Olivawgood name, isn't it?the foot of mt fujiRegistered Userregular
edited March 2009
I thought the Borg Queen was a bit lazy in that they needed an antagonist and the emotionless collective voice of the Borg ship just was not providing interesting dialogue
But at the same time, she looked creepy as fuck and had some good dialogue with Data and Picard
A "fascinating" from Spock.
A double handed power strike during a fight.
I will only accept this movie when I see all of these things.
Man, okay, I've been watching a ton of Star Trek lately. What is the deal with those double handed attacks? Is it some sort of futuristic fighting style that we're just not advanced enough to understand? Everybody does it all the time, and I just noticed for some reason.
I'm pretty sure it's a relatively easy stunt for the principals to learn, and delivered to someone's padded back it probably doesn't run a very high risk of injuring the person struck.
Also, it's a full body move, so it looks good and would do some damage if it didn't make the user's balls as punchable as it did.
Also, we need to show Spock learning the neck pinch (the writers decided to have him use the pinch because hitting someone with a rock just didn't seem doctoral enough, and figured a human expert would know where to pinch)
I'd just like to say I hated Undiscovered Country because it was sloppily written and had a lame ending and included a bunch of dumb characters and cheesy dialogue (not in the good way)
Admittedly I haven't watched the whole thing in like eight years but I sincerely doubt it was as good as Wrath of Khan or First Contact or even Star Trek IV
I am willing to cut any writer who touches time-travel some slack because it's impossible to handle intelligently
No. Nononononononononono. NO. I will not cut someone slack for doing something stupid because they couldn't figure out how to do it intelligently. If they can't figure out how to do it intelligently, they shouldn't be doing it at all. They do not get a pass for fucking up because they were too damn stupid to get it right
Yes, yes, yes
I am sick and tired of people accepting mediocre writing, even in Trek which (be honest with yourselves here) is generally not written very well. They had a big screen movie, why couldn't they have a solid plot? Did we have to have Worf yell "ASSIMILATE THIS!" and blow up a bunch of borg soley for the sake of the kids in the theatre?
Like I said, I enjoyed FC, I think it's the best TNG movie, and it's better than your average episode. I don't think it was written remotely well, and that's a shame.
I am willing to cut any writer who touches time-travel some slack because it's impossible to handle intelligently
No. Nononononononononono. NO. I will not cut someone slack for doing something stupid because they couldn't figure out how to do it intelligently. If they can't figure out how to do it intelligently, they shouldn't be doing it at all. They do not get a pass for fucking up because they were too damn stupid to get it right
Yes, yes, yes
I am sick and tired of people accepting mediocre writing, even in Trek which (be honest with yourselves here) is generally not written very well. They had a big screen movie, why couldn't they have a solid plot? Did we have to have Worf yell "ASSIMILATE THIS!" and blow up a bunch of borg soley for the sake of the kids in the theatre?
Like I said, I enjoyed FC, I think it's the best TNG movie, and it's better than your average episode. I don't think it was written remotely well, and that's a shame.
It's because it's time travel. It seems really cool but can't stand up to fridge logic, as any theory clashes with some conception of causality.
The rest of you, I fucking hate you for the fact that I now have a blue dot on this god awful thread.
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
edited March 2009
The minute any sci-fi show embraces time travel as anything more than a once in a million chance event like B5 did, it's a ticking clock to how fucked up the continuity will get.
Let me make this clear: I think time travel in Star Trek has really fucking ruined the franchise for me.
I was okay with City on the Edge of Forever maybe and hell even Voyage Home was alright because you had to risk being blowed up good by doing some warp speed shit around the sun. Not that it made any sense because they went from Earth to the Sun doing Warp 9.9 which in reality should have meant they left the damn solar system behind in seconds but dammit it wasn't an easy thing to do so it was okay.
But NOOOO, we have to have Voyager with it's shitastic 'present day' Earth episode and the whole Temporal Starfleet or whatever the fuck it was about. Which then turned into Enterprise with Nazi aliens. And hell DS9 had like 4 episodes based around Earth's past IIRC. And while most of those episodes weren't horrible, they didn't help much.
And then we have Generations which is the most idiotic use of time.....whatever the fuck that Nexus shit was ever.
Was there even a point to Saren's plot? Did it really matter that he go through all the trouble to redirect the Nexus towards a planet? Couldn't he have just pulled a Kirk and go get himself blowed up?
And that was really the only point behind Generations, to get Kirk and Picard to meet. And what was the payoff? A lame death for James T. Kirk (although there are books where he's resurrected because some people just CAN'T...LET...GO), a plot that didn't make sense and Picard making the stupidest choice of all since ever.
Hey Jean Luc, if you want to stop Saren how about instead of going back to just before he almost blew up another solar system and risking it all on a small hope and maybe go back to say BEFORE YOUR FAMILY DIED IN A FIRE, SAVE THEM, THEN TAKE A STROLL DOWN TO HIS STATION AND PICK HIM UP THERE!
And hey you'd save the ship too!
But noooo, gotta have some lame climax for the sake of movie tradition instead of serving the plot.
So yeah, time travel should just up and die unless it's like the whole point of the show like Quantum Leap or 7 Days, shows which actually handle the damn premise with better results.
Was there even a point to Saren's plot? Did it really matter that he go through all the trouble to redirect the Nexus towards a planet? Couldn't he have just pulled a Kirk and go get himself blowed up?
I was under the impression that it was a crapshoot to go in by ship as the ship tended to get torn to shreds without any guarantee that you'd enter the Nexus. A planet on the other hand is a bit more sturdy.
Time travel is by nature almost impossible to deal with, without fucking things up in some way, or at very least making them seem fucked up in some way (due to temporal paradoxes). Does this mean you just shouldn't use time travel? I don't know, maybe so, maybe not. That's really a matter of opinion.
But as in everything else in life, there is no such thing as perfection in storytelling. Every story has its flaws and logical fallacies. The most important thing is that the main plot makes sense internally; other sense-making is gravy. I would like the story better if it were perfect, but who wouldn't?
First Contact does demand that you swallow some whoppers as it introduces the main plot. That done, I still maintain that it was a good movie.
Hell, Star Trek IV was way, way worse in terms of fucking up with time travel, with the flimsy excuse that it was in large part a comedy film.
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KageraImitating the worst people. Since 2004Registered Userregular
Was there even a point to Saren's plot? Did it really matter that he go through all the trouble to redirect the Nexus towards a planet? Couldn't he have just pulled a Kirk and go get himself blowed up?
I was under the impression that it was a crapshoot to go in by ship as the ship tended to get torn to shreds without any guarantee that you'd enter the Nexus. A planet on the other hand is a bit more sturdy.
I dunno, the refugee ship made into the Nexus albeit on accident, and the Enterprise-B made it far enough.
I don't know the details of how it worked other than it ripped a big chunk in the Enterprise-B but Kirk made it in okay.
Time travel is by nature almost impossible to deal with, without fucking things up in some way, or at very least making them seem fucked up in some way (due to temporal paradoxes). Does this mean you just shouldn't use time travel? I don't know, maybe so, maybe not. That's really a matter of opinion.
But as in everything else in life, there is no such thing as perfection in storytelling. Every story has its flaws and logical fallacies. The most important thing is that the main plot makes sense internally; other sense-making is gravy. I would like the story better if it were perfect, but who wouldn't?
First Contact does demand that you swallow some whoppers as it introduces the main plot. That done, I still maintain that it was a good movie.
Hell, Star Trek IV was way, way worse in terms of fucking up with time travel, with the flimsy excuse that it was in large part a comedy film.
Time travel can be used effectively and in a non retarded manner, but you're basically saying that since time travel always produces problems that they shouldn't even bother with trying. That if you can't write a plot, just include time travel and you have the ultimate unassailable movie.
If the audience can ask "why didn't he just go back to 5 minutes before that?" or "how the hell can that character say "NOT ENOUGH TIME" with a straight face when he's sitting in a time machine?" you have a problem.
In my opinion it really shows a lack of creativity, and I'm more than a little pissed that they're using time travel again in the new movie. There were three deep space nine episodes about time travel, and they were all well written and didn't nag the hell out of you with stupid questions. It can be done without making you have to stop thinking.
Also I still say the borg queen was as bad as anything in ST:5. I consider the time travel in ST:4 more absurd in the mechanism used to accomplish it, but here's the thing, that isn't a problem. The oversight as large as "why didn't the borg go back in time before engaging the federation fleet?" isn't there. Requiring suspension of disbelief as to the events of the plot and accepting incredibly moronic decisions by the characters in the film are two different things. I can accept a character can shoot lasers out of their eyes or create a bomb with chewing gum and some duct tape, I can't accept that the same character would then run away from pursuers when there's a vehicle available because the plot needs him to have a foot chase. See what I'm saying?
Time travel is by nature almost impossible to deal with, without fucking things up in some way, or at very least making them seem fucked up in some way (due to temporal paradoxes). Does this mean you just shouldn't use time travel? I don't know, maybe so, maybe not. That's really a matter of opinion.
But as in everything else in life, there is no such thing as perfection in storytelling. Every story has its flaws and logical fallacies. The most important thing is that the main plot makes sense internally; other sense-making is gravy. I would like the story better if it were perfect, but who wouldn't?
First Contact does demand that you swallow some whoppers as it introduces the main plot. That done, I still maintain that it was a good movie.
Hell, Star Trek IV was way, way worse in terms of fucking up with time travel, with the flimsy excuse that it was in large part a comedy film.
Time travel can be used effectively and in a non retarded manner, but you're basically saying that since time travel always produces problems that they shouldn't even bother with trying. That if you can't write a plot, just include time travel and you have the ultimate unassailable movie.
That is not at all what I was saying, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.
If the audience can ask "why didn't he just go back to 5 minutes before that?" or "how the hell can that character say "NOT ENOUGH TIME" with a straight face when he's sitting in a time machine?".
Yep, that's horribly awful writing which is internally inconsistent and worse than anything in First Contact. The closest FC comes to that is to make you ask, why didn't they send a Borg cube back in time after they found out the first one had failed?
And that's a question you'd encounter in any story where you gave the merciless villains the capability to travel back in time.
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Jesus Christ, you guys are sapping my enjoyment of the movies by osmosis. Hasn't it also been brought up enough that the Borg can come up with extremely advanced solutions to problems given their general knowledge base, but they will always be extremely blunt and crude in any of their implementations given their very nature.
And to be very frank, people bitching about time travel in a show that involves objects and information moving faster than light need to get a grip.
Science in Trek is basically future magic, and every race in Trek is dumber than a sack of Voyager writers, so no, I don't hold the Borg up to some high standard of villiany. They get to be just as dumb as the rest of them.
Watching all the movies sounds like a great idea, but I've seen Nemesis and Insurrection a good three times too many. Maybe a classic run might be good prep for this movie, considering the timeframe involved and even though I hate The Motion Picture I might as well start with it.
Time travel is by nature almost impossible to deal with, without fucking things up in some way, or at very least making them seem fucked up in some way (due to temporal paradoxes). Does this mean you just shouldn't use time travel? I don't know, maybe so, maybe not. That's really a matter of opinion.
But as in everything else in life, there is no such thing as perfection in storytelling. Every story has its flaws and logical fallacies. The most important thing is that the main plot makes sense internally; other sense-making is gravy. I would like the story better if it were perfect, but who wouldn't?
First Contact does demand that you swallow some whoppers as it introduces the main plot. That done, I still maintain that it was a good movie.
Hell, Star Trek IV was way, way worse in terms of fucking up with time travel, with the flimsy excuse that it was in large part a comedy film.
Time travel can be used effectively and in a non retarded manner, but you're basically saying that since time travel always produces problems that they shouldn't even bother with trying. That if you can't write a plot, just include time travel and you have the ultimate unassailable movie.
That is not at all what I was saying, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.
If the audience can ask "why didn't he just go back to 5 minutes before that?" or "how the hell can that character say "NOT ENOUGH TIME" with a straight face when he's sitting in a time machine?".
Yep, that's horribly awful writing which is internally inconsistent and worse than anything in First Contact. The closest FC comes to that is to make you ask, why didn't they send a Borg cube back in time after they found out the first one had failed?
And that's a question you'd encounter in any story where you gave the merciless villains the capability to travel back in time.
No the worst that FC makes me ask is why they didn't go back in time before engaging the federation fleet, after it's over it makes me ask "so? they didn't solve shit, the borg can do it again?". Along with a whole host of other problems. They could have, for instance, gone after the vulcans past instead of the humans past seeing as they're just as important in this venture.
Hasn't it also been brought up enough that the Borg can come up with extremely advanced solutions to problems given their general knowledge base, but they will always be extremely blunt and crude in any of their implementations given their very nature.
Which was completely destroyed by the introduction of the borg queen character. A species that could have any action explained by how very alien their thought process was, turns out they have a queen who's completely understandable in human terms.
Time travel is by nature almost impossible to deal with, without fucking things up in some way, or at very least making them seem fucked up in some way (due to temporal paradoxes). Does this mean you just shouldn't use time travel? I don't know, maybe so, maybe not. That's really a matter of opinion.
But as in everything else in life, there is no such thing as perfection in storytelling. Every story has its flaws and logical fallacies. The most important thing is that the main plot makes sense internally; other sense-making is gravy. I would like the story better if it were perfect, but who wouldn't?
First Contact does demand that you swallow some whoppers as it introduces the main plot. That done, I still maintain that it was a good movie.
Hell, Star Trek IV was way, way worse in terms of fucking up with time travel, with the flimsy excuse that it was in large part a comedy film.
Time travel can be used effectively and in a non retarded manner, but you're basically saying that since time travel always produces problems that they shouldn't even bother with trying. That if you can't write a plot, just include time travel and you have the ultimate unassailable movie.
That is not at all what I was saying, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.
If the audience can ask "why didn't he just go back to 5 minutes before that?" or "how the hell can that character say "NOT ENOUGH TIME" with a straight face when he's sitting in a time machine?".
Yep, that's horribly awful writing which is internally inconsistent and worse than anything in First Contact. The closest FC comes to that is to make you ask, why didn't they send a Borg cube back in time after they found out the first one had failed?
And that's a question you'd encounter in any story where you gave the merciless villains the capability to travel back in time.
No the worst that FC makes me ask is why they didn't go back in time before engaging the federation fleet
Which we've answered again and again.
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Was there even a point to Saren's plot? Did it really matter that he go through all the trouble to redirect the Nexus towards a planet? Couldn't he have just pulled a Kirk and go get himself blowed up?
I was under the impression that it was a crapshoot to go in by ship as the ship tended to get torn to shreds without any guarantee that you'd enter the Nexus. A planet on the other hand is a bit more sturdy.
I dunno, the refugee ship made into the Nexus albeit on accident, and the Enterprise-B made it far enough.
I don't know the details of how it worked other than it ripped a big chunk in the Enterprise-B but Kirk made it in okay.
edit: He could transported into it.
As to not quote your previous argument as I am a lazy bastard...
I believe the deal with the nexus and time travel was that it technically occupied all times at once kind of in the way that the worm hole aliens existed.
It's because it's time travel. It seems really cool but can't stand up to fridge logic, as any theory clashes with some conception of causality.
Slightly off-topic: I always thought that 12 Monkeys presented a relatively logical, internally consistent version of time-travel. It picked one approach (namely that the past cannot be changed) and stuck to it. Am I just stupid in thinking that it didn't have any major time-travel related plot holes?
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"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
It's because it's time travel. It seems really cool but can't stand up to fridge logic, as any theory clashes with some conception of causality.
Slightly off-topic: I always thought that 12 Monkeys presented a relatively logical, internally consistent version of time-travel. It picked one approach (namely that the past cannot be changed) and stuck to it. Am I just stupid in thinking that it didn't have any major time-travel related plot holes?
Actually, yes, there are different, less conventional ways to handle time travel. Saying you can't change the past is one of them. You can also do stuff like having your time traveling character hitch a ride in the mind of a person in the past, only able to observe events but not make changes. I'm sure there are other methods I'm not thinking of at the moment.
That said, the standard way to handle traveling to the past is as First Contact did--it's a well-established and accepted trope, and I don't know if I've ever seen a story that involved changing the timeline and didn't involve some kind of causality problem or paradox somewhere along the line. And any TV episode that introduces time travel as a repeatable capability is virtually guaranteed to cause plot holes in the sense of why don't they just use it again?
Oh, and 12 Monkeys is an awesome film.
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And any TV episode that introduces time travel as a repeatable capability is virtually guaranteed to cause plot holes in the sense of why don't they just use it again?
Well, I can't recall if they've outright stated it, but temporal anomalies and excess chronitons have always been a big part of Star Trek, and any obvious scientific plothole is usually explained by way of technobabble. Not saying this makes it okay, but I think it has been fairly well established in Star Trek fiction that time travel isn't something you just do again and again without creating all kinds of disruptions in the time-space continuum. That's always how I've seen it, anyway.
The other way of handling it is that every time you make a change in a timeline, a new parallel universe springs up (in a bastardization of quantum theory.)
So you go back in time and kill your grandfather and you create a universe where you don't exist, yet since you're from a universe where your grandfather was never killed, you don't cease to exist due to paradox.
The problem with time travel is that it is space/time travel. If you want to go back or forward through time, you need to account for movement through the space/time continuum from every conceivable level. Time travel movies do not take into account the movement of the Earth through space, the movement of our solar system, the movement of our galaxy, the movement of the super-cluster of galaxies, etc. There's really no way of ever finding out where that particular moment in space/time was.
Like Erios said, if you can accept the concept of people traveling at warp speed, and transporting themselves around, then you can just enjoy the ride.
I don't know - I don't care about details like that (the space-time thing) because they strike me as uninteresting from a story point of view. As with so much sci-fi and fantasy, I don't want rigorous real-world logic so much as internal logic and internal consistency - because otherwise I couldn't enjoy any of it. The complaints raised here with respect to Star Trek time travel address its lack of internal logic, I'd say.
Thirith on
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Well, there are two kinds of internal logic: Logic internal to the story, and logic internal to the overarching milieu. I think First Contact was mostly pretty good from the former perspective. I enjoy it as a movie.
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I bet you guys can't enjoy The Matrix without going "god damnit, energy doesn't work that way!". :P
On the contrary, I love The Matrix. I don't treat sci-fi as a science lecture. I am able to suspend my disbelief long enough to be entertained. I just think it's silly arguing over whether time travel was handled well in a movie, when it's never handled well.
I consider the time travel in ST:4 more absurd in the mechanism used to accomplish it,
The mechanism is absurd, yes, I'll readily agree to that. The thing is, that's not ST:4's fault. That mechanism was already established and used at least twice in TOS. So while we can bitch all we want about it, we can't really fault ST:4 for keeping in line with established canon.
Also, the same mechanism was used in First Contact. Sure, they got into the past by following the Borg Sphere's tachyon technobabble thing. But how do you think they got back to the present at the end?
I believe Data mentions some technobabble about opening the same temporal rift the Borg used with... probably tachyons or something. God knows tachyons are Star Trek's Swiss army knife. Got a problem? Tachyons can probably solve it.
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On the contrary, I love The Matrix. I don't treat sci-fi as a science lecture. I am able to suspend my disbelief long enough to be entertained. I just think it's silly arguing over whether time travel was handled well in a movie, when it's never handled well.
But it is sometimes. It's handled with a modicum of internal consistency. Not often, but often enough to show that you can do a better job.
Having said that, I enjoyed First Contact on a purely gut level. Was it cleverly written? No. But in almost all cases the acting and/or the nostalgia factor helped elevate the script to something better, at least for me.
I believe Data mentions some technobabble about opening the same temporal rift the Borg used with... probably tachyons or something. God knows tachyons are Star Trek's Swiss army knife. Got a problem? Tachyons can probably solve it.
Yeah, but can you use them to open a bottle of wine?
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"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Actually think they got back by emiting tachyons through the deflector dish. And that is because the deflector dish is not just a swiss army knife, it is the freaking swiss army knife god!
Also, Star Trek as a milieu has shat on its own internal consistency so many times that I just can't be bothered to care anymore.
While true, the movie in question is a fan service movie that fucks internal consistency several times for the sake of the kids and the non trekkies. One of the other guys.
And no, the "why didn't they go back in time before fighting star fleet" wasn't answered. People speculated about it, but it wasn't answered in the film. You can't just leave it to speculation to close plot holes.
Again I have no problem with time travel, all 3 of DS9's time travel episodes were awesome. They were internally consistent, at least tried to use logic, and had well written stories (well two of them were just funny fanservice episodes, but even so...). I like that sisko accidently got a major historical figure killed and when he took his place and returned to the future his face was in the history books under that guy's name. Heck even TNG's main time travel episode (all good things) was awesome.
Anyway, I just consider First Contact poorly written, I'm sorry. If you disagree that's fine, but there were better written episodes.
Only if you run them through the deflector dish first.
Are you insane? Without rerouting main power through the plasma relays and reversing the polarity on the photonic buffer conduits you risk causing a protonic backlash in the primary warp circuit!
Also, Star Trek as a milieu has shat on its own internal consistency so many times that I just can't be bothered to care anymore.
While true, the movie in question is a fan service movie that fucks internal consistency several times for the sake of the kids and the non trekkies. One of the other guys.
How can it be a fan service movie that also fucks things over for the sake of non-trekkies? Does not compute.
And no, the "why didn't they go back in time before fighting star fleet" wasn't answered. People speculated about it, but it wasn't answered in the film. You can't just leave it to speculation to close plot holes.
Fair enough, I can agree that they should have explained it better. Still, I think they made enough of a plot point out of how the Borg are seeking perfection and so forth that it makes sense to assume that's why the Borg saved time travel as a contingency plan, instead of using it as a first resort.
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Technobabble is fine with me, the ds9 episode where they went to the 21st century was an entirely technobabble premise. The solution to the problem in the story (we've just fucked history what do we do to fix it) wasn't technobabble related. If a show has to have it, it should never be part of the central conflict or solution to the conflict. In First Contact's defense it didn't mess up there, they technobabbled their way into the situation and their way out, but the main conflict was with the borg onboard and that had nothing to do with it.
Voyager was often too guilty of technobabble solutions and no internal conflicts. Actually First Contact had a decent internal struggle with Picard but I found the external struggle just retarded and boring. "ASSIMILATE THIS" and "Lock n load!" made me face palm.
Also, Star Trek as a milieu has shat on its own internal consistency so many times that I just can't be bothered to care anymore.
While true, the movie in question is a fan service movie that fucks internal consistency several times for the sake of the kids and the non trekkies. One of the other guys.
How can it be a fan service movie that also fucks things over for the sake of non-trekkies? Does not compute.
Ding ding ding, you've found the problem. The movie can't decide if it wants to be accessible or made for the fans. It keeps toggling between needing to have really seen the show to know what was going on and then doing things that are clearly only there so non fans can relate. The borg queen is there for non fans to relate to, but even having the borg as villains with no explanation of who they are or why they are so scary completely ruins that.
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But at the same time, she looked creepy as fuck and had some good dialogue with Data and Picard
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Also, it's a full body move, so it looks good and would do some damage if it didn't make the user's balls as punchable as it did.
Also, we need to show Spock learning the neck pinch (the writers decided to have him use the pinch because hitting someone with a rock just didn't seem doctoral enough, and figured a human expert would know where to pinch)
I like the cut of your jib.
Yes, yes, yes
I am sick and tired of people accepting mediocre writing, even in Trek which (be honest with yourselves here) is generally not written very well. They had a big screen movie, why couldn't they have a solid plot? Did we have to have Worf yell "ASSIMILATE THIS!" and blow up a bunch of borg soley for the sake of the kids in the theatre?
Like I said, I enjoyed FC, I think it's the best TNG movie, and it's better than your average episode. I don't think it was written remotely well, and that's a shame.
It's because it's time travel. It seems really cool but can't stand up to fridge logic, as any theory clashes with some conception of causality.
Let me make this clear: I think time travel in Star Trek has really fucking ruined the franchise for me.
I was okay with City on the Edge of Forever maybe and hell even Voyage Home was alright because you had to risk being blowed up good by doing some warp speed shit around the sun. Not that it made any sense because they went from Earth to the Sun doing Warp 9.9 which in reality should have meant they left the damn solar system behind in seconds but dammit it wasn't an easy thing to do so it was okay.
But NOOOO, we have to have Voyager with it's shitastic 'present day' Earth episode and the whole Temporal Starfleet or whatever the fuck it was about. Which then turned into Enterprise with Nazi aliens. And hell DS9 had like 4 episodes based around Earth's past IIRC. And while most of those episodes weren't horrible, they didn't help much.
And then we have Generations which is the most idiotic use of time.....whatever the fuck that Nexus shit was ever.
Was there even a point to Saren's plot? Did it really matter that he go through all the trouble to redirect the Nexus towards a planet? Couldn't he have just pulled a Kirk and go get himself blowed up?
And that was really the only point behind Generations, to get Kirk and Picard to meet. And what was the payoff? A lame death for James T. Kirk (although there are books where he's resurrected because some people just CAN'T...LET...GO), a plot that didn't make sense and Picard making the stupidest choice of all since ever.
Hey Jean Luc, if you want to stop Saren how about instead of going back to just before he almost blew up another solar system and risking it all on a small hope and maybe go back to say BEFORE YOUR FAMILY DIED IN A FIRE, SAVE THEM, THEN TAKE A STROLL DOWN TO HIS STATION AND PICK HIM UP THERE!
And hey you'd save the ship too!
But noooo, gotta have some lame climax for the sake of movie tradition instead of serving the plot.
So yeah, time travel should just up and die unless it's like the whole point of the show like Quantum Leap or 7 Days, shows which actually handle the damn premise with better results.
But as in everything else in life, there is no such thing as perfection in storytelling. Every story has its flaws and logical fallacies. The most important thing is that the main plot makes sense internally; other sense-making is gravy. I would like the story better if it were perfect, but who wouldn't?
First Contact does demand that you swallow some whoppers as it introduces the main plot. That done, I still maintain that it was a good movie.
Hell, Star Trek IV was way, way worse in terms of fucking up with time travel, with the flimsy excuse that it was in large part a comedy film.
I dunno, the refugee ship made into the Nexus albeit on accident, and the Enterprise-B made it far enough.
I don't know the details of how it worked other than it ripped a big chunk in the Enterprise-B but Kirk made it in okay.
edit: He could transported into it.
Time travel can be used effectively and in a non retarded manner, but you're basically saying that since time travel always produces problems that they shouldn't even bother with trying. That if you can't write a plot, just include time travel and you have the ultimate unassailable movie.
If the audience can ask "why didn't he just go back to 5 minutes before that?" or "how the hell can that character say "NOT ENOUGH TIME" with a straight face when he's sitting in a time machine?" you have a problem.
In my opinion it really shows a lack of creativity, and I'm more than a little pissed that they're using time travel again in the new movie. There were three deep space nine episodes about time travel, and they were all well written and didn't nag the hell out of you with stupid questions. It can be done without making you have to stop thinking.
Also I still say the borg queen was as bad as anything in ST:5. I consider the time travel in ST:4 more absurd in the mechanism used to accomplish it, but here's the thing, that isn't a problem. The oversight as large as "why didn't the borg go back in time before engaging the federation fleet?" isn't there. Requiring suspension of disbelief as to the events of the plot and accepting incredibly moronic decisions by the characters in the film are two different things. I can accept a character can shoot lasers out of their eyes or create a bomb with chewing gum and some duct tape, I can't accept that the same character would then run away from pursuers when there's a vehicle available because the plot needs him to have a foot chase. See what I'm saying?
That is not at all what I was saying, but thanks for putting words in my mouth.
Yep, that's horribly awful writing which is internally inconsistent and worse than anything in First Contact. The closest FC comes to that is to make you ask, why didn't they send a Borg cube back in time after they found out the first one had failed?
And that's a question you'd encounter in any story where you gave the merciless villains the capability to travel back in time.
And to be very frank, people bitching about time travel in a show that involves objects and information moving faster than light need to get a grip.
Watching all the movies sounds like a great idea, but I've seen Nemesis and Insurrection a good three times too many. Maybe a classic run might be good prep for this movie, considering the timeframe involved and even though I hate The Motion Picture I might as well start with it.
No the worst that FC makes me ask is why they didn't go back in time before engaging the federation fleet, after it's over it makes me ask "so? they didn't solve shit, the borg can do it again?". Along with a whole host of other problems. They could have, for instance, gone after the vulcans past instead of the humans past seeing as they're just as important in this venture.
Which was completely destroyed by the introduction of the borg queen character. A species that could have any action explained by how very alien their thought process was, turns out they have a queen who's completely understandable in human terms.
Which we've answered again and again.
As to not quote your previous argument as I am a lazy bastard...
I believe the deal with the nexus and time travel was that it technically occupied all times at once kind of in the way that the worm hole aliens existed.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Actually, yes, there are different, less conventional ways to handle time travel. Saying you can't change the past is one of them. You can also do stuff like having your time traveling character hitch a ride in the mind of a person in the past, only able to observe events but not make changes. I'm sure there are other methods I'm not thinking of at the moment.
That said, the standard way to handle traveling to the past is as First Contact did--it's a well-established and accepted trope, and I don't know if I've ever seen a story that involved changing the timeline and didn't involve some kind of causality problem or paradox somewhere along the line. And any TV episode that introduces time travel as a repeatable capability is virtually guaranteed to cause plot holes in the sense of why don't they just use it again?
Oh, and 12 Monkeys is an awesome film.
Well, I can't recall if they've outright stated it, but temporal anomalies and excess chronitons have always been a big part of Star Trek, and any obvious scientific plothole is usually explained by way of technobabble. Not saying this makes it okay, but I think it has been fairly well established in Star Trek fiction that time travel isn't something you just do again and again without creating all kinds of disruptions in the time-space continuum. That's always how I've seen it, anyway.
Very much so.
So you go back in time and kill your grandfather and you create a universe where you don't exist, yet since you're from a universe where your grandfather was never killed, you don't cease to exist due to paradox.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Like Erios said, if you can accept the concept of people traveling at warp speed, and transporting themselves around, then you can just enjoy the ride.
It makes me wonder if some of these writers even understand that our planet orbits the sun.
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
Or even that the Earth rotates.
However, Back to the Future is one of my favorite movies. If it's entertaining I don't really give a shit about the plausibility.
"Flux Capacitor...uhh...fluxing..."
On the contrary, I love The Matrix. I don't treat sci-fi as a science lecture. I am able to suspend my disbelief long enough to be entertained. I just think it's silly arguing over whether time travel was handled well in a movie, when it's never handled well.
Also, the same mechanism was used in First Contact. Sure, they got into the past by following the Borg Sphere's tachyon technobabble thing. But how do you think they got back to the present at the end?
"Nothing is gonna save us forever but a lot of things can save us today." - Night in the Woods
While true, the movie in question is a fan service movie that fucks internal consistency several times for the sake of the kids and the non trekkies. One of the other guys.
And no, the "why didn't they go back in time before fighting star fleet" wasn't answered. People speculated about it, but it wasn't answered in the film. You can't just leave it to speculation to close plot holes.
Again I have no problem with time travel, all 3 of DS9's time travel episodes were awesome. They were internally consistent, at least tried to use logic, and had well written stories (well two of them were just funny fanservice episodes, but even so...). I like that sisko accidently got a major historical figure killed and when he took his place and returned to the future his face was in the history books under that guy's name. Heck even TNG's main time travel episode (all good things) was awesome.
Anyway, I just consider First Contact poorly written, I'm sorry. If you disagree that's fine, but there were better written episodes.
How can it be a fan service movie that also fucks things over for the sake of non-trekkies? Does not compute.
Fair enough, I can agree that they should have explained it better. Still, I think they made enough of a plot point out of how the Borg are seeking perfection and so forth that it makes sense to assume that's why the Borg saved time travel as a contingency plan, instead of using it as a first resort.
Voyager was often too guilty of technobabble solutions and no internal conflicts. Actually First Contact had a decent internal struggle with Picard but I found the external struggle just retarded and boring. "ASSIMILATE THIS" and "Lock n load!" made me face palm.
Ding ding ding, you've found the problem. The movie can't decide if it wants to be accessible or made for the fans. It keeps toggling between needing to have really seen the show to know what was going on and then doing things that are clearly only there so non fans can relate. The borg queen is there for non fans to relate to, but even having the borg as villains with no explanation of who they are or why they are so scary completely ruins that.