Star Trek: Nemesis/Headscratchers


 * Did Shinzon even have a motivation other than creating action scenes? The Romulans abused him, so he wants to conquer Earth and bring glory to their empire? His needing Picard's blood is apparently supposed to explain why he wants to blow the Enterprise into tiny pieces. Why didn't he just explain that he needed a sample of Picard's blood to live and ask nicely?
 * No he did not. That's part of why Nemesis was so badly received. Even Marina Sirtis and LeVar Burton said it sucked.
 * Personal take: After dropping a bridge on the Rommie senate, he's basically the boss of the Empire. He wants to kaboom Earth because it's Federation Central, and the Feds are the main threat to his new-found property.
 * Except the Feds aren't a threat to him. They were enemies of the Romulans not Shinzon, and Shinzon had no reason to suspect the Feds had any ill will towards him at all.
 * The Federation weren't the enemies of the Romulan species. They were enemies because the Romulan Empire was a large and aggressive military power that had previously shown a willingness to foment wars between other governments for their own gain. They have no reason to assume that Shinzon's administration would be any different, so they have no reason to back down on their defenses. They would probably prefer it if the Romulan Empire collapsed entirely. Shinzon knows this, so he considers the Federation a threat to his power.
 * Shinzon's crazy, man.
 * It was my understanding that taking what he needed from Picard would have resulted in Picard's death, as I recall it being said that he needed a full transplant. Picard needs to have some blood and marrow. I imagine they could have tried cloning the blood and marrow once they had enough (disregarding that cloning got them in this mess in the first place), but it would have still been a major and risky operation for Picard. Also, Shinzon was nuts.
 * If Shinzon was reasonably intelligent he could have easily taken what he wanted from Picard and the movie would be 10 minutes long. Just think about it. He has a ship that can fire when cloaked, so all he needed to do to get Picard was fire on the entireprise when cloaked taking out it's shields, beam picard aboard and warp away.
 * Shinzon was too caught up in his own ego and in studying his progenitor to take the direct approach. At least once in the course of the movie, his Viceroy urges him to speed things along, but he's too busy being angsty. And mindraping Deanna for no reason.
 * Which goes back to my point that he's an idiot and the movie would be 10 minutes long if he was not.
 * It's called hubris, and it's a common ailment among fictional characters.
 * Shinzon wanted to be as great a hero to the Romulans (or at least the Remans) as Picard is to his people. The biggest thing you can do for the Romulans, especially according to an angry youth living in the shadow of a human, is overthrow the increasingly pacifistic government and hijack the military for total annihilation of Earth, AKA Federation City.
 * The scenes that would have explained Shinzon's motive were actually chopped out. According to those scenes, even if Shinzon had gotten the transplant he needed, it would have added another decade or so at most to his life, since his genetics were still pretty badly warped. Therefore he wanted to do something big in the time that he did have, to ensure that his name would go down in history. His plan was to use his big badass ship to take out the Federation government and Starfleet Command on Earth, then launch a full-scale invasion. It's not a particularly original motive, but it shows that the screenwriter had at least put some thought into it - it just so happens that the producer and director thought it wasn't really that important to give their villain ("The best since Khan!") a backstory and a motive.


 * Picard says B-4's name is typical of Noonien Soong's clever naming schemes, but Data and Lore refer to types of information, and B-4 is just AOL Speak. B-4 is supposed to have less neural development, but should be just as intelligent and capable as any android lacking in personality, but instead he acts like a child, so he's meant to act this way for now until he gets out of this state naturally or by upgrading. Why do we care about B-4 as a new character if he's not much more than a Deus Ex Machina? Why do we care about Data's death if B-4 is an obvious way to negate most of it? The movie was hyped as a huge status quo change, but the end just sets up a reset switch.
 * And the switch is tripped sometime between Nemesis and the Abrams tie-in comic. B-4 is dead, and Data has his body.
 * For that matter, what kind of freaks were Dr. Soong's parents, to name him "Noonien" in the first place? Noonien was Khan's first name ... Khan Noonien Singh, augmented tyrant and war criminal, whose surname is already just one vowel's-worth of pronunciation away from "Soong". So isn't that a lot like a Mr. and Mrs. Hetler tagging their kid "Adolf"...?
 * Khan was a dictator and a tyrant, but he wasn't a monster (at least not until his wife died). Even then he never got as bad as Hitler. And as revealed in Enterprise, the Soong family had ties to the Augments. Possibly the name just got passed down.
 * It's more like tagging their kid "Napoleon" or "Alexander". Khan was a tyrant but he wasn't genocidal.
 * In a rare instance of something good coming out of Enterprise the explanation could plausibly be; Data's creator's grandfather was an augmented humans nut and conceivably named his son Noonien Soong /because/ of the similarity, with Data's creator being Noonien Soong Jr. Now why the Kirks named their son 'Tiberius' on the other hand....
 * Arik Soong is actually Noonien Soong's great-grandfather. So maybe Dr Noonien Soong is named after his grandfather, Arik's son -- it's not an uncommon practice.


 * How in blue hell did Janeway make Admiral before Picard?
 * There are good answers below, but come on, this one's easy: Picard took Kirk's advice to heart. He probably got offered more admiralities than Riker was offered ship commands (and we know that's saying a lot), but he turned it down every single time because Picard realized that, like Kirk, his "first, greatest destiny" is captaining a starship. Meanwhile, after seven years of wandering out in the cold, Janeway would take a desk job at Starfleet HQ in a heartbeat.
 * Starfleet realized they had to get her OUT of the Captain's chair as fast as possible.
 * Why not just fire her ass? Or let her teach stellar cartography at the Academy? Her promotion puts MORE people under her command!
 * It would be very hard to fire her, that's just the way all government bureaucracies work. The cartography thing would have been a good idea, though.
 * As an Admiral with a desk job, all of her orders and communications would be a matter of public record, and she'd be heavily scrutinized. It's sort of a combination of Kicked Upstairs and Promoted to Scapegoat / Reassigned to Antarctica. And as the above troper mentioned, there was no way in hell they were ever going to let her command a starship again. Everyone knows starship captains make the real plot changing decisions in Star Trek, and that Admirals are really only there as window dressing. Really it's an example of Starfleet Command being Dangerously Genre Savvy.
 * Here you go Katey, try not to lose the desk.
 * The Dilbert Principle (look it up on Wikipedia). Besides, considering the fine tradition among Trek captains to decide that the rules are closer to guidelines, there may be more people under Janeway's command but very few of them are actually listening to her.
 * I think that in the EU books, everyone got bumped up a rank or two. That would put Janeway straight in the Admiral Section. Besides, under her command, Starfleet made first contact with dozens (if not hundreds) of species, has more information about the Delta Quadrant than it ever could have possibly gained through any other means, and she's acquired technology that will have Federation scientists entertained for years to come. Besides, Picard's probably been offered promotions left and right for years; he just declines them. Look at Riker, who was offered ships left and right throughout his career and chose to stay on the Enterprise. And, of course, Kirk told him not to accept a promotion, and you don't argue with James Tiberius Mother Fucking Kirk.
 * Point taken re: Kirk. If Janeway was just an admiral in the EU, I wouldn't mind so much, but having her pop up and order Picard around in Nemesis, well... Just Bugs Me.
 * I'm sure there are also a lot of high-level bureaucrats who still resent Picard for wiping out much of Starfleet and killing thousands of their subordinates, friends, and family members at the Battle of Wolf 359. Even if he were inclined to accept a promotion, I doubt any would be forthcoming after that, no matter how many times he singlehandedly saves the Federation's bacon.
 * "Much of starfleet" is an exageration, caused by the people writing TNG at the time having no idea how big a fleet something like Starfleet would require to be operational over an area as big as the Federation. The Dominion War showed a much better scale of numbers, and from that size, the ships lost at Wolf 359 would not be considered a high amount at all. Plus Picard has been offered promotions, he turns them down.
 * Mind you, when Wolf 359 happened, the Alpha and Beta Quadrants were more or less at peace. Starships are probably expensive, space socialist utopia or not, and that's a lot of people that could be occupying themselves with doing something useful instead of crowding the cosmos. Around the time when the Borg attacked, Starfleet would quite possibly have been more like a cross between the Coast Guard and NASA than the Pacific Fleet of World War II. The Borg attacked, cleaned Starfleet's clocks, and along with the Romulans and Cardassians stirring up trouble in later seasons and leading into Deep Space Nine, Starfleet has probably been on a huge expansion program until we see the massed fleets mixing it up on Deep Space Nine. But back at Wolf 359? We probably saw quite a bit of Starfleet's experienced cadre of officers get atomized and assimilated there.
 * This Troper's theory is that Janeway's promotion is due to her post-mission debriefing after Voyager's return to the Alpha Quadrant being the most epic act of perjury in galactic history. And the crew would obviously back her up (as its in their best interests to present only the best side of their little trip and 'forget' about the ten trillion or so court-martial offenses they're all guilty of), except for the holodoc, who can be memory-edited. So, Starfleet only knows that Janeway had the most successful trip ever, and doesn't know about all of Voyager's stupid mistakes. Shazam, promotion.
 * Ten trillion court-martial offenses? When was this?
 * She is in the very least guilty of killing a member of her crew for dubious reasons in the episode Tuvix which is almost definately not allowed, she allowed children to be killed because she believed a very clearly bullshit story about how a species ages backwards, and she did work with Vidian pirates in a few episodes which the Federation almost certainly won't approve of.
 * The actual # is of course an exaggeration, but the "Cynics' Corner" Voyager review site didn't have a category labelled 'Court-Martial Offense of the Week' for no reason.
 * Because Picard doesn't want to be an admiral. He was actually offered a promotion to admiral in one episode (complete with a position as Headmaster of Starfleet Academy). He refused both. Picard likes exploring space, he doesn't want to be tied to a desk job on Earth.
 * And, on the other side, after all Voyager went through, one can hardly blame Janeway for finding a certain appeal to a nice solid desk and a house in San Fransisco.
 * I think it's necessary to cut some slack for Janeway, after all she was a rookie captain; mistakes were bound to be made. When Picard got the Enterprise, he'd been captain for like 20 years by that point, Kirk had also been in the big chair for a while by the time Original Trek began. Archer was a rookie captain as well, and he was even more a ditz than Janeway.
 * IIRC, TOS starts off not very far into Kirk's first year as a starship commander. I think 'Rookie' is appropriate.
 * True, but the regulations for Starfleet captains were apparently much looser in Kirk's day than in TNG. Hell, they didn't even have a Prime Directive in TOS.
 * Sure they did. Kirk just ignored it whenever it proved inconvenient.
 * Well, when Janeway returns home, all the higher-ups at Starfleet ask her: "What did you do out in the Delta Quadrant?" And she replies: "Made lots of first contacts, had sex with a Q, made a treaty with some aliens that were even more dangerous than the Borg to not attack us (and we even became friends!), oh, and those Borg guys? Yeah, I killed the queen and gave them a horrible virus that has probably killed off 99% of them. Oh, and here's all the fantastic data we've collected on the way for things like new warp drives, ship schematics, a few time travel devices..." How could they not make her an admiral? Or, they should have at least made her admiral of a Delta Quadrant/deep space fleet where she has the most experience.
 * Basically, beating up on the Borg for four years and living to tell the tale more than merited promotion. Besides, seeing some of the other officers that made Admiral over the years (the one in The Drumhead, for instance), Janeway doesn't look all that bad.
 * For what it's worth, I'm behind this one.
 * I always assumed Janeway no longer had a ship to command. The Federation probably took Voyager away to be studied by the finest minds in Starfleet. Even if they couldn't duplicate the technology, keeping a ship that powerful from falling into enemy hands just makes sense.
 * Most likely, so Star Trek fans could go "Well, at least this film isn't Voyager."
 * Other way around, it was a big "F--- You!" to all the fans who were saying "at least this isn't Voyager", from the people who over the years heard fans going "we want less Neelix" and then went "sure, here is more Neelix" in response. This time it was fans going "thank god for Trek that isn't Voyager, we want to forget that", and so the response was "hey, heard you hate Voyager, here is Janeway a rank above your precious Picard, suck on that one!". The movie theatre I was at had people stand up and leave when Janeway came on screen. The thirty seconds or so Janeway was on screen for the Voyager fans (both of them) cost this film a huge amount in goodwill and probably contributed to its poor reputation as lots of fans were not prepared to cut it anymore slack after seeing her.
 * Star Fleet used to offer Picard promotions all the time. He kept turning them down. They gave up for a while. Same happened with Riker. He was always being offered his own command, but he would choose the Enterprise instead. He only quit and pursued his own command after he got married. Go figure.
 * Has the Enterprise-E an area equivalent to Ten-Forward on the Enterprise-D? If so, did Guinan survive ramming the Scimitar?
 * The Enterprise-E was designed to be much more military in its function than its predecessors, in recognition of the fact that the Federation was getting into a lot more fights than it used to (Borg, Dominion, etc.) I would imagine that an actual lounge would be considered superfluous, since unlike the holodecks, the only purpose it serves is recreation and would therefore be out of place on a ship of war. If she's around at all, Guinan may have been given a position as an adjunct counselor under Troi's supervision--just a theory, but it's the only one I can think of. Another possibility is that there is a lounge, it's just not located right at the front of the ship any longer.
 * Given that Guinan is never seen aboard the Enterprise-E, I'm guessing she's not on board at all. (In fact, we never see any civilians on the Enterprise-E.)
 * I'm assuming that she just regenerated. And I don't mean that as a joke. I'm certain that Guinan is a Time Lord.
 * Also, plenty of warships have lounges. War is stressful. Hell, in the military, peacetime can be stressful. A place designated for blowing off steam and having a hot meal and a cold drink (or vice versa or whatever based on your personal preferences and/or Bizarre Alien Biology) is very handy on warships. In any case, it could double as a training area/briefing room/improvised hospital area or whatever else you'd need a big room for. As mentioned elsewhere, they could easily have put the lounge anywhere, or just used the holodecks for the same purpose, or it's possible it's in roughly the same spot and we just haven't had a plot reason to go there yet.
 * One episode of TNG made it clear that Guinan could/thought she could fight a Q, she has a sixth sense that can penetrate the 4th dimension and has a lifespan of hundreds of years. I realize the regeneration quote above is nothing more than a joke, but actually Al-Aurians having some form of incredible endurance may not be amazingly far-fetched. Slightly diminished by Soran dying during Generations but possibly justified in that the missile that blew up in his face contained a star-killing superweapon.
 * Didn't Guinan stay in the Nexus in Generations?
 * That was just a shadow of her, a "fragment" left from when she was briefly inside the Nexus before being transported out by the Enterprise-B.
 * Why did LaForge have ocular implants again, when he finally got real eyes in the previous movie?
 * It was explicitly stated that the effect wouldn't be permanent once LaForge was no longer under the planet's influence. Of course, why his optic nerves would degenerate for no reason ater being repaired is never explained; it would be getting your car fixed, but having it break down again as soon as you leave the shop. But whatever.
 * That pretty much describes what happens everytime I take my car to a mechanic. I swear they break shit on purpose to make you come back.
 * A better analogy would be to say that it would be like re-growing a severed hand, only to have it just fall off later. Geordi may have been born blind, but it isn't as though his optical nerves are under constant assault.
 * Depending on the nature of the disorder, they probably are constantly being damaged. It's a genetic disorder that affects the eyes themselves rather than the nerves (given that he has milky white cataracts covering his eyes when we see them without the visor), so his lenses are probably constantly forming congenital cataracts as they grow. The magic radiation's somehow repairing the existing damage, but without it, new, damaged cells gradually replace the ones the radiation fixed.
 * When the Enterprise picks up B-4's distress signal they soon realise that the pieces are scattered on a planet inhabited by a pre-warp civilisation. As established numerous times in the series and movies, this means the Prime Directive expressly forbids any cultural contamination. No-one must know about the existence of alien worlds or more advanced technologies... except Picard has a new dune buggy he wants to try out. They proceed to race around the desert collecting bits of android and then - when the locals show up with their sub-machine guns - fire energy weapons at them, potentially killing or at least seriously wounding several of their troops before summoning a giant flying shuttle and soaring away into outer space. Court Martials for all!
 * Whispering grass, don't tell the trees, 'cause the trees don't need to know.
 * Riker deals with Shinzon's Viceroy by luring him into a Jefferies Tube, established in all other continuities as being snug crawlspaces sandwiched inbetween the decks of the ship. The two end up fighting on a precarious metal gantry over a huge chasm lit from below by a gigantic white light source. Where on the ship is this, exactly?
 * The Holodeck, obviously.
 * Keep in mind that the Enterprise had just rammed the Scimitar. Where Riker and the Viceroy were likely became distorted by the impact, creating a gap in the decks/superstructure.
 * The bridge is located on the top of the Enterprise's saucer section. When the viewscreen is destroyed and a large hole forms at the front of the bridge, the view out of the hole is what you'd see if the bridge were at the leading edge of the saucer - given how much bigger the Enterprise-E is than its predecessor you should be able to see the saucer curving away ahead of you.
 * Not necessarily. It depends on how steep the curve of the saucer section is and how high above the saucer section the bridge window is.
 * This is a common complain in a lot of Trek, but it's been established time and time again that shuttles and runabouts have their own transporter systems, making Data's space-jump to the Scimitar, not to mention his noble sacrifice, unnecessary.
 * Not entirely. Someone had to stop the Thalaron weapon. Simply using the shuttle transporters to beam Picard back wouldn't have helped, as the weapon would still have fired and killed everyone on board. Someone had to sacrifice themselves to stop it.
 * Beam in, shoot guards, overload phaser, beam back out, PROFIT.
 * Yeah, yeah. If every movie were written by the people that complain on Headscratchers pages, every movie would be a ten-minute adventure of either a Boring Invincible Hero or a Villain Sue. And whichever it was, someone would make a Headscratchers page to say how it should have been about the other one. At some point you just have to say "It happened the way it did for the sake of drama and/or the plot."
 * Massive space ships weaving around like F-16s in a dogfight. Not saying it's not possible, especially given that all ships in Star Trek run on Phlebotinum and will thus do whatever the writers and SFX guys want them to do. But yeah, it Just Bugs Me.
 * This movie acts like the Federation-Romulan alliance formed in Deep Space Nine never happened.
 * The US and USSR went back to hating each other a few months after World War II ended. It's not difficult to imagine the Federation and Romulans had the same falling out after the Dominion War.
 * If we had skipped other series after the end of TNG and gone straight through the movies, the level of cooperation with Romulans by the end of the movie is a bit hard to believe--the reunification movement is way underground, and they had been shown as backstabbing jerkfaces almost every time they had been on screen (with one subversion, maybe a couple more, playing off audience expectations of this). With the (shaky) alliance from the Dominion War, however, it's a little more plausible that they would be willing to bury the hatchet for a moment and fight alongside the Enterprise for a strictly noble purpose. Or at least that's how I feel, having experienced the movies without seeing most of Deep Space Nine first.
 * The Romulan military allied with Shinzon and killed the Senate precisely because of their alliance during the Dominion War; the military thought the Senate was going soft and becoming too friendly towards Earth. The movie opened with most of the Romulans responsible for the alliance dying horribly, and the Federation has no idea where it stands with the new regime. The ending showed that, despite Shinzon and the hardliners' efforts, most of the Romulans don't want to keep fighting the Federation and the hostilities really are ending for good (barring anything crazy happening, like ).
 * My theory, the new Government of Cardassia realised that it would work out a lot better for them in terms of influence if they could split the Federation off from the Romulans. So they turned to a simple patriot who just happened to have nigh on incontrovertible proof that the Federation conspired to drag the Romulans into war on false pretences and assassinate a Senator (with help from persons, sadly, unknown, of course). So relations got very frosty very quickly. Maybe that is why they have a superweapon, they were already gearing up for a war on the Federation as soon as they could manage to regenerate their losses from the first war.
 * The off-roading scene. Picard mentioned being amazed in an episode of TNG when he saw automobiles in a holodeck fantasy, because automobiles were a thing of the past. Shouldn't people not even know how to drive anymore, because the automobile is obsolete? Then again, it has been established that the director of Nemesis never saw an episode of TNG.
 * The dune-buggy scene was ridiculous, but the first season dialogue suggesting that holodecks were a whole new invention probably fell into Broad Strokes continuity, like the Ferengi's behavior; they've always acted since then like holodecks have been around for years (Voyager characters even talk about growing up with children's programs). At any rate, he's been playing Dixon Hill holodeck programs for several years either way, so automobiles wouldn't be a mystery to him anymore. Now, whether Picard would really be so overjoyed about going on a dune-buggy ride through the desert...
 * How about the Voyager episode "The 37s" where Kim mistakes a truck for an early hovercar? Dumb even by Harry's standards...
 * This is the same canon where television has apparently disappeared. It might be best to just forget that these things were ever mentioned.
 * During Data's wake at the end of the film, the remaining crew toast their fallen comrade... using a wine labelled Château Picard. Huh? given how Picards whole family was killed years before, who the hell is still bottling this stuff? clearly it isn't Jean Luc and Robert had no visible staff during Family - and given how his brother chastised Jean Luc's wine palette getting degraded by synthahol, I find it highly unlikely he actually kept bottles of the stuff just lying around his quarters.
 * Eight years have passed between Generation and Nemesis... some high quality French wines (especially reds) are not meant to be served until decades have passed.
 * Presumably Picard contacted whoever was handling the family affairs back home (the executor of the estate, or however laws work in the 24thC) after Generations and arranged for some staff to be taken on to keep things ticking over. It's unlikely he'd allow the last of the family legacy to vanish given how big he is on tradition.
 * Also, the vintage of that wine bottle is 2267. Picard and Data share some of it in a deleted scene, but even in the finished film the label is fleetingly visible. So at the time, the wine is over a century old -- evidently the grapes of the future produce wine that is substantially longer lasting than those of today.
 * Or, once a wine has reached its proper aging in the bottle, you stick it in your wine rack that has a built-in stasis field.
 * We can possibly justify the super ship and weapon by saying that it was developed the Romulans but how the heck did the Remans get taught advanced medical practices? For that matter when did they learn how to fly the most advanced ship around? The movie introduces them as a slave race that was used as cannon fodder in the Dominion War.
 * These are slaves in the 24th century. You generally want your slaves to live long enough to be productive, and they have to be trained in certain tasks (like flight) if they're going to be fodder. Also, they built the ship, so they should know how to fly it.
 * We see nothing in the movie (nor do we hear anything) to suggest that the Remans were well educated. The flashback we get suggests that they were largely forced to mine for...something. Additionally the idea of fodder in space battle doesn't really make sense. Space isn't two dimensional for them to soak up damage and if they've been enslaved for most of their existence then arming them, teaching them how to fly combat ships and telling them to fight someone they have no quarrel with is an excellent way to make them switch sides.
 * Planetary engagements require footsoldiers. These footsoldiers need to be taught how to maintain their advanced weapons, communication equipment and so forth. You might even want them on the front line flying ships in certain obvious suicide missions. Not to mention their use as laborers in shipyards and other construction facilities. It's more unbelievable that they could construct a monster like the Scimitar in secret. That they could construct it in the first place is reasonable. As for switching sides, the Remans would only do that in the face of a better offer. With the Romulans likely maintaining a hold on the space fleet, they could glass Remus if their slaves got out of line.
 * Slaves were generally kept to the bare minimum of useful education for two reasons in the past: the masters don't care about educating them, and they don't want to give them more opportunities to rebel. In the 24th century they have a lot more numerous and effective ways of keeping slaves in line, like pain/death chips implanted into their spines. Thus while the Romulans probably don't care about educating the Remans, they can train them up to a much higher level of usefulness without worrying about being overthrown (until Shinzon came along). It's a lot easier to use slaves as soldiers when the first time some slave gets the idea to turn his weapon on a master, you can just push a button and make his head explode.
 * So at the start of the film, the entire Enterprise senior staff is taking time out for a wedding. Okay. Then they get on the Enterprise and set course for Betazed, for another wedding. Not okay. Who on Earth authorised Picard to use the Federation flagship as a glorified limousine? This isn't some diplomatic mission, they're literally just ferrying a bunch of people to a wedding. And not even an important wedding, one between two members of the ship's crew! Ever heard of shuttlecraft? Or are we supposed to assume the Enterprise has some mission out that way afterwards?
 * Taking the daughter of one of the most prominent ambassadors and politicians from one of the most prominent worlds in the Federation home for her wedding isn't a diplomatic mission?