Memory Alpha and Memory Beta both claimed author Diane Carey named Kirk's mother Winona in Final Frontier. Not so: Vonda N. McIntyre mentioned Winona and Kirk's Sioux ancestry two years earlier in Enterprise: The First Adventure. I don't know if McIntyre was the first to use Winona, but she preceded Carey.
I'm guessing McIntyre knew that "Winona" is a Sioux name meaning "first-born daughter" or "eldest daughter." We learned a bit about a previous Winona in The Myth of Princess Wenonah. Clearly someone knew Indian lore in making Kirk's mother part Indian.
Review of Star Trek
This discussion is a good excuse for reviewing the new Star Trek movie, which I saw this afternoon. Alas, it was good but not great. A lot of fun, but not what I'd call real Trek. I'd say it resembled a young tribute band pretending to be rock legends.
For Trek fans, the movie had a ton of problems. Almost every one of the criticisms in these reviews is spot-on:
"Star Trek (PG-13)"--MountainX.com
In The Racialicious Roundtable For ‘Star Trek’, several young critics note how "hot" the young actors are. Among these critical chestnuts are a few gems:
The Star Wars/Star Trek divide stems from how Star Wars is a space opera fantasy, emphasizing mythological and supernatural elements, and how Star Trek is science fiction, with allegorical statements about real world politics, race relations, and morality.
Unfortunately, Trek XI is more space opera than science fiction. The obviousness of Abrams’ desire to make the franchise more Lucas than Roddenberry is pretty appalling to someone who has actually watched the five TV series.
I don’t see that Abrams Trek is Star Trek in any sense deeper than the characters, places, and ship have the same names. Whatever we see of the original series–whether it be that clichéd optimism about the future of humanity non-fans are always harping on, the *essence* of the Enterprise and her crew, Starfleet, Starfleet Academy, the Federation, 23rd/24th century Earth and the rest of the Alpha Quadrant, or the made-for-TV allegories Roddenberry so loved–Star Trek fans are projecting onto this movie.
This is Trek legacy, and Abrams hasn’t earned any of it–he outright rejects it. His contribution was to reimagine the origins of Kirk and Spock, getting a lot of details not only different, but wrong. Mere revision of canon is not necessarily wrong, but incoherent and illogical plot, uncharacteristic behavior and situations, and ignorance of Trek beyond the superficial *is* wrong.
EB wrote:
I do agree with Elton, this movie got a lot of the Star Trek details wrong which made it hard for me, as a Star Trek fan, to fit this movie into the established Star Trek Universe. I can accept a complete reboot, but I also just found the movie full of holes--
What rubs me wrong about Kirk is not that he’s the athlete among the nerds, but that he’s the white American guy whose been advanced over everyone else without merit (literally it’s a--“you showed up against orders, you’re first officer while I’m gone”).
Somehow, Kirk is so special that he doesn’t need to earn his place, it’s given to him and accepted that because of his gender and origins he’s supposed to be the natural leader and any other power structure in which he has to answer to someone else is unnatural.
jsb16 wrote:
To be honest, I couldn’t take this Star Trek at all seriously. It was so obviously fanfiction, from the time-travel conceit that underlies it to the shot of Iowa that might as well have been Tatooine to the plot holes large enough to hit warp speed in…
pololly wrote:
[T]hinking it through, I really liked Star Trek because I honestly felt like it was a big fun dumb movie.
You can find plenty of reviews that tell you what was good about the movie, including some of the above. The first third of movie that introduced the characters was fine. Once they boarded the Enterprise, however, problems started cropping up.
Here are some of the movie's worse flaws:
As for the characters...not only was Karl Urban's McCoy the best, but he was the only actor doing the right thing. Everyone else was doing their (or Abrams's) impression of how the characters should be. E.g., Spock as an angry young man whose logic barely masks his emotions. Only Urban was trying to give us the, er, real McCoy--i.e., the characters brought to life by the old cast members.
For the first third of the movie, I was thinking it could be an 8.5. Second third, maybe a 7.5. Third third, a 6.5. Overall rating: 7.5 of 10. Which puts it well behind most of the Trek movies.
For more on the subject, see The Indian-Star Trek Connection.
Below: The real Kirk acting out his Sioux side.
4 comments:
Kirk's mother's Sioux descent is perhaps considered to be ephemeral information. In any case, it obviously was not considered in casting Winona Kirk in the new movie. But they did keep her Sioux-derived first name.
Trek XI is so much like Star Wars that Collegehumor made a video comparing the two.
Star Trek and Star Wars shouldn't cross. When they do, you get The Crystal Star.
The problem with the "Death Star" comparisons is that you have a lot of precedent in "Star Trek" itself, with multiple doomsday ships/devices in the movies and even the old-series TV episodes.
Likewise, there is precedent for Kirk getting angry over a bad guy killing his relative.
I think most of the old Star Trek villains were better conceived than Captain Nero. He went back in time to Kirk's birth, then sat around for two decades to get revenge on Spock? Ridiculous.
What about all the times Spock saved the entire galaxy, including the Romulans? If Nero kills Spock, maybe Khan or the Kelvans or the Borg conquer the Romulan Empire. It's stupid to tamper with two centuries of history for the sake of vengeance.
It's not as if Spock destroyed Romulus. Rather, he singlehandedly tried to save it. How about blaming everyone who didn't try rather than the one person who did try?
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