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

A nuclear bomb that pool-balls the atoms just right so it works as a big replicator that terraforms a whole planet?

kinda like Spock being in love with Uhura?

Or Chekov being 17?

Or Kirk never having had a previous posting to a starship?



Yeah, it is, kinda cheap but on the other hand, trek fans have ret-conned far more difficult contradictions.

Consider this:
In Khan's day, the tech did not exist to identify this particular property, or it was never tested for;

In Space Seed, there was obviously no opportunity to investigate all the finer details of Khan's blood;

In this timeline, Section 31 (or whomever) have either not discovered this angle or have and have cloaked it in secrecy.

Also: McCoy is a golly gee-whiz doctor who has a reputation for miracle working (not unlike Scotty)and thus figured out something no one else had;

Also: Khan blood isn't an all purpose "cure-all" but simply effective on the particular damage done to Kirk.



In short, it's easy enough to rationalize that it was ever thus and we simply didn't know about it - which is, YES, a rationalization but no bigger one than a thousand others Trek-fans have had to employ in the past.

(like explaining the difference in Klingon heads for instance.

also assumes the ship can handle the stress.

also, we accept that Spock is so VERY god-damned-smart that he can calculate how to execute this wild-ass maneuver with such precision as to arrive at the EXACT MOMENT he wants.

I was speaking more to the fact that anyone with a warp speed ship is capable of time travel, according to Star Trek. Any Joe Schmoe can go back in time and fuck with things.

You don't even need a ship.

In "Assignment: Earth", when they intercept Gary Seven's transporter beam, Scotty remarks that a transporter beam with enough power can cut across not just the Galaxy, but time.

Gary then later makes some remark to the effect that the 23rd century is past tense to him, and Kirk's crew doesn't belong there, making it evident that he is indeed from the future.

So, if they pounded all engine power into just the transporter they could do it.

Yeah, whatever is in the new movie will be way dumber and less plausible than:

A device that can create habitable planets out of nothing.
A major character dying, being brought back to life by said planet, and having no ill-effects from his death.
A probe showing up out of nowhere, demanding to talk to whales, and being answered thanks to a spaceship flying around the sun to travel back in time to 1987.

You either buy in or you don't.

Not to mention that character being "aged" by the planet to exactly (or near exactly) the same age as when he died.

And when they boosted the warp engines for TNG, how come the D didn't go back in time every time they went past warp 2 or something?

Warp speed either sends you back in time, turns you into a lizard or gets you from A to B. Ooooookay.

Sure, that's a cheap gimmick. But, come on, now. Nowhere near as cheap-gimmickal as Black Hole Soup or Jesus Blood.

Because it's not just speed. It's speed in a large gravity well.

Maybe John Harrison will turn out to be the younger ?

Or his father?

Wishful thinking I know! But if a Noonien, or a Noonian, MUST be in STiD, I'd rather it be Data's "father" or "grandfather" than Mr. Roarke. If true, Brent Spiner must be livid.

The Genesis Device in TWOK was actually based on the idea of terraforming which is a very reasonable and scientifically valid concept.

It's all a reboot universe anyway, so really it's not the established character anymore. To be frank, this is why I give the time-travel bullshit as much crap as I do - because it was completely unnecessary and caused more problems than it was attempting to solve. So just call it what it is - bad writing. Abrams Trek is supposed to be a movie for movie fans, so it should get judged on that basis alone. And given the lazy, derivative writing that it has, and its sequel appears to have, I'd say that these are bad movies. "Star Trek" being slapped on there as the title has nothing to do with it, since it's just Space Adventure in Space anyway.

It was more or less like Berman & Braga wrote the last one, too.

Oh, but we know this isn't true as he heals some diseased kid to blackmail some starfleet officer and his blood also brings a tribble back from the dead.

Seems like a cure-all to me.

"It's NOT my fault if STiD turns out to be a lemon. It's 's fault!"

You CAN'T be serious.

I'm gonna file this under "JC purposely fucks with people in order to get a rise" given you are prone to that.

in a day?

Yeah.

If THAT is reasonable, then so is the idea of genetically altered blood being able to revive the dead.

illogical. Anecdotal evidence. Insufficient data.

I can be a fuckin' quesadilla-flavored purple aardvark if I wanna. You just try and stop me.

The sun hasn't the mass to allow for any meaningful time dilation via gravity, so they're using velocity. And that's going forward.

As for backwards, well even using the Godel model the Sun doesn't have the relevant gravity to create a time-like curve.

Terraforming is a viable concept. TWOK simply accelerates the timetable it occurs on for dramatic purposes.

Reviving the dead is not a viable concept.

Weird coming from a Christian.

Plus, certain circumstances IRL it's happened, so yes, it's a viable concept.

It just feels all kinds of wrong here and it's obvious the entire point of it is so Kirk can live. It feels like a plot train.

For example?

Google "dead man brought back to life" and you will find quite a few examples of it.

I'm not doing your work for you.

And death is defined as a "PERMANENT cessation of biological functions".

If someone is "brought back to life" then by definition they were never dead.

"Clinical death" is merely a term for certain biological functions (like circulation and heart beat) that are normally absolutely vital to life not functioning for a period of time.

Except that medical science can already revive people who are clinically dead in some circumstances, in ways that would have seemed far fetched 100 years ago. Why is it so hard to imagine a genetic mutation that can do this and more? There are people in this world who believe somebody died 2000 years ago and resurrected three days later. This is hardly something unreasonable for fantasy or sci-to.

[edit]
Damn it! Should have read Tamar's post.
[/edit]

The only time a Star Trek plot flaw really smacked me on the forehead was Picard choosing to exit the Nexus when he did* Worse, it's the set-up for Kirk's death scene.






*Hey why not go back to before your nephew died? How about when Soran was still onboard?

Yeah, but it's all good now.

The JJverse brought Kirk back, and Shatner is the future version of that Kirk, and that's the Kirk that showed up to the Oscars.

Star Trek has hardly ever been about hard science-y science fiction. The question is whether the gadget is explore as a cultural what-if, or whether it's a cheap plot twist. While I haven't seen this movie yet, the original Genesis Device was fully realized, from the cultural and personal positions of the scientists that worked on it right through to the personal consequences of its misapplication.

Three movies, well two at the very least, basically revolved around Genesis in its many aspects. That's not the same as saying "...and incidentally, the augment also has magic blood."