I went to see Star Trek Beyond again the other day and I noticed something that I hadn’t before: the escape pods on the bridge of the Enterprise were specifically called Kelvin pods. At every other point, crew referred to escape pods until the bridge crew specifically began to evacuate. We saw the pods after ejection: escape pods were larger, presumably could fit multiple crew members (going by previous Trek history, really, and the size and number that we glimpsed), and had to be got to. The Kelvin pods were streamlined, single person carriers and built straight into the walls of the bridge. Accessible from any point in that space, effectively.
‘Kelvin pods’ or their equivalent haven’t been seen before in Star Trek (as far as I know) and definitely have never been referred to before in the Kelvin timeline. The USS Kelvin bridge crew had to leave the bridge to evacuate, and George Kirk had no point of escape after he set the ship on its fatal collision post. Given the name of these pods, it’s safe to say that these were installed after that incident to ensure that no Starfleet officer would ever have to go down with his ship in that way. Had there been pods in the bridge, George Kirk would have been likely to survive.
And I think that this is a thought that occurred to Kirk as he stood there, watching his ship be ripped apart too logn after the last of his crew (darling Checkov) had abandoned ship. As he lingered and made that decision to go. To live. To save his crew like his father would.
I noticed this when I saw it and remembered thinking what a beautiful little piece of world building it was.
It’s a very casual kind of way to remind the audience, not only the reaching effect of the Kelvin incident in-world, but also how hard it is for Jim Kirk to escape the circumstances of his birth.
There he is, able to get his crew to safety and follow them off the ship because of something that was created to prevent what his father had to do. In a way it’s George Kirk getting Jim off a crashing ship all over again.
Since I know there’s probably a fair amount of you out there who haven’t seen the first three Mad Max movies, I’m here to tell you a li’l secret about them:
All the people complaining about how Max “isn’t the main character” in Fury Road are big ol’ Fake Fanboys cause Max’s primary character trait in literally every movie is “I hate this, why is it happening, please leave me alone to brood in the desert in peace”.
He’s much more the central focus of the plot in the first movie but in Road Warrior and Thunder Dome he basically just gets kidnapped or beat up by wankers in weird bondage outfits and spends the rest of the movie trying to leave as soon as possible while other people are like “please solve our absurd post-apocalyptic problems”. There is not one single point where Max actively seeks out being a hero until it is forced upon him. He ACTIVELY TELLS PEOPLE WHO ASK HIM FOR HELP to take a hike.
Mad Max himself would like nothing better than to never, ever, ever be the main character.
He would also like for people to stop stealing his fucking car.
Nobody wants to escape his own movies more than Max Rockatansky.
He understands better than his own fanboys that his life sucks and you don’t want to be like him, to be Max is humiliating and painful. Every time he gets dragged into a conflict, he ends up worse than he started. Max seems to realize no good can come of this, and is weirdly genre-savvy because he’s always trying to make a getaway at the first signs of encroaching Plot. I find this darkly comical and endearing – at no point does he snap off witty quips and save the day and get the girl. Ever. He’s perpetually a weird desert loser with terrible luck. It’s great.
What makes Max a badass is the ability to survive to the end of any movie he’s unfortunate enough to find himself in.
This relates to a theory I have, which is that the archetypal Western Male Hero is James Bond, to the degree that people (Mainly straight white men) start to see every Western Male Hero as James Bond.
Which is to say an aggressively masculine, quip-spitting, hyper violent womanizer. The ultimate Male Power Fantasy. A new supermodel love interest (or two) every film, a gun in his hand, and no consequences for his actions.
Consider:
Captain Kirk: Painted as a headstrong idiot who spends all his time banging green skinned alien queens. In reality, a pretty firmly Feminist character.
Han Solo: Pictured as a suave too-cool-for-school scoundrel. Actually kind of a mess with a ship that’s falling apart. He constantly has people after him, not because he’s some sort of superscoundrel that makes powerful enemies, but because he makes deals with dangerous people, and then fails to live up to his end of the bargain. From what I recall, it’s not even that he double-crosses them or anything, he just screws up.
Mad Max: To quote that one hilariously stupid review that helped make the movie so popular, “In the post-apocalyptic future, it’s going to be MEN LIKE MAX THAT ARE IN CHARGE!” Max just wants to drive his car around the desert and be sad. He doesn’t want any of this.
It’s like, the Male Power Fantasy (as exemplified by James Bond) is so strong that we feel a need to cast everybody we can in that same mold.
jim often worries that his crew sees him as more than he is. he is their captain and highest authority and to them he is the most important being in the universe; to them he is the essence of courage and of bravery and he is steadfast and resolute. he is heavenly and ethereal, beautifully cosmic and fantastically stellar.
but jim does not think he is these things; he cannot bring himself to identify with this tangle of words, these characterizations. the truth of the matter is, he is not any of these things but rather
he is small, minute; he is not a force to be reckoned with, for he is feeble and he is frightened and painfully inadequate and he constantly feels as if he dove into the deep end without first taking in a large enough breath and he is struggling so very badly to tread water that he feels he is going to drown
and he is not a celestial body. he is not a moon or a planet. he is not the sun and he is not the stars; he does not bring light and he does not bring life
if he were to be celestial, jim thinks, he would be a supernova, brilliant and burning and intensely incandescent but this luminosity is brief as he explodes with the energy of a thousand suns and in his effort to be brilliant he is wildly destructive, eradicating nearby forms of life and extinguishing proximate joy and when the destruction is squelched he leaves behind an unprecedented darkness and a sinister sort of silence
if jim were to be celestial, he could also be a comet who trails his ice behind him and who sweeps away all the warmth in his path and he is frozen. he cannot be thawed.
jim is seen as very nearly divine but
he is not eternal or immortal or forever and he does not transcend the stars and he does not measure up to the elegance of a nebula and certainly not to the wonder of a galaxy.
jim kirk is not divine.
jim kirk is just a person. he’s only a man.
he is not a god.
and upon hearing their captain’s musings, jim’s crew would beg to differ.
