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

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It also shouldn't have any impact on V-Ger coming back.

It's not a gaping plot hole, its a weak plot point. I believe that there's plenty of information already provided within this thread that supports Kirk's promotion as plausable, in real world analagy, highly unlikely yes. BUT, it's a movie, a story, and given the context provided within the story, and not taking "but in the real world this wouldn't happen" into that context, Kirk's promotion is plausable.

Regarding Nero's character arc, this was the weakest part of the story for me. I won't take any of that unprovided background information into context of the story. Within the story itself, what we know is that Nero was away on his mining ship, he hears that his home planet is going to be destroyed, the Vulcans are slow to help, and don't save the day. He apparently didnt have time to get his wife off planet before its destruction in the film. Blaming Spock is easy, Romulans have hated Vulcans for so long, and tend to be more emotional than their couzins, that it's easy to say "You Vulcan's had a way to save our planet but shuffled your feet too long to get the job done".

I can see all that, but really it is still pretty weak, but I get it. It's the next step in that destroying the federation after he'd gotten his revenge that quite didn't make any sense to me.

And sense Nero had gone back in time-line plot, then Romulus was still there. He could've simply waited for Spock, captured him and made him figure out how to prevent the destruction of his planet before it occured. That's the plot hole of the time travel / alternate time-line plot. Otherwise what's the point in getting revenge when your planet is just going to end up suffering the same fate at some point in the future again?

Well when you toss out the precondition that "such-n-such would be very unlikely in real life" then yes, almost anything within the context of a movie can be taken as plausible.

I hope not. I hate that movie more than any of the Star Trek movies.

Lothic I was supporting you. The only times I know of instant high ranks is when the country allowed people to buy their rank like the British used to do, or when new technology was being implemented and they needed to fill the ranks with experienced people.

Like how Gregory Boyington resigned from the Marines as a Lt. but when he re-enlisted he wrangled a Majors commission because of his experience serving with the Flying Tigers.


So it's possible Kirk could have been made captain of a much smaller vessel like a corvette or patrol ship right out of Starfleet Acadamy but a cruiser like the Enterprise? Total BS.

But it has nookleyer wessels!

You use the phrase "raw cadet" as if Kirk spent three years in classrooms and then suddenly found himself in command of the Enterprise. I don't think that's how Starfleet Academy works. It sounds like cadets actually sometimes, if not often, serve on starships as part of their training. According to Memory Alpha (although my own recollection of the episode in question is a little hazy) Kirk almost certainly must have served aboard a Starship as a first year cadet, as he participated in a peace mission for which he was given a commendation. If Kirk was a recognized rising star at the Academy, he could have had lots of actual experience with starship duty and starfleet operations. We also see from the movie that when cadets were assigned to starships they were assigned to actual, if not always critical, duty stations. Uhura was able to immediately replace a communications officer, which implies she was at least familiar with the position at more than just an academic level.

So Kirk was a cadet (and literally days away from becoming either an ensign or a junior Lt) but he might not have actually been "raw."

Really? The whales bother you more than God needing a starship?

There's also a more political explanation. Academy enrollment is at historic lows. Starfleet service is voluntary, dangerous, and doesn't pay well (or at all). Half their fleet just got squished and Starfleet is going to need replacement officers and ships to be built, and is going to need public support for that. So what do you do with the greatest hero of Earth and the Federation in its entire history? You parade him around in the newest shiny starship on a goodwill tour of the Federation, to encourage people to sign up, and drum up support to rebuild the fleet.

Perhaps that is a more palatable explanation for why Starfleet would put Kirk in command of the Enterprise. Because at the moment, the most important value both Kirk and the Enterprise itself have to Starfleet is as marketing symbols.

Actually. I think that's what people are missing.

In real life it's not likely to happen but has and can easily happen again!

They are extraordinary situations/people that pull this off.

You see it happen to Kirk and think "that would never happen or it's so rare it wouldn''t" without thinking "the movie/show is about that extraordinary situation/people"

Yeah, it's a common happen stance in movies. But then again, not a lot of people want to see "Star Trek: The Average Hum Drum Boring Adventurers"

Arrogant But Run of the Mill Captain: All hands to battle stations!

Vulcan 2nd in command: Captain we have a 5% chance of surviving this encounter, with only a .0001% chance of actually winning.

Captain: I like those odds!

*ship blows up*

Kirk is the extraordinary captain. Prime Spock knows this. In fact, watching the movies, all of Starfleet, Klingon Empire and the Romulus Empire knows this. They know it so well, that 70-80 years after his death, they all still know it.

At least God didn't have mindnumbing, blinding lens flares every 3 seconds. Not to mention, ST V answered the burning question of why Captain Kirk was climbing a mountain.

How would they see him through all the lens flares?

Perhaps, but then the inverse can be said to be true too and thus, taking how things work in real life, almost nothing would be possible in many movies as well.

What's important is was what happened within the context provided for the story, possible?

In this case, quite clearly, it is. Of course what happened isn't possible or highly unlikely in the real world. But, given these facts:

The call comes out from Vulcan that its under attack.
Star Fleet mobilizes, and due to the approximated nature of the threat, needs to man all their ships, including the recently built Enterprise
The almost the entire crew is manned by people that just graduated from Star Fleet.
Fleet warps and is destroyed.
Enterprise makes it late to the party, Captain Pike needs to leave, places Spock (apparently the only non-recent graduate officer on ship besides the doctor who ends up dead anyway) in charge, and makes Kirk 2nd in command.
Spock ends up relinquising command to Kirk.
Kirk saves the day.
Pike can't captain anymore, most of the fleet destroyed, this is wild west time for star fleet, admirals and such are a bit long in the tooth to go out into the wild, so young guy who saved the day after taking command of the ship is officially given command of the ship.

Those are the plot points, and while it's admittedly weak, the story bears out how it occurs.

The real plot hole is the time travel and poor character arc revolves around Nero, not Kirk. Even then, when taking into context of other Star Trek movie villains, Nero ends up merely serviceable in comparison. There were worse.

Actually. I don't see why Nero really should be worring about saving Romulus.

He knows this is a different timeline. What wife is he going to save exactly? The one his double is going to marry? Not exactly saving HIS family is it?

He's a revenge driven man, who's admittedly putting the blame on the wrong person (likely because he has no one else to blame) but then again, Spock seems to be putting the blame on himself as well, which logically I would think he should know isn't the case, but it's just further proof he's always been a bit emotional (or is that a old vulcan thing to lose ones logic as they got older?).

"My audience is usually a little more... 12."

For me personally, the question of plausibility depends on what's being questioned. Every work of fiction is allowed high latitude for initial conditions. How plausible is it that we will invent warp drive, or that there are Vulcans and Andorians? Star Trek is allowed, as part of its initial premise, to invent its own universe without regard to plausibility for the most part. That's what we're supposed to accept when we enter that universe.

Fortune within the story doesn't have the same wide open latitude, but we assume that movies and other stories have to be interesting and we therefore can be asked to make the assumption that we're only seeing the story because extraordinary things happened to have occurred at that time. Some level of unusual activity is to be expected, because the mean (average) is boring.

Self inconsistency is the main area where I don't give a lot of latitude for implausibility. If the story itself creates rules and relies upon them within itself, and asks the reader to buy into them, then it has an obligation to follow them itself. Things should always work the same way, people should tend to act within the limits of their revealed personalities most of the time, etc.

We have lots of evidence that 21st century militaries are not run like Starfleet is run. But we don't have a lot of evidence that Starfleet in Star Trek isn't run more or less as depicted within Abrams Trek, so that doesn't bother me so much.


Plus, to be honest my own background makes me see plausibility objections in a completely different light than most people. So many people complained about how totally ridiculous "red matter" was as a plot device, when I was thinking "that's a stranglet blob" whereas far fewer people (at the time) were complaining why Nero couldn't just have dropped it into San Francisco bay. The problem with complaining about plausibility is that most people aren't really good at applying plausibility in actual reality and that *should* temper their own belief in their ability to judge plausibility in fiction. It usually doesn't, though.

I think I'm the only person on the planet that wasn't bothered by the lens flares.

I wasn't really bothered by the lens flare either. Complaining about the exaggerated lens flare in a JJ Abrams movie is like complaining about the exaggerated make up in Kabuki theater.

Didn't bother me at all. In fact, I hear this mention of it all the time and then watch the movie and go *shrug* really I don't even notice it as anything bad.

Shakey cam is far worse imo, and much more noticable to me.

Though I was watching Star Trek last night thinking the exact same thing as Arcanaville mentioned...Why isn't he just dropping the Red Matter ont he planet? Or just activating it near the planet? It would seem to destroy the planet either way!

Jim, madness has no purpose, or reason, but it may have a goal


Admittedly, this is another weak part of the plot, although not in the direct sense. The real question is what did Nero believe would happen to his future wife and child if he tampered drastically with the timeline by eliminating the Federation. That's a big enough change that it could have altered history enough to make it so they were never born. Trying to avoid that would be a good reason not to just show up on Romulus and hand them the Narada, but it then makes it irrational to completely obliterate the Federation as well. But then again, he's nuts.


Incidentally, I see more people jumping on the bandwagon that the first two Terminator movies' time travel don't make sense. Someone recently mentioned the argument to me, and I thought about it for a while and came to the conclusion that - inadvertently - those two movies actually make total sense: they actually depict one of the few ways the whole story could actually make sense.

Here's what happens. Skynet invents a time machine. But it suspects based on its understanding of time travel that you cannot arbitrarily change the past. If relativity is correct, time travel isn't impossible but it cannot lead to contradictions. In particular, you cannot change any element of the past that would alter your decision to actually travel to the past. Doing so would create a paradox, and the laws of physics will conspire somehow to prevent that from happening. But Skynet isn't certain: it decides the logical option is to test the theory. So it sends a T-800 into the past to kill Sarah Conner. If the theory holds, this attempt will fail because it would be eliminating the reason it has for sending the Terminator into the past which is a contradiction, but its worth a shot. Immediately upon dispatching the T-800 Skynet checks its memory banks for any evidence that the terminator succeeded. Instead, what it discovers is upon careful research, the components used by Cyberdyne systems to create it bear evidence that they possessed components of the very Terminator Skynet just sent into the past. Therefore, Skynet has created a predestination loop: it caused its own creation, which is a self-consistent history.

Knowing this now, it knows any attempt to change the past must prevent that change from altering any element of history up to this point in a way that would alter Skynet's plans to send a terminator into the past. It has accounted for this possibility and kept its Ace in the hole: the prototype T-1000. The T-1000 is a shape-shifting terminator. Its job will be to kill John Conner in the past and then replace him. The T-1000 will then try to infiltrate the resistance by being its leader, and then even try to lead the humans in a successful revolt against Skynet. But when the moment that Skynet sends the T-1000 into the past is reached, the T-1000 will then, now that it is safe to do so, turn against the humans and destroy the resistance.

The reason why Skynet sends the T-800 to kill Sarah Conner is that this is the most logical way to ensure John Conner isn't born. But it has to send the T-1000 to kill John Conner directly, and when he is old enough that the T-1000 can copy him and extrapolate what he will look like when he is older. So Skynet picks a teenaged John Conner: young enough to be vulnerable, old enough to copy.

When the resistance finds the lab, its just after the moment when the T-1000 is sent back. These are grunts, not scientists. They don't know anything about time travel theories. So they think its their job to stop both Terminators. They send Kyle after the first one, and a reprogrammed T-800 after the second one. They do this under orders from Conner, who survived both attacks and knows, because of predestination loop, what is supposed to happen. By sending what he remembers encountering, he fulfills the requirement of having a self-consistent universe timeline and the net result is that *all* of the time travel, both Skynet trips and both resistance trips are essentially predestination paradoxes. But they are paradoxes in name only: they represent self-consistent timelines as far as relativity is concerned.

Skynet believes that it can keep sending Terminators back in time until it gets it right, because the universe will in effect keep erasing its mistakes until it gets it right. But the other possibility is that the resistance will eventually get it right and stop Skynet from making any more time travel trips, which is what happens.

This line of thought can theoretically be extended to encompass Terminator 3.

Because he was utterly irrational and bent only on revenge? I mean, presumably that was why he was called Nero, and not, say, Claudius or Marcus Aurelius. Honestly, with a reference as transparent as that you want a diagram? :)