“Star Trek:” Why It Sucks (Part One)

In the interest of full disclosure, I really wanted to hate this movie. I wanted a passionate hatred to burn so deep within my soul that phaser-like beams would shoot out of my eyes and destroy the screen that it was exhibited on.

I did not hate this movie.

However, my not hating the movie is not the same as my actually liking it. Yes, the movie had a lot of stuff that really worked well; for example, I honestly believed that Chris Pine, Zach Quinto, and Karl Urban were actually better in their roles than the original actors. However, there were several major problems with it that flipped the little “suck” switch inside my brain, and those problems must be addressed.

I will go so far as to say that they must be addressed in a calm, rational manner. Thus, I will be forgoing my usual profanity-laden, snarky manner with which I usually dissect why things suck. This film’s level of suck, while significant, is not fatal. And besides, the fanboys have already been screaming to high heaven with vitriol and hyperbole. I will arrive at my arguments in a calm, rational manner.

In other words, pardon the pun, I will be addressing this film’s shortcomings…logically.

 

Part One: Time Travel…why it sucks.

 

I will be breaking my analysis and criticism into manageable bites by addressing them in separate posts. The second article of the series can be found here , and I will add links to future installments as I put them up.

People have been complainining about, and saying this film was necessary because of, the enormous amount of continuity that the Star Trek franchise has accumulated. I call bullshit. And I’m allowed to say that because I wrote for Star Trek. My DS9 spec script “Division By Zero” got my then-writing partner Joe Passarella and I invited in to pitch to DS9. None of our scripts made it to the screen (although one of our B-plots was eventually re-envisioned as “Take Me Out To The Holosuite”) but I was, in the process, one of the writers invited onto the ground floor of what would become Star Trek: Voyager. I ended up passing on the opportunity because I hated how the show’s staff squandered the potential that the late Mike Piller had created when dreaming up the characters and their stories. (I may write more on that at a future date; let me know if there is any interest.)

Thus, I’m one of a few hundred people who is honestly in a position to tell you that Star Trek has no continuity. What it has is a history. The two are completely independent. Star Trek has never been afraid of just ignoring the inconvenient baggage it’s saddled itself with, or just brushing over the little mistakes that popped up when some writer wasn’t paying attention. (For example, the possibility that Data had slacked off for 64 years after graduating Starfleet Academy — what a long semester abroad, huh?) We even have an acronym for it: YATI. “Yet Another Trek Inconsistency.”

In fact, the Star Trek front office, at least under Mike Piller, actively discouraged people from making continuity references. Writers were told that we should focus on telling our own stories and our own concepts, and continuity be damned. The producers would find ways to make good enough ideas fit into the history when needed, and when not, continuity be damned.

Yet, now some people are saying that the only people who have a problem with the new Star Trek movie are continuity freaks, and that that massive continuity was the reason a reboot was needed. Sadly, the producers and writers of the 2009 movie wound up hoisted on their own petard by trying to make the movie “fit” into continuity enough that they could then blow up all the continuity and start over.

And that’s where they made several huge mistakes.

Marty McFly and the Shaved Cat

In fiction, there are two major theories of time travel and its consequences, which I like to call the Marty McFly theory and the Shaved Cat theory.

The Marty McFly theory embodies the Grandfather Paradox, and claims that if you make a change in the past that might impact your life, then those changes will eventually catch up with you. If you prevent your forebears from breeding, then you will cease to exist. The Shaved Cat theory works around this, and states that no matter what you do in the past, you can’t change the fact that you existed to make that change. Time is resilient.

Star Trek subscribes to the Shaved Cat theory. Kirk and his crew were not wiped from existence when McCoy prevented Edith Keeler from dying because they were there to observe it. Kira, Odo, and O’Brien were not wiped from time when Sisko, Bashir, and Dax jumped into dystopian San Francisco because they saw them beam down. When timelines re-form after major disruptions they accomodate the people who make the changes.

The only major thing which these two theories of time travel agree upon, however, is that changes caused by a changed timeline only go in one direction. Ripples from bending the timeline do not drift back into the past. For example, if you were to jump back to September 10th, 2001, and alert the authorities to the hijackings in New York and Boston the next day, the consequences of that act would not bounce back and reverse the ruling in Bush v. Gore the previous year. Yet somehow the gigantic disruption of the timeline that took place in this movie somehow rippled backward and changed at least three major events before it took place.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

The Jim Kirk in the 2009 movie is an only child: the first and only born son of Lt. George Kirk of the USS Kelvin. In the Original Series (which J.J. Abrams openly admits he never watched), Kirk had an older brother, George Samuel Kirk (who he called “Sam”). Sam is not seen in the 2009 movie, neither on the ship nor on Earth. He is never referred to. In fact, I refuse to believe that Lt. George Kirk would not ask about whether Sam had been gotten off the ship when he asked about his wife, or at least tell his wife to tell Sam that he loved him. Some acknowledgement at least. Rumor has it that the kid that Kid Kirk passes on the road after stealing Matt Parkman’s car was supposed to be Sam, but his name was changed at the last minute to take Sam completely out of the picture.

Unfortunately, if you want to change history with a plot device, you can’t retroactively change something that happened four years earlier. Whether the writers just ignored Sam (as it looks from watching the film) or went back and edited him out (a retcon made with splicing tape) after the fact, taking Sam out of Jim Kirk’s life is not something that can be done that way.

There is one alternate possibility that occurred to me while typing this, however. In the original timeline, Jim Kirk was supposedly born in 2233, and Sam born in 2229. Yet the birth of Kirk in the 2009 Star Trek film is clearly stated to be taking place in the 2220′s. What if the child who was supposed to be born aboard the Kelvin in history was not James Tiberius Kirk, but George Samuel Kirk? Then, when Mommy Winona gave birth to the child who was supposed to be Sam under extreme duress caused by the events that screwed up the timeline, the parents were pressed harder than usual to come up with a name. Instead of defaulting to George Jr. (much like I was given my father’s name when the two grandfathers were arguing over whether I would be named Anthony or Lewis) they quickly picked the first acceptable male name they could think of: James. This also fits in with the Shaved Cat theory, which states that by traveling back and causing the time disruption, our timeline’s Spock has to be cushioned in his landing. He needs a Jim Kirk to make him who he became. Thus, since the genetic material that would have become James Tiberius Kirk was atomized somewhere along the neutral zone before his birth could have occurred, his destiny and name fell to the next best thing.

And since both Sam and Jim were played by Bill Shatner in the original series, we can easily explain away why people from the future recognize Sam Kirk as Jim Kirk.

You see the shit we’re put through when we’re forced to reconcile continuity? If the producers had just left the time travel crap out of the film, this could have been avoided.

Turn Pike

There can be no doubt that Christopher Pike was born before Jim Kirk. Pike was in his 30′s when he commanded the Enterprise in the original series (there is some obscure reference to that, I forget where). The new movie is set some time during where Pike’s first mission aboard the ship would have take place. Yet Pike is clearly older than his 30′s in this movie. This is especially disturbing because the actor playing Pike in the movie (Bruce Greenwood) is slightly older than Pike would have been during Kirk’s command of the Enterprise in the original series.

Thus, it looks like the effects of the time disruption knocked Chris Pike’s birth date about 20 years. Wow, that’s powerful temporal stuff. I can buy the distorted timeline causing Hikaru Sulu, Nyota Uhura, and Pavel Chekov being born earlier than before since they were all born after Jim/Sam Kirk to begin with (and the Shaved Cat theory would lend to the timeline putting them there when Spock needed them). But it can’t make someone born before Jim/Sam be born ever earlier than him.

Again, stuff we wouldn’t have to argue about without the time travel crap. We wouldn’t have to try and reconcile this.

By the way, in both timelines Montgomery Scott and Leonard McCoy are older than Jim Kirk. Fortunately, their stories are changed the least.

Except for…

That Fucking Dog

Scotty talks about testing his Transwarp Beaming theory on “Admiral Archer’s Prized Beagle.”

Jonathan Archer was captain of the NX-01 Enterprise in the 2150′s. With Star Trek’s medical science I can buy the idea of a 140 year old Jonathan Archer. I can not buy the idea of a 94 year old Porthos. Not even Phlox is that good a medic.

If the temporal disruption was powerful enough to reach all the way back to Enterprise time, why didn’t it spare us by wiping out the entire show? Or at least the second season?

And it’s all for naught anyway….

…because if you insist on keeping with continuity, then you’re screwed. There is no way in the Star Trek universe to create any significantly altered timelines. In the 29th Century, the Federation has a series of ships that are specifically used to maintain and preserve the integrity of the Federation’s timeline. The pretty ship you see to your right is the USS Relativity as seen in the Yoyager episode Relativity (written by Bryan Fuller, Nick Sagan, and Michael Taylor, three writers I trust more than the people who wrote the screenplay for this movie). They patrol the timelines and make sure that major screw-ups don’t threaten things. The destruction of a certain important planet (this is the last spoiler warning you get — that plot point gets hammered in an upcoming post) and the death of six billion people would certainly be enough of a problem to make a 29th Century Federation ship jump back to the 23rd Century, where it could easily destroy a 25th Century Romulan ship before it could even destroy the Kelvin.

So, either you throw all continuity out the window, or you’re screwed because the continuity is self-correcting. Unless you just ignore it.

“I hate temporal mechanics”

As I keep saying, all of these problems would have been avoided if the producers had just done what every other Trek writer in the past has done: say “screw continuity, I’m telling the story I want.” But they felt the need to use a deus ex machina to create their alternate timeline so they could feel free to do whatever they wanted and still claim that every Star Trek story afterward still happened.

So, that’s my first major problem with the new Star Trek movie. But far from the most significant. I just wanted to get it out of the way first because (a) it’s such a big gripe on my part and (b) it’s the only major part of suckage of this film that I think the writers and producers could have easily avoided. They probably aren’t talented enough to have avoided the other pitfalls, which I will address later.