Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, as an odd-numbered franchise entry, is often cited as proof of the “even=good, odd=bad” pattern. Certainly it’s the first film in the series made primarily for a specific marketing reason (“We have to get Nimoy back! It doesn’t matter if Spock’s dead!”). It’s a movie that has neither a real beginning or ending. But, given those caveats, I maintain that the film is still a surprising and powerful experience.
There will be spoilers.
I had the pleasure of seeing it on its original run, when we didn’t know there would be Trek movies 4-13, let alone four new TV series. For all we did know, this would be the final Trek movie ever. It certainly drew some hard lines: Kirk and his command crew abandoning their Starfleet careers, David Marcus dying, and the destruction of the Enterprise itself. Unlike most current movie series, with installments that feel more like episodes, STIII felt like an actual movie, where the story wrought fundamental changes on the characters and their universe. There was no sense that things would be back to normal by start of the next film, if there even was a next film.
Which brings me to three non-verbal, purely visual moments that emphasize just how good a movie this is. No, not the big ones, like Kirk falling backwards after his son is killed, or Spock raising his eyebrow to show he’s at least partly himself. These are even smaller moments that don’t so much advance the plot as help populate the Trek universe with real people (I use “people” here in the non-specist sense).
Make no mistake: Spock may be referenced in the title, but STIII is emphatically about James T. Kirk. As David Gerrold says, the best Trek stories boil down to, “Kirk has a decision to make,” and that’s never been more true, here. In this film, he faces his biggest decision ever, the one with the deepest personal cost (Edith Keeler notwithstanding): how far will he go on the off chance that he can help his dead friend? The answer, of course, is all the way.
The first moment I want to highlight happens when Kirk meets with Admiral Morrow after Sarek’s visit. Morrow not only refuses permission to allow the Enterprise to return to Genesis, he warns Kirk that continuing to press the issue could cost him his career.
Watch Kirk as Morrow speaks. Up until this moment, the scene is shot in a standard cut-to-who’s-speaking style, until Morrow lays it all out for Kirk. Then, instead of cutting to Morrow talking, the camera stays on Kirk as he listens, slowly zooming in so that you see the reality of the situation really register. It’s not a surprise to him: Kirk, being Kirk, already knows what he’ll lose if he persists. But in that moment, even as Morrow is warning him, Kirk makes his decision.
So, when Morrow finishes, Kirk apparently blows it off. “I had to try,” he says with a friendly grin, making it seem like the whole issue is over.
Of course, in the next moment he tells his crew, “The word…is ‘no.’ I am therefore going anyway.”
One of the real treats of STIII is that it gives not only the original crew moments to shine, but even the actors in bit parts. McCoy’s waitress and the alien pirate in the space bar, Uhura’s “Mr. Adventure,” and nervous Captain Esteban make impressions in roles that could have been dispensable.
One of the most perfectly timed moments, and the second I want to point out, comes when Jeanne Mori, playing the Grissom’s helm officer, reacts to the report that the Genesis effect has resurrected Spock. It’s a moment that lays bare the whole reason for this film’s very existence, and to play it straight would make it even more ridiculous. So the reaction is given, not to Captain Esteban or any of the other named characters, but to this nameless officer. The slow burn of her eyes as she recognizes the sheer ludicrousness of this development ensures that we’re laughing with the movie, not at it. Yes, we know this is silly, the moment tells us. Just go with it, though, and we promise it’ll be worth it.
The third moment occurs during the mind-meld montage at the movie’s climax. That scene hovers on the edge of camp goofiness, with the whole planet Vulcan combining their mental forces to effect a soul transplant, moving Spock’s katya out of McCoy and back into his regenerated body (imagine if they moved the wrong soul). Only the grim events that precede it (the death of David Marcus, the destruction of the Enterprise) stave off the giggles.
Since it’s a montage, it consists of slow, overlapping pans across various parts of the group: the high priestess T’Lar’s grim profile, the Vulcans all with their eyes closed, the Enterprise crew watching helplessly.
Well, most of the crew. Saavik, the Vulcan helm officer, stands with the Enterprise crew, yet closes her eyes and contributes her mental energy to the Vulcan effort.
This moment always carried a ton of symbolic Trek weight for me. The first Vulcan we ever met, Spock, served in Starfleet against the wishes of his father, a conflict that isn’t fully resolved until the end of the next movie. Also half human, Spock has to resist the urge to let that part of himself out, even as he’s surrounded by the best that humanity has to offer.
Saavik, introduced in the prior movie, is a young Vulcan trying to puzzle out human behavior; she wants to understand it so that she’ll be a better Enterprise officer (a callback to the character Xon from the abortive second Trek series). She does not wish to become human, just to understand them, and her efforts (from the comic ones in STII to her almost bitter dressing-down of David Marcus in STIII) allow us to see the human characters from a clear-headed outsider’s perspective.
Yet here, at the end, she stands with the Enterprise crew, yet joins in the Vulcan effort. Part of this, of course, is personal: Spock was her mentor, and she may (thankfully this is left vague) have gotten even more intimate with the younger version of his brainless self. So she has a personal stake in the outcome.
But this goes beyond the purely personal—it’s simply something a Vulcan would do. Group affiliations (in this case, Starfleet) do not preclude heritage. It’s a moment that, to me, echoes throughout the Trek universe, adding to the sense of reality and depth that—piece by piece, episode by episode, movie by movie—makes Trek so much fun. Of course Saavik is both Vulcan and Starfleet. She embodies (to borrow a phrase) the best of both worlds.
There are other fine moments, of course, both big and small, no doubt due to director Leonard Nimoy’s determination to let his actors act and not get swallowed by special effects or ensnarled in plot details. And as I said, this creates a sense of a universe populated with living beings who have their own opinions, interests, and lives.
The closest contemporary analogy I can think of to STIII is with The LEGO Movie. Both films were created primarily due to marketing concerns (I know, you could say that about all films, but seldom is it this blatant, and it certainly wasn’t back in 1983…), yet in both cases, the filmmakers entrusted with the project managed to go beyond the call and give us a real story with genuine emotions. And in both cases, that feels like something of a miracle.
Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He’s been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. His latest novel is Chapel of Ease, available from Tor Books.
I’ve never been a huge fan of ST II-VI, or of Harve Bennett’s larger body of work, but I’ve always felt that Bennett’s (no relation) script for The Search for Spock had some beautiful dialogue writing, almost poetic at times. It’s a nice movie to listen to, even though the story doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Thank you, Alex. Great article. Always nice to see TSFS get some love.
Nimoy was an underrated director in my opinion, and I wish he had done more films. My favorite scene is the build up to the battle between the Klingons and the Enterprise. It’s an excellent piece of suspense, made even better by Horner’s music.
I love this article, Alex! I was a brand-new Trek fan when ST III was on cable TV, and I would watch it over and over (“…only on The Movie Channel,” Shatner intoned in his filmed intro). You’re right: It’s a movie you just have to be willing to go with, since so many of its premises don’t hold up under close scrutiny. Thankfully, as Christopher says, the dialogue makes up where the plot is lacking, and the character moments are many and spot-on. McCoy-as-Spock in the Mos Eisley cantina San Francisco nightclub is just about perfect. (“Where’s the logic in offering me a ride home, you idiot?!?”)
I have to demur, though, about the mind meld scene. It has never really worked for me, even though I think Dame Judith Anderson is fantastic as T’Lar, and Horner’s swelling score is superb. But, apart from Saavik and Kirk, none of the actors look very engaged in or even interested in what’s going on as we pan past them. And Scotty keeps “checking out” Saavik for some reason. It distracts me.
I also wanted to add: every time I watch ST III, Robin Curtis grows on me as Saavik. Understand: Kirstie Alley will always, always be Saavik in my mind – but I have really grown to appreciate what Curtis does with the role, playing it, as Nimoy directed her to, as pure Vulcan. Other people find her line, “David is dead,” just cringeworthy delivery – I always find it devastating, even before Kirk collapses. Watch what she does with her eyebrows – she’s struggling to keep some pretty violent emotion tamped down at that moment. Her voice almost, almost falters when she says, “Admiral…” It’s a gut-wrenching moment.
I am surprised you could select only 3 great visual moments from a movie that is full of them. Thanks again for this great post!
Good article! I actually like this film better than either TMP or TWOK. I find that they both try too hard to be profound. I usually cite TSFS as counterevidence to the whole odd number/even number theory. It’s a lovely story about friendship and loyalty, and it has the best Uhura scene in all the TOS films.
#3
Checking out? It looked to me like Scotty was trying to figure out the Vulcan spiritual internet that was going on between Saavik and the rest of her people. It was something new to him.
@4/Jana: Too bad Uhura’s one good scene comes at the cost of excluding her from the rest of the movie.
@6/Christopher: True, but the scene stands out for me so much that this never bothered me.
When people say a Star Trek (or any tv gone to movies franchise) movie feels like an episode just on the big screen, that is generally a bad thing. They of course mean, to use Insurrection or Generations as an example, that it is one of the over long plodding ones where they had filler and padding to dress up a very slight script which was more an idea and couple of good lines. Unlike TMP or WoK, or even Nemesis, which are very clearly movies and succeed or fail as movies on their own movie merits, Search for Spock does feel like they took an episode and shoved on the big screen. But not one of the filler episodes, this was one of the good ones.
It may lack the FX and that movie-weight to it, but I love it nonetheless. I think the story is engaging, it is character driven, has and uses continuity to its advantage, and it is filled with little moments. Also there is the requisite scenery chewing guest star as the villain, courtesy of Christopher Lloyd. If you split it in half and showed it as a two parter, then it would favourably compare with Best of Both Worlds or any of the other really good tv stories. I love it for that, and I think the franchise is all the richer for it. I’ve never understood why it is so overlooked.
A full article and a bunch of comments on this movie, with no mention of the actual main story upon which the Spock business hangs. It goes to show what this movie could have been if they had been able to move beyond the Klingon-of-the-moment plotline.
I feel this movie has always got a bum rap. This movie is a ‘heist’ movie and its awesome! Scotty playing the sabateur, Uhura hoodwinking the young ensign, Sulu and Chekov just being badasses.
Such a fun movie. And the visuals of the Grissom over the Planet – even though they are model shots – look amazing to this day.
I saw this one in the theater when it first appeared, and I still enjoy it. I’ve long felt that this one has been underrated, in part being forced in retrospect to fit the even-odd narrative. There are lots of great moments here and some effective character arcs too. I think Christopher Lloyd did surprisingly well as Kruge as well, being a better villain overall than the story really should have allowed.
Thanks for the article!
Possibly my favorite Star Trek film. Genuine characters driven by grief. A villain fighting a totally different battle than our heroes. Loss piled upon loss. And gorgeous new starships, of course.
@9/sardinicus: I’d say “the actual main story” is the heist and the way everybody works together to save Spock’s katra. The Klingon story is just a subplot. And I remember that when the film was new, I thought “it’s about time that we get to see some Klingons”, after they had been redesigned and then barely used in TMP, and not used at all in TWOK.
Although the way they’re portrayed here is a bit odd, with the pet on the bridge and Kruge being called “Lord”.
#13
Good point about it being a heist film. The next one, Voyage Home, has a heist element to it as well. I mean the 20th century section is pretty much Ocean’s 11 with whales.
When I saw it in the theater and Kruge came on screen it seemed that half the audience, including me, yelled out “Reverend Jim!”
Would’ve loved to see more of badass Uhura.
But this did set up Star Trek 4:Save the Whales, which I love.
@15/wiredog: It’s interesting that the Klingon crew here contains two ’80s sitcom stars, Christopher Lloyd as Kruge and John Larroquette as Maltz (the sole survivor). And they both do an excellent job as serious villains. Of course, Larroquette has gone on to demonstrate many times since that he’s an absolutely brilliant dramatic actor as well as a gifted comedy actor.
@5/Cheerio – Ok, I admit my viewing of that scene is probably unduly influenced by having seen one of Doohan’s personal appearances, at my college in the 90s, sometime after “Relics,” where he made a comment about Gates McFadden being “a fine piece of meat.” It colored my impression of him for the worse. But, you are right, there are other ways of looking at the scene, too, and your interpretation is no doubt the intent. Even so, I find it distracting that he’s focusing on her, but that’s more my issue than the movie’s.
I want to join the chorus of praise for Christopher Lloyd. @13/Jana – I bet you anything Kruge insists on being called “Lord” by his subordinates, and that he motivates his crew by fear – heck, how many gunners must he go through, killing them off whenever they miss the mark! (He almost blows Torg to Sto-Vo-Kor, too!) And I’m really intrigued by his relationship with Valkris. What motivates this woman to own up to having seen the Genesis info, when she knows, clearly, she will pay for it with her life? I submitted a story on this couple to Strange New Worlds multiple times, revising and editing and altering year after year in hopes of getting it right, but to no avail. Someone should really take on Valkris in Trek-lit – there’s got to be a fascinating story there (even if it wasn’t meant to be mine!) :)
And, yes, Uhura is sidelined for most of the movie – but boy, when she has her moment, what a moment it is! Far better than Sulu’s, which is also pretty good. Chekov doesn’t really get much, does he? He gets to speak some actual Russian onscreen for the first time (it means, “I’m not crazy, so there!” – I asked Koenig at a personal appearance about it, and my impression was he was kind of annoyed at my question, even though I think it was a reasonable one for a middle schooler in the pre-internet era to be asking…) And as much as I know Christopher doesn’t like the re-use of the destruct codes from “Let That Be…,” the destruction of the Enterprise sequence still gives me goosebumps, all these years later.
Argh, I have too much to do this weekend, or I would stop and rewatch the thing right now! So much good stuff there. So underrated by most. What a fun discussion this is!
@16/Christopher – Maltz as “sole survivor”: Yes! One of my favorite bits in Marc Okrand’s Klingon Dictionary was the way the “editor’s introduction” ended: “Maltz, we thank you.” :) I think there have been some fan speculations, maybe even licensed fiction, where Maltz kills himself in the brig rather than being taken alive, but I hope that’s not the case… Who knows, maybe his life within the Federation as a prisoner led to eventual “release for good behavior” and planted some small seeds toward the eventual detente between the UFP and the Empire…
My main complaint about Trek III is that it’s never quite clear why they need to get Spock’s body back (for in-universe reasons, I mean). I think Vonda McIntyre did everyone a service in her novelization by rearranging the sequence of events so that the original aim was simply to divest McCoy of Spock’s katra on Vulcan, and only once he heard the news that Spock’s body had survived did the more ambitious plan of fal-tor-pan take shape.
I’m also not real cool with Admiral Morrow’s easy dismission of “Vulcan mysticism,” but I know not everyone takes that moment as I do. What can I say, I was a comparative religions major, so handwaving someone else’s religious/philosophical system away so casually just because it doesn’t speak to you always rubs me wrong, and seems unworthy of Starfleet’s top brass. (Then again, there’s far worse to come in Star Trek VI, so….)
@19/Mike: McIntyre didn’t rearrange the sequence, the film editors did. As I recall, both the novelization and the comic book went with the original script order in which the Grissom‘s discovery of Spock’s tube was the first scene of the movie (though McIntyre added several chapters of transitional material before getting to that point), so the crew already knew about it by the time they reached Earth. That suggests that the editors’ decision to restructure the film and move back the opening Grissom scenes came too late for either the novel or the comic to be adjusted to match. And what you describe sounds like what was done in the final film — Sarek didn’t even suggest fal-tor-pan until they were already back on Vulcan with Spock’s body.
But it’s always been a plot hole — why did they even go to Genesis in the first place if they didn’t know Spock’s body had been resurrected? Why not just take McCoy and his katra back to Vulcan? If it was just about wanting Spock’s body to be buried on Vulcan, wouldn’t that have already been in his will or his Starfleet file, so that they would’ve known better than to do a burial in space?
I am a big fan of the “Stealing the Enterprise” scene. So many things to love:
– Kirk starts the scene by giving Scotty, Sulu, and Chekov a way out, while fully knowing what these men will do. Everyone plays this bit so well: Shatner is warm and charismatic; Doohan, Takei, and Koenig immediately sell how much loyalty they have to one another.
– The slow burn of the Enterprise breaching the Spacedock doors. I know the Enterprise will escape because the story demands it… but to watch the mounting tension between Shatner and Doohan as the doors loom closer always gets me.
– The crew of the Excelsior. Doubtlessly James B. Sikking plays his Captain Styles for laughs, but you can tell this is a man who expects ruthless perfection from his ship and crew.
I remember back when the Star Wars: Special Edition came out in 1997. The reviewer in the local paper commented that, based on his work on Episode IV, it’s a pity that George Lucas never developed his director skills because he showed some definite talent. Unlike his contemporary, Steven Spielberg, Lucas walked away during the formative years of his career and never developed the skill set that Spielberg cultivated. Watching The Search for Spock, I wonder how Leonard Nimoy would have fared if he had spread his wings and directed something other than Star Trek sequels and light comedies.
@21/Jason Shepherd: I assume that local reviewer changed his mind about Lucas’s directorial talent after the prequels came out. (I read somewhere that Gary Kurtz was effectively an uncredited co-director on the original film, though I don’t know if that extended to actually directing actors on camera.)
And Nimoy did direct one dramatic feature, The Good Mother.
#21
Agreed. The stealing the Enterprise sequence is another example of Nimoy’s skill in handling suspenseful scenes. It takes real talent to make backing the car out of the garage an exciting thing to watch. :-)
I’ve never been a huge fan of James Horner’s music, but his “Stealing the Enterprise” cue is my all-time favorite of his. It’s just so lively and thrilling. I don’t think the scene would be anywhere near as exciting without it.
Just finished watching this for the first time in a while — partially inspired by the article; partially a need for things that give me comfort. I’ve never entirely subscribed to the even-odd dichotomy — I think III is a fine movie and I is, well, flawed but still underrated (maybe because it’s paced more like 2001 than like Star Wars?). V was the only genuine stinker of the original series movies.
I don’t know why but everything to do with Spacedock has always stuck with me over the years; seeing the movie for the first time and watching Enterprise fly into this utterly gigantic structure just blew my mind.
(Much moreso, in fact, than similar sequences in Star Trek Beyond; mostly because the way they implemented the concept in Beyond just seemed kind of silly; and am I the only one who got darned near offended at the way that Abrams kept putting the Enterprise in atmosphere or even underwater?)
@25/hoopmanjh: Well, Abrams didn’t direct Beyond, just produced it, so the design of the starbase probably wasn’t his decision. And I can’t blame the makers of new SF movies for trying to find new ways to portray spaceships after decades of seeing every possible way of depicting a ship hovering against a starscape.
Personally, I’ve always found the ST III Spacedock design rather questionable. Why such tiny doors? That seems risky, and it limits the size of the ships it can handle. (The reuse of the Spacedock footage for a starbase in TNG’s “11001001” was problematical because the Enterprise-D could never have fit through the doors if it were on the same scale as the ST III structure.) How can you have ships floating in the hangar area if there’s gravity in the adjacent sections? (Although, granted, many Trek productions have assumed gravity could be localized that way.) Is the interior pressurized? If so, why? If not, why even have the doors? I’ve always preferred the TMP arrangement where there’s a drydock exposed to space and a nearby office complex. The one advantage I can think of for the enclosed model is protection against meteoroids and radiation, but I’d think that deflector shields would handle that.
@ChristopherLBennet — Yeah, Spacedock is wildly impractical for all the reasons you listed; but seeing it in the theater, at that particular time, at that particular age, it just got to me for some reason. Kind of like the unfinished Death Star II.
@27/Yeah, that’s kind of the problem. I never liked the Star Wars-y aesthetic that ILM brought to the Trek movies’ ship and tech designs. It was never as practical or logical as Matt Jefferies’s designs for TOS or Andy Probert’s for TMP and TNG. And nobody’s ever designed starships as elegantly as Jefferies did.
The Grissom is a prime example. That ship makes no damn sense. How do people get from the upper hull to the lower hull? Is there even anyone in the lower hull?
I saw a diagram of the Oberth class which implied there were turbo lifts integrated into the nacelle supports. However there is the possibility that the separation is a feature. I mean it is a science vessel for dealing with the more out-there type of science so it could be for isolation reasons. Keep the science folks doing the science stuff in one part of the ship and the people running the ship in the other and then you’ll avoid the whole beamed aboard a science-thing which threatens the ship.
I’ve always assumed the lower part of the Grissom was some kind of unmanned sensor pod. But finding logic in Star Trek designs gives me a headache, and that includes Jeffries’ work. The Enterprise is beautiful of course, but tactically that thing is built like a fragile piece of origami, as Beyond demonstrated. Practically, with Starfleet getting into so many conflicts, their ships would look more like the Battlestar Galactica, rather than literally sticking their necks and bridge crews out there. But I’d rather appreciate the beauty instead of logic. Indeed, Spacedock is still my favorite space station.
Also, up to this point in Search for Spock we still don’t have an idea just how big Starfleet is, do we? We haven’t seen a fleet of ships yet in the movies, so Spacedock is a nice shorthand for the size of this organization. Big dock means big fleet.
@30/Cheerio: The problem is that most SF films and movies don’t portray space combat at all plausibly. Realistically, the kind of weapons used in space combat would be likely to vaporize a ship altogether if they hit it at all. Or else they would be beam/radiation weapons rather than impact weapons.
Indeed, there’s a very good reason why it’s good for a battleship to be made of multiple separate pods. Shock and energy are transmitted better through a medium than through a vacuum. If a ship is a single, integrated pressure container, then the shock of an impact or explosion can propagate through the entire ship and kill the whole crew. If the ship is a set of separate pressure compartments with a significant amount of space between them, then that keeps the shock and heat from propagating beyond a single section at a time, so a fatal impact would just destroy one part of your ship rather than the whole thing at once. Also, the more the occupied pieces of your ship are spread out with empty space between them, the lower the odds that an impactor or beam will strike a vital area to begin with. So when approaching space combat realistically, a compact, boxy ship design is actually far worse. The rules are very different in space than they are in an atmosphere.
Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda, which strove for hard SF in its first couple of seasons and had JPL propulsion engineer Paul Woodmansee as its scientific consultant, did something similar: The ship had a single main central body, but during combat, the crew was localized in various battle stations throughout the ship, and all the unoccupied compartments in between were vented to vacuum. There were no Trek-style shields, so any projectile that hit the ship was going to go through the whole thing; but the odds that it would hit an occupied compartment were low, and the vacuum kept the damage from propagating to the rest of the ship.
#32
All true, but I was thinking more in line with Star Trek and BSG’s realities than our own. The BSG would probably hold up longer against Krall’s swarm than the Enterprise, simply because there’s no neck to cut and no bridge up top. Simplistic thinking, I know. I’m convinced that realistically in space combat we’d be pretty well screwed — for various reasons.
I’m not familiar with Andromeda, but sounds very interesting. I’ll seek it out. Thanks.
@33/Cheerio: I think the problem is that the Enterprise was designed at a time when special effects didn’t easily allow for close-range ship-to-ship combat, so that attacks targeting specific portions of a ship weren’t really on the table; but ever since Star Wars, that close-in “dogfight” approach has become more standard.
As for Andromeda, I’m cautious to recommend it. I was a big fan of its first season and a half (and an active member of its online fan community, which several of its key creators participated in), but though it had great hard-SF ideas, it suffered from very cheap production values. I was always more a fan of its potential than its execution. And it was made by a studio that constantly meddled in its shows to cut costs, and so its creator/showrunner Robert Hewitt Wolfe was fired midway through season 2, and after that it pretty much went to hell under a new showrunner who didn’t know what he was doing. Practically the only worthwhile episodes after season 2 were the ones written in season 3 by Zack Stentz & Ashley Edward Miller, who stayed on from the original staff and gamely continued trying to write something as close as possible to the original version of the show even while the other staffers were writing a completely different and much dumber show in their episodes.
@20/Christopher: “But it’s always been a plot hole — why did they even go to Genesis in the first place if they didn’t know Spock’s body had been resurrected? Why not just take McCoy and his katra back to Vulcan?”
Although Sarek doesn’t explain to Kirk what the Vulcans intend to do with Spock’s katra (which fits the notion that Vulcans keep all their important stuff secret), I think he still makes it clear that both the katra and the body are needed for whatever it is: “Why did you leave him on Genesis? […] You denied him his future. […] He entrusted you with his very essence, with everything that was not of the body. He asked you to bring him to us… and bring that which he gave you, his katra, his living spirit.”
In the first and in the last sentence, “him” refers to Spock’s body, not to his katra. It doesn’t sound as if Sarek wants the body for a burial on Vulcan. It sounds as if he needs it for the execution of some mental technique to give Spock a lasting afterlife.
I know that it’s only the film’s justification for getting Kirk and crew back to Genesis so that they can discover that Spock’s body is alive, but I like it. In Star Trek minds are sometimes treated as self-contained objects that can be tossed around at will and placed anywhere – in a different body, in a machine, in a spheric container. I like it that this film acknowledges, albeit in a weird way, some kind of mind-body connection.
Of course, that doesn’t invalidate your second point – if it is so important for Vulcans to bring their bodies home, the information really should have been in Spock’s will or his Starfleet file. But compared to the plot holes in TWOK, this is nothing.
@28/Christopher: “And nobody’s ever designed starships as elegantly as Jefferies did.” I agree. The Enterprise and the TOS Klingon ships are the most beautiful and imaginative spaceships ever.
Now there is an article ripe for the writing. Five Great Sci-Fi Franchise Ships.
I suggest the Odyssey from Ulysses 31. Central core, but nice big ring dispersing the vital systems around it. Relatively flat from one angle, and lots of empty space for weapons fire to miss through from the other. Obviously when under attack from actual deities it didn’t do so well, but I’m not sure NASA has a plan for that either (Maybe deploy Richard Dawkins in ship-to-ship missile?).
@random22 I’m so glad someone else actually watched Ulysses 31!
Now if I could only find a decent copy of the Captain Future anime…