timboerger.net Not afraid of a few strong opinions.

The Enterprise Curse

I've been writing a bit about Star Trek Online (post coming soon, honest) and recently I had a post about if Scotty were an IT guy today.  I think it's fair to say that Star Trek itself has been on my mind lately.  I like the fact that the venerable franchise seems to be in resurgence with a successful movie out last year.  Thinking back on the movie though gives me a headache as there are so many logical fallacies in the movie (red matter, time travel, Romulans who wait in vengeance for twenty years, the Federation who never seems to investigate a destroyed ship, etc.), it finally dawned on me that the Enterprise wasn't really that good for the command crew.

Take Kirk.  Legendary captain who is torn out of time by the "ribbon" and never seen again except by Picard...who convinces him to go on one more adventure where he dies.  Must have been out of practice.  Bye bye, Kirk.

The latest movie has Spock sucked into a singularity (yeah, right) and into another time line.  Again, we have to assume that Spock never returns to his original time line and is gone for good.  Just as a side note, how interesting would it have been if they had gone back to the Mirror universe instead?  A brutal and vicious Kirk paired with the cold, calculating evil Spock.  I digress.

Two down...who's next?  Ah yes, my favorite.  The third in command of the Enterprise, Montgomery Scott.  Gets to the point where he was going into retirement and his ship runs into a Dyson Sphere.  He sets up some sort of transporter loop and is able to save himself until he can get rescued by Geordi LaForge and the Enterprise-D.  After that he shuffles off (get it?) to never be heard from again.

Who's left?  Bones lived to be a doddering old man, so there's that.  Sulu got his own ship eventually and didn't disappear.  There's surprisingly little to be said though of Chekov, Uhura or nurse Chapel.  More tragedy perhaps?  Given time, I'm sure the writers will certainly do some time travel thingy and mess things up with at least one of them dying.  A noble death, of course, but still dead.  Could be worse though.  They could end up drumming for Spinal Tap.