ST: WTF

Television, Movies Games and Books Star Trek
#1

[CENTER]Some good natured ribbing and fun discussion I would like to call-

[SIZE=7]ST: WTF
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Star Trek 4: Humpback Whale Karaoke Night

Part One:

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One scene I desperately wanted to see but unfortunately was denied was the ‘Frisbee catch’ scene. Imagine a young man tossing a Frisbee toward the camera, below an energetic dog tears off after it. Tongue lolling out in a classic doggie grin, grass flies into the air as the dog builds up speed, steadily gaining on the spinning plastic saucer. The dog leaps gracefully into the air and triumphantly snags the Frisbee in its mouth (this last part in slow motion). This victory is cut short when the dog impacts with the cloaked Klingon vessel; this induces a gong-like sound. The stunned dog falls down to one of the wings and then sliiiiides down the invisible wing. It lands unharmed in the grass with a little ‘yip’,Frisbee still in its mouth.

This would mean that latter when Kirk and his posse teleport from the Hospital and then lift off to grab the whales that the ship is surrounded by police, news vans, a land rover with U.N.I.T. printed on the side, Carl Sagan and of course Scully and Mulder.
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This begs another question, what happened to the cloaking device since the previous film? The cloak was so crappy in 3 that Kirk and officer ‘oh-my’ can see the distortion from it just by staring at the main view screen while it is in ‘high rez’ HD mode.

Did Scotty update the video drivers? Or switch to an NVIDIA GPU? Because now it works better than Predator armor; which makes no sense because in space a cloaking device would have very little to do. Where as in a frakking public park it would have all manner of things to cope with.

And why would you land the ship in the first place? If the ship has been beaten up by the transit around the Sun and is acting a little ‘wonky’ why risk an atmospheric entry? And then land the ship in the middle of a highly populated city where pigeons, kites, RC aircraft, homeless people or a Gay Pride Parade are sure to run into it. God I would love to have seen the Bird of Prey covered with pigeons that would have been hysterical!

And if the reactor is acting up and power consumption is an issue, then parking in orbit where the cloak would only have to be turned on low to hide from Earth’s primitive sensors seems more sensible than landing in the middle of a public park where you will have to crank the cloak all the way up to high; and then hope to God it won’t rain, or have a dust storm…

More to come.

Class discuss.

Amendment:

Star Trek is a great series which has inspired us and entertained us. It is capable of inducing social change, sparking debate and opening our eyes to injustice. But it also has moments that make us go WTF?!? This is what the thread is for. We can laugh at what was considered the norm in the 60’s, or plot holes, inconsistencies. Or things that Paramount or Berman did that infuriated you, or made you roll your eyes. This does nothing to detract from what it has accomplished over its long and illustrious career.

#2

I lurve this.

I just watched Voyage Home last night. It never occurred to me but I pondered, “Hey, we’ve got a time machine. How 'bout we go back 10 million years and grab from the abundant population of whales instead of travelling to the 20th century where we are sure to run into trouble trying to kidnap some endangered whales?”

#3

Yup. I just watched the TOS episode “Catspaw” last night…Star Trek has a quite a bit of WTF.

But, right before that I watched “The Doomsday Machine”, so you take the awesome with the WTF.

#4

If they had they would have had no fuel source to recharge the ship and simply would have been stranded there…they needed the nuclear wessles for that :slight_smile:

the WTF moments are totally a part of the fun of Star Trek and it’s own way of not taking itself too seriously though…

#5

Example:

In the famous episode “The Enemy Within”, which was written by one of my favorite writers Richard Matheson; there was a very weak plot point.

Down on the planet Sulu and the away party are trapped because the Transporter has been taken offline until Scotty can figure out how to keep it from splitting people in-two. Every time the camera revisits the away party suffering in the unending cold I kept thinking, “Why don’t you send down a shuttle to pick them up?”

Still it is a great episode, and most of the Twilight Zone episodes that I really, really like were written by Matheson. One of his books was made into three very different movies, Omega Man, The Last Man on Earth and I am Legend. He also wrote one of my favorite time travel movies, Somewhere in Time. Sure it is sappy, naive and has a major paradox in it, but I love it all the same. The camera work combined with that amazing soundtrack just gave me goosebumps when I first saw it, and well, I guess I am a sap for a good love story.

What was the Paradox you ask? THE WATCH!

It did not hit me until I had seen the film like… 4 times. I was admiring the watch and then it hit me, “Where the Hell did it come from?” Every time I ask somebody who has seen the movie that question it is always the same thing-

“Where did the watch come from?”

“The old lady gave it to him.”

“And where did she get it from?”

“She got it from him.”

“So again, where did it come from?”

Their face screws up in concentration, I smell a clutch burning and then ‘pop’ it finally hits them. They gnaw an their lip for awhile and finally, “FUCK! Your making my brain hurt!”

LOL!

#6

[SIZE=4]Part Two:
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[SIZE=6]The Whale Tank Fallacy

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One of the nice things about ST 4 was that the crew got to actually do something, sure the quests they were sent out on may have been a little flakey and not well thought out, but it was nice to see them doing something.

Example:

Scotty and McCoy go to the Plexiglas factory and after the tour begin to haggle over product and then reveal the secret to ‘Transparent Aluminum’. At first when I saw that I thought, “Transparent Aluminum, what a cool concept.” And then moments later I thought, “Why does it need to be transparent?” Sure later on I realized that no it doesn’t really need to be transparent, but because they had no money with which to purchase their materials the only thing they really had to trade with was… knowledge.

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Which got me thinking much later… Why do you need a whale tank? Other than to give 3 cast members something to do it really is pointless, is it not? You have a cargo bay already, why not use that? As mentioned in a previous post the Bird of Prey should have been left in orbit, so while there remove everything from the cargo bay that you might actually use; and then jettison the rest into Earth’s orbit. Being a Klingon ship there would be no need to reinforce the walls because Klingon ships are over-built, because Klingon ships are not multipurpose like Federation ships are, Klingon ships are Warships first and foremost. They are designed to take a beating and keep fighting.

And when you beam the whales aboard there is no need to beam so much Frakking water aboard either, just a few feet of water is all you need; after all it is only a 15 minute trip back to their time. In fact my idea would have made a really funny scene for the film, almost as funny as the Frisbee scene.

Scene:

Sulu increases the ships velocity as they near the Sun, the sound of the ships engines build in the background. The ship begins to groan as the hull is placed under tremendous pressure by the Sun’s gravitational tidal effects. It begins to shake. The camera cuts from crew member to crew member, showing the stress building on their faces as the ship shudders and groans around them. Objects shake and fall from their workstations. Some of them steal looks at one another, and each puts on a brave face to reassure the other. Cut to the cargo bay-

Scotty is standing in two feet of seawater wearing hip-waders, whistling ‘singing in the rain’ as he hoses down the two whales with water to keep their skins nice and moist during the trip.

LOL.
Anyways, the ship has internal sensors right? So having transparent walls is completely unnecessary when teleporting the whales aboard, the only purpose it does serve is so that Kirk and the babe from ‘Adventures in Babysitting’ can stand next to the tank and deliver their lines of dialog. Which still could be done in my version of the movie anyways… It just would have been done actually inside the cargo bay and while walking around the whales and interacting with them.