sekiharatae | Trek Babble (Reply)

In addition to my deep and abiding affection for things that are blatantly obvious on this journal, there are also a wealth of things for which my interest kind of... ebbs and flows. You can ask me at any time if I like one of these things, and I'll say yes... but whether or not I'm obsessive about it will depend upon my mood or what's captured my attention lately. Harry Potter, for example. Right now, I'm not particularly interested in reading HP fanfiction, but there have been times when I've spent days doing nothing but.

Presently, I'm on a Star Trek kick. We got the new movie on DVD for my dad for Christmas, and my hubby got me blu-rays of the original cast movies and first season TOS.

So you could probably guess I'm a Star Trek fan. When I was a kid, I probably watched more TOS Trek reruns than any other kind of live action TV. Never cared for TNG or DS9, but I liked both Voyager and Enterprise.... although not as much as TOS. And, although I enjoyed it, and I'm looking forward to the next film in the 'rebooted' franchise, I have issues with the 2009 reboot. Mainly I think they tried to get too much mileage out of their initial change to the time line, but other things bothered me as well. Although... I was happy to see in the deleted scenes that they didn't forget Kirk had an older brother (I can never clearly hear what Kirk yells as he drives by, so I didn't know who that was supposed to be).

Anyway, one thing that bothers me is that the new Kirk's eyes are blue. They're a beautiful blue, to be sure, but they're still blue. Kirk's eyes are hazel. Now... Chris Pine actually wears prescription contacts, so changing his eye color would've been easy. Failing that, however, they could have explained it with, I don't know, science fiction? I mean... there's a glaucoma drug that has already been found to turn eyes brown in a significant portion of users. That's real.   So, how difficult would it be to come up with some sort of techno-babble to explain Kirk's eye color being different in the reboot? That they didn't implies that either the powers that be: (a) didn't care that they were different, (b) didn't know they were different, or (c) didn't think anyone else would care. Which is silly when women have made over Kirk for years, and eyes tend to be important to us. Not to mention that eye color is considered part of a person's basic identification and description. Every state I've ever lived in lists it on your driver's license! It bothers me especially as a writer, because knowing what characters look like is important. How many times, as writers, do we reference eyes?

That aside, another thing that bothers me is the rumor that someone has been cast to play Khan in the next reboot film. This is not because I think only Montalban can play the character -- although, Montalban has to be a hard act to follow. No, it's because Khan doesn't fit at this point in the rebooted timeline. Happily, IMDB no longer lists Khan as a character, nor Nestor Carbonell as the actor (when it did just a week ago), so maybe they won't go there.

Think of Starfleet exploration into space as a ripple effect. Kirk's original five year mission started six years later than it does in the reboot, and it wasn't until then that anyone encountered Khan. So, in the reboot timeline, that ripple shouldn't have reached as far yet. Even considering that the new Starfleet may be either more or less aggressive in pushing their boundaries than in the original time line.

If the next movie decides to revisit anything from the old time line, I think it should be The Cage: the original TOS pilot, featuring Captain Pike. Captain Pike's life has now been changed as well, and he will never meet the Talosians as captain of the Enterprise. But Kirk could. Admittedly, The Menagerie (the two part episode of TOS which reused footage from The Cage) states the events in The Cage happened 13 years before the 'present day' events in the episodes. But in the reboot, the Enterprise herself isn't constructed until thirteen years after her TOS launch date -- a discrepancy that can probably be explained by Starfleet pulling back from exploring the deeper reaches of space after the Kelvin encountered the Narada. Taking a slower approach that allowed them to develop better shields and scanning devices and such, to better protect themselves. So a Kirk encounter with the Talosians would seem possible. Either way, it's just a thought. But I really hope they don't revisit anything from TOS -- especially the first season -- without some sort of plausible explanation for the difference in how far Starfleet has explored.

I'll quit babbling now. ^^; Migraine is making me see spots anyway. (So forgive me for my typos, I can't see them...) Stupid Bob.