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Star Trek XI Plot Details Revealed
HotChk101 writes to tell us that the plot for Star Trek XI has been revealed over at IESB. This information has not yet been confirmed by the studio so take with the requisite grain of salt. Be warned link contains potential spoiler information.
HotChk101 and Star Trek? Something here does not compute.
Spock dies?
Who would have guessed an article that tells you the plot of a movie would contain spoilers? Luckily TFA has so many spoiler warnings that I gave up reading before I got to any mention of the plot.
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
So the author starts off the article by lambasting those who don't know the original series, and then proceeds to spend the majority of the article rehashing the "City on the Edge of Forever" episode and the Kobyashi Maru scenario. Oh, and has a few sentences thrown in about the new movie. Man, that was bad.
Clearly I forgot to equip my +5 Codpiece of Karma.
I'm getting pretty tired of prequels and time travel. This seems to have a lot of both. Don't get me wrong, I'll still pay to go see it and drag my wife along kicking and screaming to see it with me. I'll probably have to fork out for good dinner to get her to come along.
Who knows. It can still be good. Let's hope it doesn't suck or I'll get more resistance from the Mrs when trying to go to the next SciFi movie.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Harlan Ellison, who wrote the original TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever" was not at all happy about the rumors:
So either Abrams didn't get clearance, or the rumors aren't true. From what we know of Leonard Nimoy's involvement, I'd guess that it's the former rather than the latter. So either Abrams will have to pay Ellison off, or production will have to shut down since the WGA strike precludes any changes to the script.
This could really throw a monkey wrench into everything...
I was expecting to be disgusted and amused, but came away thinking that, for a big-studio picture at least, that could actually be a pretty decent plot with good writing and acting.
Plot: Kirk, Picard, Janeway, Cisco, and that guy from enterprise that nobody liked all get merged together in a transporter accident, not only fusing body, mind, spirit, and time.. but also...
A CAT.
After several days of bickering about which part of there personality was most dominant Tuvok and Spock have to do a threesome mind meld in order to seperate the individual personalities. After several intense shots of tuvok and spock both appearently giving birth(facial expressions only) they both suddenly stop and lock at eachother. Appearently in shock.. they announce to the world that the winner of this battle of personalities was no one but:
Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds.
Shortly after this serenity was seen flying off.
You may think this to be satire.. but with the cluster fuck that this new movie promises to be, I might actually wish they made mine instead of theres..
©Daniel M. 2007.
^ Just incase.
So basically, -1 troll/offtopic is really slashdots way of saying "I hate that you thought of something before me."
LET. IT. DIE. BONES.
Out of the 10 current films, three of them involve time travel with the intent of changing the present. Are the writers so bereft of fresh ideas that they need to go back to this stale premise again??? Gahh! Jar Jar was annoying, but at least he was original.
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Come on. We all know the curse of the odd number Trek movie. It has happened every time. While the Trek content out there has toned down a bit (there isn't a single active series out there), I still think the movie will suffer the curse of the odd number. I hope that it won't, but I just have this feeling that both the trekies and non-trekies will hate this movie. The trekies will hate it for changing the "universe" for some reason or another, because it is going to be a prequel, and doing that just begs to mess with the cosmic timestream, especially in a sci-fi universe with so much literature, movies, and TV series as Star Trek (this is one of the reasons why trekies didn't like "Enterprise" due to it screwing with the "verse"). The non-trekies will hate it because to them it is just another trekie film...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Is it just me, or does the whole test taking process Kirk has to go through sound like a ripoff of Ender's Game?
Um...I think someone needs to remind Abrams that we already did an "aliens go back in time to destroy the entire federation by attacking one key point in history" plot.
Star trek time travel plots have always been inconsistent and many times lame but this just takes the cake. Ohh-noes someones going back in time to kill the hero when he was a kid we better go save him.
It might also go hand in hand about the rumored series reboot with a new show (the idea of a new star trek show ware none of the events of the previous shows happened so they didn't have to worry about breaking the time line or plots of tos/tng like voyager and enterprise did)
With all trek rumors this smells more of fan fiction then real
Case in point: they're doing the Time Travel plot again. The only thing different about this one is that they're going through the time portal at the City on the Edge of Forever, instead of colliding with a "black star", doing a tight orbit around the sun, or imploding the warp engines.
Whoops! I just gave away the "spoiler"! Except that I didn't mention that Spock is traveling through time to save Cadet Kirk from assassination. Which isn't a "spoiler". It's just a plot summary like you'd see in any movie review.
Trekkies are so lame. Myself included!
SCORE!!!
No matter what crap they produce, just stamp "Star Trek" on it and they've sold tickets.
They won't stop producing crap until you stop paying them for the crap.
It's got time travel in it. It's 100% guaranteed to suck. That's why they had to include baby Spock
...to the plot of one of the "new" orginal episodes made by that elvis impersonator in his garage, newvoyages.com I think the site is. You can bet THEY didn't get Harlan Ellison's permission.
With JJ Abrams at the "helm" it won't be light years away from that anyway.
The Star Trek franchise has lost all of its appeal to me. Actually, it did a while back. I haven't seen a ST in the theater since the IV one - Voyage Home.
I prefer Flambe as apposed flamebait.
I've often pondered the idea of a series following a Star Trek group of sergeants. Like an away team, following orders. Not the sanctimonious, self serving upper chain of command. I'd much rather follow the adventures of some more regular joe's. One's who don't have the luxury of allowing hollowed ideals to get in the way of "results". Leave the captain where he belongs, on the bridge or in his stateroom.
Once the continuem got word that some alien was try to destroy their favorite playtoys- um, species, they would simply wipe the dude out.
What would the Q do without the painfully bowed legs of Beverly Crusher?
You just KNOW they sold tickets to watch all those Borg-Federation space-fights from a distance, like off-track betting.
Well being that the TNG cast won't(well probably won't and I think the same can be said for DS9 and Voyager) do another flick it stands to reason the easiest way is to go back for more prequels. Even though its a rather convient plot device, time travel can add lots of story lines that are too difficult to work out with a very linear time frame.
Insert funny smart-ass comment here.
Truly, they're boldly going where no Trek film has gone before - a *plot*?! Abrams sure has guts. I dunno is the hardcore trekkers are gonna go for that plot stuff. Maybe if he puts in enough phasers and green dancing alien girls, they won't notice the plot.
Not a BSG type clean break, but I'd like to see them find a spot into the future. Y'know, where some new writing could occur. Enough with the time travel and the continuity issues.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Hey, what was wrong with Star Trek I: The Motion Picture? I really liked that one, ya kno.
B.
Every experiment which ends in a big bang is a good experiment.
Why can't anyone write a friggin' Trek script without pulling out the old Time Travel saw?
I'd love to see a well written script that didn't devolve into time travel or strange-particle-du-jour emissions.
Why does it always have to be time travel? Have we exhausted all that can be done in a sci-fi script??
*sigh* I don't even know if this is an odd or even Trek any more. I think I've given up on Trek.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The biggest reason that Enterprise sucked total ass was because of time travel, the "temporal cold war", and alien space Nazis.
Paramount takes a few years off to let the franchise breathe again, and they come back revitalized with... more time travel crap?!
When will they ever learn?
The PROBLEM is that time travel does NOT change the present. They heroes fix the problem in the past and the present is the present again.
There's nothing moving FORWARD. There is no development or change. The entire movie could just as well never have happened.
Of course, if I'd dug out my handy roman numeral calculator, I might have spotted that it's an odd numbered film.
It's doomed.
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Plots schmots... if Sulu is really played by a girl, I'm swearing off Trek forever!
Mostly.
... the plot will be changed in:
1) Romulan war ships travel in time from the 24th to the 23th century to destroy humans
2) Federation invents a time travel scanning and anti-paradox device
3) The Federation sends it's fleet to the 23th century to stop the Romulans.
4) 15 minutes fight with tons of special effects
5) Biggest Federation warship runs out of ammo after 10 torpedos
6) Another 15 minutes of fight with tons of special effects
7) Romulans hits Federation anti-paradox device, creating a paradox
8) Everything back to normal.
9) Spock dies.
10) ???
11) Profit!
Seriously, they should let it die and make something new. There have been enough movies and series and so many (limited) plots. What should come next? Picards time travelling adventures? There have been enough and enough good time travelling episodes, that plot is over. If it's used more and more it will get boring.
On the other hand, Nemesis sucked and it was an even-numbered Trek movie. So maybe XI will make up for that by not sucking.
On the gripping hand, it may not be possible to produce a non-sucking Trek movie any longer.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Name her Sarra Konnar ...
...
... Spock gives a message to baby Spock ... baby Kirk has sex with Spock's hot mother producing some half-vulcan/half-human hybrid that may show up in later scripts ... the Romulan/Borg hybrid is defeated ... the Federation gets new Borg technology ...
Combine the Romulans with the Borg
Okay, new plot. A Borg'ified Romulan travels back through time to kill Kirk. Something about Spock's hot mother
That should be good for a few movies and maybe another TV series.
Fuck time travel movies.
The entire movie is turned into a XXX feature where T'Pol vulcanizes Archer...
But being a prequel, isn't this technically Star Trek Zero, zero being an even number.
Paramount welcomes its Quantum leap fanboys...
Star Trek 6 ?
There was a play out years ago in the Seattle area called "Star Drek" (or such).
It had the BEST time travel plot. It is TNG time and TNG crew is celebrating "Cpt Kirk Day". Picard is not happy. So Q changes Picard to an ensign and drags Kirk forward in time and drops him in as the captain of TNG Enterprise. It was very funny.
Move from the PAST to the FUTURE is a safe use of time travel.
Jar Jar was NOT original - 'he' was a parody of an African-American stereotype.
So long as they do not have them all in the same year at the Academy or even all at the Academy at the same time. If they have Kirk and Chekov or even Sulu in the Academy at the same time I am waking out of the theater.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
And time travel is handled so poorly. In the TOS episode they had to go back and find out what happened, so it makes since for them to go back and figure it out.
In the movie plot however, Spocks knows what the Romulan's plan is, so he could just go back in time right before the Romulan tries to go back in time and kill him there couldn't he? He knows where and when he will be, but instead chases him some place where he has trouble finding him.
Same with the Generations movie plot. If Picard and Kirk could come out of the ribbon at whatever time they wanted, they could have chosen a better time and place.
In First Contact, the Borg could have time traveled in secret, not in the middle of a big battle where someone might figure out what they were doing. They could also keep trying until they got it right - they still had the knowledge of how to do it even if that one ship was destroyed.
I don't remember much about the save the whales movie.
That is the first time i have EVER seen anyone say "on the gripping hand"..
:)
Kudos.
Tobias Ussing http://www.nearby.dk
There seems to be an almost religious fantatisism with keeping everything nicely contained within the same timeline of events at Paramount.
While not related, I had played through the Halflife 2 Epsiode 2 commentary and they mentioned something about the flashlight battery now being separate from the main HEV sprinting battery, and their argument was that they weren't going to make the game less fun just for the sake of a keeping bad game design decision true throughout the lifespan of the series.
That said, I've always felt this was the most compelling argument for allowing for new things to happen without always resorting to time travel: http://bztv.typepad.com/newsviews/files/ST2004Reboot.pdf
More Twoson than Cupertino
However if it had been another Next Generation movie, well, then there would be something to see indeed ;-)
Actually, the rule is "odd or even". At least in my experience.
Yes! I've got a brand new idea. Why don't they kill off a main character! That is always exciting and rarely done with this type of franchise. That should provide some fresh experiences for trek fans out there...
If time travel stories count as prequels and prequels count backwards, then "First Contact" was 0 and this one is -1.
I didn't want to leave this blank.
My three least favorite plot complications are time travel, amnesia, and anything having to do with a "prophecy."
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Why would anyone want to move the plot forward, or the characters to develop further? People are already super-invested in things the way they "know" them to be. These time plots are the perfect device for Star Trek--the characters and situations are already well-known and familiar to the hardcore fans. It's like that kids show Blues Clues, which shows the same episode every day for a week because little kids crave the familiar.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
They were the only ship in the system that could fly, and they did a "time travel" jump.
The warp drive was out of energy, but the cloaking device worked.
Kirk doesn't get laid!
Having watched about a dozen of them, I have to say they're easily on par with MST3K. Lucky me, I married a woman who also loves MST3K, and we watch these together.
Isn't that going to be Star Trek Online? Or am I confusing it with some other sequel?
Chris Mattern
Well, given time travel, then prophecies kind of come with the territory. It's just a matter of context really. I'm a time traveller, you're a prophet, he/she/it is a fraud.
I'd add to the list of annoying plot complications 'controlled by an evil alien entity'.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Paramount welcomes its Quantum leap fanboys...
They did that with Enterprise.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Oddly enough they married two sisters.
It's not so complicated, just renumber the movies! Lucas did it. Star Trek the Motion Picture could become "Star Trek IV: A New Hairpiece". The "New" Star Trek could be "Star Trek I: The Phantom Storyline". Look how much money this strategy made for Lucas.
Huh? We got a couple paragraphs copied-and-pasted from a TOS episode wiki and STII wiki, and that's the big spoiler? Are there enough desperate living-in-basement Trekkers out there that these non-news items still work?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Without reading anything... to THANK YOU PROFUSELY for posting that there would be spoilers and not revealing them in the headline.
Ellison deserves no respect. I don't give a damned if the guy cured cancer, there is very rarely an excuse to be an asshole of that magnitude.
As for you, fuck off. You're as bad as the Theo De Raadt apologists.. then again, Theo actually does something worthwhile, so you're worse.
More like Star Trek:Lost
I wonder if we will finally find out the origins of the smoke monster.
It needed more special effects and long quiet scenes where the enterprise hovers over a very large ship.
Harlan insults pretty much everyone he meets {particularly anyone who doesn't immediately gush over his greatness}. To call him an "infamous prick" would be an insult to infamous pricks. The guy makes Joe Eszterhas look like a modest sweetie.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Mark my words, this will be done right. We are coming full circle here. The only thing that could make it better for me personally would be if the episode started on the bridge of the enterprise D.
We have:
- Nimoy's Spock - probably the most loved and respected character across every Trek series, and probably the last time we will see him on the big screen
- City on the Edge of Forever tie in - one of the best Trek episodes ever
- Good old fashioned time travel without a bunch of techno babble - the Guardian is more mystical than techy
- Romulans!
- The Kobayashi Maru test - a character defining event for the good old Kirk
- No Shatner! He's chosen to become a parody of himself. His presence couldn't amount to more than comic relief.
And you know you can count on them to make the manner in which Spock must save Kirk a wonderful classic morality play as in Star Trek II.
I refused to even go see the last Trek movie, Voyager made me sick, and Enterprise made me give up. But somehow I am optimistic that the stars will align on this one. Here's hoping!
No. He was a complete rip off of Snarf by Larry Elmore with some annoying Black and White Minstrel Show lines tacked on and extra stupidity. It's a pity that Lucas never credited him and also made the character so annoying. Elmore drew the strip for Dragon Magazine and has also done a lot of impessive fantasy art. You would have seen his work on a lot of book covers, the sides of vans, t-shirts, box art for the Everquest game, box art for Tonka and Matell toys etc etc.
I'll wait for a decent DVD Screener-rip, without grayscreens etc. to come out on torrents, and for some other poor schmuck to download it and pass the DVD/CDs around.
Let someone else waste their bandwidth and optical media.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The curse will undoubtedly continue with this one. The weakest of the first 4 were The Movie and Search for Spock. Then came the laugher directed by Shatner, Final Frontier, did that ever stink. Then Generations, and finally, to hit an all-time low for utter crap, Insurrection. In between, they had some decent even numbered movies, but this one? Curse of number 11. DD.
Funny, I only seem to remember movies about time travel that I liked.
To each his own.
And just to piss you off since you obviously aren't going to enjoy the movie:
Yousa livesa longs and prospa.
If you can read this, I forgot to post anonymously.
Well, given time travel, then prophecies kind of come with the territory. It's just a matter of context really. I'm a time traveller, you're a prophet, he/she/it is a fraud.
I'd add to the list of annoying plot complications 'controlled by an evil alien entity'. Or how about an enemy that has you so outclassed, the only way they can be defeated is either through jaw-dropping stupidity on the part of the enemy or a credulity-banishing one in a million shot that never could have been made or some stupid-ass deus ex machina. UGH! Yeah, build the Borg into some big awesome enemy and they're so damn powerful, the only way they can be defeated is with a mathematical riddle. UGH!
Well I was walking down the street just a-having a think
when I met a snake of a producer gave me an evil wink
he shook me uo, he took me by surprise
he had a Trek franchise and the devil's eyes
Oh we wrote some scripts and I felt a change,
talent meant nothing never would again
Let's do a timewarp again! Deus ex machina again!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Of gods and men looks like a good movie series!
def greetings(x): return {'friend': 'Howdy', 'enemy': 'Dye [sic]'}.get(x, 'g0 4w4y, l4m0r')
Star Trek I was actually pretty good. All you have to do is lose the first 45 minutes of the movie. Get rid of Kirks pissing contest with Captain whats-his-name, no transporter malfunctions, no 20 minute fly around the Enterprise in a shuttle (I mean, it has a nice new paint job and all, but pleeeze). Just start after the worm hole bullshit, where the shit hits the fan with V'ger and your are in business. It might even be almost as good as Star Trek IV. Of course, it would only be about 1 hour long...
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
Can I ask: am I the only person on Earth who thinks the "City on the Edge of Forever" episode of TOS sucked? That, alone, is enough to make me avoid this movie.
Give me "Balance of Terror" or "The Doomsday Machine", any day.
Sit, Ubuntu, sit. Good dog.
Question: Which editors would Spock and Data prefer, and how does this reflect on the eternal battle of the editors and of the science officers?
Spock would be a vi user. He would admire it's elegance and simplicity and the emergent power. Spock preferred tools that were robust, reliable, and efficient, rather than heavily feature-laden. He'd appreciate vi's efficient and organized key commands and the single insert/command duality, while he'd consider emacs key bindings to be illogical and inefficient for beings with only ten digits. Same goes for the insert/command mode duality versus emacs cascading and overlapping sets of major and minor modes. Spock was also a man of action, who would go from a basic theory about the alien to a working prototype of a weapon to actually testing the weapon on the alien at close range as quickly as possible, and gladly revise his theory if the test should fail. A science officer like this needs to know the tools he has at his fingertips, and doesn't have time to go digging through endless help pages trying to figure out how to get his block indentation to work right.
Data would be an emacs user. He himself is an incredibly complicated and difficult to understand machine, giving him a different aesthetic view than Spock. The complexity of emacs' key bindings would mean nothing due to his super-human dexterity, not to mention he could probably run emacs natively on his positronic net with only a few percent of his resources used. While Spock frequently fell back on basic scientific principles, Data liked to use physics so advanced nobody had ever heard of it before he just created the theory in his head. This is part of why Data was a more contemplative science officer who would take the time to work out the ramifications of his theories. Multiply his apparent time spent thinking by how fast they imply that he can actually think, and it's not hard to imagine him spending what would be for us endless hours using M-x help to find features he didn't know existed -- just like a real emacs user.
So what does this mean? Well first, notice how most of Spock's problems with emacs are due to knowing his own limitations -- he doesn't have android-fast fingers or a brain that can run and interface with the editor directly. He requires simple and robust solutions because he can't carry a computer as powerful as his ships down with him on every mission. Data, a machine of complexity to match that of emacs, has none of these problems. While each science officer has their strengths as does each editor, it comes down to this: The more sophisticated scientist uses the more sophisticated editor. Thus do Data and Emacs combine to win out over all other science officer/editor combinations (as if there are any not mentioned that are worth mentioning).
You're welcome!
The enemies of Democracy are
Fascinating.
Yup...
Yes, unlike Dontsay Dick and Neverdone Jack of web-comic "fame," Harlan Ellison has an established and rarefied personality... which he earned the right to express through the feat of actually accomplishing something noteworthy.
I'm sure to the PC prissies that live their lives by the standards of Slashdot moderation (wherein any forthrightly-expressed or outside-the-norm opinion is "-1"), the legendary Ellison is nothing but a "troll" or a "flame-baiter" regardless of his accomplishments or status, while weak-sister geek idols who pathetically recycle the pop culture that others -- like Ellison -- worked to create are hailed as the paragons of cool.
Hypothetically, if any sane and literate person had to choose between removing the body of work of the penny-arc*de weasels and Harlan Ellison's from human history, it's really not a choice at all. Stymied cretins lamely pouting on the Internet over their perceived emotional abuse is not cause for support, or in a sane (or masculine, for that matter) environment, witless positive moderation.
Honestly, Sheepdot really sucks these days. To paraphrase Death, "you're all so fucking pompous... and none of you have got any balls."
The summary warns you about spoilers but you click the link anyhow.
*sigh*
Star Trek used to be so much fun. Now I don't even care.
Nothing is inexplicable; only unexplained -Tom Baker, Doctor Who
"Honestly, Sheepdot really sucks these days. To paraphrase Death, "you're all so fucking pompous... and none of you have got any balls."
Is that why you're posting anonymously?
After all, since he was still in the Academy, he wasn't trained enough yet to be hitting on some green guy's woman. I guess they were trying to kill him before he grew up to be a cop or a lawyer or a... OK, I could say singer, but that would be ridiculous...
That is all.
What's Harlan been up to lately? Last thing I know of him doing (besides 'City' & getting a creative consultant credit for Babylon 5) was the teleplay for his story 'Demon With The Glass Hand', which I liked. And that's been over 30 years ago.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
zomg they all invole space too! Clippy may have been annoying but at least he wasn't in space all the time!
GLORX 3:16
I loved how they stuffed 5 minutes of action into a 2 hour 23 minute film.
The best actor never got a credit for it. That being, of course, the Enterprise Refit. Beautiful ship, still my favorite Enterprise of all time.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Star Trek XI: Electric Bugaloo Starring Turbo and Ozone, and that one guy who break dances with hand crutches "Staaaaar date 3105.....can't seem to...... head ......spiiiiiiinnnn....." "head spinning is illogical Captain!" "SHUT UP!!! im going to PRICELINE.COM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" CAPTAIN OUT!!!!!!
http://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Academy-Collision-Startrek-Starfleet/dp/141650396X Go read this book. Its worth it.
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
Liked the latest even number didn't suck?
BTW I have never seen it after reading about it here on slashdot and how everyone laughed when data had to do a scene similiar to Spoke in Star Trek II.
May the rest in peace after Bermans bad career milked it to death. In my mind they are done as is with everyone else who watched Star Trek in the old days.
http://saveie6.com/
Where've you been?
Pournelle was using that on BIX (rapidly picked up by other Bixen) back before The Gripping Hand (working title "The Moat Around Murcheson's Eye", if I remember right) came off the presses, i.e. circa 15 years ago.
I've seen it a number of other places, too.
Or, was that a whooshing sound I just heard?
-- Alastair
Posting pseudonymously is courageous? Really? Aren't you just being swayed by the name Sheepdot bestows upon those who, for whatever motivation (and don't be so sure you know), choose not to create an account?
I personally know several cypherpunks who have risked -- and in two cases, endured -- jail time defending their beliefs, and whose courage is beyond compare. Take your simpering groupthink attitude out of this thread. You're offensive.
Ask Connie Willis!
If posting anonymously constitutes cowardice, so does fastening one's seat belt when in a motor vehicle or wrapping one's hands before a boxing match.
no no, i know what it is, i just never saw anyone write it before is all.
And i know it is really old, hence why it really surprised me.
Tobias Ussing http://www.nearby.dk
That sounds like an idea. You could make one a crusty-old veteran, give him a buddy from his war days (not a man who lead thousands, though, make them both clearly grunts), add in a pilot, and then populate the ship with boring run-of-the-mill occupations like a doctor, a preacher, a grease-monkey, a woman of ill repute, a mercenary, and maybe a psychically damaged teenager who moonlights as an unstoppable killing machine. Then you could have them do jobs just to earn enough money to keep the ship flying and themselves from starving. The jobs should be pretty freaking pedestrian, and you get most of your gee whiz points from the character interaction and development, not from the hook for the episode.
None of this "saving a planet, bah, we do that weekly" nonsense -- you'd have them ignored by the universe most of the time, make a difference in the lives of a few dozen people once in a while and, OK, maybe we can give you a bit of leeway for the series finale.
Then you'd dial back the technology. No more main deflector array of plot-hole patching -- the ship barely works. The doctor actually performs surgery, rather than merely instructing the computer to turn on the Magical Healing Device. Have him lose patients once in a while. Less photon torpedos. Screw that -- no photon torpedoes, their existence just encourages you to write space battles. It has been mathematically proven that you can't write a dramatic space battle. No phasers -- that encourages you to write bad guys who are not worth killing.
That show would rock. Too bad nobody will make it.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
So in straczinsky's star trek: rebooted, the three main characters all know the 'secret' that there is some mystical race out there in the stars that left clues about what when and how that they will find out more about this over the 5 years story 'arc'. And there are some 'dark evil forces' lurking out there plotting against them.
No!
The ST:TOS was so awesome because each episode was a completely self-contained short story. There was no 'story arc' to follow and no grand design behind it -- that stuff is why voyager, ds9, babylon 5, enterprise, and the bad episodes of st:tng sucked so badly. The old series was so great because it wasn't a soap opera, they were just independent stories set in a future. Sure there were common stuff like klingons and romulans, but only as plot devices to tell that particular story.
I give up my mod points to point out that you're not alone. Personally, I think it's the best, most grown-up ST film there's been. 'Wrath Of Khan' felt like it was made for TV, I don't remember a damn thing about 'Search For Spock', and IV was a kids' film with a couple of funny lines. (... there were films after #4?)
Warning: if you're going to buy the special edition 2-disc DVD of 'ST:TMP', there appears to be at least two versions out there. The sound/picture quality on mine sucks (scratchy artefacts on the picture, clipping in the audio), but some others have said their DVDs suffer no such problems.
Mod Parent +1, The Mote In God's Eye Reference.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Too bad the webcomic dullards were the ones who started it, or you might have some point. Ellison isn't an asshole; he just doesn't take shit from anyone. You don't see him attacking random people. He just doesn't like to be fucked with.
And the guy's a real character. His personality makes him stand out almost in the manner of a Hunter S. Thompson (another entertaining, interesting person frequently characterized by sheeple as an "asshole"). Unlike (e.g.) boring, vanilla, utterly forgettable, tragically-hip webcomic artists, he's impressed his name and character firmly into history. He'll be remembered.
Your forgetting one thing. If this "Villain" had already stepped through the portal, and succeeded, it stands to reason that the future was then forever altered, and returning to where the "Villain" in question entered the portal would be impossible since such events would no longer exist in the timeline. Didn't you guys ever watch Back to the Future Part II? Sheesh.
If the futuristic setting of this movie is removed, what is left? an very mediocre movie about political intrigue: a bunch of guys want to assassinate a leader of the opposing force in order to change the balance of power in favor of them. We have seen this a hundred times before; it's not real Star Trek.
A real Star Trek movie would be a movie which tackles with the unexpected, the mysterious, the alien; a movie which would respect Rodenberry's vision as expressed through TOS and TNG: a relatively peaceful galaxy, with many mysteries to explore, strange new enemies, strange new situations, things that stress the human imagination...
But that requires real talent, original thinking, knowledge of sciences and history, and many other things, which are difficult to find in todays writers.
I, as many other fans, will go to see this movie. But this will not prove that the movie is good; it will only prove that we Star Trek fans are hungry for more Trek. If the movie is not bad, it will be cast as a success...it will take a huge number of fans to deny it to make it a failure. And all this simply because it's about Star Trek.
Gets the plots in before the WGA strike?
They'll come up on something they haven't seen before...and they'll lose their transporter and warp drive capability. Then they'll take the (insert technobabble thing here) and reverse the (insert another technobabble thing here) to save the day with only seconds to spare only to end the movie with some quote from literature.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
Hey, Harlan, you finally figured out these intartubes things! How's the future looking now?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
A mediocre body of aging science fiction work is hardly an excuse for 40 subsequent years of insults, physical assaults, and frivolous lawsuits.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Mod parent up. This self-contained storyline mechanic is the hallmark of many good series. X-Files was great when they were one off episodes...the series began to drift once it became about the 'alien invasion conspiracy' that took forever to expose. The best sci-fi/fantasy series of all time never extended beyond a single episode -- the Twilight Zone.
;)
The Star Dreck universe has extended into space opera and has very little pure sci-fi in it anymore. The movies just make this worse.
Rely upon canon for factual consistency and characterisation for familiarity for your audience, but if you become a slave to it you stagnate. Time travel (bad idea) without consequence (worse idea) is a cliche that should be avoided at all costs.*
* Dr Who excepted of course.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
So whatever the call plot isn't really relevant I'd say.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
My three least favorite plot complications are time travel, amnesia, and anything having to do with a "prophecy."
Trek seems to be unusually burdened with a rather long list of bad plot elements; it's kind of what made Red Dwarf possible in the first place. Anyway, these are easily the worst offenders, and I couldn't agree with you more.
The time-travel stuff is what really gets me. There are ways to use all of these devices and not compose total schlock in the process, but this one gets abused the worst. Dr. Who had it right: time-travel has repercussions and consequences, and hence why it's a good mechanic if used in that context*. It's really pointless to have a time-travel story and not wind up someplace different than where you started, since it's time-travel. There's no fun in knowing that everything will be okay no matter what happens, which is what Trek invariably does.
Same goes for prophecy. There's foreshadowing, and then there's giving the whole damn thing away.
Amnesia works, but only if it parallels the audience's ignorance. You have to take away *everything* familiar (ship, tools, etc) rather than have everyone stumble around the ship for an hour until Geordi finds an anomaly in a log somewhere.
(*The latest incarnations of the series have left the Dr orphaned from his race since his home world was removed from existence during a temporal war. In a sense, this brutally shoved some older stories out of cannon since they now exist on a different/false timeline - now that's some good sci-fi!)
We just need to revise the theory to account for observations now that we're into double-digit Trek movies - if the sum of the (arabic) digits is odd, the movie will suck. This accounts for the Nemesis paradox, but will also require this new one to not suck, which doesn't seem too likely with this plot outline. Bonus - two non-sucky movies in a row in Trek 19 and Trek 20.
WAIT! I come from the future to tell you something
I don't quite remember, but I know it fulfills the prophecy!
What he was describing was more like Space: Above and Beyond than Firefly. Firefly did not really have "regular joes"; they were more like misfits.
No longer will you be deprived of your beloved Captain and First Officer. You may now salute each other with the Vulcan sign, "Live Long and Prosper". You can start those old recordings of Star Trek Danger music, you know the ones where Kirk is fighting for his Life and hairpiece. You can once again wonder how Mr. Spock Goes through life devoid of emotion, except when the Vulcan Sex urge hits.
Ah yes, the giddy days when original meant you were actually watching a hardworking scriptwriter/storyteller plying his trade by giving his audience a story that is both unique and original. How a Producer and Director feverishly poured over every shot to make sure that it was more visually exciting as the last and not to be duplicated by any other show or movie. How actors took to heart their roles and played them with conviction, sometimes being a little too hammy, but hey who doesn't.
Tis such a shame that we now have to drudge through another Time travel show with the cast of the Enterprise. That Spock must endure the humiliation of trying to save his best friend from the clutches of evil people by traveling through time. Having to endure a movie with a very young Kirk not getting the dancing green girl's booty or any other woman's booty and watching him cheat on an exam.
Ohhh the Horrors of incompetent and unoriginal writers and directors. We're forever doomed to ride the waves of time travel forever. All the originality has been sucked from the imagination of Hollywood. It's now nothing more than the home of $20 prostitutes and crack heads.
Actually, it's -3.
STIV: The Voyage Home is 0
ST:Generations is -1
ST: First Contact is -2, and
This abomination is -3.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Right you are. "Mr. Sulu, full reverse!"
Well, and I meant it was fairly common to see it in discussions on BIX (and some other places) after Pournelle introduced it. Haven't seen it that much recently, I'll grant you.
-- Alastair
Maybe you weren't aware, but "mediocre" means ordinary -- which means that anyone should be able to do it.
I'm not going to bother to ask you to come up with anything comparable -- you surely cannot -- but it deserves mention that his Hugos and Nebulas (which represent excellence in the field) directly contradict your amateur, emotion-motivated assessment.
The thing is, Wikipedia is edited by the same sort of groupthinking dullards that moderate Slashdot. Characterize Ellison's personality with as much abandon as you like, but the fact that a million other lemmings agree doesn't make you correct.
Wikiality invoked.
I hope the time travel haters are staying away from the new show Journeyman. I watched the first ep, thought it was "eh", but then watched the next couple over the course of 2 days.. it's a time travel show.
***** SPOILER ALERT *****
It was about saving whales.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Star Trek is about moving forward, not backward. And that is why prequels will flop. "Enterprise" didn't do too well because it was essentially a prequel.
I'm not sure how good this new movie will be since it sounds like a prequel disguised as a time travel story.
I hope they start making movies based on some really good Trek novels, instead of making up some prequel crap.