A short update to an old Star Trek: Nemesis AskMe April 5, 2013 1:36 PM   Subscribe

In regard to the following two-year-old AskMe...
Is there any connection between the Nemesis movie script described in the movie Trekkies and the last ST:TNG movie, Star Trek: Nemesis?

...So, Tooty McTootsalot plopped down $1 to put an e-mail in Gabriel's inbox on Facebook.

Here's the conversation:

McTootsalot: "Hi Gabriel,

Sorry to bother you, but I was hoping you could help me answer a burning question I've had. I haven't found anything online that answers this, so I thought I'd ask the source, you.

In Trekkies, you show off some amazing graphics you created for your local club's submission for a script for a Star Trek movie. You showed a Romulan armada, a space station, and a logo for "Star Station: Nemesis".

Five years later, a movie comes out called Star Trek: Nemesis, and is the only Star Trek film to feature Romulans as the main enemy.

Is there any connection? It seems like a big coincidence, but then again, I have no idea if the stories are similar."

Gabriel: "That question was on my mind for years and I did finally get to meet John Logan, the screen writer, and he did confirm to me that yeah, he saw Trekkies and thought Nemesis would make a cracking title for a Trek film. I agreed. Too bad it was kind of a shitty movie. Other than sharing the Romulans, the stories were not similar at all though."

----

That’s all.
posted by blueberry to MetaFilter-Related at 1:36 PM (57 comments total) 15 users marked this as a favorite

Wait, Facebook email costs $1 a message? OUTRAGE!
posted by filthy light thief at 2:13 PM on April 5, 2013


Yeah - should be $20. Same as in town.
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:18 PM on April 5, 2013 [8 favorites]


ROMULANS ARE JUST KLINGONS WITH DADDY ISSUES
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 2:24 PM on April 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


"Kind of" a shitty movie? It was a plagiarized script, except that somebody neglected to xerox the page from Khan that explained how a group of marooned peasants got their hands on a top-shelf galaxy warship.

More seriously, thanks for this. It's a neat update.
posted by cribcage at 2:26 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Still better than Insurrection.
posted by griphus at 2:30 PM on April 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


Also after the three Lore episodes and "Time's Arrow," I cannot for the life of me figure out why anyone is surprised at finding another Singh android.
posted by griphus at 2:31 PM on April 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


Did Noonian ever claim that Data was unique?
posted by dfriedman at 2:34 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


And it's Soong, not Singh.
posted by dfriedman at 2:35 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


And it's Noonien, not Noonian.
posted by dfriedman at 2:35 PM on April 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


That's pretty cool.

My Venture Scout troop (read Eagle Scouts) used to shoot a bunch of fun video adventures about a Robin Hood style character called Knot in the Wood (yes, there were lots of bad puns, Andy Zaltzman would be proud). We entered one for a competition, where Tony Robinson was a judge. About a year later, one of our terrible jokes ended up in an episode of Blackadder.

It was a bad joke and not particularly original, but we were so happy to have it used in a show we loved.
posted by arcticseal at 2:35 PM on April 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Noonian_Soong
posted by dfriedman at 2:36 PM on April 5, 2013


Can someone explain to me what's the deal with paying to email someone?
posted by aubilenon at 2:54 PM on April 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


On Facebook, f you message someone you're not friends with, Facebook puts your message in an inbox called "Other." Most people never check this inbox and a lot of people aren't even aware of its existence.

You can avoid this by paying $1 and having your message go to their main Inbox.
posted by mokin at 2:57 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


mokin: "You can avoid this by paying $1 and having your message go to their main Inbox."

this sounds terrible.
posted by boo_radley at 3:02 PM on April 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


Monetizing through the use of a shitty interface. That's like underwear gnome brilliant. So would it cost a dollar to ask blueberry about the connection between blueberry and Tooty McTootsalot?
posted by Toekneesan at 3:04 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Personally, I'd love to know what arcticseal's joke was, or at least which episode of Blackadder it was in...
posted by pammeke at 3:09 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


I'm pretty sure we're one Google+ shuttering away from Facebook charging us to not make our search histories public.
posted by griphus at 3:10 PM on April 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


This reminded me to check my Other folder. I had a message from a primary school friend who's just officially become a nun in Estonia.
posted by vegartanipla at 3:11 PM on April 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yeah, c'mon arcticseal, don't leave us hanging.
posted by benito.strauss at 3:14 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


On Facebook, f you message someone you're not friends with, Facebook puts your message in an inbox called "Other."

I knew about the "charging to message someone you don't know" part, but i didn't know about this. That's pretty fucking shady for a major website.

It's like, in the territory of something i could see a second-rate dating site pulling.
posted by emptythought at 3:15 PM on April 5, 2013


Are you suggesting that Facebook is not a second-rate dating site?
posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson at 3:18 PM on April 5, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'm assuming the joke was in Amy and Amiability, which featured a Robin Hood-like highwayman, played by SPOILER.
posted by It's Never Lurgi at 3:39 PM on April 5, 2013 [3 favorites]


That's pretty fucking shady for a major website.

Or it's awesome, if you like that Facebook creates a closed network. I don't want Facebook messages from people I don't know (I get enough emails from people who think I'm somebody else), but at the same time I don't mind a one-dollar loophole if someone really has something to say.

Think of it like screening comments on a major website by making folks pay five bucks to post.
posted by cribcage at 4:40 PM on April 5, 2013 [15 favorites]


you guys know that throughout the history of email, there were serious proposals by various people, some even respected, to somehow charge micropayments for each email sent in order to stop spam.

Obviously the internet couldn't pull it off, but facebook can.
posted by Ad hominem at 4:59 PM on April 5, 2013


How long have they been doing this? Is it a new thing?
posted by aubilenon at 5:01 PM on April 5, 2013


ROMULANS ARE JUST KLINGONS WITH DADDY ISSUES

Except for the actually being Vulcans part.
posted by y2karl at 6:32 PM on April 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


at the same time I don't mind a one-dollar loophole

This. $1 is high enough that a million Nigerian scammers (and others) won't ever get into my inbox, but low enough that my second-cousin who finally wants to reconnect will totally be willing to pay without much more than a blink.

Also, Nemesis was a terrible movie, but I can think of at least two movies I am less willing to sit through, not to mention about fifteen episodes I would not only put below Nemesis, but would be willing to pay to see Nemesis in place of.

Spock's Brain isn't even the worst of the lot. We're talking These Are The Voyages and Symbiosis and stuff.
posted by SMPA at 6:35 PM on April 5, 2013


I'm here to talk about ROMULANS if anyone would like

OK, OK, OK...

So, like, the Yellow Menace Romulans from TNG are like the Imperial era Romans, all heirarchy and thought control and the primacy of Empire and Patrician interest, and the toga-and-marble-column Romulans from TOS are like Republican era Romans, all pursuit of tech and glory and Death to Kings, and they should fight.
posted by Slap*Happy at 6:50 PM on April 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yellow Menace Romulans from TNG are like the Imperial era Romans
[...]
toga-and-marble-column Romulans from TOS are like Republican era Romans


They're also Communist China, FYI.
posted by SMPA at 7:00 PM on April 5, 2013


... This =may= come as a shock, but you should google "Yellow Peril" or "Yellow Menace" - the obviousness of the Chinese Communist characters is offset by the brilliant beauty of the Birds of Prey, one of the finest starcraft designs in scifi history, and a high point for Star Trek. Instead of pompous and ferociously intelligent Romans at the helm, we had caricatures of a then-current rival power.
posted by Slap*Happy at 7:19 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Well, strictly speaking, nearly everything in the original series was a straight-up caricature of something in the real world. The Klingons were the Soviets, the space hippies were... hippies... ahem. I choose not to hunt down all the episodes that were about the Cold War because it's half of them.

Anyway, the part I liked - in terms of cleverness - was that they didn't just stick with the "these are the wacky scary bad guys" thing, or some crass racial stereotyping crap; the Romulans were so secretive that even their cousins knew nothing about them, they had technology way beyond ours, they actually valued different-but-also-valuable things (as opposed to being totally nonsensical idiot aliens like the inhabitants of Cheron, or those guys who decided they needed to duplicate 1930s gangland warfare and didn't notice that Fizzbin was a transparent effort to distract them,) etc.

The part of me that chooses not to remember what was going down with Majel Barrett and Nichelle Nichols likes to think the stupid racial stuff (for Klingons and Romulans) is the fault of the network rather than Roddenberry.
posted by SMPA at 7:37 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Romulian fashion needs to move beyond shoulders and office carpet fabric.
posted by The Whelk at 7:37 PM on April 5, 2013 [6 favorites]


Hey... I thought office carpet was back in?
posted by P.o.B. at 7:59 PM on April 5, 2013 [1 favorite]


Sorry, was out at dinner. It was Amy and Amiability, joke was this :

Blackadder: [after noticing a portion of his newspaper has been cut out] Baldrick, why has half the front page been cut out?
Baldrick: I don't know.
Blackadder: You do know, don't you?
Baldrick: Yes.


Not the greatest joke but we loved it. Thank you, please tip your server.
posted by arcticseal at 8:16 PM on April 5, 2013 [10 favorites]


The earliest known use of gunpowder in Europe to blow shit up involved Blackadder being framed to take the blame for killing the intended victim when being blown to bits didn't work.

No, really.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:24 PM on April 5, 2013 [2 favorites]


It's N'hooniahn, and the h is silent, if you please.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 8:55 PM on April 5, 2013


dfriedman: “And it's Soong, not Singh... And it's Noonien, not Noonian.”

Relatedly: it's definitely Khan Noonien Singh, and given the pioneering role Dr Arik Soong played in the development of the genetic augmentation program which eventually birthed Khan, it somehow seems likely that Khan and Dr Noonian Soong either share a common namesake or one is named after the other. It's odd to me that they never seem to have explored this; I have a hard time believing that whoever named "Dr Noonian Soong" didn't have "Khan Noonien Singh" in mind when doing so.

Also, if they were going for the same names, it was a very good idea to change "Singh" to "Soong," since having this weird evil genetic ubermensch be a Sikh was pretty darned racist. I guess the scriptwriters decided to have Khan be a Sikh that because the Sikhs "were the most fantastic warriors." Which, er, doesn't really help.
posted by koeselitz at 12:27 AM on April 6, 2013


The best thing about Nemesis is that it's perfectly clear who the bad, shitty guys are.
posted by gt2 at 3:58 AM on April 6, 2013


It's odd to me that they never seem to have explored this; I have a hard time believing that whoever named "Dr Noonian Soong" didn't have "Khan Noonien Singh" in mind when doing so.

Roddenberry was trying to get in touch with an old friend from China, Kim Noonien Singh, whom he had lost touch with in World War 2. Facebook not being available at the time, he couldn't just pay a buck to get a message into Kim's inbox, so he did the next best thing, and threw a similar name into a popular television show, to try to get his attention. Twice.
posted by radwolf76 at 6:23 AM on April 6, 2013 [5 favorites]


I'll never forgive Atkinson for giving up on Blackadder before we got Blackadder in Space.

I mean, granted, Red Dwarf, but honestly, it should have been, even if it never occurred to anyone and even if Capt. Blackadder left no progeny before he went over the top.
posted by mwhybark at 7:01 AM on April 6, 2013


ROMULANS ARE JUST KLINGONS WITH DADDY ISSUES

Then what was Worf?
posted by Sys Rq at 7:44 AM on April 6, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'll never forgive Atkinson for giving up on Blackadder before we got Blackadder in Space.

Blackadder's Christmas Carol.
posted by Sys Rq at 7:46 AM on April 6, 2013


Still better than Insurrection.

I disagree. Insurrection was not a very good movie, but it was a perfectly acceptable bland episode of TNG. It at least maintained the feel of TNG. Nemesis felt as though the characters of TNG were just kind of wedged into a not very good action movie. That is not to say that TNG has no business in an action film; First Contact was pretty good because it makes sense with the Borg -- killing them is about the only option one has. Nemesis, on the other hand, should have had significantly more intrigue -- especially in a post-Unification environment. It should have been more like Star Trek VI.

Also, there was no need to introduce a new race of Romulans. Or Starfleet dune buggies.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 7:58 AM on April 6, 2013 [5 favorites]


Or a new Data, for that matter.
posted by The Great Big Mulp at 8:00 AM on April 6, 2013 [3 favorites]


$5 gets you my witty and informed commentary on this topic.
posted by panboi at 8:05 AM on April 6, 2013


Singh Soong? Sing Song? God that's a terrible joke.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:07 AM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


“And it's Soong, not Singh... And it's Noonien, not Noonian.”

Sometimes.
Soong's first name was spelled "Noonien" in the scripts for "Datalore" and "The Measure Of A Man" while all subsequent scripts ("Brothers", "A Matter of Time", "Birthright, Part I", and "Inheritance") spelled the name "Noonian". The okudagram for Data's personnel file seen on-screen in "Conundrum" used "Noonian" while the passenger manifest seen in "Inheritance" used "Noonien". The "Noonien" spelling is used in several reference sources, including the Star Trek Encyclopedia and StarTrek.com
posted by ricochet biscuit at 2:36 PM on April 6, 2013 [3 favorites]


I'm sorry, Captain, I canna split this hair any finer!
posted by y2karl at 4:29 PM on April 6, 2013 [4 favorites]


I'd love it if someone went back and wrote a Star Trek prequel as if it was written in say 1941 with aliens representing groups of that time, and then I would love a comic book/show/movie of Star Trek written from the perspective of a 1920s American. Imagine how awesome Art Deco Star Trek could be.
posted by drezdn at 6:21 PM on April 6, 2013 [3 favorites]


i'm pretty sure i love every last one of you, especially those involved in the spelling part of the conversation.
posted by nadawi at 8:31 PM on April 6, 2013 [1 favorite]


Romulans =should= be Vulcans with sibling rivalry issues... and vice-versa.
posted by Slap*Happy at 8:58 PM on April 6, 2013


RODNEY!
posted by clavdivs at 11:48 AM on April 7, 2013


Wait, Facebook email costs $1 a message?

Can someone explain to me what's the deal with paying to email someone?

How long have they been doing this? Is it a new thing?

LMGTFY.
posted by dhartung at 2:42 PM on April 7, 2013


I love this. FWIW, blueberry and I have no connection, other than he saw my initial post, and sent me a message asking if I'd ever sent that e-mail I mention in the thread.

It was $1 well spent. I'd been wondering that for years.

Also, Nemesis > Insurrection, nerds.
posted by Tooty McTootsalot at 6:21 PM on April 7, 2013 [3 favorites]


Insurrection was a xeroxed (TV) script with a few added pages. Nemesis was a xeroxed (movie) script with a few missing pages. At that point I suppose it's just personal preference.
posted by cribcage at 6:50 PM on April 7, 2013 [2 favorites]


LinkedIn charges $10 to message someone you don't know and I still receive one or two every month.
posted by miyabo at 9:41 AM on April 8, 2013


At that point I suppose it's just personal preference.

Yeah, I agree. The reason I prefer Nemesis over Insurrection is that it's explicitly not a overly-long TNG episode with a bigger budget and that is apparently the exact same reason people prefer Insurrection over Nemesis.
posted by griphus at 9:47 AM on April 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


« Older Jump to best answer?   |   Frederick Jaffe's son shows up to answer a... Newer »

You are not logged in, either login or create an account to post comments