[ SECRET POST #2739 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2739 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 021 secrets from Secret Submission Post #391.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

Bullshit. She may or may not have earned a place without Spock, but if she hadn't then she sure as hell would not have been able to bully any other assigning officer into bumping someone else for her. The only reason she is there is because she was able to use her personal connection with Spock to make him bump someone else for her. This is why superior officers are not supposed to fuck junior ones, and if he really had to do so then Spock's original decision was the correct one to avoid favoritism.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

I get that. The thing is, though, no other officer would have assigned her to the Farragut because they wouldn't have been concerned about the appearance of favoritism. An impartial observer would have assigned her to the Enterprise but Spock wasn't impartial and hence she took him to task for almost screwing her over to cover his own ass.

It WOULD have been favoritism if Uhura were unqualified, but she was clearly MORE qualified than the person they had -- indicating that the fault lies with Spock.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

That she ultimately turned out to know a different language set from the other guy is irrelevant. That is just luck (or writer being lazy about characterization), that comes after she bitched to her boyfriend about not getting the plum job and the boyfriend giving in. Hey, in any other service if you don't like your assignment, or think it is beneath you, then that is just tough luck. And if you are fucking a superior officer or instructor, and try complaining to the brass that they aren't giving you a plum enough job that you think you are worth, then you just got both of you fired. Uhura gets the job because she is fucking Spock, and it is just good luck she happened to know the exact one of five million interstellar languages that the villain turned out to speak.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

Unfortunately, I can't agree with you given that Spock said that he placed her on the Farragut in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism. If he hadn't said that, if she wasn't one of his top students, and if she hadn't shown herself to be more competent than the man currently at the communications post (to such a degree that PIKE immediately asks her to replace him) then I would agree with you.

The scene is definitely problematic though and it is rather emblematic of the issues of the Spuhura relationship -- it's underdeveloped. Because the first time we see that scene it does, indeed, look like a member of a military-style organization chewing out a superior officer for not getting exactly what she wants. The problem is that, given Spock and Uhura's personal relationship, Spock's judgement was impaired in this instance and Uhura was right. It's a scene of a girlfriend taking her boyfriend to task for trying to hide their relationship in a way that negatively impacts HER career. Pike would not have asked her to take the post if she were unqualified. And Spock himself admits that the reason she was assigned to the Farragut is due to him wanting to cover his ass -- not because the Farragut is where she's best suited or the place she earned. The place she earned is on the Enterprise.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

And the place she was assigned was the Farragut. If she didn't like it, then she should have thought about that before embarking on a relationship with her superior. In that sense, she earned that place on the Farragut through lack of good judgement.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, she was assigned to the Farragut but my point is that the assignment was unjust because Spock had a conflict of interest. HE is the one who is making HER pay the price for their relationship. And that's not okay.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

And that is why you don't have that kind of relationship with a superior/junior officer. She should still have sucked it up, because it was still a matter of potluck that she spoke one of millions of languages that happened to be needed. Unless you are going to claim Uhura is fluent in everything, so would always know what to speak.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

How was it a matter of luck? She's a xenolinguistics student -- the top xenolinguistics student in Spock's class -- and the issue that arose was one of knowledge of languages. Her performance in class is directly related to her performance in the field in this instance.

Let me put it this way -- on a lot of college campuses, it's not always against the rules to date your professor (this actually surprised me when I looked it up). If a professor gave you a lower grade on a test than you earned in order to avoid the appearance of favoritism, then HE is in the wrong. He's trying to protect himself by giving you a lower score than you've earned and you absolutely should fight to get what you worked for.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

You know what would be cool. A scene in the next movie where the partner/parent of whoever had to take Uhura's place on the Farragut confronted her. She basically consigned whoever replaced her there to death in the great fleet wipe out when she had Spock bump her to the Enterprise. It would be good to see the consequences of that played out on the screen.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

Did someone else take her place though? I though she was reassigned but does that necessarily mean someone else was moved or could she have just been added to the Enterprise and the Farragut be short one person?

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

You know, I'm not going to go into whether Uhura should or shouldn't have pushed Spock to move her. Spock certainly shouldn't have been in charge of his lover's posting assignment, though I suppose in a crisis there might not have been time to do things in proper channels, and I really hope they didn't get involved while he was her teacher -- before or after could be okay, since their ages are comparable, but not during.

But assigning Uhura moral responsibility for the death of whoever got moved to the Farragut is irrational, and Starfleet shouldn't let any irrational bereaved survivors near her. If Person A cuts in line and takes the last seat on a bus, and Person B consequently has to take the next bus and is killed when someone blows it up, Person A is an asshole, not a murderer.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

Clearly she should have just forced her best friend to smuggle her onboard the ship when she wasn't even supposed to be on there in the first place like Kirk did, since apparently when Uhura demands the place she earned it's terrible but when Kirk bullies his friend into getting him a spot he did not earn there's no trouble at all. So sick of this particular double standard.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

I actually think that McCoy's the one who instigated it. Kirk had accepted that he was left behind, but McCoy looks back at him and can't abandon him so he uses his medical knowledge to get Kirk onboard. I think, in this case, it would be more pertinent to ask why people don't take McCoy to task rather than Kirk -- since Kirk wasn't really the "actor" in this instance.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

Spock's sleeping with his students, Kirk's hacking the database, McCoy's a hypochondriac washout from civvie life with no respect for rules. Pike gives out Starfleet references to his friend's drunken son. The relief helmsman doesn't know how to start the ship and the duty helmsman pulled a sickie...are we sure this Enterprise was the flagship because it is starting to sound more like the F troop to me.

Shit, we got another screw up. This one can't pronounce his "W"s. Where can we post him? Out with the beagle killer, or just stick him on the Enterprise with the rest of them?

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

I laughed. Then I cried because it's so true.

Although I believe TOS Kirk also hacked the database as well for the Kobayashi Maru.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

I am firmly in the camp that Kirk's hacking the database was one of those things they should never have shown. It sounds cooler in conversation than it could ever look on screen (even without the director saying "I want you to have him eat an apple, so he'll look like even more of an asshole") because onscreen it just looks like a kid cheating at an exam instead of an older man reflecting on the cunning thing he did in his youth. I know the rule is "show, don't tell", but somethings telling works better. This was one.

Or at least, the way it was glossed over in the movie anyway. Maybe if we sat through Kirk's first attempt at it with him, watched him puzzle it out and what the ramifications were, saw him set up the Mission Impossible style raid to access Starfleet's servers, got other memebers of his future command crew on side... That would have been so much better than just a few lines of dialogue about him bitching about it, then cut to him being smug in the simulator.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[abharding]

Well to be fair I think the apple eating was more a nod to the scene where we first learned about how Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru test. The problem in the first movie was there was no reason for Kirk to be eating anything on the bridge. In the TWOK helped set the scene - Kirk was telling a story about how he beat the test not taking the test itself.

I would have liked to see that movie.

[nyxelestia]

This is a good point, and one I wish the movie ran with.

Because from what I remember, TOS had these guys as all being the best in their fields and with extensive careers under their belts by the time they came together on the Enterprise.

I wouldn't have minded them being total screw-ups in this movie, if it had really gone for a "before they were famous"/"before the legend" angle. It would have been fantastic to see them go from being total screw-ups who do stupid things like sleep with superiors, hack databases, and violate medical ethics, to the highly-competent and well-trained people we've seen in the show, especially if it went with a "screw-ups but also geniuses" attitude.

Not only did the movie not go that route, but it played them off as already being the good Starfleet officers we see in the movie, but without any career or much training to back that up. It takes their imperfections and instead of analyzing, deconstructing, or otherwise utilizing them as flaws, the movie tries to legitimize them or dismiss them outright.

I would love for the movie being about Spock learning to control his latent rage into the serene calm from TOS, watching Uhura going from someone who sleeps with superiors to standing in her own right and maintaining professionalism despite awkward pasts, and I would definitely have loved to see Kirk go from being a wild child for the sake of it to learning how to follow the rules unless they are actively wrong. And seeing Pike come to regret his referral, only to be proven wrong/right-all-along, would have been a fantastic story-arc.

Instead, we got STID.

Re: I would have liked to see that movie.

[tabaqui]

Wow, yes. So much yes to this comment.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[tabaqui]

No fucking kidding.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe because "I'm Chaotic Good, dammit" was classic McCoy's schtick, so it fit what the audience expected off a younger, less responsible version of that character. And, it happens early enough in the movie that some viewers hadn't realized that everyone is Chaotic now (because that's darker and edgier), so McCoy was given the benefit of the doubt.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

I can see that. I think people might also give McCoy a pass because the movie clearly doesn't try to hide that he's breaking regulations. Whereas with the Spock and Uhura scene, since we don't know that they're a couple when it happens, it does strike the viewer as INCREDIBLY disrespectful on Uhura's part at first glance. I think this does explain why so many people are so hung up on it. I just wish that they would re-evaluate the scene with the relationship in mind because I think that makes it clear that Spock is the one who should be catching the fandom's flak rather than Uhura.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, if Spock's and Uhura's roles were reversed, the flak would be thrown in the right direction (Uhura's, in that case.) Uhura usually catches the flak in all scenarios because she is either the Woman In The Way or Letting Down Team Minority, depending on what fandom spectrum the complainers come from. Straight-up series purists tend to be equally annoyed at everyone for everything. :)

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

My flack has always been mostly directed at the writers and directors for thinking that scene was okay in any way. But it also made me think more 'ew Spock you are gross don't date students' than anything about Uhura.

Re: The Reboots Improved Literally One Thing

[(Anonymous)]

When will the notion that a woman standing up for herself is bullying die?

Please just let it die. She was right, he was wrong. He was fucking her over, and he admitted it, period.

She had a right to stand up for herself.