I really enjoy the movie despite the problems, but it does have huge problems. And thankfully some of the stuff (no swearing in the 23rd century) has been retconned.
Edit: Since I already opened this can of worms, my biggest problem with ST IV, by far, is that Kirk and his crew have major difficulties adapting to 1980s Earth when not only do they not have that difficulty when on clandestine missions on entirely alien planets, Kirk and Spock do not seem to have a problem adapting to 1930s Earth in City on the Edge of Forever.
It kind of makes them seem inept and it bothers me.
If you have fun watching it, then go for it. The whole Shatner focused thing makes a lot of sense. He would setup shots in minutes instead of the industry norm of hours just for that focus.
A lot of them like the religious criticism (which I think is heavily watered down by that alien not being the mythical god of either Vulcan or Earth), they liked the idea of a Vulcan pro-emotions cult, and I’m sure some of them like pew pew space battle with the Klingons.
I like that it’s about exploration. Even if it’s Sybok forcing the expedition to begin with, Kirk does ultimately make the choice to go along with it. No other Trek movie is actually about seeking out a strange new world.
I like the shore leave scenes. I hear a lot of complaints about them, but I appreciate spending a little time with the our characters just being dysfunctional friends.
I like that it makes full use of DeForest Kelley. His “pain” scene is excellent, and his frequent exasperation with Kirk is sold very well throughout the film. Say what you will about Shatner’s ego, but he gets that Kirk can be a petulant child at times, and needs McCoy to verbally smack some sense into him, as in the brig scene.
For that matter, I like Kirk’s pain speech. A little sermonising, maybe, but that’s Trek for you. It works well enough considering that two films ago this man was forced to abandon his estranged son’s corpse on an exploding planet. Insisting on holding on to that pain is substantial, but very Kirk.
I enjoy the entire meeting with God. A little goofy, but terrifically quotable.
I do see plenty of faults. A lot of the humour doesn’t land. Introducing our new hero ship as a piece of junk is immediately off-putting. The Scotty/Uhura pairing comes out of nowhere and ultimately goes nowhere. The ground assault sequence was disappointingly underwhelming. The effects are weak af, and if I saw it on release in theatres I’d probably feel pretty sour towards the apparent trajectory of the series towards something that felt more direct-to-video.
But I never have a bad time watching it. The good outweighs the bad for me.
Yeah, I’m clearly in the minority, and I might just be too forgiving of the TOS era movies. I’m certainly not as inclined to give a break to Insurrection or Nemesis. But if you do give it another chance, I hope you enjoy it a bit more this time!
My head canon attributes the crew’s poor adaptability to the 1980s to having made the trip in a Klingon bird of prey, which almost certainly would not have had good historical data about 20th century Earth. No data, no “here’s how to act” briefing.
But credit to Kirk for having “double dumbass on you!” at the ready. Absolutely devastating.
Didn’t they have that historian with them? I believe he got shot not long into the mission, but they did go down to the planet with a historian who knew about the 1930s and gangsters.
You’re thinking of A Piece of the Action. In City on the Edge of Forever, McCoy goes through the Guardian of Forever and Kirk and Spock go through after him. All three adapt just fine, including McCoy, who is also insane.
No, what I’m thinking of was a season 2 TNG episode where a historian goes onto the holodeck into one of Picard’s Dixon Hill holonovels, and he gets shot and dies.
Fair enough. I was just guessing to be honest since you were thinking 1930s episode. I haven’t seen A Piece of the Action in years. Other than the fun part where Kirk teaches the two thugs Fizzbin and the concept of cultural contamination being a reason for the Prime Directive, it’s a really stupid episode.
Edit: also the planet modeled itself on a book about Chicago mobs of the 1920s, not the 1930s. Oops. Must have been a really detailed book.
In A Piece of the Action? Yeah, I think so. But the whole planet (apparently) was supposed to be an incredibly realistic portrayal of a mob-controlled Chicago in the 1920s down to the fact that the cars were both recognizable models and had manual transmissions with a clutch Kirk didn’t understand how to use, all from one book.
I always took that to mean that the concept of a forbidden word had lost all meaning in the future post-scarcity society with strong civil rights.
So, in my head-canon, people in the future who do curse, do so as an academic hobby.
They’ve actively studied what combinations of words would have caused alarm in a chosen century of history, and then use those words. Anyone who reacts to the fact that they’re cursing, in my head-canon, is reacting to the fact that they clearly intended to curse, having studied how to do so, and were looking for a reaction.
I suppose, but it’s not presented that way in the dialogue:
SPOCK: Admiral, may I ask you a question?
KIRK: Spock, don’t call me Admiral. …You used to call me Jim. Don’t you remember? Jim. …What’s your question?
SPOCK: Your use of language has altered since our arrival. It is currently laced with, …shall I say, …more colourful metaphors. ‘Double dumb ass on you’ …and so forth.
KIRK: You mean profanity. That’s simply the way they talk here. Nobody pays any attention to you if you don’t swear every other word. You’ll find it in all the literature of the period.
SPOCK: For example?
KIRK: Oh, the collective works of Jacqueline Susann. The novels of Harold Robbins.
SPOCK: Ah! …‘The giants’.
(Sorry about the bad transcript, it was the first one I could find.)
I wouldn’t exactly call either Jaqueline Susann or Harold Robins to be examples of authors known to have excessive swearing in their books. The problem is that the punchline doesn’t work unless it’s those sort of authors and not authors of the time who did have extremely sweary books, like John Irving. So it makes it sound like everyone in the 23rd century is a prude who basically doesn’t swear.
And Kirk not understanding how ‘dumbass’ worked kind of cemented that in.
In my head-canon, it’s boredom, not prudishness, that caused swearing to die out.
Almost no one in the future swears because it’s not any fun anymore, because almost no one else cares.
This allows for i.e. Mariner being intentionally fluent in 20th century swears, and command crew around Mariner reacting - not because anyone cares in the 24th century about those words, but only because they know Mariner explicitly intentionally chose those words to cause annoyance.
It also allows Kirk, another academically minded rebel, to have some poorly researched idea how to swear in the 29th century, while Spock is genuinely confused at encountering a long dead way of speaking.
Yeah, but it didn’t die out. Not just Mariner and T’Ana swear. There’s plenty of swearing in Discovery and SNW. It’s been retconned and rightly so.
Edit: And Raffi swears in Picard as well. And then there’s Data’s “oh shit” when the Enterprise crashes in Generations. Plus, you know McCoy swore as much as T’Ana did, they just couldn’t broadcast it.
Yeah. Bones absolutely was meant to swear like a sailor, and couldn’t get out part the censors.
This all still fits my head-canon, in case it helps you enjoy Trek IV more.
In my head canon, It’s not that swearing died out. What died off is any particular words being exceptional or able to cause offense.
Spock is confused in the 20th century, because the angry man expected a reaction to his swearing.
A typical angry 24th century person wouldn’t waste their energy adding swears when truly angry, because the swears don’t bring any additional reaction.
We do see some evidence of this in other Trek - 24th century people (at least federation officers) are often shown to get very articulate, when angry.
So I attribute Spock’s confusion to encountering a 20th century person who became less articulate, when angered. Then Kirk has to try to explain that the selected (less specific) words carry 20th century cultural significance.
Very hard disagree from me. I find it to be one of the most fun Star Trek movies, and by the metrics, most fans agree. This is the first time that I encounter someone that suggests that Star Trek IV would be unpopular.
OK, certainly this season now follows all previous seasons and Picard. After half the season the writing drifts off from good start into eh whatever.
Nice surprise I found was “Captain” Rhys! Damn he looked fly as hell in that chair!
But the episode itself, what’s going on with that library. So it changes location every 50 years but also is in the badlands for a century already. It seems to have relations to all kinds of species, but also is kind of secret. They have strict rules against misbehaving. But when a big bad ship with heavy weaponry comes along, they are helpless. Ah and almost forgot, they require you have that metal slip to even get there, but the Breen are welcome without it if they are nice. So much promise with it and so poorly written.
Don’t get me started on Moll and her takeover of Breen society, like what. Most xenophobic race ever and its that easy to turn the average Breen? Not believable.
Should it still be considered breaking the Prime Directive if you are fixing/adjusting the work of another advanced culture which previously infected a world’s advancement and beliefs? Also, for it to have been perpetrated by the Denobulans is just upsetting. On “Dear Doctor” (ENT s1e13) Dr. Phlox, a Denobulan, explains how the actions of Archer’s crew would drastically change the historical and cultural outcome of a planet.
I was fine with them. They weren’t my favorite episodes, but as @zero_spelled_with_an_ecks mentions, it offers a different facet of the character. The idea of the stern, “stuffy” Picard indulging in 1940s American noir roleplay is amusing to me. It’s one of those things that’d come up in one of those awful “two truths and a lie” icebreaker activities.
Part of me likes that we’re getting some Breen lore, part of me is worried that spending more time inside Breen culture takes away some of the inscrutability and unpredictability that made them so menacing in DS9, and part of me is a little disappointed they didn’t go with the Typhon Pact “there are actually five different species all pretending to be the same Breen” interpretation, because that always made me giggle. But all of me fukken loves one thing:
Michael’s short little throwaway “wait, you’re Breen?” to L’ak pretty heavily implies that this is the first Breen anyone has seen without an encounter suit in over a thousand years. Way to go, Breen!
part of me is a little disappointed they didn’t go with the Typhon Pact “there are actually five different species all pretending to be the same Breen” interpretation
That would be suspiciously close to what the Xindi were in Enterprise, so I don’t think that would have been a good idea.
The instances hosting active Star Trek communities didn’t exist during the previous season of Discovery, so Lemmy isn’t a great way to gauge relative interest.
On Reddit, the /r/startrek discussion thread for 4x02 has 1.1k comments and 4x03 has 600 comments while the thread for 5x03 only has about 400 comments. This seems to support your hypothesis.
If you think about the range of organisms just here on Earth - from single-celled creatures like bacteria, or below that even with viruses that are just DNA wrapped in proteins, to other single-celled creatures like Amoeba (yes, that’s an enormous range still in just the realm of single-celled creatures alone!), to multicellular plants, animals, birbs (haha lolz we know those aren’t real!), and finally humans who can literally split and harness the power of the atom - then extrapolate that to the whole Universe in Star Trek, we don’t need to think that every super-powerful creature seen is a “Q”.
To an amoeba, already every one of the numerous forms of insect life on planet Earth is like a “Q”. In that sense then, Q itself was an oddity - not in being a race with that much power, but in choosing to even bother to interact with the lesser forms. After all, we do not do that, to the ones multiple rungs down on the hierarchy below us (or if we do, e.g. yeast, we don’t “introduce” ourselves to them, as Q did to humans).
I think it is consistent with Star Trek’s philosophy, especially in TOS, that we are not supposed to “know” everything, about the VASTNESS of the large, wide universe it is in:-).
startrek
Top
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.