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More Star Trek VI musings...

Volpone

Zombie Hunter
Just rolling around in my head how an entertaining flick could have, were it not for lazy, sloppy production, been so much more powerful.

First off is the sloppy costuming. The rank insignia isn't right. Scotty's back to being a commander, etc. And Valeris is wearing a cadet red turtleneck instead of an appropriate Star Fleet color. But more egregious is Valeris herself. You've got to know that, in an early draft, Valeris must have been Saavik. It makes so much more sense. Otherwise Spock just has some perverse sugar daddy fetish for young Vulcan chicks. But if it is Saavik instead of some random Vulcan chick, the relationship and the sense of betrayal makes so much more sense. On top of that, Saavik has a reason to hate the Klingons for killing her boyfriend, David. And she learned from Kirk that sometimes you need to break the rules to win and she learned from Spock that sometimes you need to lie if the stakes are high enough.

As I understand it, they couldn't bring back Kirstie Alley who, after her appearance in TWoK as Saavik, went on to become a huge star. And apparently they didn't like Robin Curtis. But they didn't want to recast Saavik yet again. Which brings me to my final point: There was too much going on in TSfS when the crew is reunited with Saavik, but it would have been awesome to explain the recasting with McCoy asking "Did she change her hairstyle?" and Kirk replying "I hadn't noticed." Then they could have used it again in TUC to bring whatsername into the role.
 
Oh! I forgot the other one. At the start the Excelsior is on a mission to catalog gaseous anomalies. The Enterprise--and her crew--are broken out of mothballs for a symbolic mission to escort a Klingon ambassador to peace talks.

At the end, Uhura comes up with the idea to destroy the Bird of Prey by using all that stuff they're carrying for cataloging gaseous anomalies--"Thing's got to have a tailpipe."

So they used the opening as foreshadowing for the resolution. But bungled it by changing ships mid story. I guess they couldn't figure out a way to get the Enterprise at the Praxis explosion--and still establish that the Excelsior is out there, with Sulu in command--and they decided it was far more rewarding to have Spock and McCoy configuring the torpedo than just some random Excelsior guys so they just said "fuck it, maybe the viewers won't notice."
 
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