It kinda makes sense that Kirk is there while Spock talks to his dad. Kirk is his best friend after all. It also makes sense that people present him with information and he makes the decisions. That’s how the chain of command works. He’s the Captain of the flagship of the Federation. He’s the decision maker. He bears the responsibility for their actions, so he decides what those actions will be.
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.
Oh man, when I saw Frakes name I had high hopes for this. Not going to write too much about the episode but I have no clue how they are giving this series a satisfying finale in that very last episode after this!
One thing though, what the hell was going on with Discovery when they tried to find that clue within the two black holes. They go in, get out of the two black holes, see the container and are like, let’s talk this over how to get this thing. Then the Breen swoop in and tractor that bucket into their cargo hold within 5 seconds! What gives? That was just needless incompetence. The Discovery crew is seriously not that stupid.
Why not having the Breen swoop in as Disocvery is attempting to escape. Then while Discovery is heading out the Breen grab the clue. Could have made up some technobabble about how some radiation from the black holes obscures Discovery from the Breen or whatever.
Anything else but what was shown. Damn. How is this so hard?
The entirety of this season was riddled with examples of characters acting nothing like themselves. Burnham outright says she’ll let terrorists get away unless she’s added to a mission, Rhys/Owo mention that people can cloak but they have a way to track them then never use it and get surprised after visually clearing a room, S1 Burnham during that weird time skip episode acted nothing like her Season 1 counterpart, Book had access to information that was said in Season 3 he couldn’t possibly have… It’s like they just let random people guest write every episode of the season.
Despite being a prequel, I think they are telling a unique (and imo awesome) story. We know the end result, but between the decent writing and S tier acting I think that this has the chance to be remembered as the best Trek ever imo. I may be in the minority, but having a hard coded ending shields the show from Paramount getting bored with it and forcing a bs ending. Even if they try, we know what happens in the end.
It’s just that the TOS prequel angle is exactly the way that Paramount can force some BS … because it’s the path to a TOS reboot.
We know paramount would want to do this (they’ve stated openly that familiar faces and franchises will be their future focus). And they’ve already played with the timeline. The episode with young Kahn establishes that we’re in a different canon timeline now, which means they’re probably feeling ambitious here about rebooting TOS in their own way. It need not cancel TOS, but just delay the timeline so that they can squeeze in their own pre-TOS TOS reboot.
From Lower Decks and Disco being cancelled, to Matalas heading the new Marvel Vision TV series (which means “Legacy” ain’t happening any time soon) … everything is lining up with the execs focusing on a SNW -> TOS reboot arc (for the cash).
From all of the reactions I’ve seen to the TOS characters in SNW (which I personally haven’t enjoyed because I like SNW and its own characters) … I think people would either eat it up or Paramount would be reasonable in expecting people to eat it up.
Even if the TOS prequel stuff eases, they’ve already laid the groundwork with Kirk now being an established secondary character and everyone apart from Sulu and Bones and of course Chekhov having been introduced (but they all come kinda later don’t they?)
I hope I’m wrong. But like I said, the moment Kirk appeared in the finale of SNW S1, however much I liked the episode, that was the door way for paramount forcing BS.
And just in case anyone thinks I just hate TOS … it’s not about that, it’s about moving on from TOS and doing new things, and also, frankly, avoiding the pretty under-diverse set of characters TOS had compared to what we’d expect today. It really would be something if all of the women in SNW were to be pushed out for the men of TOS, which, in my opinion has already happened in the episodes that featured TOS characters (notice how La’an and especially Ortegas have been underdeveloped here and there?)
As long as we don’t get a Mass Effect style ending, I’ll be fine. I’ve always liked Trek, but SNW made me love it. I love the acting so much that it’d take a lot to get me to hate what the writers are potentially forced to do. My only real problem with Discovery is that in the end it focuses on a single character, and that can feel tiring at best. SNW makes it feel like the whole crew is important with a story to tell. My head cannon is that whatever is written, Pike is willing to use 7th century cookware inventions to make his crew happy, and to great effect. I’ll never get over him giving a shit about the entire crew.
As far as the potential ending BS goes, I think the writers for this series legitimately have more respect for the franchise than to just make final episode simply “Pike got hurt and now can only beep boop in a chair like a boss.” The “minor” characters matter here. This might be me just fangirling, but I have huge hopes for SNW going into (hopefully) S5 or beyond.
Yea I suspect that this is where things will go actually. But I’m not sure execs can resist the idea of a TOS reboot.
I’m not enough of a TOS fan to know how viable it is, but if they can get a writer keen to write stories that don’t break canon but simply add to the original stories, I think the execs will green light the shit out of that.
Which is completely subjective and based off of your opinion. Moreover, I’m talking about the current season. There’s a reason I haven’t bothered to interact with anyone else on this thread slagging off the entire show. Not interested in that. The scope of the post is pretty narrow and obviously so.
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.
Egregious is the word I would have used for the very first season of Discovery, and that's when I stopped watching. Strange New Worlds is much more my speed Trekwise [the musical episode excluded] and am looking forward to more of that, and this new Star Fleet Academy show I keep hearing about.
Yeah, I’ve never been fully onboard with Discovery. The constant threats to the entire universe wore on me quite a bit. I’m definitely looking forward to more Strange New Worlds. It reminds me a lot of old Trek that I enjoyed so much.
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.
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