And there are still, presumably, DOZENS of people on the Enterprise alone more qualified to command a starship than the guy that was 30 seconds from getting kicked out of the Academy.

It's possible that the whole Earth defense fleet got blowed up off-screen. But unless I'm totally misremembering, all that actually happened on-screen was that six or seven ships got blowed up. That's like four or five thousand people total, maybe a quarter of those commissioned officers.

Okay, so maybe Starfleet's small. Maybe that was the vast bulk of the O6-and-below officer corps. But if that's the case why promote Pike? The guy was clearly fit for duty, although he was still recovering. Even if most of the deployed officers were killed, it's not like there was a sudden, unexplained shortage of flag officers.

Okay, so maybe Pike's injuries were sufficient to take him off the line. The promotion to rear admiral was a courtesy. And maybe Starfleet really did need to promote cadets quickly in order to shore up the ranks. But Enterprise? They gave the brand new flagship of the fleet not to one of the surviving commanding officers — remember, the fleet was massing in the Laurentian system during the events of the film — but to a cadet who broke many, many laws?

That can't be hand-waved away. The only thing that could make it make sense is to postulate that Starfleet works on entirely different rules from any existing human military or pseudo-military organization. Hell, the Salvation Army has a more well-defined order of battle than Starfleet.

I don't really think you're in any position to complain about the way in which people disagree with you. I listened to two hours of people trying to enjoy a movie while you complained about the tiniest of nerd issues.

Kirk being promoted to captain makes perfect sense in the context of the movie. A bunch of officers died, Kirk proved that he was talented and a leader, so a decision was made.

Now, I'd understand your complaint if Kirk was, say, a Starfleet ROTC dropout or something.

Nero's shortcomings as a villain are well documented and agreed upon. I would have liked to see ideas for what a better villain would have been, but OK, that's fine.

What I take issue with is things like the discussion of the ship itself. Three people on the podcast thought the ship looked awesome, and one person didn't, so the commentary for ten minutes became about why that person didn't like it, which turned out to be 'because it doesn't look like a 20th century aircraft carrier.'

Don't get me wrong, I liked the commentary, and I liked that a critical face was turned towards it, but way too much of the commentary went towards you or people having to disagree with you.

Last edited by Gregory Harbin (2010-04-21 00:29:25)

Mod face:

Whoa, folks. Let's bring it down a notch here.

Based on the events in the movie, apparently all you have to do is stand in one spot for more than thirty seconds and someone will give you command of the Enterprise.   Most likely as they're headed out the door at a full run.   Aieee, YOU do it! 

As I said earlier, that struck me as amusingly odd from my very first viewing of the movie - it's like being captain is cancerous or something.  Hell, we even see TWO people voluntarily submit themselves to certain death at Nero's hands rather than stay in that chair.

Starfleet in general seems awfully lax about a lot of rules - I agree that the whole Bones-sneaking-Kirk-aboard injection scene, while kinda funny and slapstick, is also clearly court martial bait.

But even with all that, I have to say that I didn't find it outlandish that Kirk got the captain job.   Of course that's not how it works under normal military protocol, but there is such a thing as a battlefield promotion, even in our era.   

There are even such things as battlefield commissions, in which enlisted men become instant officers as a result of heroism or circumstance, without ever spending a day in OCS.     And the movie shows us plenty of hints that Starfleet is in *ahem* a bit of disarray that day.     

There's the additional wrinkle that Kirk finds out from Old Spock that he MUST become the captain, and has to do it sooner than he might have otherwise.  So he's got motivation to grab the chair however he can get it. 

It's also implied that when the crisis has passed, Kirk still keeps the job at least partly due to the behind-the-scenes machinations of Old Spock.

Again, while the details can be quibbled about, the general spirit is very original Trek - those guys were always breaking the rules left and right, it's just that they kept saving the galaxy by doing it and so Starfleet tended to look the other way.  Crazy kids.

Of course Star Trek is just a movie. But there's this whole spectrum of plausibility. If Kirk had sprouted wings and flown across the galaxy, I think we'd all be on the "not buyin' it" side of the argument.

I'm freely admitting that I'm the weirdo here. I have no problem accepting spaceships and suspiciously humanoid aliens and time travel and black holes that don't work at all like black holes, but show me a large, hierarchical organization that doesn't work like a normal large, hierarchical organization and I call bull. That's me, that's my quirk.

You know what I like though? Pie. Apple, pumpkin … mmm. Pecan. Yeah. I sure could go for a nice slice of pecan pie right now.

Who's with me?

Fuck me? Fuck you! All I said was that I like pie! You're the one who kept harping on the subject! I would have dropped it if you'd just let me have my opinion!

"It's just a movie" should be the Godwin's Law of movie discussions.

Of course it's just a movie. It's still worth talking about. "It's just a movie" is another way of saying, "It's not worth talking about." If that's your opinion, fine, but perhaps you should refrain from participating in a movie commentary forum.

And, as we've already discussed, Star Wars is a space fantasy. The nature of the magic beans is far different. That being said, you're right! The fact that Luke gets an X-Wing and is a flight leader instead of Wedge or Biggs DOESN'T make sense. And it's a weakness in the story of Star Wars. And to be stronger, there SHOULD'VE been some justification of why Luke turns out to be the very last, desperate hope of the Rebels.

Hey hey hey. Try and keep up. We're done fighting over TV shows and movies. Now we're fighting about pie.

All kidding aside, the large-scale parts of "Star Wars" were always the bits that worked least well for me. Even as a kid, I never quite bought into the whole "the Emperor's dead, the civil war is over" thing. I liked that story best in IV and V, where it was a few scrappy heroes and a menacing villain against the big backdrop of a galactic civil war. The bit that always piqued my imagination the most was that line in A New Hope where Tarkin says, "The Emperor has dissolved the council permanently." And then they spend twenty seconds talking about the bureaucracy, and the Tarkin doctrine. It's not gripping stuff, but it's fantastic world-building, because absolutely none of it is as-you-know. It's all setting, and it got real verisimilitude.

I guess I personally respond best to stories about little heroes in big settings. Cause that's how I like to imagine myself.

Now, back to the pie question, goddammit, 'cause that's what's really important. I submit to you, honored friends, that whipped cream is inherently superior to ice cream as a pie topping, and that it always will be!

I do not feel strongly about that issue!

Right, but my point in the commentary was that the the level of justification for your magic bean determines what genre your story exists in. If I levitate in midair, it's a fantasy. If I levitate after waving a wand, it's a wizard-style fantasy. If I levitate because I have an antigravity generator, it's science fiction. If I levitate because I'm actually at the center of a rotating space habitat, it's hard science fiction.

The neatness of Star Wars is that it mixed elements of fantasy and science fiction, but because it contains fantasy elements at all, it automatically lends itself to that common denominator of magic beans.