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| - that the stun setting kills, or conversely the kill setting just makes them madder?
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* Well how are you to know, if a species is not known to you, whether to put the thing on simmer or roast anyway? There will be many occasions on which you don't have time to try it out at the lowest setting and then say "Oh, hang about, that didn't work, just give me a second to try it on No. 2. There, now you're stunned, thank you very much." You either risk killing them or being reduced to a smear of grease yourself.
* On the TOS Type 1 and on the TNG "dustbuster" types the intensity control was right next to the trigger, so you could easiy increase the setting.
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* But you'd still have to give it a go first and see whether it worked. If it didn't you may have lost your only chance, hower easily you could make the adjustment.
* The new phaser (compared with Starfleet phasers in the original ST franchise) is less flexible and has a more complicated mechanical design. It's a change which can happen in an alternate reality/universe. Why the change? It could be for many reasons considering the process of military equipment design and approval in our own world. From within the lore of the franchise; Maybe the new design is more powerful, or it was promoted by important figures in the Federation. We don't know for certain. All we do know is that alternate reality/universe episodes in the ST franchise did show equipment differences between universes. And because ST 09 takes place in an alternate reality/universe, the equipment, ships, and people don't have to look exactly like their counterparts in the original ST franchise. BB ;-)
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* "Plus, what happens if the nozzle/emitter gets stuck partially turned around?"
* The Original Series seemed to have at least four different phaser settings: "stun," "heat," "kill" and "vaporize completely." It could kill without leaving a mark, or it could heat rocks, or it could make the target go "POOF!" The "stun" setting didn't even always act the same. Robert Crater in "The Man Trap" wasn't knocked out. "Stun" just made him woozy and his speech got draggy. It had to wear off. After that, it usually seemed to knock people cold for a few minutes, after which they'd recover quickly and bounce to their feet. Don't get arrested - even Seth knew that and he used to point at planes.
* This is so unbelievably trivial that I feel a sense of shame by even mentioning it here. The fact that Kirk and McCoy seem to have switched eye colors. I suppose the only reason it bugs me is that they very easily could have changed that to fit with the original actors' eyes, with either CGI or even two pairs of contacts from Sam's Club. There's nothing we can do to explain it, it doesn't matter in the slightest, but it just bugs me.
* In the film's climax, Scotty ejects the Enterprise's warp core(s) to escape the black hole. Okay, I can accept that it causes some explosion that alters space-time and allows them to get away. But if they eject the core, wouldn't that make the warp field collapse and have them fall into the black hole?
* According to some resource (I can't remember which), the Enterprise is actually ejecting some of its antimatter containment pods. I don't know if Scotty changed his plan the instant after he told Kirk, or if it was a writer error, but that explanation makes more sense.
* Spock Prime showing Mr. Scott his own equation...blegh. I know they needed it right then, and "cheating" seems to be a mini-theme in the movie, but it just strikes me as discordant that Scotty's famous equation won't 'technically' be his (well, kind of...). Spock says he hadn't "yet" invented it, but now he will never really discover it; he just kinda saw it. I know, I know, not exactly complaint-worthy...still, though, seems like he'd be just a little miffed he had that denied, regardless of the immediate "holy shit" reaction to seeing such an equation. (And this is coming from a guy who wasn't a Trekkie before '09.)
* Mr Scott pulled the same trick in Star Trek IV, so he technically invented Transparent Aluminium as well, instead of the (undoubtedly very rich) 80s engineer he gave the formula to. Give the poor Scot at least ONE achievement!
* How did anyone onboard the Kelvin know that the Narada was crewed by Romulans? In TOS it's established that no one has ever actually seen what a Romulan looks like, prior to Kirk's encounter with them near the Neutral Zone. It's not like the Narada has a distinctly Romulan design. If anything, they should have been wondering when the crazy tattooed Vulcans had turned up.
* Watch again; during the Kelvin attack, nobody actually references Nero's crew as Romulans. It's only once we've skipped forward 20-odd years that anybody mentions Romulans at all. This Troper is of the opinion that the Kelvin's crew probably did complain about crazy tattooed Vulcans, but were set straight by the Vulcans themselves.
* How much gravity does an artificial black hole have? When it's inside a planet, we see people on the surface walking normally.
* How is it that the Federation is made up of people from over 150 different planets yet the computer on the Enterprise still cannot understand a Russian accent?
* It can understand a regular Russian accent however I like to believe that instead of being an obvious fake he just has a very specific regional accent.
* It's a joke.
* Really superficial, but: why is Chekov's hair curly? Seriously, This Troper could deal with pretty much every military/physics/timey wimey situation listed above, but Chekov's hair is still bugging me a year later! It seems like an Unnecessary Makeover. I would almost even prefer the terrible TOS Monkees wig make a comeback.
* His hair is curly because hair is primarily composed of keratin, a protein, which grows from a sac called the follicle. Cells in the hair follicle generate keratin, and various other proteins, which become a part of the hair shaft. These proteins contain sulphur atoms, and when two of these sulphur atoms pair up and bond, they form a disulphide bond. If the two sulphur atoms in the same protein are at a distance, and join to form the disulphide bond, the protein will bend. On the other hand it may be because Walter Koenig's real hair has probably never been seen on screen anyway and asking Anton Yelchin to wear a Beatles wig is a step too far.
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* Like Shatner, Koenig doesn't have any real hair (or not much, anyway).
* No, making him look like Davy Jones would be an Unnecessary Makeover.
* It's a change which can happen in an alternate reality/universe. Why the change? In ST 09 Chekov was born after the branching of the timeline to the alternate reality/universe. Due to the "butterfly effect" (which was also shown in many ST alternate universe and time travel episodes) the actions of a few can lead to drastic changes in what happens to a planet or in the culture of the sector. - So, Chekov's parents in the alternate reality did not conceive him at the same time as Chekov in TOS. He is genetically similar but not identical. So, his hair is different.
* Why did the Jellyfish computer state its manufacturing origin was in stardate 2387 (the alternate reality stardate = actual year)? If it came from the original universe, shouldn't it use the old stardate system, not the new one?
* What old stardate system? In previous Trek productions, the stardates were just random numbers the writers pulled out of thin air. "Stardate 2387" might just as well be following the old stardate system for all the sense it made.
* True for TOS, not quite so true for TNG onward - although there was some oddities, especially with episodes that showed the stardate for events that happened years before TNG began a general rule was that the first two numbers remained untouched until a year (that is, a season) had passed, at which point it went up by one, and episodes in general tended to have stardates go up as the season progressed, rather than fluctuate widely as it did in TOS.
* What about all of the cosmic threats out there that wouldn't have been affected by the altered timeline? V'Ger, the humpback whale probe from Star Trek IV, the giant space amoeba, those Denevan neural parasites, Khan and his crew sleeping peacefully in the Botany Bay, the Borg, the Dominion, Armus (the tar monster that killed Tasha Yar), and so on and so on and so forth. Doesn't Spock Prime have a moral obligation to warn people to watch out for those? He can hardly claim to be trying to maintain the Temporal Prime Directive; the timeline is pretty well screwed as it is. If he doesn't warn people about those things, then he's effectively murdering all of those threats' victims through inaction. Not cool, Old Spock. Not cool.
* Where is it stated Spock Prime doesn't give the alternate Star Fleet a rundown of the major dangers they'll be facing over the next hundred years? We didn't see Prime Spock's debriefing at Star Fleet HQ. Of course, given how much the time line has changed, how much use that information will be is questionable, but there is no evidence he didn't provide Star Fleet with what information he knew.
* You're forgetting that Spock Prime could make things worse by warning the Federation about future threats. Not to mention that many of those events could have been butterflied away. And in any case, it looks like the Federation is much more prepared than it would be, seeing as Starfleet is no longer a scientific and exploratory force, but a peacekeeping and defensive armada.
* Also, just to throw this out there, there's nothing stopping him from warning them when the warning becomes relevant; there's no point in the movie in which Spock's knowledge of future perils would have helped in the Nero plot, so he hadn't mentioned anything at that point. Later, however, he can say what would logically need to be said.
* Two points: (1) Spock has never actually encountered the neural parasites, the Borg or the Dominion (on-screen) or Armus in person. How is he supposed to warn Starfleet about threats he knows next to nothing about? (2) Nero and his crew encountered V'ger in the comic book tie-in series of the same name. That right there is already an alteration of the original timeline. There's nothing that says all the future events will play out exactly the same way.
* How could Spock not know about the Borg or the Dominion? He lived through two (canon) Borg invasions and the Dominion War. It's absurd to say that because he wasn't personally involved that he would have no knowledge of major current events. The neural parasites or Armus (serious, Armus? For real?) probably aran't common knowledge outside of Star Fleet, from which Spock has been retired since probably before the start of TNG, but the Borg wiped out half of Star Fleet and the Dominion War was basically World War II on a interstellar scale. There is literally no way Spock could not be aware of those events in explicit detail.
* Spock did know about the Denevan parasites, they first appeared in "Operation: Annihilate!", episode 29 of TOS. That was also the episode where the Vulcan inner eyelid was introduced.
* The Kobayashi Maru. In the original timeline, Kirk reprograms it so the Klingons are awed by his reputation. He's cheating, but it shows he doesn't believe in unwinnable situations and intends to earn that sort of reputation, and turns him from a cheat to a potential hero. Here, he just turns off the Klingon shields. Again, it shows he doesn't believe in unwinnable situations, but he just expects the universe to go his way, showing him to be an entitled brat. I know the film's supposed to show him growing into a hero, but this level of arrogance just makes it seem like he shouldn't even have got that far in the academy, given that Starfleet's supposed to have numerous tests of character. There's "potential hero with bad qualities he can overcome" and there's "arrogant jerk".
* Um, I'm sorry, but is "disable the Klingon's shields" really more arrogant than "make the Klingons worship the ground I walk on and run away in fear"?
* Is that canon, though? I didn't know the exact way Kirk fiddled the KM was established. My preference is for the version in the EU novel 'The Kobayashi Maru', which I think might be what you're referring to (though Kirk's storyline in that novel isn't as good as Sulu's - "Foul, Menak!"). Either case it doesn't really matter - it all gets butterflied away by the retcon, and for me personally the scene is done perfectly, a CMOA candidate even.
* No, it isn't. "Disable the Klingons' shields" is basically a rejection of the actual realities of a situation. "Make me infamous and feared among the Klingons" is something he could theoretically control--and funny enough, he fulfilled that projection. Besides, he would also have made a point that people don't react to everyone in precisely the same way; get yourself a reputation, and people will respond to THAT first. "OMG, that's Famous Guy Who Kicks Our Butts a Lot" would reasonably cause someone to hesitate before engaging, if not make him suddenly remember that he needs to go wash his goldfish.
* I got the feeling it was more a protest than anything else; Kirk doesn't believe in a no-win scenario, and doesn't like the fact that the Academy a test specifically programmed to be unwinnable.
* Exactly. I thought the entire thing was stupid. If the aim was to see how cadets react to the situation (similar to the tests in Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet; some test trustworthiness, for example) and how they improvise, then it makes sense. If the aim is to teach cadets to feel fear, then it fails, because there's no way you can feel fear when you're completely safe.
* The real purpose of the test is to make sure the cadet doesn't freeze up with indecision and do nothing. A CO will face situations where there's no good answer, but they still have to bite the bullet and make a decision. The fear to be overcome isn't the fear of dying, just the fear of getting the answer wrong and flunking the exam. (The test only works that way, though, so long as the cadet doesn't already know it's an unwinnable situation going in, like Kirk did - by the TNG era, they were using a few other secretly unwinnable tests to play the same role.)
* That answer works pretty well in the Prime universe; however Spock specifically states "The purpose is to experience fear; fear in the face of certain death." Either the test is stupid, or Spock was the one who failed to see its purpose.
* I'd chalk it up to Spock using inappropriate hyperbole, since he's still a cadet and, being half-Vulcan and raised by Vulcans, has a wonky understanding of human emotions anyway. As said, there's no way it can really create a fear of death, anymore than a grueling Halo level can terrify anyone into thinking they're going to die. Besides, fear of death might not even factor into it for some cadets; they can choose not to rescue the Kobayashi Maru. The most it can hope to simulate is the fear of failure.
* To be honest, I'd chalk it up to the test being stupid; Spock isn't even a cadet at this point, he's a full blown commander, and soon-to-be XO on Starfleet's new flagship. As he's the one who programmed the stupid test for the last few years, I'd assume he knows it back to front, so I'll lay the blame on whoever came up with it.
* It depends on how the test played out in the movie, which I can't really remember. If the only option was to go rescue the Kobayashi Maru, then yeah, the test is dumb and serves no purpose. And even if it's designed well, it only works so long as the cadet doesn't know there wasn't any right answer - Kirk already knew that, so his reprogramming the simulation was really a more honest approach than playing it straight (it at least clued Starfleet into the fact that the gig's up).
* Who says it's the Captain's death he was referring to? Someone is going to die. You either fear dying, and you fear letting people die.
* Two things: one, it is never stated in canon just how Kirk (Kirk-Prime, let's call him) reprogrammed the Kobayashi Maru test to be winnable, only that he did -- the explanation you're given is Fanon at best. Second, and more important, this is a different Kirk. Indeed, the fact that he's kind of a brat who needs to mature to become the natural leader inside of him is kind of his plot arc, no?
* It's not Fanon, it's part of the Expanded Universe canon. In the game Star Trek: Starfleet Academy the player is given the option to alter the Kobayashi Maru scenario by choosing to weaken the Klingon shields, dumb down the AI or make the Klingon captain fear and respect the player personally. Since the last option is the only one that works it is fair to assume this was what Kirk did too.
* In Star Trek, Expanded Universe (with a few exceptions like Uhura's first name that end up being given the imprimatur of canonicity) frequently has zero relationship to canon. Choose to believe that Kirk-Prime used one or another method to beat the Kobayashi Maru in your Personal Canon if you're so inclined, but accept that we don't know, because canon does not say one way or another.
* The Narada's incursion into the timestream obviously affected everything that happened after that event. So, what would happen if the Chris Pine Kirk and Co. went back in time to 1980s San Francisco and snooped around a bit? Would they run into Bill Shatner Kirk? And if not, then just who in the hell invented transparent aluminum in this timeline?
* According to the official explaination, yes. When the Narada went back in time, its appearance caused the timeline to split in two at that point, meaning Shatner Kirk and co would still be in San Francisco if Pine Kirk went back.
* Does that mean that when the Space Whale Probe comes to Earth in the new timeline, Pine etc will time warp back to the 80s where they might meet Shatner?
* One would have to assume Prime Spock warned alternate Star Fleet about the whale probe in advance and the Federation has a Space Whale Task Force hard at work on a solution for when the probe arrives.
* Given that the Romulans power their starships with minature black holes, shouldn't they have probably been able to do something to prevent this entire situation in the first place? I mean, it's sort of their shtick. For that matter, given that every one knows Trilithum makes stars go Supernova at this point, shouldn't most Alpha Quadrant factions have spent years scrambling to find a way to stop said novas? I mean, random Maquis almost did it to the Cardassians in Deep Space Nine.
* Well, given that Orci and Kurtzman can't be bothered to read anything other than what they have written, they wouldn't know.
* The only way I recall in a ST story that the creation of a supernova was prevented was in ST Genesis when Picard used the Nexus. But the Nexus is out of anyone's control and comes and disappears in one story in ST Canon. And in ST Genesis the Nexus uses time travel to prevent the supernova but doesn't affect the star. So, the Nexus is not a technology within the franchise.
* If ever there was a ST story where a technology was needed to stop a supernova it would be in ST Genesis. But there is no Federation technology shown which can prevent a supernova in the film. In fact in one timeline in the movie the Enterprise and all of her crew are destroyed by a supernova. - Therefore in ST Genesis the most advanced Federation ship has no way to stop a supernova. And this story is after TOS, the original cast films, after TNG series and a couple of seasons of Deep Space Nine.
* Until the red matter idea was introduced in ST 09 I cannot recall any technology in the ST franchise which could stop a supernova. If my recollection of the facts are wrong, please correct them.
* So, your conclusion that since "most Alpha Quadrant factions have spent years scrambling to find a way to stop said novas", they must have been successful doesn't fit the facts of the franchise imo.
* But in the movie it's established that black holes can do just that, and creating black holes is something that the Romulan shipyards seem capable of doing given that their warships are powered by such.
* Bottom line; ST O9 having the Romulans not being able to stop the supernova does not contradict ST Canon.
* Spock Prime's line of thought, put somewhat uncharitably: "I can't just visit Alternate Me and provide my knowledge to help save the day, because it's far more important that Alt-Kirk and Alt-me become Fire-Forged Friends. And the first step Kirk must take to become so closely bonded with Spock is to rub in the loss of Spock's planet, people, and mother to the point that he wants to kill Kirk. What Could Possibly Go Wrong??" My real peeve here is Spock's insistence on conflating the alternate characters with the ones from his universe, for example, telling Scotty that "you haven't invented it yet" and telling Quinto-Spock that "my customary greeting would be oddly self-serving". The thing is, these are truly different people, with different backgrounds shaping their characters! At best they have the same DNA, and in the case of people conceived after the divergence, that's not too likely either. On what basis can he assume that, for example, this Kirk and this Spock will work great together? (He hasn't seen any of them until Kirk shows up.) And Kirk simply must become the captain, because he's Kirk. Is Spock Prime in his old age just afraid of change and trying to recreate his glory days?
* For your first point: IIRC, Spock Prime urges Kirk to challenge Spock's authority not just because it's Kirk's place to become Captain, but because Young Spock, for all he tries to hide it, is emotionally compromised in the mission. People who are emotionally compromised tend to let their feelings get in the way of their better judgement, which can lead to them making mistakes.
* For the second: maybe so, but who are we to begrudge him that? Spock Prime is an old man trapped possibly about as far from home as you can get; several hundred years in the past, in an Alternate Universe to boot. He's been separated from everything he knows and shunted into a timeline that, for all it shares similarities, is nonetheless significantly different. Plus, his home planet in the past has been wiped out and there are hardly any Vulcans left. All he really has left are the memories of the past; his life-defining friendship with Jim Kirk and his experiences on the Enterprise among them. And lo! He has the opportunity to influence a younger version of himself to follow this path which ended up arguably making him a better person and defining his life. Why would he want to deprive the younger version of that? Yes, it's a (slightly) different universe and Spock probably understands this full well, but from his point of view it probably can't hurt.
* He could've also assumed that although the universe seems to be significantly different, certain events that occurred in the prime-verse could still happen. The last thing their universe needed was no Kirk and Spock to deal with, say, V'Ger or the Whale Probe.
* Inconsistency between verses that might not be accountable by the Alternate Universe:
* In TOS episode The Immunity Syndrome Spock is able to feel a whole ship of Vulcans die a great distance away from the Enterprise. Apparently he felt physically sick, nauseated, when he felt the combined shock and terror in the minds of the 400 Vulcans on that ship. If this was continued in the new verse couldn’t it be assumed that the Vulcans would have some sort of physical reaction to the multitude of individuals’ combined reaction to their imminent death? (Could it also be assumed that the physical feelings could be amplified by the increased number of imminent deaths? Or is this just projection?) It was implied in the episode that this effect was due to Vulcan biology (or something that is particular to Vulcans). If it was biology then shouldn’t it transcend the Alternate Universe’s ability to change, as it usually only changes the timeline (with exceptions like personalities, relationships, technologies and etc. that the timeline could change in a short amount of... time.... {if they decide to go with evolution it takes a lot longer than the time that Nero changed}) changes?
* Who's to say they didn't? They just didn't bring it up in the movie because, well, we actually saw the planet being destroyed, so it'd be bizarrely redundant to have Spock say "oh, and I'm also feeling really physically ill from having watched my homeworld blowing up, not just because of the obvious fact that it's my homeworld and I just lost my mother and almost everyone else I ever knew, but also because of an empathic awareness of the event". It might have made for more drama with Uhura if they'd dealt with that onscreen, but as it is, we can just assume he did telepathically feel it happening and just didn't mention it because he's trying very hard not to lose control.
* Once it's possible to teleport people onto moving ships that are light years away from you... why do you still need the ships?
* It's a lot harder to boldly go where no one has gone before when you're essentially guessing where to send them with a teleporter (did you forget that it's first ever usage nearly resulted in one of the subjects drowning due to being teleported into a pipeline?), and as we've been shown on multiple occasions teleporters can and often do fail (The Motion Picture having one of the more gruesome examples), not to mention being easily blocked by practically everyone and their dog. Beyond that, ships have other uses, their function as a military force being among them.
* Okay, so the whole thing that kicks the story off is the red matter. But, it never functions the same. Through the course of the movie, it's shown to be capable of sending ships through time (undamaged), destroying planets, stopping stars from being destroyed, and destroying ships. Regardless of whether it had something to do with structural integrity or where it is detonated, wouldn't the pieces of planets or ships destroyed by said matter just appear out of nowhere in the past and cause more havoc (possibly changing the course of the whole story in the first place)? And on that matter, what detonates it? It seems to be simply contained matter, yet, only explodes when it touches it's target? How exactly do you create a detonation system to a blob? Even if it is supposed to detonate when leaving containment, shouldn't it blow up in the face of it's user? And it if it's a time thing, wouldn't they need to be an exact distance with an exact velocity? Or am I forgetting something?
* It creates a black hole when exposed to intense heat, like explosions or supernovas or a planet's core. Now, how this is used produces different effects. Drop it in front of a supernova, bye bye supernova. The star isn't fixed, it's gone. That matter, even if it ends up somewhere, is crushed into paste. Then two ships fly into it and travel through time. They have shields so they come out intact. Then it's shot into the core of a planet, devouring it. Again, paste. Nero's ship suffers that fate thanks to the black hole opening up inside the shields the second time.
* The shipyard at the beginning. What kind of space navy, even one only a tenth as organised and technologically advanced as Starfleet, build a shipyard on the surface of a planet? That puts it well within said planet's gravity well, and it's not like the ships themselves are necessarily designed to hold their own in those conditions...
* They're building ships to be stronger in this timeline so they're not only able to stay together in a planet's gravity well, they're now being specifically designed to do so.
* Is it just me, or does Sarek look more than a little like Count Chocula?
* Spock and every vulcan you see is... pinkish, for a better word. If their blood is green, shouldn't they have a green tinge? Would it have killed them to make them put on greenish lipstick and blush? Or was that too time consuming and costly?
* That's exactly why the Vulcans and Romulans in the rest of Trek usually have a greenish tint. I guess Abrams just wanted to break away from that look this time around, for aesthetic reasons.
* Young Spock does have green bruises after getting in a fight, and older Spock's face appears green (if only slightly) in the one scene after the death of his mother. Most likely it's just very subtle this time around.
* Where's T'Pring? Spock's backstory wasn't really affected by Nero until the main events of the movie. Why is he macking on Uhura? If by some coincidence T'Pring was on the Kelvin, she would have only been two so Sarek would have betrothed Spock to someone else instead. Spock's just a big ole slut in this movie.
* I think an even bigger question is why the hell was Spock okay with a teacher/student relationship.
* That's a bit of a taboo today, but it was much less of one even a generation ago. There's no particular reason to think it should continue to be in the 23rd century.
* It's taboo for a reason and even Spock makes note of it in the movie. A teacher/student relationship can attribute to favoritism, which is why it's frowned upon especially in militaristic places where promotion is highly regarded. This goes back to the main point of why Spock of all people, thought this was a super idea. Not only was Uhura his student, but she's now his subordinate. Your credit goes down the tubes when people find out you're banging a superior officer and you'd be resented for it, possibly even transferred to another ship.
* All taboos are taboos for reasons that make sense to a given society, but might not to the next. I would be hard pressed to think of any no indication anywhere in all of Star Trek that teacher/student relationships are a particular problem: as Janeway says in "Eloqium," "Starfleet has always been reluctant to regulate peoples' personal lives." (and frankly if one hangs around the corridors of academia long enough, one will observe that it happens plenty, taboo or not. I can't speak for the military, but I doubt it's unheard of). The film plays it like Spock is being a stick-in-the-mud and that Uhura is a freethinking woman who has made her choice... why second guess this?
* Uhura replaces a communications officer on the bridge because she's fluent in multiple Romulan dialects. This part makes sense, given the ship's requirement to know what the Romulans were doing. However, the officer she replaces apparently can't even tell Romulan from Vulcan. How would anyone get a position as a Starfleet communications officer without speaking the Vulcan language fluently? Given Vulcan's importance, it arguably ought to be a mandatory course for all officers.
* Romulan and Vulcan are similar due to their shared ancestry. He could understand Vulcan. What he could not do was pick out similar-but-not-identical Romulan speech in all the mess. Plus, given that they seemed to be short on crew at the time, maybe this guy just got shuffled to a posting he would not have qualified for otherwise.
* Why does the Kelvin getting destroyed make Starfleet scramble to make super-tough, super-sized Starships? Or rather, whey does it make them make their ships tougher than the original continuity? We know from TOS and various other episodes in later series that Starfleet lost ships before, and that didn't suddenly produce super-starships or militarism outweighing exploration in response to those losses. The Kelvin was just one lost ship amongst many, was there an Admiral's grandkid onboard or something?
* The Kelvin wasn't destroyed by some random superweapon or energy being or bacteria or any such nonsense like that. It was destroyed by Romulans. They knew this. One of the most belligerent superpowers in the galaxy just pulled a superweapon that could curbstomp a presumably top-of-the-line ship with no effort. That screams militarization. Same thing happened when they met the Borg and the Dominion in the first timeline.
* Alright, all of the points about how Nero could have used those twenty five years more constructively can be explained away by the fact that in the deleted scenes he was a prisoner of the Klingons. His reasons for hating Spock make more sense because he felt personally betrayed by Spock in the novelization. That makes sense. What doesn't make sense is why this wasn't included in the film shown in theaters. The audience could easily notice that Nero had plenty of time to avert the annihilation of his people but apparently did nothing. Why was this cut and left for the book? Did J.J Abrams think that the audiences would revolt over an extra fifteen minutes making things more comprehensible?
* Blame that on sacrificing exposition for a concise run-time with more explosions.
* Studios hate having movies too long because the "3 - 15 minutes" that would be left in otherwise add up, and the longer length results in it playing less times in the day. Snip a good 8 minutes or so out, and you might be able to squeeze in one more showing per day.
* Not getting into whether or not Kirk was correct in his actions, why was he given command of the Enterprise when he forced Spock to give up control? From the perspective of the crew Kirk not only assaulted two security officers when they escorted him off the bridge but had moments ago taunted Spock about the death of Spock's mother and what might have been 99% of all Vulcans. Even if Spock felt he had to give up command because he was being emotional that in no way meant that Kirk had any place in command.
* One can assume the crew stuck up for him after saving Earth. Plus, y'know, saving Earth. Kirk proved his mettle.
* The events of Kirk's apparent mutiny and taking command happened prior to saving Earth. Afterwards it might have been enough to get the entire thing swept under but why were they listening to anything he said before then?
* Kirk was named first officer, and Spock willingly removed himself.
* Why didn't Spock Prime go with Kirk to talk to his younger self? That would have sounded more reasonable than telling Kirk 'taunt my younger (and physically stronger) self about the loss of everything he's ever known'. He couldn't have been worried about altering history because Vulcan had just been destroyed by a black hole and Spock Prime is going to actively be a part of world anyway.
* This is explained in the film itself, by Spock Prime at that. He didn't come because he wanted Kirk and other!Spock to become friends, which would be less likely to happen if he'd just done the job himself.
* He sent Kirk to taunt his younger self until Young Spock lost control of his emotions, and it was done by bringing up the destruction of Spock's people. This was supposed to make them friends?
* Worked, didn't it? Prime!Spock obviously knew that however Kirk went about it, Alt!Spock would be forced to accept his feelings and get over it.
* This has been bothering me for a while, but why does Spock call Kirk "Jim" when they're onboard the Jellyfish? If you don't believe me, the specific line in question is: "Jim. The statistical likelihood that our plan will succeed is less than 4.3%. [interrupted by Kirk] In the event that I do not return, please tell lieutenant Uhura-" He's interrupted there, again, by Kirk telling him that their plan will work. Why this bothers me is that Spock doesn't refer to Kirk by Jim AT ANY OTHER TIME during the entire movie as Jim. It's especially weird to see it there when he refers to Uhura – who he's in a relationship with - by her rank and last name. It's just so out of place and almost feels like it's meant to bate the Kirk/Spock shippers (not that they needed it anyway). So, why the hell is it in there?
* Given the situation, maybe he just didn't feel comfortable calling him Captain or by his last name.
* A minor one: near the end of the movie, when they transport Spock to Enterprise, why is he standing? He was sitting in the chair. He should have emerged from the transport in the sitting position and fall on his ass. If the transporter can "correct" one's position, why didn't it work for Kirk and Sulu?
* Because Spock emerging from the transport and falling on his ass at a dramatic moment would have only served to satisfy nitpickers, get a cheap laugh at the expense of a character's dignity, and disrupt the flow and tone of the scene, all of which are bad writing.
* Why is warp travel suddenly this strange white-misty realm thing, whereas the shows pretty consistently showed it as simply moving through space with star-streaks (or debris-streaks, whatever)? Being in alternate timeline shouldn't change the laws of warp physics, should it?
* Evidently the shows' representation was inaccurate.
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