The Official Red Room Bitch About Star Trek Into Darkness Thread! (SPOILERS)

Trek has bought people back from the dead before. McCoy in "Shore leave", Scotty in "The Changeling" and Kirk(yes Kirk) in "Return To Tomorrow".

In real physics, you are correct. In Star Trek physics, with warp drive and artificial gravity and Roddenberry knows what else? Nope, all you need is what was said on screen: the proper curve, at the proper speed, in the presence of a large enough gravity well.

So...Christ was never dead then?

Also..

Well, Nitpick, I don't see the word "permanent" as part of the definition of death.

And it's not "my work". There are too many examples to choose from so if you are really interested I told you how to find them, lazypants.

Welcome aboard to atheism, Dayton.

Your free toaster will be arriving soon.

Something, something, tachyons, something, something, subspace, something, something, iso-something.

Dialogue in "The Changeling" affirms that Scotty was not actually dead.

The wikipedia details death as by definition being a "permanent" condition.

And I never take seriously what an atheist says about the Bible.

You cannot use things you do not believe in as evidence.

So, do you think the world of Star Trek is real?



If not, there goes every single argument you ever took part in where you cited episodes or movies.

I'm not an atheist.

You can't have it both ways. Either Jesus died and was resurrected from death or you toss out the bible and everything you claim to believe in.

Which is exactly why we shouldn't be bothered by JJ bloodd doing things real blood can't.

Just because God did something 2,000 years ago in no way validates it being used in the Star Trek universe.

So, how are you on Aslan the lion?

Your the one who claims it's impossible when your entire religious framework in reality depends on it being true.

You can accept it as real, but you can't accept it as a storytelling device in a fictional story?

Troll.

Um... whaaaaaaaaaat? Dude. Dude. Have you reread your post and thought about it? I mean, really given what you wrote there some hardcore critical review?

No, we should. Because there's outlandish-outside-of-science-fiction, and then there's just fuckin' stupid. And JJ & Co. didn't just cross that line, they yelled, "Banzai!" and dived over it headfirst into a pile of cinder blocks.

Even if that distinction is important to you for THAT example, there are still plenty of others.

I think that's just become my new signature.

This is true, and indeed some of those other examples do not hold up all that well now.

I recently saw a TV interview with Harlan Ellison from sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, where he basically said: Trek was often nowhere near as good as it could have been, and to extend our reverence for the show into a cult celebrating its mediocrity is unbecoming. I think he's right. TV narrative and cinema SF have become a lot better since the early days of Trek; some of the bad episodes would be failures today much like JJ's first movie was a failure. (And indeed, some of the worst episodes were failures right away.)

but I'm not speaking of "Spock's Brain" here, I'm speaking of flaws in otherwise quality episodes which are simply accepted. Hell, The Search for Spock is a generally well regarded Trek entry (though hell and gone from TWOK of course) and the whole fucking plot is based on a notion every bit as ridiculous ans "magic blood" if not more so.

Oh, come on, now. I'm not saying the hyper-aging respawned Spock wasn't ridiculous -- but Khan Noonien Jesus Blood isn't even on the same plane of ridiculousness. To get that ridiculous, you'd have to retcon Star Trek: First Contact so that as soon as the Borg go back in time, Q shows up and undoes everything. It's that level of ridiculous. The only character save that's anywhere near as ridiculous as "Khan Noonien Jesus" was the nexus bullshit in Generations. The only plot device, in general, that equals it is the "we have to move 700 people because 20 other people want their planet" crapfest that was the entire premise behind Insurrection.

I don't think it's anywhere near as ridiculous, but that's not really my point anyway. "The dark lord has this volcano in his back yard that will destroy him if you melt his jewelry in there." isn't really a convincing design for a reality, but the plot works, and the world is interesting.

In terms of plot, death is interesting when it's about loss, and fighting death is interesting when it's about sacrifice. When you design a plot to culminate in a shocking death and then have a gimmick to immediately undo that death, you're undermining your own plot.

In terms of SF, life from dead matter, creating a world by destroying its current form, and powers fighting for a revolutionary technology are all interesting reflections of cultures and individuals in the face of scientific progress. So's the issues of augmented humans, and perhaps the movie deals with that; I don't know.

I think the biggest issue with Khan Noonien Jesus is that it all adds up to a big, "Just kidding!" Which, really? It's all leading up to a reset button?

Not to say Trek hasn't done it. Actually, yeah, there is a little bit of that, after all -- wasn't the whole point of the reboot to allegedly "give them the freedom to do new things"? So when are they going to get around to doing new fuckin' things, already?

But back to Trek already having done it -- they at least had the courtesy, in the case of Spock's death-and-subsequent-reset, to not bring him back in the same fuckin' film. They hinted that he'd be back, but they didn't pull the trigger on even hinting at it until after the other characters had had to basically come to terms with the death of their friend. They even turned it into its own story, and while the rapidly-aging-Spock was gimmicky, there was the McCoy-carrying-Spock's-soul subplot that, IMO anyway, really did pull enough weight for itself and the gimmick.

Anybody think we're going to get that kind of work out of Abrams & Co? Because I don't think they're even going to give us the cheese-ass "retarded replacement Data that'll BE Data in a couple weeks" that we got in Nemesis.

I disagree. In order to retcon magic blood, you need one sentence: "hey, we never knew that about him before"

in order to accept TSFS (or the two you mentioned) you have to suffer the whole ridiculous concept for 90 plus minutes. It's not JUST rebooted Spock, it's the SCIENCE fiction show building a plot around a Vulcan afterlife, it's the idea that you can PUT your soul somewhere else not only when you die but BEFORE you die, it's the idea that katra has to be at one specific place or it is lost forever, it's the idea that you can put it back if you happen to have the body handy, it's the magic protomatter candy that fucks up everything else but creates a perfectly functioning being, it's the whole business of not only aging him,but aging him to the very proper age he was when he "died", it's the tube "soft landing"...it goes on and on and on.

and that's AFTER you swallow the premise of the Genesis device in the first place.

In comparison, we have on rabbit out of the hat, which is - lazy though it may be - a wildly common trope.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BackFromTheDead

So noteable, it has it's own name:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AppliedPhlebotinum

did you not see, or did you disregard, my previous point on that (which may or may not have been in this thread)?

The plot is, and has been described as such a multitude of times by TPTB, about KIRK and his maturation from hotshot punk into the guy we recognize from TOS

Thus, the whole story, every beat, is about how kirk reacts, how the events and his choices mold him, and what sort of man ultimately results.

What resulted, if the spoilers are to be believed, is a man who recognized that his own arrogance had endangered the lives of hundreds of people under his command and was willing to lay down his life to save them.

The point is not remotely "OMG Kirk is dead! The horror!!" - the point is "Kirk is fully willing to die in order to save his crew"

Because KIRK has NO clue McCoy has some phlebotinum handy.

Once we know about the scene, we can realize it's been telegraphed for months. The same Kirk who refuses, at the beginning of the story, to accept the possibility of Spock's death is, at the end, willing to accept the inevitability of his own. Pike lectures Kirk about his choices getting him and his crew killed.

The movie isn't about Khan and it isn't about terrorism and it isn't about shiny trinkets and it isn't about tribbles - it's about the evolution of Kirk's character (e.g. the man's character, not the"character" as in the role in the film)

In that sense, what McCoy or anyone else does to bring him back is not relevant because Kirk doesn't know about it in advance.

This tactic doesn't sit well with me. It's fine as an outside-the-story explanation for the retcon of the character, but that wasn't my gripe, anyway. IMO, this isn't Khan anyway, because JJTrek was never connected to the real deal except by the names to begin with. So their Khan could be a Golden Retriever, for all I care.

But you'll forgive Black Hole Soup and Khan Noonien Jesus based on things which, while utterly ridiculous outside of Star Trek, at least made sense within that context?

I'm not even saying you shouldn't call those things out -- but how can you be any less firm in your criticism of Abrams & Co. pulling things out of their asses that are even more blatantly obvious in their ridiculousness?

Let me give an example -- here's a continuity error that runs from the end of Back To The Future to the beginning of Back To The Future II:

Near the end of Back To The Future, Doc Brown drops Marty off at home and then takes off down the street and time travels into the future. The next morning, Marty wakes up to The New Improved Family(tm) and just before he and Jennifer take his new truck out for a spin, Doc Brown shows up and piles them into the DeLorean.

Here's the first continuity error: Marty tells Doc there's not enough road to get up to 88mph. He had just seen Doc get the DeLorean up to 88 on that same stretch of road the previous night.

And then it gets compounded immediately when Doc gets the DeLorean airborne and hits 88 in less than a full city block's worth of run-up to the time jump.

Now that's a pretty serious continuity error, not least of all because the character watches another character do something which he claims the very next morning can't be done, that very thing being done less than a minute later. And the only reason for all that halfassery? Just so that the creative team could show off the car's new ability to fly. No other plausible reason for that clusterfuck of errors.

We could gaffe on that all day long, and that's basically what you're doing with TSFS. Yes, there's a seriously huge gimmick at work.

Now imagine Michael Bay remakes BTTF and introduces History-Reset-Bubble-Gum.

I won't entertain for a second the notion that you wouldn't be yelling, "What the fuck!"

There are gaffes and gimmicks and cheese-ass goofs that we'll entertain, but only if they add to the story, or at least don't rob too much from it.

Black Hole Soup and Khan Noonien Jesus blood rob from the story. They're what the writers came up with because they ran out of ideas -- and whether that's literally true or not isn't entirely as pertinent as the fact that, for a lot of people, that's how it looks. It looks like they got about nine tenths of the way through plotting these things and went, "Ohhhh, shit. What do I...? How do I...? Fuck it, black hole soup. Fuck it, magic blood."

That's the difference between bad ideas (Genesis planet) and no ideas.

No, I hadn't seen that. I can't really say anything substantial about that before I've seen the movie. I guess I feel that having a glass pane Vulcan greeting Khan-induced death scene in a second Star Trek movie draws the parallel so closely that the comparison becomes inevitable, and is clearly intended.

Beyond that, I think what I'd want to see for the gimmick blood to make sense plot-wise is to take seriously its effect on Kirk's assumed growth: What does it do to the man who was willing to sacrifice himself for his crew, when he learns that the universe will bend over backwards beyond all probablility, beyond anything he could have counted on, to save his life?

Does it humble him? Or does it turn him, who we've already established tends towards arrogance, to run into every hail of bullets that comes his way, sure that he just can't die? Or does it do something completely different? The possibilities are endless, but what I'd want to see is a plot that takes that closely averted death seriously, as opposed to employing it as a tacked-on twist that keeps the series going after the plot-enduced death of the main protagonist.

Neither is condemned or forgiven...itias what it is, both in the old incarnation and the new.

Goofy is goofy, then and now - JJ & his pets didn't invent it or take it to any new level.

A. It's not "more obvious and ridiculous" - it's merely more recent.
B.I'm not "calling out" the old movies except to offer perspective on your complaints about the new. I'm not Roger Ebert or whoever and I enjoyed all the TOS movies, there were even parts of TFF I liked.

You shouldn't take my analysis as condemnation.

Seems like a difference in taste to me.

If it is a deal breaker for you, cool by me. Just be as understanding when I say that a lot of us DON'T see the difference and that doesn't makes us "fanboys" or idiots.

it's worth noting that the Jim Kirk in TOS was a hell-bent-for-leather risk taker who could look back at 50 and say "I've cheated my way out of death" so if this guy does turn out to be that guy it would make some sense. But he would also be a guy who had learned he COULD fail too.

How is Black Hole Soup not more ridiculous? Maybe if it'd fallen out of the test tube and bounced around like a rubber ball while NuScotty got in a tickling match with Nero?

The Genesis Device was not equally ridiculous. That, at least, was a piece of utterly ludicrous technology rather than just... magic goop. They couldn't have made it any more laughable if they'd shown it sparkling in sunlight.

This is a well made point; unfortunately, it also puts the lie to the hot air they sold us about the whole reason for rebooting Star Trek. In order to reboot any franchise, to get it to the point where you want to start doing things differently, you have to establish the foundation of the reboot.

To the extent that you do, you're just retreading material that's already been done. To the extent that you don't, your use of the original property rings false. Remakes can work -- the 2010 True Grit remake is a good example. But it's also worth noting that the 2010 True Grit isn't so much a remake as a more faithful film adaptation of the source material of Charles Portis's novel.

Reboots, on the other hand, are generally sold to the fanbase of the original material in order to guarantee the investment required to produce them -- otherwise what would be the purpose in recycling the original property? At the same time, they aim for an audience that is explicitly not that original fanbase, which leaves that original fanbase feeling like they've been sold out.

Why didn't that happen with the Christopher Nolan Batman trilogy? Because Nolan was actually faithful to the spirit of the Bob Kane creation. Why did that happen with the Joel Schumacher Batman? Because Schumacher wasn't.

Star Trek was created for nerds. The revival of TOS is proof. The success of TNG is proof. When did Trek start to flag? When B&B took over, a "creative" team who frankly didn't seem to give a shit about the fanbase.

JJTrek The First will prove to have been an anomaly where its popularity is concerned, probably driven by its invocation of the property it's a cheap, cynical knockoff of We'll see if JJTrek: The Wrath Of Wooster proves that hypothesis, though.

Jesus Tapdancing Christ, are you nerds STILL arguing plot details on a movie THAT HASN'T EVEN BEEN RELEASED YET???



Get a fucking life!