ST(Films): Nemesis

[Dînadan]

http://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/film10.php

Watching this review recently got me wondering about what could have been done differently, specifically the car chase; given that the car chase was put in to keep Patrick Stewart happy, so had to be in there in some form, is there a better way it could have been incorporated? A few ideas I’ve come up with:

1) following on from Chuck’s comment about going in under the cover of night, have them go in under cover of night and run into the locals who attack them. And as this is apparently Planet Mad Max, have them retaliate with weapons along the lines that the locals use so that after they’ve gone the locals will dismiss them as just another roving band. And have them dress like the locals rather than wearing Starfleet uniforms and have their buggy kitted out to look like the ones the locals use. The chase could either take place at night, or (as the reason beaming was ruled out was because of an ion storm), have the storm hit forcing them to take sheetlet until day which is when a small break happens forcing them to go now or be stranded.
2) drop the pre-Warp bit. Instead have the aliens be a group of smugglers/pirates that are using the planet as a base and who they run into accidentally. Doing this eliminates the issue of breaking the Prime Directive. This could also be worked into the main plot by also having the smugglers/pirates having been hired by Shinzon as part of his plan and being the ones who had planted B4’s parts there.
3) move it to later in the film. Instead of having it on Planet Mad Max, have it on Remus. When Picard is captured, instead of having him held on Shinzon’s ship, have him held in a fortress or whatever on Remus, and when Data breaks him out, part of the escape is them stealing a Reman/Romulan off-road buggy (either being transport used for travelling between mines or some sort of Reman light combat vehicle) and being chased by Remans in other vehicles. You could even concoct a reason for it being a viable means of escape (or even why they’d use buggies in the first place if it’s mining equipment rather than transport) by saying the planet has funky magnetic fields which create dead zones that prevent transporting so they couldn’t just be transported back inside the fortress or get beamed up by the Enterprise immediately.

Any other ideas? Baring in mind there has to be a car chase to keep Patrick Stewart happy.



Also, what are people’s ideas for reworking the film in general?

[TGLS]

OK. In my star trek 10, Picard gets trapped in a prison of his own mind by the villain. Eventually, he needs to get to somewhere in his mind fast, and he conjures an Aston-Martin into existence. But the villain knows this and sends goons on motorcycles after him.

[Jokie155]

I think that would depend on whether or not to count Insurrection as canon as well. I am utterly 100% convinced that Janeway made Admiral before Picard because of his actions in that movie being so idiotic and counterintuitive to the best interests of the Alpha Quadrant, that Starfleet brushed it all under the rug and pulled a Worf on him, referring back to when his Starfleet career was 'frozen' for abandoning the mission to rescue a Cardassian defector.

Anyway, assuming that he is still stuck as Captain, and that the main plot is a complete destabilisation of the Romulan Empire, why not start by making use of existing races rather than just pulling the Remans out of nowhere? I'm having to discount Star Trek Online's immense efforts to make them work, and props to the writing team for really pulling it off IMO, because they just look so unbelievably out of place in the Trek lineup of races, not to mention the 'costumes' that no-one would blame Season 1 Picard for mocking. I say scrap them out in favour of a different race that's looking to move up the galactic ladder of power.

And since I have a thing for Orions, I'd start with them. They formed one of the most noteworthy crime syndicates in the galaxy, and while we've seen that their intelligence has been sketchy in the past, not identifying O'Brien as a double agent for example, getting someone more favourable to them at the top position of one of the three galactic powers makes for a pretty strong motivation on their end. The Federation would be too tricky to infiltrate, and we've seen what happened when outsiders tried to mess with Klingon rulers in the past after all.

Do we even need Shinzon to have this Picard clone subplot that's of no real significance other than to give Patrick Stewart even more screentime to postulate about and such? What if they actually tried to make more of an effort to keep with TNG, and instead used one of the younger people from 'Unification'? Again, one of those kids went on to feature in STO as a leading character, so a better writing team clearly thought it was a good idea anyway, more as an example than trying to rely on STO to prop up problematic plots.

So, we have a potential Unificationist, who after watching the Romulan Empire bounce back and forth about its politics on the Dominion War and end up trying for peace with the Federation before corruption took back over, and in the end he feels he has to do something drastic. He won't have the Federation involved any more for fear that Romulus will end up like Cardassia, a second rate power under Starfleet protection, so he goes to the Orion Syndicate and this elaborate plan is formulated to overthrow the Senate and reform the Empire as an independent, but more co-operative power. Remaining neutral with all sides, but not out of suspicion and paranoia.

Of course, lifetime criminals are always ready to exploit weakness when it's found, Shinzon sees this coming and ensures that the second phase of his plan pits Starfleet against the Orion Syndicate in the end, building him up to be a much better villain than what we got. Playing the naive hopeful with ideas, and being layered in the fact that he actually does believe in them, but really having the more ruthless edge to ensure that his 'allies' can't stab him in the back anyway. He can get to the position of power, and then hold onto it by keeping the Syndicate in place without having to submit Romulus to the Federation for any period of time while he forms the new government and stabilizes his authority with the military. All his forces can still be kept out of the fighting and thus in a strong position if things turn ugly.

Then the big twist to both shake things up massively, and redeem some of the failings of the show itself. In comes Sela with the Tal Shiar under her thumb, ready to blow the whole mess between Shinzon and the Syndicate to the Federation unless he concedes to assist in her last act of vengeance; take down the Enterprise and her crew.

Now you've got the great potential that can be forged from a young hopeful turned murdering power-grabber, and an old enemy of the Enterprise crew in a far better position to start striking back.

So, rather than having the 'slave race' build an incredibly advanced warship, you have the infinitely more plausible situation of Sela and the Tal Shiar building the Scimitar. The Enterprise has two enemies to face down, while the Romulan dissidents rush to their aid, and the Orion Syndicate uses the new opportunity to get back at Shinzon for pulling them into an unwanted conflict with Starfleet, and all around a big messy space battle to wow the crowds and bring in the effects. The Enterprise can be badly damaged without resorting to Troi to do it all for them, we're spared the idiocy of B4 and Data imitating Superman, Sela can have a much better out to her character alongside Shinzon, and the ultimate irony is that the Empire reforms into a more Unificationist ideal situation as a spite to Shinzon, rather than because of him.

Sure, it's a lot heavier on the villain side of the plot, but I guess that's where so much of the problem lies, so I went to fixing all that up first. And the thing is, what more is there to do with the crew when story arcs were concluded over seven long years anyway? Even if the point isn't to be a last hurrah for the TNG crew, we've seen them established so well by now that getting to actually do more with the villains rather than retreading ground with familiars should be a good thing.

And again, not trying to use hindsight as a crutch, but even in the reboot that tried its best to pump life into a all but dead franchise, shoving the villain's character development out of the movie itself was a colossal mistake. This has been my immense two cents on the matter.

EDIT: Okay, so it really is lacking as far as the TNG crew are concerned, but it's 4am and I came up with all this on the spot, I just don't feel up to doing their side of the story as well.

[SuccubusYuri]

It's too bad we killed off Rene. He'd have made a great Sela pawn, say he was found in a liberated Dominion camp and the Romulans just...held onto him for the hell of it. Well you know, because of his name. That might have been a reveal that had some impact, at least.

[Jokie155]

Looking back at that mess after a long night's sleep, I think I can deduce a few key points.

1. Don't let it be Wrath of Khan II. Just putting Sela as the main antagonist would be a step in the wrong direction. I think it would be a much better separation from previous movies to keep her as the manipulator rather than the figurehead, which is what Shinzon 2.0 would be, and keeping him as described means we can have another look at the sort of Romulan 'who does what he believes is best for the Romulan Empire', which I've always found to be a fascinating character arc to explore.

2. Don't just make up a new race out of the blue to be behind so many of the plot points. Either use the Tal Shiar as a seperating faction, or the Orion Syndicate or Klingon breakaways (Toral had a better out at least in DS9; The Sword of Kahless, but why not let him be a minor character again?) or perhaps even Section 31 looking to reform the Romulan Empire into something better suited for the future of the Federation. It's hardly a 'nemesis' when we barely know about any of the villainous characters because there's been no previous conflict between them and the heroes at all, so draw upon existing material to coagulate this TNG nemesis instead.

3. Do try to make the side of the story focused around the Enterprise crew be about more than Picard and Data. Yes, we all like Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner, but clearly having a lead director who was both incompetent at his job and unforgivably rude to LeVar Burton, a true veteran of Trek directing, lead to the bigger names having too much sway to pull the proverbial blanket to their sides. Balance it out somewhat.

Maybe Picard is having something of a crisis after his career was frozen, and he's become more of an observer while Riker captains the ship and finally accepts that promotion he kept putting off. (As I recall, he didn't participate in the mutiny in Insurrection, alongside LaForge, but maybe I'm wrong?) Data is fitting into more of a command role as first officer, Worf can regale about his time as Klingon Ambassador. Spread things out.

[CareerKnight]

I kind of wonder if Stewart ask for the car chase to be put in before or after he read the script. If it was in response to the script being bad and him just wanting something out of the movie then just making the script not a pile of crap would solve the problem.


As for the problem of how did a slave race build the Scimitar, I have two possible head canon answers for that.
A. The Reman's aren't all just shock troops and miners but some actually work on building the ships for the Romulan Fleet and know more about ship design then the Romulans give them credit for (given how arrogant the Romulans are, not hard to believe). Throw in some sympathetic Romulans giving the Remans access to some advanced technology and it becomes a hell of a lot more likely.

B. The just say its theirs. Simple and believable. After being oppressed for as long as they have they don't need much justification to claim it as theirs. Remans mined the metal, therefore its Reman. If you find this type of reasoning hard to believe just look at any youtube video talking about Alexander the Great and you will inevitably find somewhere in the comments people arguing vehemently about his nationality regardless of how much evidence they have to back it up.

[Dînadan]

Hybrid of ideas A and B:

Considering how devastated the Tal Shiar probably were after their team up with the Obsidian Order to nuke the Founders, is possible that a secret facility or two slipped through the cracks during whatever reformation/damage control the surviving elements did to recover from the loss so that even after they were back to what they were by the time of the Dominon War, those facilities were still unaccounted for. One of those facilities could have been on Remus and have been ‘staffed’ by Reman labourers who built ships there, and after the facility fell through the cracks, they kept it secret and worked on building a ship in secret; either using plans that already existed or a small group working in secret to educate themselves on the finer points of ship design before designing their own/modifying an existing design.

[nebagram]

If they wanted to make if Wrath of Khan II (which I, like Chuck, always thought was called 'First Contact') then the solution is blindingly obvious, especially as they half-did it in Nemesis anyway- bring back Lore and make it about Data's Nemesis instead of Picard's. Data's the breakout character anyway, utilise that.

[Beastro]

You're all putting more thought into the plot than the makers of the film ever did.

Alongside that tried feeling everyone in the film projects there's a feel of grabbing random bits of ditirius and shoving them together to make a story that they didn't want to make.

[Morgaine]

Frankly to me the only way to salvage this trainwreck would've been to do something else entirely.

Everything was a bad idea. Shinzon was a bad idea, the Remans were a bad idea, NotLore was a bad idea. The Doomship/superweapon was a bad idea.

Oh and just as an aside, as much as I love Patrick Stewart.. there didn't need to be a car chase to keep him happy. That was put in for him by a fanboy friend of Brent Spiner's who had no business writing scripts to begin with.