Is This Logical? and Is Logic Transcendent?
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|---|---|
| Title: | Wither Wesley |
| Creator: | Susan Meinecke |
| Date(s): | 1987, 1989 |
| Medium: | |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: TNG |
| Topic: | |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Is This Logical? is 1987 Star Trek: TOS essay by Susan Meinecke.
Is Logic Transcendent? is a 1989 essay by Martin Weil in response.
The first essay was printed in the January 1987 issue of The Communicator, and reprinted in Academy Chronicles #14 in 1989. The second essay was also in "Academy Chronicles" #14.
Some Topics Discussed
- fifth Star Trek film (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home -- the one with the whales)
- authorial intent
- logic plot holes, and the nature of fans to nit pick
- fanon and disagreement about Sulu's first name
- language and obscenities
- much more
From the First Essay: "Is This Logical?"
Before I start this, let me say that I concur with George Takei and Nichelle Nichols and Star Trek archivist Richard Arnold that "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home" is the best of the Star Trek movies. Then let me say that the constraints of being a professional writer, and of writing for specific markets, often require me to bite my tongue, rather than say what I really want to say about various elements of Star Trek.
[...]
Let me preface these remarks by saying that I believe that a piece of art must stand on its own merits; if problems I am citing are explained in the novelization but are not resolved in the movie, the movie is incomplete — the novelization does not complete it, but is a separate work.
The problems I had with the movie? First, to borrow Mr. Spook's newly-acquired vernacular, what the hell did the probe want, and what did the whales say to it to make it go away? I know that Vonda Mclntyre has offered her own explanation for that, but I disagree with it as thoroughly as I disagree with her giving Sulu the first name of "Hikaru" when fandom and George Takei had, until her first Trek novel came out, bestowed George's own middle name of "Hosato" upon the helmsman.
Besides, as I said before, the film is a separate entity from the novel, and in the film, there isn't even a suggestion of what the probe wanted.
The second problem I had was, logically, what are they going to do aboard the new Enterprise with two captains? I know Mr. Spock has never wished for command, but now that he's acknowledging his feelings, maybe ambition is, indeed, one of them. (Ah, there's a potential conflict.)
Then there is the problem of the whales, who, being mammals, need to surface in order to breathe; just how were they supposed to do that in a tank with no maneuvering room? And I leave it to the mathematicians among us to determine whether there was enough water in that tank for them to float under normal gravity conditions; the tank may have provided a bathtub effect (you can swim in a pool, but there isn't enough water in your bathtub to buoy you up).
While we're talking gravity, how did the whales — especially the very pregnant Grade — handle the increased G force generated by the sling-shot effect? If that didn't throw her into premature labor, nothing could.
Another interesting puzzle is why Scotty beamed Kirk, McCoy, Chekov, and Gillian out of the elevator and into the park instead of into the ship — just to give Gillian the opportunity to jump into Kirk's arms as he beamed up? The others went up the ramp, didn't they? Why use the ramp at all, when you have beaming capability? And just how did they beam on board with no one on the ship? If the beam was left to pick up anyone who stepped onto a set spot, wouldn't it be able to pick up any passing rabbit, squirrel, or jogger?
Something else occurred to me while watching "Star Trek IV" — Mr. Spock has been tugging at our lower extremity for twenty years. I mean, here's a guy who was raised by a very human, English-speaking mother — and he's a genius who never forgets a fact or figure. His deadpan lack of understanding of English idiom was a marvelous way to get McCoy's goat ("Why would I want to obtain the doctor's horned, bearded ruminant, assuming that he had one?"), but, come on, he knew what Bones and Kirk were saying all along.
His facade was destroyed when he took so readily to the mild obscenities of the film. I'll just bet that Spock, like all the fans, has been waiting 20 years to tell the captain "Just a damn minute."
This revelation poses another problem. Now that Spock has been through the mill of life, death, residing in McCoy's brain, and being filtered back out, he is becoming a truly integrated personality. Does this mean we'll see no more battles between his Vulcan half and his human half? Was that a smile on his face when they pushed him into the water? For that matter, was that a smile that almost crossed his father's face during their last conversation? Sarek is a full-blooded Vulcan. Does this mean that all we have been led by Spock to believe about Vulcans is a big cock-and-bull story? ("Why would one make up a fable dealing with a rooster and a male bovine?")
Okay, I'm nit-picking. But isn't that what fans have done since time immemorial? I leave it to the rest of you to find your own holes in the plot, or patch these.
From the Second Essay: "Is Logic Transcendent?"
Problem number 1; What did the probe want, and what did the whales say to make it go away? Spock reconstructed the probe's 'communication' as being extremely similar to the songs of Terran hump-backed whales. Therefore, it can be assumed that the probe was sent by some species that, somehow, had been in contact with hump-backed whales, and since, as we learn during the movie, hump-backed whales have been extinct on Terra since the late twentieth century, they sent the probe to find out why the apparently two-way communication had been ended by the whales. If, one assumes, the foregoing is true, then the hump-backed whales brought to the twenty-third century by Kirk and his crew could have said almost anything to the probe and it would have left.
Problem 2; What are they going to do aboard the new Enterprise with two captains? Good question, except for the fact that there are more than two captain, since along with Kirk and Spook, I believe that Scott, Sulu and possibly McCoy are all captains now. The answer, however, is simple. One of the captains, in this case Kirk, is given Command status, putting him an effective grade of rank above all the other captains on board. I believe that Kirk has used his status as commissioned captain of the original Enterprise to give him an effective status above that of at least one admiral during the original run of the show. It is also standard military procedure to give command status to one individual, even if there are visiting dignitaries who would normally outrank him or her.
[much snipped]
Problem number 5: Why did Scotty beam Kirk, McCoy, Chekov and Gillian out of the elevator and into the park instead of into the ship? There are two reasons I can think of for this action. First, the problem of beaming someone from a small confined area with rapid vertical motion into another small confined area without the vertical motion. It makes sense to give some room at one end or the other for a bit of sloppiness due to not completely familiar controls. Next, why use the ramp at all, when you have beaming capability — well, why waste power when it is just as easy to walk as to drive to the store down on the corner? And Kirk beamed on to the ship to prevent Gillian from following him since they were preparing to depart. How did they beam on board the ship with no one to operate the transporter there? Well, perhaps they set up an automatic beam-up on a particular spot, but set it to go off only if turned on by a communicator beam so that the random rabbit, squirrel or jogger wouldn't accidentally be beamed on board.
Problem number 6: Spock's integration. Spook will undoubtedly suffer relapses into complete Vulcanism, while is it not believable that a father, even a pure-bread Vulcan one, could not accidentally betray the fact that Vulcans are a race that suppresses emotions, rather than one that is emotionless?
Re- idiomatic English — Spock's mother, Amanda, is a school teacher, and therefore would teach her son grammatically and rhetorically correct English, not any sort of idiomatic usages, especially considering that one's idiom depends on what branch of knowledge one pursues. Do you know every possible usage of the word 'bit' or even whether I mean one thousand or one million by the abbreviation M? (M could either stand for 'Mile' which is French for thousand, or it could be 'Mega' which is Latin for million...) So, as you can see, correct English idiom or idiomatic usage will vary by location and year. Kirk speaks a variant of English not too dissimilar from what standard twenty-third century English would be. His speech would also be affected by his love of the older English classics and their style of usage. While McCoy gets much joy and amusement from speaking a version of English that is as close as can be researched to mid-twentieth century southern United States gentleman's English, which could almost be considered a different language entirely. Plus, Star Fleet Command would use some words one way while to others they might mean something totally unrelated.
I, myself, have a few questions about certain events in the movie. For instance, how did the hump-backed whales communicate with the probe? They are a presumably non-technological species as they do not have any sort of manipulative appendages to create a technological culture. This is not to say that they may not be an extremely advanced species in regard to the psychological sciences, but what was their means of sending any sort of message to a probe out in the middle of a vacuum when they can only use sound waves? Could the whales be telepathic? Would the whale songs be a verbalization of a telepathic message? How did the probe know the whale songs to begin with, since there is no mention of anything like the probe in recorded human history? Why was the probe sending out the whale songs long before it ever reached the solar system? How long was the probe traveling before it reached Federation territory? Had it been traveling since the last hump-backed whale had been killed? If so, it must be extra-galactic since it traversed the distance from the Federation border to one of the central home-worlds in days, if not only hours, for a distance that probably amounted to several hundred light-years. Warp 15?
What about the galactic barrier? If is was extra-galactic, it almost certainly was not from the same galaxy as the people who hijacked the Enterprise in one episode, as they would almost certainly know of something like that in their home galaxy since they had apparently succeeded at that which the Klingons were trying. What effect has the disappearance of Gillian had on the past of the twenty-third century? Would she have gotten married to someone important and caused the true beginnings of world peace? Or possibly fomented the first thermonuclear war over her reaction to the unjust and unnecessary killing of whales by the Soviets? Or maybe been the mother or ancestress of some important scientist who formulated something that needed desperately to be formularized, or an important military figure? What if she would have been one of Kirk's own ancestors? Will there be some sort of delayed time distortion caused by her disappearance, or by Chekov's appearance on the watergoing USS Enterprise? Will Chekov's appearance cause the already strained relations between the USA and the USSR to fall apart? What about the old woman on dialysis who McCoy cured?
Or the formula for transparent aluminum that Scott apparently gave the plant manager? Or even the holes caused by the landing pads of the Klingon ship, or the effect the landing and takeoff had on the people in the park? Any idea how long a list one could make of the logical holes in "Star Trek IV". And how about a list of possible explanations of those holes?
It was an immensely enjoyable movie, but with a little work and foresight it could have been so much better by answering some of these questions, and making it much less of a large step to allow us to suspend our disbelief. It would also have probably helped it in the box office by making it even more appealing to the many people in this world who are not ardent fans of Star Trek.