STbtM 037: Orbital Station Flyby

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McCoy, still holding the floundering Kirk upright, finishes his conversation with the shuttle deck commander, who says "As you were." McCoy retorts "As YOU were" in a huff.

They scramble aboard the shuttle which we see in flight with others in another beautiful CGI exterior, this time of San Francisco. My only quibble is that the shuttles look like composite overlays on a background shot, and the two were not coordinated, making the shuttle turns and acceleration look a bit off. We next see a LEO approach as the shuttles ascend from the atmosphere, while inside the shuttle, Kirk announces to McCoy, who is gazing out the window "I may throw up on you." McCoy, riveted to the porthole, replies in awe "Jim, you gotta look at this!" We next see a space station that must be really breathtaking in IMAX. At last, the shuttle zooms toward the Enterprise as the music swells.

As this segment is mostly scenery, I'd like to share my response to a proposal that Nero's insane hanging around for 25 years was "easily" understandable, since people can hold such feelings for their entire lives. I understand this focus is on the plausibility of holding a grudge for 25 years, but to me this deliberately misses more obvious concerns.

For example: if we were making a film (or any fiction) and place a bikini-clad female in a blizzard on Mt. Everest, it is fine to have her unhappy with an earlier weather forecast she received indicating tropical weather, especially if we want to portray her personality as over-reacting to other's errors. However, if she continues to ignore much more important and obvious things such as the lethal cold about to kill her, it seems inadequate, (to me), to put forward "she's emotional and illogical" as a justification for her gigantic, suicidal blindspot. The fact that she can hold this grudge against the weather service for the rest of her days similarly has no bearing on whether her actions meet minimum standards for average nursery rhymes. Anyone capable of surviving a street crossing to see our film will realize our girl needs to stay warm, or we must explain why she doesn't - like telling them she's Supergirl, for example. We would never compound this problem by making her claim that finding warmth was her primary motivation, nor that she miraculously located a warm Nepalese sauna a few feet away that could save her, nor would we add an entourage of blind followers - each of which makes her situation more like Nero's. I think real effort must be put forward NOT to see such things, regardless of how good the film looks and sounds. I'm even willing to put forward such effort in suspension of disbelief, as explained here, but the emotional, or intellectual payoff must have some minimal compensation, and random miracles happening to generally ignorant, often loathsome characters to put them at the start of the ST original series is insufficient. This low bar does not require an olympic leap to clear, yet over and over this very minimal standard was unattainable, apparently for the need to crank out a fast, cheap script, similar to what was seen multiple times in both Alias and Lost. Along with ST, I thought these really promised to be some of my all-time favorites based on how great they looked and the story they promised, but ultimately they had almost nothing but eye-candy with disturbing philosophies & world views underlying them, and could not fulfill their promise. That "almost" is in respect and acknowledgement for the occasional great segment, such as Spock's "gratitude" riposte to the Vulcan Academic Council - which was an awesome moment!

As for the dialog in Minute 037, only men speak.

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