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Where to begin...

Star Trek: Nemesis did not quite plumb the depths of sheer stupidity as Worst Contact did —which was Voyager-level stupid. But on the other hand, Nemesis seemed to be a rather flat and dull runaround which was only very vaguely a TNG film or a Star Trek film at all, for that matter. The plot could have been written for any random set of characters; they just happened to be the TNG crew, within Trek settings which seemed to have been picked entirely at random. And what is worse is that the movie has all of Insurrection's defects: nothing in Nemesis really gels together or follows logically from A to B to so forth.

For all of the backstory devoted to Picard's EvilClone Skippy, any Star Trek alien race could have served as his enslavers who sent him to rot in the dilithium mines for plot purposes. In large measure, it almost seems as if the story writers simply picked the Romulans at random draw just to provide Skippy with some backstory, anydamn backstory to justify his presence in the movie beyond that of his being Snidley Whiplash and put forth some sort of reason for his hatred. But it all has the feeling of being very contrived. There is no natural sense of Skippy's history to really connect the audience to his background or motives, or make us care about him as the particular threat against the TNG heroes. Indeed, just about every major plot point seems to be driven by nothing more than convenience simply to keep driving the movie forward.

The playwright Anton Chekhov once stated a very basic rule of drama by pointing out that if you show a gun hanging on a wall in Act One, you must use it by the end of Act Three. Nemesis is chok-a-block with guns hanging on wall-racks to be fired off within the last half hour of the movie.

What, for example, is the purpose of the entire subplot where Skippy psychically rapes Deanna? Simply to make us hate him all the more? Or just to provide the Big Plot Device during the battle between the Enterprise and the Scimitar which proves the only means of detecting Skippy's Battleship of Doom behind its ubercloak? Hanging gun number one.

Why does Skippy's Number One Female Captain conveniently spot her fuhrer doubling over in pain in one scene, then to have a sudden change of heart about annihilating every human on Earth; a plan she had no problem with when conspiring to knock off the entire Romulan senate? So that she can ride to the Enteprise's rescue in the Valdore by Act Three to keep the movie from ending too soon. Hanging gun number two.

Why the big scene where Data, disguised as B4, shows off his little emergency transporter coin to Picard? So that he can use it to beam his captain to safety just before the Big Moment of heroic self-sacrifice at movie's climax. Hanging gun number three.

And why the utterly pointless and poorly photographed armed dune buggy race on the planet where B4 is found? To set us up for Picard's little run through the Scimitar's corridors in the Scorpion fightercraft —at unsafe velocities (or ludicrous speed). Hanging gun number four.

Why the entire plot thread with B4, who later turns out to be a spy device for Skippy? So that Data can infiltrate the Scimitar and rescue Picard while feeding the enemy false information in the bargain. Hanging gun number five.

It wasn't that the plot points were telegraphed to the audience, they were announced with bullhorns, with neon signs flashing. There was zero subtletly to the set up of any major scene in the whole of the film. And this lack of subtlety extended not only to the plot points, but the plot complications as well. Skippy kidnaps Picard in the middle of the movie to sample his blood. We later learn that only a full transfusion of Picard's blood or marrow or ribosomes or whatever will prevent Skippy from ageing to death, so that prevents the immediate destruction of the Enterprise when Skippy's got her in the gunsights and thus stretches out the showdown battle. We are told that Skippy's ubermicrowave ultimate weapon will require seven full minutes to charge up and deploy for firing, so this gives Picard and Data the margin of safety they need to infiltrate the Battleship of Doom and destroy it.

The remaining plot elements which supposedly provided the support for the whole wobbly structure of the movie only help to undermine it even further. I mean, we're talking about some huge plot holes and script items which was just plain dumb. For example: who couldn't have figured out that B4 was going to be trouble? Given previous bad experience with all of Dr. Soong's other androids, what made Picard, Data, or Geordi imagine that things would be any different with this clicker? The very second we see B4 at a computer console with no guards in the room, we know right off that this is only going to lead to trouble. Particularly when Geordi and Data spot a redundant memory port in B4's head which Data doesn't seem to have.

Our "fears" seem confirmed when Skippy's got Picard in his playroom and "B4" walks in, ready to download the stolen files into Skippy's PC. Only —surprise— it turns out to be Data in disguise.

So when was the switch made? When did they discover what B4 was up to on the Enterprise? How did they overpower him? And when did they have time to build that extra memory port into Data's head to fool Skippy? Because the download link was plugged into the "redundant memory port" on "B4". Never once does the movie consider it necessary to wallpaper over this rather gaping plot hole.

Skippy's got Picard nice and secure, but instead of simply extracting the genetic material he needs to live at the very moment he's got Picard helpless and available, Skippy's got to be one of these boring maniacs who likes to gloat and, like any James Bond villain, conveniently leaves the room to allow Picard's escape —just about the clumsiest plot device of the entire damn movie in fact.

The Remans live permanently on the dark side of Remus. They cannot stand bright light. At the initial meeting between EvilClone Skippy and the Enterprise officers, this weakness is spotlighted (pun intended). During the Enterprise/Scimitar combat, a Reman boarding party beams over to the Enterprise to grab Picard. We can only conclude that at their ages, the Enterprise command crew are starting to have short-term memory problems, since none of them even think to turn up the ship's lighting to the bright setting.

It seems to be at least two days travel between Romulus to Earth. EvilClone Skippy hasn't got a whole hell of a lot of time to execute his Horrific Plan, yet he wastes so much of it gloating over Picard and trying to arrange his kidnap to get the genetic material he needs to live which he neglected to get when he had Baldy Sr. in his grasp! You don't even have this incompetence in a Republic serial villain, and he ends up wasting so much time that it's an almost certain bet that he'll die before the Battleship of Doom reaches Earth.

When Deanna is telepathically contacting Skippy's Reman Viceroy, why can't Skippy make the connection as to what's going on and have the presence of mind to shoot his Viceroy to prevent his ship's position from being given away? When the Enterprise rams the Scimitar, why doesn't Picard have a tractor beam activated to keep the two ships locked together? When Picard is killing his way up to the Scimitar's bridge to stop the ubermicrowave, why doesn't he shoot Skippy when he's got him in the gunsights? And when Skippy dies on the end of the shaft Picard rammed into his guts, why does Picard just stand postrate with grief over the little bastard who just tried to kill him twice, psychically raped his counsellor, and is planning to kill Earth —and fucking does NOTHING as his ship is in the gunsights and the countdown to his own crew's deaths is ticking?!?! Simply because EvilClone Skippy never realised his potential?

The worst thing is that all these ridiculous plot holes, defects, and stupidities, could have been so easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort from John Logan at the keyboard. Time which was wasted on the wedding reception which included the two spit-and-cough cameos of Whoppi Goldberg and Wil Wheaton (who doesn't even get a single line), armed dune buggy shooting races in the desert, and Deanna and Skippy doing the nasty could instead have been devoted to filling in these holes, smoothing over the defects, and correcting some very basic errors in plotting which you'd think any screenwriting class graduate would be capable of. The movie didn't have to be as stupid as it turned out. Nemesis is watchable as a typical action/adventure space runaround. But it could have been better.

At the end of the movie, the Enterprise is a wreck in a spacedock. An appropos metaphor for the Franchise as a whole. The only problem is that the real world wreck that is the Star Trek franchise is almost certainly beyond salvage. After five progressively stupid movies and two failed TV spinoffs, one of which is already limping its way across the airwaves on UPN, the defects in this once mighty SF powerhouse may never be fixable.

Time the whole thing went to the scrapyard.

Ah good, I was waiting for Megatron's Smackdown

The Remans live permanently on the dark side of Remus. They cannot stand bright light. At the initial meeting between EvilClone Skippy and the Enterprise officers, this weakness is spotlighted (pun intended). During the Enterprise/Scimitar combat, a Reman boarding party beams over to the Enterprise to grab Picard. We can only conclude that at their ages, the Enterprise command crew are starting to have short-term memory problems, since none of them even think to turn up the ship's lighting to the bright setting.

Maybe the ship doesn't *have* a bright setting?

When the Enterprise rams the Scimitar, why doesn't Picard have a tractor beam activated to keep the two ships locked together?

Tractor beams could have either been offline or the Enterprise had insufficient power to make a strong lock.

There's a rape scene in the film?

God damn it. I hate rape scenes...

Patrick Degan wrote: The playwright Anton Chekhov once stated a very basic rule of drama by pointing out that if you show a gun hanging on a wall in Act One, you must use it by the end of Act Three.

I heard it was the other way around-if you kill the villain with a gun in Act Three, it must be hanging on the wall in Act One so that it doesn't seem like a coput or a deus ex machina.

Patrick Degan wrote:Where to begin...

Whereever you wish, mighty Megs Your posts
are always interesting.

Star Trek: Nemesis did not quite plumb the depths of sheer stupidity as Worst Contact did —which was Voyager-level stupid. But on the other hand, Nemesis seemed to be a rather flat and dull runaround which was only very vaguely a TNG film or a Star Trek film at all, for that matter.

Hey, I liked "First Contact"

I also liked "Nemesis" for the most part. I didn't think it
was dull (except for the phaser firefights, about all of which
started to get really ridiculous with Picard shooting down
DOZENS of these supposedly super shocktroop Remans).

But you have a good point in saying it could've been a movie
about...well, anything, starring anyone. That might be
a bit of an exaggeration--the movie did make an effort
at intra/inter-series continuity--but if you stripped it to
the basic premise, yeah...it could've just as easily
been Bruce Willis fighting Mr. Doughnuts.

The plot could have been written for any random set of characters; they just happened to be the TNG crew, within Trek settings which seemed to have been picked entirely at random. And what is worse is that the movie has all of Insurrection's defects: nothing in Nemesis really gels together or follows logically from A to B to so forth.

Hmmm...I'd have to ask you why you feel this is so. It
didn't seem like such a non sequitur to me. If anything,
most of the things I felt sucked about the plot from
reading the script were resolved, if not perfectly.

For all of the backstory devoted to Picard's EvilClone Skippy, any Star Trek alien race could have served as his enslavers who sent him to rot in the dilithium mines for plot purposes. In large measure, it almost seems as if the story writers simply picked the Romulans at random draw just to provide Skippy with some backstory, anydamn backstory to justify his presence in the movie beyond that of his being Snidley Whiplash and put forth some sort of reason for his hatred.

I can't fully agree that he was simply a snarling villain. He
was more complex than the single-minded, purely snarling
Khan, which says something in itself.

I also don't think that any race could replace the Romulans
is necessarily a condemnation (though I do understand what
you're driving at). I mean, really...evil is evil. It doesn't matter
*who's* doing it; like journalists sometimes say, the who and
where doesn't matter so long as you can talk about the *why*.

But it all has the feeling of being very contrived. There is no natural sense of Skippy's history to really connect the audience to his background or motives, or make us care about him as the particular threat against the TNG heroes. Indeed, just about every major plot point seems to be driven by nothing more than convenience simply to keep driving the movie forward.

It was a little contrived, I agree. I was impressed that the
film was edited such that it didn't feel quite as goofy as
the leaked scripts, but I think it was the recipient of *too*
much editing. Part of the great stuff in TWOK is simply
the atmosphere, partly a result of just passage of time
with the characters (and character development, of course,
if the writing is something more than nothing).

The playwright Anton Chekhov once stated a very basic rule of drama by pointing out that if you show a gun hanging on a wall in Act One, you must use it by the end of Act Three. Nemesis is chok-a-block with guns hanging on wall-racks to be fired off within the last half hour of the movie.

It does well to distract you often enough to not notice all four
you point out (at least me, having seen it once), but yes.

What, for example, is the purpose of the entire subplot where Skippy psychically rapes Deanna? Simply to make us hate him all the more? Or just to provide the Big Plot Device during the battle between the Enterprise and the Scimitar which proves the only means of detecting Skippy's Battleship of Doom behind its ubercloak? Hanging gun number one.

Not necessarily just to hate Shin-ky more or to set up a cheap
plot device, though the latter is actually a VERY plausible explanation,
and something that did strike me on viewing but merely as a "buzz"
in the back of my head. Rather, it could be an effort to differentiate
Picard from Shinzon, which is to pretty much make the guy, as you
say, more loathable.

So, wait a min. ...why am I objecting to this? LOL. I think you're
right! Nevermind; I'm on Heineken numero tres, which is a lot
for me.

Why does Skippy's Number One Female Captain conveniently spot her fuhrer doubling over in pain in one scene, then to have a sudden change of heart about annihilating every human on Earth; a plan she had no problem with when conspiring to knock off the entire Romulan senate? So that she can ride to the Enteprise's rescue in the Valdore by Act Three to keep the movie from ending too soon. Hanging gun number two.

This struck me as a stretch, too, though it didn't help that Shinzon
treated Donatra like a redheaded stepchild ("If you touch me
again, I'll kill you").

Why the big scene where Data, disguised as B4, shows off his little emergency transporter coin to Picard? So that he can use it to beam his captain to safety just before the Big Moment of heroic self-sacrifice at movie's climax. Hanging gun number three.

Absolutely.

And why the utterly pointless and poorly photographed armed dune buggy race on the planet where B4 is found? To set us up for Picard's little run through the Scimitar's corridors in the Scorpion fightercraft —at unsafe velocities (or ludicrous speed). Hanging gun number four.

I think that might be a tad harsh. I'd call it an effort at pointless
action, something few films of any entertainment value are without;
e.g., the chase scene of Zim Weasel (or whatever) in AOTC.

Why the entire plot thread with B4, who later turns out to be a spy device for Skippy? So that Data can infiltrate the Scimitar and rescue Picard while feeding the enemy false information in the bargain. Hanging gun number five.

This, the film even admits. "He was bait, and you fell for it." B-4
was more a device to compare Picard's struggle with his "essential
stuff" and Shinzon to that of Data and B-4's, though it was awfully
convenient that the latter two were identical.

It wasn't that the plot points were telegraphed to the audience, they were announced with bullhorns, with neon signs flashing. There was zero subtletly to the set up of any major scene in the whole of the film.

I have to disagree here. There was no indication that Data
had replaced B-4 until the moment at which such became
important, though someone could certainly guess something
similar was going to happen.

Then again, I have to ask, why is that necessarily a detraction
to the film as a whole? We certainly knew Anakin Skywalker
would fall in love with Padme in AOTC.

And this lack of subtlety extended not only to the plot points, but the plot complications as well. Skippy kidnaps Picard in the middle of the movie to sample his blood. We later learn that only a full transfusion of Picard's blood or marrow or ribosomes or whatever will prevent Skippy from ageing to death, so that prevents the immediate destruction of the Enterprise when Skippy's got her in the gunsights and thus stretches out the showdown battle. We are told that Skippy's ubermicrowave ultimate weapon will require seven full minutes to charge up and deploy for firing, so this gives Picard and Data the margin of safety they need to infiltrate the Battleship of Doom and destroy it.

It was a poor plot device in the film, but for the rest of greater
Trek, that makes sense.

Think about it. If the weapon could be deployed immediately,
why wasn't such a device used earlier? If it was, as JMS said,
"imminently achievable," how come the Romulans and Cardassians
didn't use it against the Founder homeworld in "The Die Is Cast"?
There must be a logical shortcoming to the weapon beyond
its lethality.

The remaining plot elements which supposedly provided the support for the whole wobbly structure of the movie only help to undermine it even further. I mean, we're talking about some huge plot holes and script items which was just plain dumb. For example: who couldn't have figured out that B4 was going to be trouble? Given previous bad experience with all of Dr. Soong's other androids, what made Picard, Data, or Geordi imagine that things would be any different with this clicker?

Its retardation. I wouldn't call that a plot hole any more than I'd
say Windu's failing to decapitate Lord Tyranus at Geonosis is
a gaping hole, especially since B-4 was only able to access "minor"
systems and was specifically programmed to do so (beyond his
normal abilities, as was obvious).

The very second we see B4 at a computer console with no guards in the room, we know right off that this is only going to lead to trouble. Particularly when Geordi and Data spot a redundant memory port in B4's head which Data doesn't seem to have.

Yeah. However, I wouldn't characterize that as a gaping plot hole.
A cheesy device, yes.

Our "fears" seem confirmed when Skippy's got Picard in his playroom and "B4" walks in, ready to download the stolen files into Skippy's PC. Only —surprise— it turns out to be Data in disguise.

Which was a surprise. We were given no indication that the
good guys were onto Shinzon's plot.

So when was the switch made? When did they discover what B4 was up to on the Enterprise? How did they overpower him?

Data seemed to have no trouble overpowering and incapacitating
him.

And when did they have time to build that extra memory port into Data's head to fool Skippy? Because the download link was plugged into the "redundant memory port" on "B4". Never once does the movie
consider it necessary to wallpaper over this rather gaping plot hole.

Patrick, that's far from gaping. Sticking an extra hole in Data's
neck shouldn't be a big deal. Was it too convenient, though?
Perhaps.

Skippy's got Picard nice and secure, but instead of simply extracting the genetic material he needs to live at the very moment he's got Picard helpless and available, Skippy's got to be one of these boring maniacs who likes to gloat and, like any James Bond villain, conveniently leaves the room to allow Picard's escape —just about the clumsiest plot device of the entire damn movie in fact.

I actually think that's generous The clumsiest plot device,
to me at least, seemed to be the transporter coin or Donatra's
shifting loyalties. Hard to say there, though I know this is
nothing more than a nitpick

The Remans live permanently on the dark side of Remus. They cannot stand bright light. At the initial meeting between EvilClone Skippy and the Enterprise officers, this weakness is spotlighted (pun intended). During the Enterprise/Scimitar combat, a Reman boarding party beams over to the Enterprise to grab Picard. We can only conclude that at their ages, the Enterprise command crew are starting to have short-term memory problems, since none of them even think to turn up the ship's lighting to the bright setting.

ROTFLOL! That is EXACTLY what I thought! Turn up the
fucking lights, blind the bastards, and blast them!

In Trek's defense, maybe the normally very dim cooridors
of the E-E don't have variable light settings...but even then,
you'd *think* they'd at least be able to replicate some
damn bright flashlights!

It seems to be at least two days travel between Romulus to Earth.

With a qualification: for Shinzon's oddly powerful ship, which
is evidently faster than the E-E (itself very fast among Starfleet
ships).

Still, as Master of Ossus pointed out months ago, this should
set a firm upper-limit, if difficult to define (IMO, 1,000 capships
or less, but that's another post), on the size of the Romulan fleet...
otherwise, how come some of these bloodthirsty factions of
Romulus didn't just strike Earth ages ago, if it only took a few
days' travel?

EvilClone Skippy hasn't got a whole hell of a lot of time to execute his Horrific Plan, yet he wastes so much of it gloating over Picard and trying to arrange his kidnap to get the genetic material he needs to live which he neglected to get when he had Baldy Sr. in his grasp! You don't even have this incompetence in a Republic serial villain, and he ends up wasting so much time that it's an almost certain bet that he'll die before the Battleship of Doom reaches Earth.

It has to, yes But as intimated earlier, villain incompetence
goes with the territory...even the truly god-like Palpatine didn't
sense Lord Vader was ready to throw him into a chasm.

When Deanna is telepathically contacting Skippy's Reman Viceroy, why can't Skippy make the connection as to what's going on and have the presence of mind to shoot his Viceroy to prevent his ship's position from being given away?

The Viceroy was his brother in every meaningful sense. He loved
the guy. He wouldn't just kill him, even to gain an advantage over
his "antimatter" counterpart. That, I believe.

When the Enterprise rams the Scimitar, why doesn't Picard have a tractor beam activated to keep the two ships locked together?

No power? Phasers were down to 4% full capacity. Shields were
gone. Evidently full impulse was reduced to about 100m/sec.,
and normally automonous forcefields had to be manually activated.

When Picard is killing his way up to the Scimitar's bridge to stop the ubermicrowave, why doesn't he shoot Skippy when he's got him in the gunsights? And when Skippy dies on the end of the shaft Picard rammed into his guts, why does Picard just stand postrate with grief over the little bastard who just tried to kill him twice, psychically raped his counsellor, and is planning to kill Earth —and fucking does NOTHING as his ship is in the gunsights and the countdown to his own crew's deaths is ticking?!?! Simply because EvilClone Skippy never realised his potential?

Again, that's a bit harsh. If it was me on the other end of a stake,
I might be rather stunned, too. Could you imagine seeing yourself
dying from a few feet away?

IMO, that wasn't very unrealistic, especially with Data running to save
the day far better than Picard ever could.

The worst thing is that all these ridiculous plot holes, defects, and stupidities, could have been so easily fixed with just a tiny bit of effort from John Logan at the keyboard. Time which was wasted on the wedding reception which included the two spit-and-cough cameos of Whoppi Goldberg and Wil Wheaton (who doesn't even get a single line), armed dune buggy shooting races in the desert, and Deanna and Skippy doing the nasty could instead have been devoted to filling in these holes, smoothing over the defects, and correcting some very basic errors in plotting which you'd think any screenwriting class graduate would be capable of. The movie didn't have to be as stupid as it turned out. Nemesis is watchable as a typical action/adventure space runaround. But it could have been better.

Definitely. I think it could've been infinitely better, though I
don't rate it as low as you might (I rather liked it).

I also don't agree that there are as many plot *holes* as you're
denoting, though I at least agree that most of them were pretty
damn weak (as I said, I've always found your posts interesting,
and for very, very good reason: you're a sharp motherfucker,
and will hit the nail on the head 9.9 times outta 10).

To, again, "nitpick," I'd call them contrivances. To be sure,
the plot suffered from more of these than anything put out
by George Lucas, though I will give "Nemesis" the benefit
of cutting through all of the boring, badly-acted bullshit
a'la Jake Llyod (snore) and even the otherwise brilliant
first half of AOTC which, other than a few awkward scenes,
was also great but a bit slow on repeat viewings.

At the end of the movie, the Enterprise is a wreck in a spacedock. An appropos metaphor for the Franchise as a whole.

Yeah. I find it rather sad...even though I enjoyed a good bit
of post-TNG Deep Space Nine, I think the franchise has been
in serious decline right after "BOBW II" first aired. (Well,
maybe a *bit* after...I was moved by "Family" and found
a lot of TNG's fourth season to be excellent; you get
the idea, I think.)

The only problem is that the real world wreck that is the Star Trek franchise is almost certainly beyond salvage. After five progressively stupid movies and two failed TV spinoffs, one of which is already limping its way across the airwaves on UPN, the defects in this once mighty SF powerhouse may never be fixable.

Time the whole thing went to the scrapyard.

ENT isn't wholly bad, but it's in serious need of new blood.
Remember, even TNG, which helped define Trek's peak (again,
IMO, which happened around "BOBW"...I know that's unpopular
among TOS fans, but I am willing to argue that point), utterly
SUCKED in its first and much of its second years--and NOT thanks
to the demons of late; i.e., Berman and Braga (*especially*
Braga...he's too busy with Jeri Ryan to give a flying fuck about
what he produces, though I can't say that I blame him. Wow.
She really is something).

Still, I'm pretty much ready to concede that my beloved Star
Trek is on its knees. I don't think "Nemesis" is a death knell.
As I said earlier, I thought it was entertaining; and I seriously
believe it would benefit from being *lengthened*, something
I cannot say for many of my recent favorite movies (including
my more beloved A.I. or AOTC).

But that's me.

Considering these lackluster reports on the movie, I'm not sure that I'd want to spend the 7.50 to see it. If anything I know one line that would improve this movie tremendously. Ok, so when Skippy is speaking with Picardy for the first time let him say, "Do you know what nemesis means? A righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent. Personified in this case by a 'orrible cunt. Me." I just think that would work for this flick. Snatch-o-rama!

seanrobertson wrote:I can't fully agree that he was simply a snarling villain. He was more complex than the single-minded, purely snarling Khan, which says something in itself.

Khan had the context of his having been a one time ruler of one quarter of humanity, and there was his personal conflict with James Kirk, both established in "Space Seed". By contrast, Picard's EvilClone Skippy is dropped in our lap out of nowhere and he might as well have been Snidley Whiplash.

Patrick Degan wrote:What, for example, is the purpose of the entire subplot where Skippy psychically rapes Deanna? Simply to make us hate him all the more? Or just to provide the Big Plot Device during the battle between the Enterprise and the Scimitar which proves the only means of detecting Skippy's Battleship of Doom behind its ubercloak? Hanging gun number one.

Not necessarily just to hate Shin-ky more or to set up a cheap plot device, though the latter is actually a VERY plausible explanation, and something that did strike me on viewing but merely as a "buzz" in the back of my head. Rather, it could be an effort to differentiate Picard from Shinzon, which is to pretty much make the guy, as you say, more loathable.

He's slaughtered the entire Romulan Senate. His every pore drips bitterness. He's clearly lying about his motives to Picard. And he's planning to kill Earth. I'd say there's already enough built-in differentiation between Picard and Skippy, wouldn't you? Strip away that motivation for the scene, and all you've got left is set up for the plot device. Which means we've got a major character being put through a trauma simply to set up a plot device. That is extraordinarily cheesy writing; the sort of garbage you'd expect in a fifth-rate fanzine or any Trek novel written by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath.

Patrick Degan wrote:And why the utterly pointless and poorly photographed armed dune buggy race on the planet where B4 is found? To set us up for Picard's little run through the Scimitar's corridors in the Scorpion fightercraft —at unsafe velocities (or ludicrous speed). Hanging gun number four.

I think that might be a tad harsh. I'd call it an effort at pointless action, something few films of any entertainment value are without; e.g., the chase scene of Zim Weasel (or whatever) in AOTC.

Except that the speeder chace with Zim Weesil arose directly out of her attempt to assasinate Sen. Amidala. There is at least a logical plot-linkage to the pursuit of Obi Wan and Anakin. The dune buggy chase makes no damn sense whatsoever, and somebody on another thread pointed out how it represented a far more intrusive violation of the Prime Directive by exposing the Captain, a Klingon, and an android as well as an advanced shuttlecraft against the native culture of that world than if they had simply beamed down survey teams with tricorders to pick up B4's parts —and all the set-up we get for justifying this ludicrous waste of movie time is a throwaway line about a coming ion storm. Face it; the only reason for the scene is that Patrick Stewart wanted to tool around in the dune buggy and it's kludged into setting up his tooling through the Scimitar's corridors in the snub fighter later in the plot.

Patrick Degan wrote:Why the entire plot thread with B4, who later turns out to be a spy device for Skippy? So that Data can infiltrate the Scimitar and rescue Picard while feeding the enemy false information in the bargain. Hanging gun number five.

This, the film even admits. "He was bait, and you fell for it." B-4 was more a device to compare Picard's struggle with his "essential stuff" and Shinzon to that of Data and B-4's, though it was awfully convenient that the latter two were identical.

B4 is useless baggage. You could have cut the entire plot thread with Data's retarded older brother and not really lost a damn thing from the movie. Indeed, it would have made Data's sacrifice all the more meaningful, since everything he was would have been lost. His death would have been permanent, irretrievable, and far more heroic as an act of self-sacrifice.

There was no indication that Data had replaced B-4 until the moment at which such became important, though someone could certainly guess something similar was going to happen.

Then again, I have to ask, why is that necessarily a detraction to the film as a whole? We certainly knew Anakin Skywalker would fall in love with Padme in AOTC.

Except the Anakin/Amidala romance was set up throughout AOTC and foreshadowed in TPM. Look at AOTC again and break it down, structurally, and you can see how the romance develops in stages through the script. By contrast, Data replacing B4 is just popped on us out of nowhere. There is no linkage between A and C; no intermediate step where B4's espionage is discovered.

Patrick Degan wrote:And this lack of subtlety extended not only to the plot points, but the plot complications as well. Skippy kidnaps Picard in the middle of the movie to sample his blood. We later learn that only a full transfusion of Picard's blood or marrow or ribosomes or whatever will prevent Skippy from ageing to death, so that prevents the immediate destruction of the Enterprise when Skippy's got her in the gunsights and thus stretches out the showdown battle. We are told that Skippy's ubermicrowave ultimate weapon will require seven full minutes to charge up and deploy for firing, so this gives Picard and Data the margin of safety they need to infiltrate the Battleship of Doom and destroy it.

It was a poor plot device in the film, but for the rest of greater Trek, that makes sense.

Think about it. If the weapon could be deployed immediately, why wasn't such a device used earlier? If it was, as JMS said, "imminently achievable," how come the Romulans and Cardassians didn't use it against the Founder homeworld in "The Die Is Cast"? There must be a logical shortcoming to the weapon beyond its lethality.

You've already got two plot points in the way of the weapon being immediately deployable: Skippy hasn't gotten to Earth yet, and Skippy has to grab Picard to suck out his genetic material to save his own life. The entire point is to stop Skippy from killing Earth, right? Which means he has to be stopped before his Battleship of Doom even makes it out of the Neutral Zone.

Look at it this way: Skippy's plan and his ultimate weapon would have been far more horrific for the viewer if it had been used against Romulus itself, killing off the entire planetary population in revenge for his enslavement in the dilithium mines and then developing his intention to take the weapon to Earth. Just as the Death Star first blows up Alderaan and subsequently heads for Yavin-D in Star Wars. Not only is it a far more effective demonstration of how horrific his weapon is, it gives you a Romulan fleet that is hunting Skippy on their own and has a far more logical reason to ally with the Enterprise in the plot.

And asking why this weapon wasn't deployed in "The Die Is Cast" is a bit pointless: the übermicrowave did not exist at that time.

Patrick Degan wrote:So when was the switch made? When did they discover what B4 was up to on the Enterprise? How did they overpower him?

Data seemed to have no trouble overpowering and incapacitating him.

It seems to me that the entire point of an action movie is to actually show action; far better if it's actually connected to the actual plot and the characters. The point is that we never see Data overpowering B4 and there's no hint of when B4's espionage was even suspected. It's painfully obvious that John Logan dropped the ball here.

Patrick Degan wrote:And when did they have time to build that extra memory port into Data's head to fool Skippy? Because the download link was plugged into the "redundant memory port" on "B4". Never once does the movie consider it necessary to wallpaper over this rather gaping plot hole.

Patrick, that's far from gaping. Sticking an extra hole in Data's neck shouldn't be a big deal. Was it too convenient, though? Perhaps.

Try sticking an extra hole in your computer —that is without destroying anything critical in the process. Somebody just wasn't thinking here.

Patrick Degan wrote:Skippy's got Picard nice and secure, but instead of simply extracting the genetic material he needs to live at the very moment he's got Picard helpless and available, Skippy's got to be one of these boring maniacs who likes to gloat and, like any James Bond villain, conveniently leaves the room to allow Picard's escape —just about the clumsiest plot device of the entire damn movie in fact.

I actually think that's generous. The clumsiest plot device, to me at least, seemed to be the transporter coin or Donatra's shifting loyalties. Hard to say there, though I know this is nothing more than a nitpick.

It still comes down to a "Before I kill you, Mr. Bond blah blah blahblahblah..." cliché.

Patrick Degan wrote:The Remans live permanently on the dark side of Remus. They cannot stand bright light. At the initial meeting between EvilClone Skippy and the Enterprise officers, this weakness is spotlighted (pun intended). During the Enterprise/Scimitar combat, a Reman boarding party beams over to the Enterprise to grab Picard. We can only conclude that at their ages, the Enterprise command crew are starting to have short-term memory problems, since none of them even think to turn up the ship's lighting to the bright setting.

ROTFLOL! That is EXACTLY what I thought! Turn up the fucking lights, blind the bastards, and blast them!

In Trek's defense, maybe the normally very dim cooridors of the E-E don't have variable light settings...but even then, you'd *think* they'd at least be able to replicate some damn bright flashlights!

We certainly see brighter lighting on that ship in the surrounding scenes. The only reason is as an artificial "action enhancement" device; facing the Orcs/Vampires/Borg/Living Dead/whatevers in the dark. Oooh...scary blah blah blahblahblah...

Patrick Degan wrote:EvilClone Skippy hasn't got a whole hell of a lot of time to execute his Horrific Plan, yet he wastes so much of it gloating over Picard and trying to arrange his kidnap to get the genetic material he needs to live which he neglected to get when he had Baldy Sr. in his grasp! You don't even have this incompetence in a Republic serial villain, and he ends up wasting so much time that it's an almost certain bet that he'll die before the Battleship of Doom reaches Earth.

It has to, yes But as intimated earlier, villain incompetence goes with the territory...even the truly god-like Palpatine didn't sense Lord Vader was ready to throw him into a chasm.

That wasn't incompetence on Palpatine's part; that was his being fixated on making Luke suffer as much as possible while killing him slowly and thus being distracted. Skippy's incompetence is expressed at length; in which he makes every wrong decision at every critical juncture and practically guarantees the failure of his fondest dreams and aspirations for the future.

The Viceroy was his brother in every meaningful sense. He loved the guy. He wouldn't just kill him, even to gain an advantage over his "antimatter" counterpart. That, I believe.

We're not talking about gaining advantage. We're talking about not letting your ass stick out when somebody's around to kick it. He's got to protect himself and keep his Battleship of Doom from being exposed to detection.

That's part of what I was talking about in terms of grand-mal incompetence.

Patrick Degan wrote:When the Enterprise rams the Scimitar, why doesn't Picard have a tractor beam activated to keep the two ships locked together?

No power? Phasers were down to 4% full capacity. Shields were gone. Evidently full impulse was reduced to about 100m/sec., and normally automonous forcefields had to be manually activated.

The Enterprise has sufficent power to run impulse engines, and as has been pointed out by the Lord Wong elsewhere, maintaining a tractor beam takes no net expenditure of power once its locked onto an object unless the system is horribly inefficent to begin with. And since Picard gains nothing in the tactic —he neither wrecks the übermicrowave, nor does he get armed boarding parties across— then the entire manoeuver was pointless. Picard inflicts even greater damage on his own ship for nothing.

Patrick Degan wrote:When Picard is killing his way up to the Scimitar's bridge to stop the ubermicrowave, why doesn't he shoot Skippy when he's got him in the gunsights? And when Skippy dies on the end of the shaft Picard rammed into his guts, why does Picard just stand postrate with grief over the little bastard who just tried to kill him twice, psychically raped his counsellor, and is planning to kill Earth —and fucking does NOTHING as his ship is in the gunsights and the countdown to his own crew's deaths is ticking?!?! Simply because EvilClone Skippy never realised his potential?

Again, that's a bit harsh. If it was me on the other end of a stake, I might be rather stunned, too. Could you imagine seeing yourself dying from a few feet away?

If you're a soldier, that's when you suck it up and get on with the job. The men who landed under murderous fire at Dog Green Sector, Omaha Beach, saw half their mates get blown to pieces or perforated by bullets. The battlefield is horrible; you don't let yourself forget why you're there —especially if you've got a thousand other people depending on you. It makes no sense for Picard to grieve over his economy-pack twin to the point where he's simply going to stand there and do nothing while his entire crew is killed. If he's that prone to emotional paralysis, then he's got no damn business being in command of a starship in the first place.

Patrick Degan wrote:Except the Anakin/Amidala romance was set up throughout AOTC and foreshadowed in TPM. Look at AOTC again and break it down, structurally, and you can see how the romance develops in stages through the script. By contrast, Data replacing B4 is just popped on us out of nowhere. There is no linkage between A and C; no intermediate step where B4's espionage is discovered.

Actually, there was. Or, at least, an attempt at it. Geordi says that he's found out about the intruder, and that they have a way to use the intruder to their advantage. At this point, we know who the intruder is, but we don't know what advantage they found... until we find out about the switch.

Mad wrote:Actually, there was. Or, at least, an attempt at it. Geordi says that he's found out about the intruder, and that they have a way to use the intruder to their advantage. At this point, we know who the intruder is, but we don't know what advantage they found... until we find out about the switch.

It might be the foundation for a link or a step "B" in the plot thread progression. But it's never actually built up in the script. John Logan just leaves a big hole with an "under construction" sign hanging over it.

Why the big scene where Data, disguised as B4, shows off his little emergency transporter coin to Picard? So that he can use it to beam his captain to safety just before the Big Moment of heroic self-sacrifice at movie's climax. Hanging gun number three.

I don't get it. Why is a self-sacrifice required? Star Trek IV established that you could simply latch on to someone and be transported along with them when Gillian jumps Kirk just before they beam him up.

Durandal wrote:

Why the big scene where Data, disguised as B4, shows off his little emergency transporter coin to Picard? So that he can use it to beam his captain to safety just before the Big Moment of heroic self-sacrifice at movie's climax. Hanging gun number three.

I don't get it. Why is a self-sacrifice required? Star Trek IV established that you could simply latch on to someone and be transported along with them when Gillian jumps Kirk just before they beam him up.

Then the radiation would have all been fired. What bothered me most was the idea that, if such a small dose of Thalaron was required to kill everyone on the E-E, and the E-E was just a few hundred meters from the Scimitar when the thing went off, you would think that the E-E would have been hit with enough radiation to kill them all, anyway.

Master of Ossus wrote: Then the radiation would have all been fired.

GAH.

Phaser pointed at funky device.....set to maximum setting, and
on a TIMER...

MKSheppard wrote:Phaser pointed at funky device.....set to maximum setting, and on a TIMER...

GAH.

Satchel charge of antimatter stored in a container with only enough battery power to keep the containment fields active for another few minutes. Almost completely fail-safe and a mere 1KG of antimatter would have an explosive yield of 21MT.

But then again, this is Star Trek, where time-delay fuzes and rational attack plans are a lost art...

Data's plan probably would've been to have himself go, clear out the room with the device, then set a charge up, then beam himself out. Or something along those lines, with Data surviving. But, no, Picard didn't even listen.

How about the whole "bottomless pit" aspect of the Riker, Vicroy finnal fight. Where and why the fuck would the Enterprise have a shaft like that?

Sea Skimmer wrote:How about the whole "bottomless pit" aspect of the Riker, Vicroy finnal fight. Where and what the fuck would the Enterprise have a shaft like that?

I guess the writers didn't realize that such a construct would look at home in the Death Star, but not on a relatively small starship. Now the Trekkie fanboys have to invent schematics of the E-E in which a generous amount of space is wasted for this pointless bottomless pit

Darth Wong wrote:

Sea Skimmer wrote:How about the whole "bottomless pit" aspect of the Riker, Vicroy finnal fight. Where and what the fuck would the Enterprise have a shaft like that?

I guess the writers didn't realize that such a construct would look at home in the Death Star, but not on a relatively small starship. Now the Trekkie fanboys have to invent schematics of the E-E in which a generous amount of space is wasted for this pointless bottomless pit

I was thinking, maybe the artificial gravity runs at a 60-90 degree angel to the normal orientation of the ship and the shaft actually runs near horizontal through the engineering hull and into the neck with gravity pulling you *Up* into the saucer section...

Someone at Utopia Planitia probably lost the semantics for that section during construction.

Darth Wong wrote: I guess the writers didn't realize that such a construct would look at home in the Death Star, but not on a relatively small starship. Now the Trekkie fanboys have to invent schematics of the E-E in which a generous amount of space is wasted for this pointless bottomless pit

Actually, I think it was a turbolift shaft or at least a FREIGHT turbolift
shaft, which looked pretty damn huge, what with all the lighting being
knocked offline during the battle....

Enlightenment wrote:But then again, this is Star Trek, where time-delay fuzes and rational attack plans are a lost art...

My scheme actually used equipment that DATA ACTUALLY HAD on his person...but you're right......ST has no concept of timed devices

MKSheppard wrote:

Darth Wong wrote: I guess the writers didn't realize that such a construct would look at home in the Death Star, but not on a relatively small starship. Now the Trekkie fanboys have to invent schematics of the E-E in which a generous amount of space is wasted for this pointless bottomless pit

Actually, I think it was a turbolift shaft or at least a FREIGHT turbolift
shaft, which looked pretty damn huge, what with all the lighting being
knocked offline during the battle....

A turbolift shaft should not have a walkway spanning it.

Darth Wong wrote:

Sea Skimmer wrote:How about the whole "bottomless pit" aspect of the Riker, Vicroy finnal fight. Where and what the fuck would the Enterprise have a shaft like that?

I guess the writers didn't realize that such a construct would look at home in the Death Star, but not on a relatively small starship. Now the Trekkie fanboys have to invent schematics of the E-E in which a generous amount of space is wasted for this pointless bottomless pit

Kind of like Galaxy Quest when Tim Allen and Sigorney Weaver encounter the giant pistons in the engine room, and she yells, "Why the Hell would this be here?!" The kicker was when they jumped through the last of the pistons, and there was still a flame jet at the end.

At least Galaxy Quest WAS a commedy

One that I haven't seen mentioned: the idiocy of the Romulan senate. The INSTANT that female senator left without taking the satchel, I thought 'bomb'. It never crossed the minds of the senators, and they never even seemed to NOTICE it!

And as to the fight in the E-E....why the FUCK weren't there more SF personnel? You're telling me Worf and his buds were the only group able to get into the area? Bullshit!

And did the Remans hit ANYTHING? Seriously, aside for nailing the walls and the bay door (which they never even THOUGHT of trying to open), they only hit a couple SF people! There's your 'crack troops'. Yeesh.

Iggy, remember that the SF personnel were only trying to protect the bridge, too. All they had to do was select a good defensive position and sit still. Alternatively, they could have turned the lights up on the E-E to confuse the Remans, or they could have fortified an area, or they could have used forcefields and then opened the compartment into space. That whole part of the movie was ripped straight out of ANH, and not done as well.