Star Trek
I just got out of seeing the new Star Trek. It was a fun movie but I think it's most noteworthy not as a movie but as a business decision. Here's my theory. (Fourth paragraph includes actual spoilers, but I encourage you to not read any of this until after you see the movie
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Frankly, I'm interested in seeing how this new mindset will deal with Klingons and other well known "Trek" icons. :D
Egan
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Right on. Given Abrams' past record for characters keeping and wrestling with secrets, it will be interesting to see how much the Old Spock lets slip about the various threats he knows are out there. Then again, it's not like he's going to mess up his own timeline by telling anyone, so where's the harm?
Imagine all of the redshirts he could save!
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I Spock may try to get the Federation to go visit V'Ger a few years early.
II Spock recommends a general quarantine on the whole Ceti Alpha system, leaving Ricardo and the Chippendales to rot in their broken down sand-covered homes filled with decaying rich Corinthian leather.
III Spock's rebirth is kind of a non-issue, with Khan left to rot. And if Kirk doesn't knock up Carol Marcus, then Genesis won't get developed with protomatter, whatever the hell that is.
IV Grab some whales early, before all those ships and planets get their cable scrambled
V Hey, maybe Sybok died on Vulcan too.
IV Spock sends a coded message to the Klingon high command warning them of the dangers of deregulating their lunar energy industry
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In fact, apart from all the things I didn't like about it, the idea of being freed from canon is extremely liberating: they can tell the Khan story for the first time again, or not at all (why do Khan anyway? I don't remember any eugenics wars in the 90s nor would a new audience). They can do a whole movie based on the idea of the mirror universe. Or dealing with the Guardian of Forever. Or whatever they want.
IV: Well, yeah, it would be pretty irresponsible of Spock not to mention to them to start bioengineering Whales stat. Or, hell, counting this flick Spock knows about 9 ways to time travel. Send a team back now.
V: Somehow, the alteration of the timeline by Nero wiped Sybock out too.
VII/Generations, etc: Come to think of it, the existence of the Borg is something Spock should mention.
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Oh, that's another thing that I forgot to mention. Over the years, Trek painted itself into a corner with conflict/resolution/conflict/resolution until every former enemy was resolved as a friend. This new movie opens the door to letting them re-fight all the Klingon and Romulan conflicts again with new outcomes.
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Romulans = Chinese, these quite dangerous guys off by themselves
Not the zeitgeist anymore.
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It seemed like they finally wrote a general script friendly to a wide audience, instead of trying to write niche scripts to please the really over the top die hard fans.
They also got to choose much better actors from the get go, instead of having to make due with whatever television actors they were stuck with. Eric Bana, Karl Urban, Simon Pegg, John Cho... that's a pretty good list, being that they were all backup characters.
And they also seem to have had a decent budget, which the first six or so flicks never did. And they got the guys who wrote the Transformers movie, which didn't hurt; taking a nearly-awful-yet-beloved television series with a very fixed backstory and giving it an update and a dip in floor wax... well done.
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Nemesis was particularly terrible-you could tell the writer was a huge fanboy. Every other line of dialogue had some pointless Trek continuity reference or other in it (and, God help me, I actually got them all), and that was about all the movie had to offer, because nothing about the actual story was remotely interesting.
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Then they had 9/11 IN SPAAACE!! and it turned into this big war show--but that was just kind of like a rehash of the Dominion arc on Deep Space 9, really.
Then they said the hell with it and just turned it into a show that winked at the fanboys with a ton of original series continuity references. Which was kind of fun on occasion, but only in this really niche way.
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