Star Trek: Generations/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance

• Word of God says Kirk's Last Words, "Oh my...", are a reaction to the realization that he is approaching the true Final Frontier.
  • The crew members who ordered the auto destruction of the original Enterprise (Kirk, Chekov and Scotty) were the ones present at the maiden voyage of the third ship to carry the name.
  • We're told that the Nexus is such a wonderful place that you never want to leave and yet Picard is only briefly tempted by it. We're also shown a paradise for Picard that is not at all what we would imagine for the guy (just for starters, the guy had just barely warmed up to children during the series and yet has several in his paradise, and lives in an old fashioned home that would seem to contrast his original desire to get away from traditional settings and look towards the future.) But his Nexus was created out of a temporary emotional stress he had yet to cope with, which led to him creating a "paradise" that he could quickly get over and detach himself from.
  • Harriman states that he learned about the Enterprise's missions while he "was in grade school". If he's the same age as his actor, Alan Ruck (aged 10 in 1966, the first year of the original series), then yes he did learn about them in grade school, making this an instance of Fridge Brillance.
• There was no way Picard and Kirk could have failed to stop Soran. Every losing outcome would have been the Nexus ribbon taking them back, essentially being a Reset Button. The only way they could have failed was to be seduced by the Nexus and not tried at all.
  • Or Soran could have killed them both before the Nexus ribbon got there.
    • On the other hand, if its true that the Nexus can supply any fantasy one desires, how do we know Picard and Kirk ever left?
    • Unless Kirk had a death wish or Picard was murderously jealous of him, the fact that Kirk died is a reasonably good indication.

Fridge Logic

• The Enterprise is the ONLY ship within range of the Lakul when it just left space dock at Earth. Plus the Lakul is only 3 light years away, making the Enterprise the only ship in a 3 light year radius of Earth. There is only one ship within 3 light years of the HEADQUARTERS of the Federation. At least in First Contact a small Red Shirt Fleet was assembled in no time flat.
  • While not officially established, it's assumed there are only a few dozen fully stocked ships in Starfleet during the Kirk era, with many others being low-armament, minimal supply science vessels. It doesn't make it that much better, but still. By the Picard/Next Gen era there are much, much more.
  • The biggest fridge logic is that it seems to be perfectly reasonable to fly a ship into the Nexus and be absorbed; this is what happened to Kirk. Soran could just buy his own ship and do the same, or even just asked to be dropped off in a space suit in the path of the thing. There wasn't any real need to piss off the Romulans, destroy a couple of stars and planets just to redirect the Nexus to him on a mountain top.
    • The movie does state (and show in the opening) that any ship that had approached the Nexus was either destroyed or heavily damaged. Soran was clearly obsessed with getting back to his perfect world in one piece, so attempting a move that had a high probability of him being vaporized probably wasn't something he had in mind. Still, Kirk making it through seemingly unscathed does seem to have been damn lucky. Thank goodness for Plot Armor...
      • True, but how do we know that the passengers and crew of the destroyed SS Robert Fox (not to mention the 103 people on the Lakul that Scotty wasn't able to transport) didn't end up in the Nexus along with Kirk? (But on the other hand... who's to say they did?)
        • Probably Soran didn't want to take the risk of being destroyed before he got to the Nexus. He's a scientist, not a pilot.
  • Picard's brother and nephew died in a fire. While it's not completely implausible for people to still die in fires in the 24th century, we know that the Star Trek universe has transporters, force fields, biosensors, and antigravity, so it wouldn't be hard to imagine how these technologies can be applied towards firefighting.
    • Picard's brother had an attitude towards technology that makes a Luddite seem dangerously progressive, and the house was isolated. I doubt he bothered with things like smoke detectors and so forth, so if the fire was swift enough then they could quite plausibly have perished long before any neighbors raised the alarm.
  • Anybody else bothered by Capt. Harriman's performance at the start of the film? He's hesitating like he's just a newly-promoted Captain on his first command. Does the Federation not require some captaincy experience before giving somebody command of their flagship?
    • He was afraid of looking like an idiot in front of the greatest captain Starfleet had ever known. And the press. But mostly Kirk.
    • In the novel "The Captain's Daughter", which happens shortly after the 23rd-century portion of Generations, Harriman (in his personal log) acknowledges that he should have put his foot down on the whole thing before it even got started.

John Harriman: I should never have let the ship be taken out before she was ready. I was so grateful and excited for the opportunity, I let them steamroll right over any misgivings I had. Key weapons, key defense mechanisms, not on-line until Tuesday. So why the bloody hell didn't I just insist we wait until Tuesday!

• Picard could have exited the nexus at any time and in any place, right? So why didn't he ask to be put back on the Enterprise before he let Soren return to the station and put Soren in the brig, or go back even farther and save his nephew from dying in a fire? (I think I might have missed something about where he could exit the Nexus, so correct me if I am wrong.)
  • You're not. It's expressly stated that he can go to ANYWHERE and ANYTIME he wants.
  • Perhaps he wanted to bend the Temporal Prime Directive as little as possible, so he went back to the latest point possible that had the opportunity for success.
    • NO. Picard could not go to a place where he already existed, just as Guinan couldn't help Picard out. ("I'm there already, remember?")
    • Guinan couldn't help Picard out because her in the Nexus wasn't real--it was an echo of her from when she had been in it. Picard does go to a place, and time, where he already exists.
• Real life fridge logic with regards to the Executive Meddling that led to the requirement that the first TNG movie include crossovers with TOS: They were too cautious to allow going straight from the original cast to the new cast, okay, sounds like typical conservative studio execs, right? But wait...we just finished a successful seven year run of the new series. What the hell would it have taken to have confidence in them?
  • Never underestimate how conservative some executives can be, but if you think about it there were some reasonably legitimate concerns. Yeah, The Next Generation had just done seven years on TV, but that doesn't automatically translate to huge box office receipts (although granted, it does suggest a devoted crossover fan-base); it was still fairly cult, after all. The Original Series crew, however, had managed to get people to go to six fairly big budget movies which, say what you will about the quality of some of them, nevertheless IIRC all managed to make good enough business to keep making them. Combined with how passionately territorial certain Trek fans have a reputation for being (the stereotypical nerd argument being Kirk vs. Picard doesn't come from nowhere, after all), it makes sense that when given an untested property they'd err on the side of bringing something to the table that they knew for certain had worked in the past and could be reasonably guaranteed of drawing in an audience. Hence, Captain Kirk.
• At some point during the Farpoint mission, Geordi apparently told Data a joke that ended with "the clown can stay, but the Ferengi in the monkey suit has to go." The Federation hadn't yet had a face-to-face encounter with the Ferengi.
  • The Federation knew the Ferengi existed, so it's not unreasonable that they had a few jokes going around about them. It's like making a joke about giant squids: we've known about them for ages, but it wasn't until about a decade ago that scientists were finally able to study and document a live giant squid.