Wrath of Khan discussion

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I do love how this was the first truly nuanced piece of Star Trek that came about.

I sort of see what you mean, while The Original Series did have nuanced episodes that still hold up today, The Wrath of Khan's overall dark and melancholy tone serves the themes of the film, while the series's general 60's Sci-fi vibe could lead people to gloss over those nuanced episodes.

With me, I just can't really see past the production nuance, if that makes any sense. It's a distinction I've noticed a bit that has it's own thing with contemporary/modern television.

While The Motion Picture is certainly revamped to visual detail while we even get set pieces of Starfleet administration along with a much more industrious work force on the ship, the story does run pretty similar to TOS in terms of conversation directive and tone. There we learn more about characters through how they handle the mission, but in Wrath of Khan there is a lot of compartmentalizing for the expositional set pieces, like Kirk and Bones or Spock and Saavik at the start.

Feels like a possible distinction of Roddenberry's approach. Certainly fits the bill for seasons 1 and 2 of TNG.

[Thebestoftherest]

I do love how this was the first truly nuanced piece of Star Trek that came about.

I sort of see what you mean, while The Original Series did have nuanced episodes that still hold up today, The Wrath of Khan's overall dark and melancholy tone serves the themes of the film, while the series's general 60's Sci-fi vibe could lead people to gloss over those nuanced episodes.

With me, I just can't really see past the production nuance, if that makes any sense. It's a distinction I've noticed a bit that has it's own thing with contemporary/modern television.

While The Motion Picture is certainly revamped to visual detail while we even get set pieces of Starfleet administration along with a much more industrious work force on the ship, the story does run pretty similar to TOS in terms of conversation directive and tone. There we learn more about characters through how they handle the mission, but in Wrath of Khan there is a lot of compartmentalizing for the expositional set pieces, like Kirk and Bones or Spock and Saavik at the start.

Feels like a possible distinction of Roddenberry's approach. Certainly fits the bill for seasons 1 and 2 of TNG.

I feel that Roddenberry belief that Starfleet is not military is at best childish at worst deliberately obtuse.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I do love how this was the first truly nuanced piece of Star Trek that came about.

I sort of see what you mean, while The Original Series did have nuanced episodes that still hold up today, The Wrath of Khan's overall dark and melancholy tone serves the themes of the film, while the series's general 60's Sci-fi vibe could lead people to gloss over those nuanced episodes.

With me, I just can't really see past the production nuance, if that makes any sense. It's a distinction I've noticed a bit that has it's own thing with contemporary/modern television.

While The Motion Picture is certainly revamped to visual detail while we even get set pieces of Starfleet administration along with a much more industrious work force on the ship, the story does run pretty similar to TOS in terms of conversation directive and tone. There we learn more about characters through how they handle the mission, but in Wrath of Khan there is a lot of compartmentalizing for the expositional set pieces, like Kirk and Bones or Spock and Saavik at the start.

Feels like a possible distinction of Roddenberry's approach. Certainly fits the bill for seasons 1 and 2 of TNG.

I feel that Roddenberry belief that Starfleet is not military is at best childish at worst deliberately obtuse.

I think it's just part and parcel for his vision. It's not so much a matter of not having industrious weapons, or the fact that they end up in large scale conflicts as a condition of their own directive. Their principal mission in space is to learn about other planets and communicate with other species.

In the grand scheme of things, it's more considerable that Starfleet is a highly individualized entity in the frontier of space. There is no universal charter in their commissioned territory as we recognize with our own international convention.

[Deledrius]

I feel that Roddenberry belief that Starfleet is not military is at best childish at worst deliberately obtuse.

I think it mostly speaks to a couple of aspects of writing that few people escape, even visionaries. First, he was writing in the context of something he knew well, having been in the military and the police force. It's also one of those inevitabilities that happens when trying to write something with a fundamentally different sensibility/worldview/culture than the one of the audience for which you're writing. Some things just clash if you take them too superficially/literally.

Of course, that's all giving the show a whole heap of extra credit than may have existed, at least consciously on the part of the writing staff. But from my own introspection on attempts to write similar projects, these are concepts I've grappled with conceptually.

For the most part, in Trek, this papered-over dichotomy works, as long as they don't poke too hard at the places where the seams between "scientific research & rationalist diplomatic organization" and "heavily-armed military-structure peacekeeping force" don't quite line up right.

You can take their word for it because they don't generally do things too far outside of what the characters claim is true about Starfleet, and more often than not they work to live up to those pronouncements.

[Fianna]

My view is that Starfleet is more of a general "Department of Space Stuff". The Federation has them handle almost everything that involves traveling through space, from scientific research to diplomatic relations to ferrying people and cargo between planets to, yes, military activity.

It's not that calling them a military organization is inaccurate, so much as it's reductionist. It's taking an organization that fills a plethora of different roles, but choosing just one of those roles to define them. Like calling the U.S. Secret Service a bodyguard organization; they do serve that function, providing security details to certain government figures, but they also do a lot of other important work investigating financial crimes, work that has nothing to do with bodyguarding.

[Zatman]

It's hinted at elsewhere, and pretty explicit if you think about it, but Starfleet embodies "humans are special" and while technically Starfleet is multicultural, let's face it, it's human-dominated. What I mean by that is Starfleet is regularly shown to be the absolutely most versatile force out there. As Fianna above says, it's basically the "Department of Space Stuff" while everyone else they face, literally everyone, is centered around military might. There's a funny joke somehwere that I can't find right off hand, but it basically says the reason that Starfleet so often beats, and confounds the Borg, and thus the Borg's fascination with assimilating the Federation as opposed to the Romulans or Klingons, is that while the other powers will throw their military at the Borg, Starfleet throws its engineers and is just as likely to pull a five-dimensional negative space wedgie out of their butts as they are a weapon.

But do the Romulans explore? No, they expand. Do the Klingons explore? No, they expand. Do the Cardassians explore? No, they expand. Do the Ferengi explore? Only to find profit. Probing a five-dimensional negative space wedgie just doesn't fit these other cultures' worldviews because they don't contribute to their planet-of-hats mission. I'd really like it if humans were shown to be not so special. I don't mean we're shown to lose any of these awesome qualities, merely that someone else has them too. Friend or adversary, it doesn't matter, either or both would be interesting. Stargate was heading that way with the Lucian Alliance, a group of warlords controlling a lot of commerce in parts of the galaxy, but still with scientists and engineers that can give our heroes a run for their money.

Andromeda touched on it, Humans were important, but not the founders of the Systems Commonwealth, and Earth had become a really bad place by the time of the show. But still, Humans seemed to have a high degree of importance, higher than most of the other civilizations featured.

[Deledrius]

It's not that calling them a military organization is inaccurate, so much as it's reductionist. It's taking an organization that fills a plethora of different roles, but choosing just one of those roles to define them.

Excellent summary!

It's hinted at elsewhere, and pretty explicit if you think about it, but Starfleet embodies "humans are special" and while technically Starfleet is multicultural, let's face it, it's human-dominated.

We're explicitly told this isn't the case. We rarely see it due to budgetary reasons, but the show is pretty adamant that it's much more diverse than we see, both in form and function of species in Starfleet. Even when an accusation to the contrary is made at the dinner in ST:VI, that same dialog acknowledges the exception sitting at the table in the second-highest-ranking person in the room. And by Enterprise's S4 and in Discovery we are told and see that the founding members at least have a large presence throughout the fleet, some years before Kirk's era. DS9 continued the references to this sort of diversity. And the franchise as a whole makes a point that this is the strength of the Federation, both culturally as well as when facing threats like the Borg. Ingenuity comes from all sources in the Federation.

One has to be careful to not let (admittedly amusing) reductionist or hyperbolic memes like "five-dimensional negative space wedgie" overwrite our recollection of the source material itself; that's how we get Kirk Drift.

[CharlesPhipps]

I feel that Roddenberry belief that Starfleet is not military is at best childish at worst deliberately obtuse.

It's based on Horatio Hornblower but not military!

[RobbyB1982]

Official canon is Starfleet is diverse and we don't get that variety mostly due to budget.

Also, it makes sense. Yes you can intermingle in a single individual okay and their specific circumstances, upbringing, or sheer desire to be on THAT ship can make up for a lot issues... but generally they're going to be happier surrounded by others that more readily get their culture. We KNOW there's all Vulcan ships for example.

It's not JUST a cultural thing, so it goes beyond you don't want Vulcans hanging out with party animals. When you get to species like the Benzites who don't breathe an oxygen atmmosphere and need devices to function on a human ship, or Vulcan's who have a natural strength 5x that a human who are probably constantly breaking human dishes. Or a species that has different gravity norms, or are mostly 5 foot tall or mostly 8 foot tall... or that likes the temperature to be below freezing, or has a wildly different 37 hour sleep cycle, or naturally hibernates half the year...

[clearspira]

TWOK is one of the only times we see the Miranda class actually doing what it is meant to be doing and that is an all-purpose workhorse. It is meant to be a space taxi/truck to assist out of the way outposts.

Later shows would cement the Miranda with a bad reputation as being made of paper but that's because it was never meant to be a frontline craft. It is only heavily armed because out of the way outposts tend to attract pirates in the Trekverse.