No Borg In Star Trek Sequel. Will it be Kahn?

You've never seen the stupid arguments the trekkies get into.

I don't think "flagship" means what the '09 movie's writers think it means anyway. I mean, there's plainly no admiral aboard.

Really, this particular version of Trek had way bigger problems.

In any case I was told (not being over familiar with Abrams) that this is par for the course for him -- having protagonists who are impossibly too young and inexperienced for the positions they're given. I do recall (from the trailers) the guy in Cloverfield getting headhunted by a Japanese company to be flown out to Japan to work as their VP of Marketing right out of college...yeah, right.

Yes I have.

But even for Trekkies this is a pretty minor infraction given the sheer amount of wrong happening with this movie. I mean, Abrams and Co. were more excited about the fact they snuck R2D2 into it than anything else. That says it all, right there.

Yes I actually know that the "captain" of a ship doesn't need to be a person who actually holds the -rank- of captain. But still trying to make the case that a newly graduated cadet deserves to permanently sit in -any- captain's chair (other than maybe a subwarp shuttle) would be stretch by anyone's imagination.

You should also be questioning how a Captain manages to be permanently in charge of a flagship. Both Kirk and Picard hold the permanent rank of Captain, which is not a flag rank. Kirk manages to kick a Commodore off the bridge of the flagship of the Federation, which is a mere Captain ejecting an actual flag officer from the bridge of a flagship.

Also, see: Natanael Green, promoted from private to brigadier general during the revolutionary war. That's like promoting a cadet to rear admiral in one jump. Yeah, that turned out just awful.

Trust me when I say I could actually nitpick about a whole avalanche of topics concerning this movie. This is hardly my #1st, #2nd or even #54th most pressing annoyance - it just happened to be one of the main ones that came up in this thread.

Again as I implied this topic of Kirk's captaincy in Abrams' movie is really just the tip of the iceberg about a whole slew of things related to how Starfleet has been portrayed handling things over the years.

And while I'm sure anyone can find the one case in history where a real person was promoted from one end of a rank scale to another that's simply the exception that proves the rule.

I had a friend headhunted out of college to be the head of an actual research group for a company. Its highly unusual, and easily abused fictionally, and the average person never sees such extraordinary circumstances, but the extraordinary does occasionally happen.

Heck, this dude bluffed his way into convincing people he was a veteran pilot at the age of sixteen. Supposedly he did such a good job of it that when the FBI actually caught him at one point he managed to talk his way out of it by getting a number of airline pilots to vouch for him as being an experienced pilot. This at a time when the average age of a commercial heavy aircraft pilot was over twice his age.

His story made for a good movie too. Now we come full circle.

I'm only suggesting Abrams didn't go much farther than the rest of Trek, not that Trek hasn't played fast and loose with Starfleet as a military organization.


There's actually quite a few of them, and they all share a few things in common situationally. They all tend to occur during wartime or similar circumstances, they all involve cases where there is a huge shortage of veteran combat officers but there's lots of people to command, they tend to occur under conditions of sponsorship, and they tend to reflect some unusual situation regarding the individual. Kirk falls into all of those categories.

It would actually be interesting if there was some hint of conflict between Kirk and superior rank officers; if Kirk was, say, Captain of Enterprise but only a commander in permanent rank or something. Supposedly, Richard Winters (Dick Winters of Band of Brothers fame) was promoted so fast (he went from a Lt at the time of the Normandy landing to Captain in a month, and holding the XO position intended for a Major in three months) one problem he faced was being junior in rank to all of his "peers" and having to fight to get things done.

That's part of what I was thinking when I referred to "the Vulcans." We know that at the time of TOS, Sarek was already a highly respected Federation ambassador. We learn that Spock's family wasn't just a bunch of random Vulcans when we see T'Pau presiding over Spock's wedding. Sarek alone might have been enough to tip the scales with the Federation and Star Fleet, but Spock may have also made himself known to key Star Fleet and Federation powers that be, since he says at the end of Star Trek that he himself found a planet to found a Vulcan colony. Why would the Federation allow an unknown Vulcan to do that, and why would the Vulcans just go along with it? Either they knew, or at least high ranking members of the surviving Vulcans and the Federation probably know at least some elements of Spock-prime's story.

My guess is that Pike alone was enough to convince most of the masses at Starfleet, and Sarek with or without Spock-prime was enough to convince high authorities in the Federation. Between the two, that was an enormous amount of pressure being put to bear to commission Kirk as Captain of the Enterprise. It would be like if George Washington and Benjamin Franklin both asked the continental congress as a personal favor after the war if they would assign a personal friend of theirs to be the Captain of an american ship of the line. They could have asked the continental congress to make their pet poodle the postmaster general and they would have gotten it.

Well okay then. Carry on, Mister Lothic.

And it didn't have any lens flares!

Yes but in most (if not all) of those cases I'm sure you will find that the person in question already had at least -some- experience doing what they were good at and or were much older and more experienced than a young 20-something who only (apparently) had a few days in the captain's chair.

Again I am well aware of the concept of "battlefield promotions" throughout history but you are going to be very hard pressed to find an equivalent of a naval cadet being promoted to the captaincy of a flagship (Abrams' term, not mine) within maybe a week. Even your historical examples can't match that speed: Natanael Green started his "military career" at the relative mature age of 33 organizing militias for around a full year before Washington promoted him to Brigadier General. It was arguable that he already had the long experience needed before that to justify the formality of the "quick" promotion. And it actually took Richard Winters a year and a half to go from LT to Captain, and almost a year after that to actually be promoted to Major despite his responsibilities. This promotion rate was not unheard of during WWII by any reckoning.

I already sort of met you half way on this by suggesting that Kirk may have actually only been promoted to the rank of LtCmdr or Cmd despite being made "captain" of the Enterprise. Of course technicalities like that easily got lost in the shuffle Abrams created to make an epic movie look good on the movie screen. One more time I'm not saying what Abrams did on screen was necessarily bad or wrong. I'm just pointing out, rather tongue-in-cheek, the near impossibility of Kirk's captaincy were this anywhere near resembling a real life situation. If anything I'm highlighting just how uber-awesome Kirk is because he not only saved the Earth but he got a ship under fantastically improbable circumstances.

P.S. And while Washington and Franklin may have at one point been able to get "the continental Congress to install a pet poodle as Postmaster General" I'm still absolutely convinced they'd never be fool-hardy enough to let a raw cadet have one of their best ships in a week. I'm sure they would have made even the god-like Kirk wait at least an extra week or two for the paperwork to go through.

Not sure exactly - maybe the forum database burped or something. That, or I subconsciously used the same Jedi mind trick that made everyone think Kirk was ready to take command of the Enterprise.

In addition to that gaping plot hole, did anyone else find it weird that the Romulans that got pushed back in time were so mad at the Vulcans? I mean, the Vulcans were coming to save them. They might have been a bit late, but they were still trying. It's not their fault that the star went supernova.

If my entire civilization had been destroyed by a supernova, and I had gotten thrown back in time, my first priority wouldn't be to take vengeance on the people who were trying to help me. It probably would've been to go and warn my civilization, or maybe try to work on something that could save them.


Still, given that the Romulans in this timeline should be at least semi-aware of their impending doom, having them be a little bit more aggressive as they try to find places that will be safe might not be a bad plot line.

There's some important background information relating to Spock and Nero's relationship, which makes the whole vengeance thing make a bit more sense, that wasn't included in the movie. Nero was the guy who discovered the Hobus supernova, and he tried to work with Spock to come up with a solution to save Romulus. Note: this was after the Romulan Senate decided to ignore Spock's warnings about how dangerous the nova was, and decided to sit around with their thumbs up their *****. And then when Spock failed to convince the Vulcans to help and Romulus blew up, Nero blamed Spock for the death of his wife and unborn child. So that's where the whole revenge thing comes into play.

A smarter man would've gotten his wife to safety first, and then worked on saving his planet. But Nero's obviously not that smart.

It's not that there's no money, in the sense of wealth. The problem in Star Trek IV, where this particular interesting fandom misconception originated, was that Kirk's crew didn't have any currency. "They're still using money" was in reference to the physical medium of exchange, not the concept of paying for stuff. Roddenberry's future wasn't that utopian, I mean, even Soviet government officials got paid. :)

This is why it takes very skilled writers to come up with time travel stories that don't implode the instant you look at them sideways. Sadly this Star Trek movie didn't really get the attention it needed in that regard and probably would've been better off with a story that didn't involve time travel at all.

And I'll point out that this fellow at least had FOUR YEARS to show that he had the ability to warrant the brevet promotions involved. According to the wiki it implied he received the brevet promotion to Brigadier General almost under the assumption that he was about to die from battlefield wounds. That promotion didn't become official until after they realized he was going to live.

As I said before finding a FEW cases (I concede the point that there's more than just one example out there) of quick promotions doesn't justify Kirk's case - it again only proves that it is highly, highly unusual and even when it does happen there's at least some kind of established track record to legitimize it. Kirk playing cowboy for a week doesn't merit him a captain's chair any way you slice it unless it's a plot mechanic for a movie