came onboard the Big E. Everything else happened as you saw, except with Spock instead of Decker; including the ascension with Ilia-probe at the end. All of this was designed to bring Nimoy back for this picture while guaranteeing he'd never have to play Spock again. Nimoy had not wanted to come back, especially with the big lawsuit he had going against Paramount. It was only when that was resolved that he agreed to sign up.^note "It was a very tough time, complicated by the fact that I was pursuing a lawsuit against Paramount at the time, that had to do with merchandising royalties that I had failed to receive.... [so] they were calling me to go to work for them, while at the same time I had a lawsuit outstanding against them..." Also, Roddenberry had engaged him for something else and then abruptly dropped him, so he had refused to be in the film, so Spock was left out of the screenplay. It wasn't until Robert Wise arranged to have the promised royalties paid to Nimoy that he agreed to return.

Twenty Minutes into the Future - Robert Wise creates the first vertical video

• Am I the only one who finds the one shot just after launch that is shot from the ceiling directly down on the Navigation Station and Captain's chair to be somewhat jarring? Of course this would be more a Horizontal Video than a Vertical Video (For those not knowing the term, it apples to people you tubing videos on hand held devices vertically instead of horizontally.)
  • It may have been a Call-Back to the first shot of the first TOS pilot, which tracks through the bridge dome from above, showing us the bridge crew busy at their stations for the very first time. It was a really awkward shot that didn't look good in The Cage, so (and this is total speculation on my part) I wouldn't be surprised if the shot was included in the movie because it was finally practical to film it the way Gene or someone else on the production staff had always wanted it to look.
  • There's a similar shot in The Lights of Zetar. Personally I don’t think it’s a good shot at all. It just tends to break suspension of disbelief.

The Motion Picture Has No Fashion Sense

• What in the bleeding hell are those black things on the crew members' tunics supposed to be in ST:TMP? I've never even seen any behind-the-scenes info on what function they're supposed to serve, and they look like they'd be hideously uncomfortable.
  • The belt buckles? They're supposed to be "Perscan" medical monitoring devices. But you're right about the uniforms being uncomfortable, George Takei stated that because of the way it was designed it required assistance to be removed even for minor things such as using the restroom. The redesigned uniform featured in the rest of the films with the original series cast was brought about because of the cast's reluctance to film any further films with this version of the uniform.
    • Worse than that, William Shatner said it was extremely painful for the male cast members to even sit down in them. Basically the first film was a lot more dreary and militaristic and the uniforms were supposed to reflect that. Instead they just reflected what a miserable time everyone had making that movie.

Regarding Ilia...

• So....why did she have to take an oath of celibacy? The only explanation I remember being given in the movie was that she wouldn't take advantage of a "sexually immature" (whatever THAT means) species.
  • Deltans are a very sensual race. Apparently sex for them is both extremely culturally significant and also transmit telepathic information between the members involved, sending anything from speech to memories or pain relief. However, with a human or other species is dangerous because 1. the Deltan may demand for more sex than the human can supply, and 2. the telepathy may go bad for your brain. Plus, like the silk moth on earth, Deltans emit "pheromones" that cause humans to go insanely horny. (We are not told what effect Deltan women have on gay men or Lesbians.) Much of that had to be cut out of the film because, well, G rating.
    • Short version: someone had a fetish for sexually supercharged bald women but they couldn't show the former trait in a general audiences movie.

Thruster Suits & the Deadliest Son of a Bitch in Space

• Spock's thruster suit was really pretty cool. This Starfleet-issued EVA garment comes with a big thruster on the back that lets the wearer travel short distances at relatively high speeds. You can even jettison the thruster once it expends its fuel. I've go to ask, though does Spock's suit have any sort of reaction control system? I'm working off memory, but I don't recall ever seeing evidence of one. How the heck do you maneuver or even come to a stop without one once you've discarded the main thruster pack?
  • The fella floating outside Epsilon 9 is seen to use small thrusters on his suit. Though they only seem to appear on the back and don't seem very powerful.
  • Spock's thruster suit was designed as a one-time-use engine to escape from an area when other means weren't feasible. It appears that his suit didn't have any RCS thrusters on it, but it is highly illogical to believe that Spock would go on a fact finding mission and have no way of relaying those facts back to the ship.
  • Kirk's white suit seems to be the same model, and he is seen using RCS thrusters on them in a scene not in the theatrical version when he follows Spock out the airlock door.

They Took Away His Parking Space, Too

• Other than further emasculating Decker and codifying the Decker Family motto: Stay the hell away from Jim Kirk, was there any universe-consistent reason to demote him to commander? We've seen flag officers command starships in TOS, and by Star Trek V: The Final Frontier the Enterprise has no fewer than three crew members who hold the rank of captain (Kirk, Spock, and Scotty), so why not just let everyone keep their rank for the duration of the mission?
  • Out of Universe reason: In The Original Series one of the staples was the Insane Admiral or Obstructive Bureaucrat who would step in and ruin the Captains life as he tried to command his ship in the face of their interference and they didn't want Kirk to come off like that (although it does give a nice inversion to the Kirk-Decker dynamic from "The Doomsday Machine" with the roles reversed and now it is the younger Decker with the older, higher ranking and obsessed Kirk).
    The In-Universe reason is that it is simply how Starfleet prefers to do it in that era, possibly as a reaction to all those TOS Admiral/Captain conflicts so it ensures a clean chain of command and they later changed it.
  • Wait, so our brave Captain Decker suddenly has his ship seized by the backroom wranglings of an Admiral who has been long since Kicked Upstairs, and this Admiral proceeds to declare himself Captain and demote Decker before arguing with him about every major decision? Are we sure this isn't just the stock Insane Admiral plot, plus one Perspective Flip?
    • That's probably a valid interpretation—at least for the first half of the film. The movie goes to great lengths to show that Decker really should be the one in command. And really, until Enterprise intercepts V'Ger, Kirk hardly seems like the same man from the series. In fact, TOS!Kirk probably would have called TMP!Kirk out on his crap almost immediately. It isn't until they make contact with V'Ger that Kirk starts making the right calls and acting like the James T. Kirk we know.
    • Kirk's Hollywood Mid-Life Crisis would be a recurring theme throughout the movies. Indeed, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan would continue the trend of Kirk having Wangst over whether he's too young to be an Admiral or too old to be a Captain, which would remain one of his major character issues across the film portion of the franchise.
    • Note that in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan Spock keeps his rank of Captain even after Kirk formally takes command. Either Starfleet procedure changed or Kirk mellows somewhat when it's his best friend he's taking over from.
    • In the case with Spock, that was more a of spur of the moment decision made by Kirk himself in response to an emergency, with Spock deferring authority to Kirk due to outranking him, while the case with Decker was an official arrangement planned by Kirk's superiors ahead of time.
    • Also in the The Wrath of Khan Kirk at first was content to allow Spock to retain command, but it was Spock who insisted on handing over command to Kirk.
  • This can also be attributed to the confusion between the rank of Captain, and the position of Captain i.e. commanding officer of a vessel. The commanding officer is in charge, even if there are other officers of the same rank aboard. For example, an aircraft carrier might have a number of naval aviators holding the rank of Captain, but they are all subordinate to the commanding officer, who also holds the rank of Captain.
    • It's not just a positional thing though, it's a real demotion in rank. Decker even starts wearing Commander's stripes on his uniform after Kirk takes over. Ilia notices immediately and wonders why he's a Commander again instead of a Captain.
    • To be fair, it is pointed out at the time Kirk informs Decker of the change that this is a temporary reduction in grade. Knowing Kirk, though, he'd definitely do his most to keep the Enterprise, the assumption then being (assuming Decker lasts the mission) that Decker would most likely get command of another ship were one to become available.
  • There's no explicit reason given onscreen, but considering the potential negative reaction of Decker and crew- some of which IS shown onscreen- it might have been to just make the situation crystal clear to all. Under the extreme time crunch, they didn't have time for any drama around that. In TWOK, the situation didn't seem anywhere near as extreme, and nobody cared.

Where is that external view coming from?

• This happens twice. Starfleet manages to hack into the sensor net of a Klingon battlecruiser attacking V'Ger, which shows the cloud destroying another battlecruiser, before finally showing the cloud destroy the viewpoint battlecruiser with some sort of electrical discharge... which continues to record several seconds after the entire battlecruiser, including the presumed installed external camera, has been destroyed.
• The poor Starfleet sensor array gets the same treatment when it is attacked. The Enterprise gets uninterrupted footage of the cloud when it destroys the sensor array, and the camera mounting it.
  • The array, at least, may have had some sort of satellite instillation nearby that had the 23^rd century equivalent of a camera pointed at the station. Maybe a transmitter, or something, that had to be set some distance away from the main facility—something autonomous enough to continue recording and transmitting its telemetry to Starfleet Command after the main array is destroyed.
• Notice how those cameras just keep on recording just fine even as they are supposedly being destroyed themselves? They must put more redundant circuits in the cameras and transmitters than in the whole rest of the station.
  • Later in the movie, Uhura mentions they are planning on launching a sensor probe/buoy from the Enterprise with their logs and current situation to transmit to Starfleet in the event they are destroyed; it's not unreasonable to assume the crew of Epsilon IX launched one as they were under attack, which continued to record/transmit until it, too, was destroyed.
• The short answer: the same place as the music.
• The Klingon attack wasn't monitored directly by the station, itself. Dialogue makes it clear that the telemetry is being relayed by "sensor drones." Presumably, once Epsilon IX realized that the drones were picking up something of interest, they started using the drones, themselves, to actively scan the altercation. That active scan was probably the source of the video feed. When V'Ger approached the array, it would have been prudent to use those same drones to monitor the attack on the station from multiple angles, and transmit their telemetry directly to Starfleet Command. This would hopefully give Starfleet the chance to analyze the data, and find a way to defend Earth. In fact, as often as we've seen starship captains dump their ships' logs into a marker buoy to be left behind for Starfleet to find whenever they think their ship is in mortal danger, it's probably standard operating procedure.

Why make up a new probe?

Why did the filmmakers create an entirely-fictional Voyager 6 when using the real-world Voyager 2 would have worked as well? There were only 2 Voyager probes ever planned, so "Maybe they thought there would be more?" wouldn't work.

• Perhaps simply to establish Star Trek as having an Alternate History vs the real world. An interpretation that is basically canon now that the Eugenics Wars have failed to materialize and lead to World War III on time.
• They might have hoped that the higher numbered probe would imply more advanced technology, specifically much faster propulsion systems. The probe was stated to have fallen through a black hole, but currently the closest known black hole to Earth is V4641 Sgr, which is about 1600 light years away. Based on Voyager 1's current speed, it would take over 28,104,000 years for one of the real-world Voyager probes to actually get there—and that's assuming a constant velocity for the entire trip, which is impossible. To get around this problem, the probe would have to have an FTL drive of some kind. Maybe a series of much more advanced future probes were called 'Voyager' as a legacy name to honor the original Voyager program; much like the series of progressively more advanced Federation starships are given the name Enterprise.
  • The problem with this is that Voyager 6 has an almost identical design to Voyager 1, given even a cursory glance. As for the black hole...well, terminology was a bit wonky at the time the film came out, so most likely it actually fell through a wormhole and the script used the wrong term. Decker even says this in the film, stating that the probe was lost in "what we used to call a black hole", implying an entirely different phenomenon.
  • Actually it's a case of What Could Have Been. The early concepts for the Voyager program purposed several probes before budget cuts slashed the program leaving just two. Maybe NASA in this Universe was able to launch all those spacecrafts.
  • Doesn't make a lot of sense, though, when you consider that the probe was sent out 300 years prior to the events of the movie, putting it around the early 1970s. Considering that humans didn't invent anything even approaching faster than light until Zefram Cochrane in 2063, more than likely the culprit was either a black hole they hadn't charted yet, or some anomaly similar to the one near Mars that transported John Kelly to the Delta Quadrant that Voyager (the starship, not the probe) discovered. Given that any black hole that close would not be all that swell for the inhabitants of Earth, I'd stake my money on the latter.
  • Voyager was very much in the news when the movie was produced. It seemed likely there would be more Voyagers the same way that viewers of 2001 in 1968 thought it was likely we'd have moon bases by 2001.

Starfleet & V'ger: Not So Different?

Whenever V'ger comes across an entity in space, it reduces them to "patterns for data storage" and this is treated as effectively being death. But the teleporter uses Destructive Teleportation to function—the existence of Thomas Riker couldn't happen otherwise—so V'ger isn't doing anything Starfleet hasn't been doing for decades already. Why couldn't they just pop the "patterns" into the teleporter and rematerialize them again?

• V'ger never gave them the patterns before heading off to "other realms of existence".
• Also, V'ger had digitized entire civilizations. Federation transporters can handle maybe a dozen people at once. It probably would have taken a lot of time and a lot of energy to reconstitute all of what V'ger had, if Federation technology could have done it at all.
• Also keep in mind: The teleporters might break people down into energy but it still puts them back together. V'Ger just left them as data. It should also be noted that judging from the way it's describe V'Ger is somehow transforming tangible things into literal information. The transporter seems to turn something into energy that it controls digitally but all the while the objects still exist physically.

So is Wrath of Khan a soft reboot?

See, I always took it for granted that The Motion Picture wasn’t quite canon after the second movie took everything in a completely different direction. Wo K has different sets, different uniforms, a much “smaller”-feeling Enterprise, a far less formal atmosphere between Starfleet members, and moreover it generally has a different look and feel. So either everything completely changed in Starfleet in whatever in-universe time passed, or TMP is only canon in the Broad Strokes sense.

But apparently everyone just treats it as canon? I haven’t been able to find anywhere where it’s spelled out even as a fan theory that there’s a soft reboot between the first two movies. Is this fairly common as an unspoken fanon, or am I the only one who thinks that?

Honestly, I’d believe you if you told me that I and V were in one universe and II-IV, VI and VII were in another.

• For what it's worth, many of the sets in TWOK are reused from TMP. The bridge, engineering, the transporter room, corridors, Kirk's quarters. They are redressed to various degrees, and I think the radiation room in TWOK is new. The TWOK Enterprise does seem smaller, and really probably more accurate. In TWOK, the curved roof of engineering around the warp drive is strongly implied to be the outer hull (when Khan first attacks), which seems to make more sense scale-wise, and explains why it is curved like that. In TMP, engineering extends far above that level and it's hard to see it really fitting. Also, the rec-room and cargo bay seem far too large. (Though, in filmed sets and in real life, the size of photographed things can easily make them look much smaller or larger than they are.)
  • According to diagrams of the Movie Enterprise created during production, the part of the engineering room that goes up is going up into the "neck" that connects the engineering hull with the saucer section, and the intermix shaft ends in the big crystal on the impulse drive. You can see the windows of the rec-room on the back of the saucer section, on the starboard side. It's actually a pretty good match, size-wise. The shuttle bay is very large, but if it takes up most of the back side of the engineering hull, again, as it does on diagrams, it fits.
• All the official sources treat it as canon. According to the chronologies, STTMP happened in 2271, only 2 years after the original series, and Wrath of Khan was in 2285, so there were 14 years between the two movies in-universe. That can go a long way in justifying the differences between the two. Fanon has it that Kirk took the Enterprise and his crew on at least one more five-year mission in that period.
  • On a totally unrelated side note, I always found the large gap in time between I and II funny in retrospect, given that II-IV all take place within the span of a few months, and V not all that long after that, though there does appear to be a moderate gap between V (2286/7) and VI (2293).
  • They tried to hide that ten real years happened between the end of the series and production of I. In I, it’s supposed to only be a couple of years. With II, Shatner wanted to do something similar, but with the ever aging actors, they decided to instead incorporate their aging into the story.
• I didn’t know that. I guess that’s more plausible than a lot of other official explanations in ST. Still, I can’t be the only one who prefers the Fanon Discontinuity route? It’s not that TMP is bad, (despite the rough edges) it’s just that even with a 14-year gap it’s jarring to see II come after it.
• Further complicating things, the first-season The Next Generation episode "The Naked Now" has the crew looking up the events of the TOS episode "The Naked Time" and finding a diagram of the original TOS Enterprise in her movie-era configuration. A later re-release of the same episode retcons the image to the TOS version at least, after the sixth-season TNG episode "Relics" and the DS9 episode "Trials and Tribble-ations" depict the TOS version of the ship in the holodeck and via time-travel, respectively.

• Given that none of the later films or television series reference the events of TMP, it could almost be treated as an Alternate Universe episode without affecting continuity.
  • Wrath of Khan references it obliquely. In Kirk's first scuffle with Khan, the Reliant has to withdraw because the Enterprise damaged "our photon control" (meaning that it couldn't fire torpedos) "and our warp drive", meaning that it couldn't fire phasers, either, because the refit that Kirk insisted on being undone on the Enterprise (warp drive augments phasers and phasers will not work without it) was clearly still in place on the Reliant.

Hostile actions

• Kirk decides against raising the Enterprise's shields, and also against scanning V'ger, for fear that these might be interpreted as hostile actions. But what makes him think that flying into the cloud and into close proximity of the alien entity's core would somehow not be considered threatening?
  • He was playing by ear. They knew the Klingons had attacked and that the Epsilon station had merely used scanners, so they did neither. However, V'ger aborted the second attack on the Enterprise after Spock successfully transmitted friendship messages to it, so he then assumed V'ger would not consider them hostile. It was still a gamble, but they had very little time.

Were Kirk, Spock and Mc Coy suspected of murder after Decker disappeared?

• Kirk has Ilia and Decker declared "missing". There is a lot of record of what happened to Ilia, but Decker? He just declares him missing, though granted claiming he wanted to merge with V'ger sounds kind of loony.
  • I suspect the same thing that happens at the end of many episodes: an after-action, off screen, debriefing where Kirk explains what happened (or at least as much as he's willing to admit) without it showing up in a report that may be read by others and where an Admiral can decide how much can be appended to the official report later. We see in later movies that Kirk doesn't exactly give a full report on 'Genesis' onscreen, but he had to have made enough of one that even the Klingons have an idea of what happened. (The fact the Klingons want to charge him with crimes for that involves their own distortion of some of the facts, but it's based of an Off Screen report that had to have been made.)
    • Indeed, part of Kirk's briefing to the Federation Council is shown in the opening of Star Trek IV, showing the destruction of the Enterprise and discussing the Genesis project.

Where is Starfleet?

So the refit Enterprise, as yet untried, is the only capital ship within three days travel of Earth? Where's the rest of the fleet? Particularly pressing as V'ger appears to have moved from Klingon territory to Earth in a fairly short time.

• Addressed on the main page. The original idea was that there were other ships in range, but Enterprise was the most advanced ship Starfleet could send, with the most experienced crew, and after seeing the brand-new Klingon ships prove useless they decided it had to be Enterprise.

One Million Megahertz

Mr. Spock marvels that the alien is communicating at a frequency of "one million megahertz." This is an ordinary slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, higher in frequency than microwaves but lower than visible light.

• Moreover, the simpler equivalent term "One terahertz" would be pretty esoteric to 1979 audiences, but would be recognizable with a decade and common within two. By 2273, it would probably be second nature.

Novelization; Ears

Kirk saw Spock cock an ear as if half-understanding. (from the novelization)

Would you or would you not read this as implying Spock's ears can move, like a cat's or a dog's? It seems just this side of ambiguous. You might speak of round-eared human types figuratively cocking their ears, ie., tilting their heads to one side. And obviously his ears don't do that on screen. But for the purposes of this passage, are we to read it as Spock genuinely moving his ears, a la Expressive Ears?

• Spock has never been shown genuinely moving his ears, so I would assume it was meant figuratively, while also allowing the reader to recollect that Spock has unusual ears (Spock is often the butt of "ear" jokes).

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