[quote name='blandstalker']Okay, I'm a month out of date. Sue me.
I could not disagree more, and it's this reason more than anything else that ST VI will never be my favorite ST movie, despite having an awful lot of great stuff in it.
Real drama is never about easy choices. One of the things that makes Star Trek II such a powerful movie is that there are truly tough choices with no easy outs, and these choices lead to consequences that are even tougher.
By turning Saavik, a character that everyone knows and likes (at least in Star Trek II) into a similar character that no one has ever seen before, the dramatic impact of her divided loyalties is completely lost.
Rather than see Saavik's betrayal as a devestating blow and Spock's involuntary mind-meld as a truly horrific violation, it's just part of the plot. She's one of the Bad Guys (tm) and we can totally dismiss her and everyone in league with her.
Does anyone mourn Valeris? No, not really. Does anyone really think about how a character could have the right philosophy but come to a tragically wrong conclusion? Maybe a little. But in the end, who cares about her? We don't have to, since we've never seen her before, never will again, and can dismiss her as being wrong. Our universe and worldview is not shaken
Roddenberry is correct that Saavik would never intentionally hurt Kirk or Spock, but this provides the rationale why "Valeris" works both sides of the fence, attempting to help Kirk and Spock when she can. What he really didn't like is that a much-loved character would turn out to be "bad".
This is kind of funny, occurring the way it does in ST VI. Much of Star Trek depends on taking contemporary human problems and packaging them up in an alien race. Starfleet and the Federation are supposed to be the evolved, gold standard of what humanity can become if we confront our problems.
ST VI pretty much demolished this. Klingons can be good. Starfleet types can be bad. What important is not what was done in the past, but where people go together in the future. This is not so much a repudiation of the Roddenberry model, but an acknowledgment that real life is messy and that boundaries are not always so easily packaged and compartmentalized.
It's therefore ironic that we have this message that it's not who you are but what you do that's important, and that you must look past the prejudices of the past, and yet Roddenberry couldn't let go of the idea that Saavik, because she's Starfleet and people like her, could ever be on the wrong side of a moral issue or point of view. Too bad. Much of the Star Trek that was filmed after ST VI probably would have been a lot more interesting had Roddenberry lost this argument.
Thus, by turning Saavik into Valeris, the movie undermines its own message. It's easy to say "they're wrong and we're right", but it's not at all easy to confront the idea that even well-intentioned people that you know and like can still be stuck in the past and will do surprising things to stay there.[/QUOTE]
I agree. Additionally, had the Saavik/Spock love-child story (which was original scripted in IV) been included on top of this, it would have been one of the most shocking twists in Trek.
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ing illogical.
