re: #327 scottslemmons

Takei, Plummer, and David Warner made the movie for me. There was a lot of great stuff in it, and up ‘til pretty recently, I thought of it as fairly flawless. The Tor sci-fi publisher’s website had a rewatch/review of the movie (it’s a very long article, btw) that pointed out some of the more dunderheaded decisions made by the writers, though I think they note that the acting is pretty damn great across the board.

One wee little fuckup about that “re-review”:

Hailing frequencies open. Uhura inexplicably has absolutely no knowledge of the Klingon language whatsoever, nor is the Enterprise computer programmed with any information about it, since she and a half-dozen others are poring over a ton of codex books about the language.

That was not the case, becuse, as Chekov said right in the beginning of that scene, the reason that Uhura didn’t respond normally (read: speak English) to the Klingon outpost was because the Enterprise’s universal translator’s response would be recognized as such and they’d be busted. Also, Uhura might have had some knowledge of the Klingon language at some point, but, as anyone who has taken any foreign languages in school, then never used them much, if any, after that, tends to forget them; with a UT normally at her disposal, Uhura wouldn’t have much day-to-day need to speak Klingon.

There’s nothing to say that Uhura and the Enterprise bridge crew wouldn’t be able to read a transcript of the Klingons talking to them (in fact, it’s Scotty that’s reading back the Klingon translation, with some delay, though it looks like he’s referencing a book, so the UT may have had to been completely disabled for the ruse to work), but they had to respond without the UT; having them pore through mountains of dusty tomes to formulate their responses just sets the scene up for a bit of comic relief.