I Saw Star Trek Into Darkness

I went to see Star Trek Into Darkness last weekend, and I enjoyed the movie, but I have some questions for the writers.

If you haven't seen the movie, please do. It's good. And if you don't, they may not make any more Star Trek movies.  Remember, even a crappy Star Trek movie is better than no Star Trek movie.

I'm not going to spoil the whole movie for you. Just the first fifteen minutes, and this will summarize why the movie's writers are incredibly lazy.

The movie opens on a planet with red trees. There is what appears to be a temple at the base of a mountain. A figure in a brown robe bursts through the door and into the red forest with some sort of scroll in his hands. As he races through the forest, the planet's inhabitants chase after him, throwing spears. He races between the trees, and we see it's Kirk. If we spoke Hovitos, we might know what he stole.

Kirk running from the natives

A large creature rears up before him, and he kills it. McCoy appears and grumbles that Kirk just killed their ride. So they start running. Again.

Kirk, who risked his life stealing the scroll, hangs it on a red branch runs off¹.  When the natives see it, they drop to there knees and worship it.  Well, most of 'em do. The rest keep chasing.

Cut to Spock suiting up in a heat proof outfit, obviously on a shuttle. Uhura tells him to be careful, then drops him on a rope into a volcano where he plans to activate a device to stop the volcano from exploding, which would kill the natives on the planet. The rope breaks, the shuttle malfunctions and Uhura and Sulu are beamed back to the ship. Spock realizes he is stranded, but sets to work.

Kirk and McCoy run through the forest to a cliff overlooking the ocean where they Butch and

Sundance jump hundreds of feet into the water. The water is inexplicable deep there and they speed through the water to a submerged Enterprise. It's submerged so they won't be detected by the natives.²

Once aboard, Uhura tells them that Spock is stranded in the volcano. Kirk asks Scotty if they can beam Spock up. Nope. The water and the volcano require line of sight before transport will be possible³.

Kirk orders the ship to leave the water and rescue Spock, if the natives see them, too bad. Here's the picture of the impressive rise out of the ocean:

Oh wait! That's the Enterprise wising from the atmosphere of Titan!  Here's the picture:

Oh wait! That's from the ending where the Enterprise rises out of the clouds on Earth. (Not really.  Can you believe no one has posted that yet?)  HERE's the picture:

The natives watch in awe as the ship rises and streaks off apparently miles to the volcano. Seriously. It flies off to a small dot. Kirk ran that far from the temple.

Anyway, Spock accepts his death, sets up the equipment and spreads his arms to be engulfed by the volcano before it is frozen. Just as the volcano erupts, Spock is beamed up, and the device freezes the volcano.

Cut to the natives as the shaman draws the Enterprise on the ground, which fades to the Enterprise headed for Earth.

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¹ Obviously the scroll is important to the natives, which begs the question: Why did Kirk take it? What was so important about it that it had to be taken from the temple? Was that the primary mission: steal a scroll? And if it's so important, why abandon it? Did he steal it just to use it as a distraction?


² In the Original Series, every time the Enterprise drifted into an atmosphere, the danger was that the atmosphere would crush the hull like an eggshell. After all, the spacecraft is designed to contain one atmosphere of pressure from leaking into space. It's not designed to keep several atmospheres of pressure from getting in. And why submerge the ship to keep the natives from seeing it? Do they have such good eyesight they can see it in orbit? And why didn't the natives see the freakin' shuttlecraft flying into the volcano, for crying out loud?

³ That could explain why  Kirk and McCoy jumped hundreds of feet into the water, risking broken limbs. But couldn't they have stood on the edge of the cliff as Scotty beamed 'em up, er, down, er, sideways? He was pretty quick beaming Sulu and Uhura off a shuttle crashing into a volcano. Wait. As the shuttle plummeted into the volcano it fell out of line of sight. So, if they needed to be in line of sight to rescue Spock, shouldn't that been a factor in the mission planning? "Captain, we'll need to stay in line of sight of Mr. Spock in case of trouble." "Nah. Fuck him! I need a scroll for my cabin. Park this thing in the ocean. We'll jump off cliffs into the water."
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Something occurs to me.

Comics today tend to decompress the story so that it can be republished in collections. I remember a stretch of Superman in the late 90s. Somehow, Superman was stranded on an island of cavemen. On his way to the island, a whole issue was about him seeing a sea monster and fighting it. Next issue, he's on the island.

Someone on the Internet pointed out that in the Silver Age, there was a story where Superman was racing to rescue Lois from some catastrophe, and he sees a sea monster and deals with it in four panels. In the 90s, the whole race to rescue Lois took four issues, with the sea monster taking up one issue.

Movies, on the other hand, keep trying to cram more and more into the film. The opening of the Star Trek flick would have been a great episode on TV,

Oh, and did you notice the line "We'll use Mudd's ship that we captured last month"? That was from IDW's prequel mini-series, "Countdown to Darkness." You can buy it with the link below.

Star Trek: Into Darkness

Wow. On TV the ships are so durable.  In the movies they are so fragile.

I'm sooooooooo glad JJ Abrams is FINALLY making a movie where the Enterprise crashes on a planet.  It's never been done before! At least not with lens flare.

I miss real Star Trek. . .

Yes, I'm going to see this movie.

As you may or may not know, I am a Star Trek fan, and read all the novels. But I must confess that the recent string of Star Trek novels are starting to wear me down.

Beginning with Resistance, the Borg are Back. In this book, the Enterprise destroys a cube and learns of another one. Admiral Janeway tells Picard to stay away, and rushes to investigate. And in Before Dishonor Janeway dies destroying a cube.

For whatever reason, I missed Star Trek: TNG: Greater than the Sum, and instead dove directly into the Destiny trilogy, beginning with Star Trek: Destiny: Gods of Night. The Borg are attacking the Federation with an eye on genocide. They aren't assimilating anything, simply destroying worlds, killing billions. So far in the book, about halfway in, they have destroyed 5 or 6 cubes. Some insurmountable enemy.

Here's what I like about the book: it ties all the series, except the Original Series, into on universe. So you have Ezri Dax, Seven of Nine, and Picard fighting the Borg on different fronts.

Here's what I don't like about the book: The Borg are back. Frankly, there's no drama in their appearance. There's a lot of predictable Picard hand wringing, recalling his time as Locutus. And the borg menace reminds me of the Star Wars New Jedi Order. In that series, the New Republic is attacked by an invading force who manage to sweep across the Star Wars Universe conquering every world, and killing Chewbacca and Anakin Solo. Finally, at the last possible moment, and after billions of deaths, the invasion is thwarted. And that sentence could apply to the new Star Trek novels, too.

This invasion will end soon, and a new menace will appear, as Pocket Books brings Voyager into alignment with the new order. However, a new alien menace looms on the horizon and that will be the next arc.

Basically what I'm saying is that Pocket Books has stopped exploring space and started turning the Star Trek Universe into a space war series.

In 1984, Diane Duane's Star Trek novel My Enemy, My Ally was published by Pocket books. The novel introduced readers to the Rihannsu, and introduced us to the Romulan language.

I have to confess that I read this book five or six times in 1985-1986. I still consider it one of the best Star Trek novels ever written.

In 1987, she wrote (with her husband Peter Morwood) The Romulan Way, the story of McCoy's arrest and transport to Romulus, or ch'Rihan as it's called in this series. I didn't like it quite so much, but it actually had a Rihansu dictionary at the back!

Thirteen years later, Duane returned to the series with a two-book continuation, Swordhunt and Honor Blade. The two book series apparently left the Romulans and Federation on the brink of war.

I say apparently because it's been 6 years since I read the books. They were unsatisfactory, at best, and were meant to be a continuation of The Romulan Way. I have completely forgotten what went on in the two books.

Finally, in 2006, 22 years after this series began, Duane deigns to finish her story in The Empty Chair.

So far, I'm not terribly impressed. Duane is an excellent writer, but her habit of referring to Captain Kirk as Jim is annoying. I can't think of another writer who has done that, and this makes her books jarring when compared to the rest. The book opens as Ael and Jim prepare for war. We are dropped in with the expectation that we will know what is going on, and why. I'm halfway through the book, and there has still be no recap of the previous books. I could have tolerated it six years ago, but now?

I'm hoping Duane's skills will allow me to enjoy the book, but I'm not too optomistic.

I am currently reading the Star Trek book Crucible: McCoy: Prevenance of Shadows, and I am a little bit pissed off.

The book is exceptionally well-written, and is bold in its attempt to record McCoy's career and an alternate past where McCoy saved Edith Keeler, and changes history. But David R. George III's book basically resets Pocket Books' Star Trek history.

For example, in the 1988 novel Final Frontier, after the episode "City on the Edge of Forever", Kirk returns to Earth to mourn Keeler, and discovers his father's diary, and learns that George Kirk served on the Enterprise under Robert April. Now, 18 years later, that never happened. Instead, the ship leaves the Guardian of Forever and goes to Deneva to stop flying parasites that spread mass insanity.

Later, after the events of the episode "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky," George writes that McCoy never saw Natira again. So much for the 2004 novel Ex Machina!

Korax destroys the Guardian of Forever, invalidating the TOS novels Yesterday's Son, Time for Yesterday, the animated series episode "Yesteryear" and the TNG Novel Imzadi. In the aftermath, Kirk is promoted to Admiral and is excited by the prospect, and McCoy resigns from Star Fleet because he's tired, and not in protest to Kirk's promotion, as Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wrote in the adaptation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Spock's resignation is because of Zarabath, not because he failed McCoy who was kidnapped by someone posses by the katra of a mad Vulcan warlord and chronicled in 1988's The Lost Years. That might invalidate the remaining books in "The Lost Years" Saga.

Attention Pocket Books: Take a page from Ballantine Books, the publishers of the Star Wars books, and make all your Star Trek books internally consistant!

I have just finished reading Star Trek: The Manga. It was okay. Mike Barr's story "'Till Death" was a rehash of "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," or "Chosen Realm" except this time it's a war between the sexes, and it ends in Balok and Loki fashion. "Anything But Alone" by Joshua Ortega rewrites Enterprise's "Oasis" and Deep Space Nine's "Shadowplay." Chris Dows' "Side Effects" gives us yet another origin of the Borg. "Orphans" by Rob Tokar comes close to originality but brings mecha into the Star trek Universe in a Marvel Comics fashion. (Anyone remember the Loch Ness monster attacking the Enterprise? That was from the so-called "House of Ideas.") "Oban" redoes "Elaan of Troyius" with an cute animal instead of a hot asian chick. Micheal Shelfer's art in the Oban is passable, even though he can't seem to decide which incarnation of the Enterprise he wants to use--the Original Series version or the movie version, or he is just too dependant on his refrences.

Is it too much to ask that we get an orginal story?