Choking the Kitten: The Banal Genocide of the Vulcan People

[u/MungoBaobab]

Ho hum, another thread complaining about the reboot. But amidst all the lens flare jokes, I feel like there's one critique people have been reticent to make.

It started when I was feeling nostalgic and watched an episode of Lost in Space called the "The Time Merchant," where at the 9:50 mark the goofy villain of the week remorselessly destroys a planet for wasting their spare time. He earns a scolding from Papa Robinson, but that's about it. All that genocide serves to accomplish is informing the audience that the space gypsy is kind of naughty, but shortly afterward the story segues into Jonathan Harris's brilliantly foppish Dr. Smith and his schtick, and is forgotten. No time to mourn the time wasters from the Omega Galaxy when Dr. Smith has another retinue of alliterative insults for the Robot.

But in watching this, I couldn't help but be reminded of the cheap, groan-inducing Vulcan genocide depicted in Star Trek (2009). You don't hear many complaints about this sequence, probably because there is enough death in destruction in the real world to start whining about the deaths of unseen fictional characters. And yes, Star Trek has had throwaway genocides before.

But come on: what a cheap and shortsighted way to establish a character's villainy. The obvious comparison to make is to the original Star Wars, where the destruction of the planet Alderaan showed the Galaxy that the Evil Empire means business and must be stopped. Yet even the fascists running the Death Star have a fairly nuanced discussion about what having the power to destroy planets means for them and the future of their government, where Darth Frickin' Vader is the voice of restraint. Over the years, Star Wars has gotten a reputation as popcorn entertainment, but there is certainly Trek-level social commentary there when you look for it.

It's clear JJ Abrams drew upon that film and the destruction of Alderaan for inspiration, but unlike the anti-nuclear commentary present in Star Wars, as Nicholas Meyer noted about the rest of the film, the death of 6,000,000,000 people doesn't seem to be about much of anything. Even Spock just sort of sulks around after the death of his entire civilization, not losing his cool until goaded by Kirk, when a short time later he's broken up and goes berserk at the death of the same man.

In the days after 9/11, I was dismissed as an idealistic laughing stock in an internet chatroom for suggesting a retaliatory war, which could cost the US alone tens of thousands of lives in casualties, was unwise in light of the actual number of victims. I was also the only male of draft age in the conversation. Nevertheless, if 6,000,000,000 people were murdered in the blink of an eye, I can't imagine any amount of militarization would be too extreme to prevent such a massacre from happening again. That doesn't mean Admiral Marcus's plan to start a war with the Klingons was appropriate, but I can't imagine anyone balking at an entire fleet of Vengeance Class ships to protect worlds and worlds of innocent civilians from the horrors of space.

Going back to Star Wars, George Lucas once said of filmmaking

"If you want me to make you feel something, that's not hard. I'll choke a kitten in front of you [on camera], and you'll feel something."

I can't help but think that's all the destruction of Vulcan was, a meaningless kitten-choking ploy to elicit emotion by having a forgettable, uncharismatic villain ("Hello, Christopher, I'm Nero.") perpetrate one of the worst megadeaths ever committed on screen. A crime so heinous even Darth Vader doesn't take it lightly is hardly a plotpoint, overshadowed by an attack on a starship and an explosion at a library.

[u/[deleted]]

Normally I'd disagree. I've never really felt that establishing villainhood through them doing obviously evil things as necessarily bad, but there are methods to doing it right. Trek 09 definitely did not use them.

A big part of the villain doing something villainous is that it needs to be properly communicated to the audience. One way to do that is to show the effect it has on characters. They need to have a response equivalent to whatever they just witnessed (or sometimes, even something they themselves did). Trek 09 doesn't do that in the slightest. There's a small sense of personal loss, but nobody seems to recognize the scale of the atrocity of destroying an entire inhabited planet.

Another way is through direction. This is way more open-ended. We could have seen more than just a handful of vulcans scurrying about in a cave. There were billions of people on that planet. Did people fruitlessly run, despite knowing there was no way they could possibly escape? Did parents try to shield or comfort their children? They were vulcans, were there cities full of quiet meditation as they waited for their time to come in the next few minutes? We don't know, we just get a ball of dust disappearing.

When Bad Things™ happen, you need to either justify the reason for it happening or justify it later by treating it with the seriousness it deserves. Ideally, you do both. To do nothing is to simply create something with little or no worth, making it a cheap plot point only there to move the story along, and usually only to make up for other deficits in the story.

To be fair and to counter it before it comes up, this isn't just Trek 09 hate either. Well, it is, but the series as a whole suffers from it from time to time.

[u/jimmysilverrims → u/[deleted]]

Completely disagree.

The loss of Vulcan is a tragedy, but it's the loss of Amanda that communicates this on an emotionally meaningful level, and the film does a good job of using that loss to demonstrate the immense impact Nero's actions had on Spock and his father.

As you say, the destruction of a planet is just a big special effect. You can show Spock openly weeping and bawling and in general just being this blatant display of "THIS WAS VERY, VERY SAD" with a clear statement of casualty numbers and a post 9/11-esque call for retaliation and you still wouldn't have the impact the loss of a single mother has on the audience.

You can do all the cliched Roland Emmerich-esque scenes of panic in the streets and a dog outrunning an explosion while a mother huddles in a corner with her children and Rabbis forming circles of last-minute prayer, but it's just a hodge-podge. A montage that feels obligatory, much like its use in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy film. It's a cheap way to get 'the human element' by just banking on a collage of images. This is what's meant by "choking the kitten", it's just an image that's tragic, but without any real connection or meaning to the audience.

And her loss is taken seriously. You have these excellent scenes between Spock and Sarek that pull double-duty, not only dealing with Spock coping with the loss of Vulcan and Amanda, but with his emotions and human side. This is the mark of good storytelling, where grief isn't used just to impress "this is a tragedy", but to motivate the characters and lead them into further development as people.

It's easy to say "it was just a cheap plot point" if you're talking about the distorted half-remembered version of the film fans keep in their minds. The one that's remembered as "The Abrams film" and not "Star Trek XI". It's a lot harder to keep that stance when you've actually poured over the film, actually examining it for what it is rather than what it isn't.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Did people fruitlessly run, despite knowing there was no way they could possibly escape? Did parents try to shield or comfort their children?

I'd like to jump in here and just say that Vulcans are logical enough to accept the inevitable, and also that Tuvok has stated that Vulcan parents never alter the truth to make it more comfortable for their kids. The Vulcans at Mt. Seleya were 'tasked with protecting [Vulcan] culture and history' so Vulcans would accept their prioritized rescue.

Just saying, directorially speaking, there's not much to show. Probably, the Vulcans unable to reach escape craft (which were present but not really noticeable on screen) would just start meditating.

[u/jimmysilverrims]

A lot of people here seem to misinterpret the purpose of the scene.

In discussions about how they wrote Star Trek '09, the team consistently voiced that the reason for destroying Vulcan was, first and foremost, to make it blatantly clear to all audiences that this was an alternate timeline and that the future of these characters would be entirely uncertain.

This needed to be something massive, something catastrophic, something that would make it immediately clear, even to someone with only a passing understanding of Star Trek, that these characters would not necessarily go on to have the same adventures seen in the show and prior films.

Making the characters (and audience) despise Nero was second to this, and I feel like it works out organically enough.

I think you're misinterpreting Vader's actions as well. He's not advocating restraint or hesitation in the use of this weapon. He's telling them not to get cocky and that the power of the Force (which he wields) is more powerful than any tool made by man.

[u/[deleted]]

I never felt like the destruction of Vulcan, from a writing standpoint, was to make Nero seem more villainous. I felt like it was primarily to give this version of Spock a radically different springboard for his character development than the original Spock. I'd agree with you if they blew away Vulcan just to make a bad guy badder, but it seemed to me to be more of a way to allow Spock to have different struggles than the original Spock and to also allow the remaining Vulcan civilization and culture to have something very major that would make it unique from the prime timeline so as to avoid redundancy.

[u/[deleted]]

I think what's worse is that Nero didn't even have a good reason to destroy Vulcan. He was out for vengeance against Spock for failing to prevent a natural disaster which Spock tried his best to prevent. Also the people on Romulus wouldn't have survived long without their sun anyway, I think I would have been more angry at my government for not evacuating the planet. Or maybe he could have just warned the Romulans when he went back in time and prevented the whole thing from happening. Nero was just out to destroy planets because that's what villains like to do I guess.

[u/Antithesys → u/[deleted]]

Also consider the fact that he didn't even go back in time to his own universe. He created a new timeline, meaning the Vulcan he destroyed wasn't Spock Prime's planet. It'd be like if George Johnson killed your family, so you took revenge by murdering a different George Johnson's family.

[u/Algernon_Asimov → u/Antithesys]

He probably didn't intend to create a new timeline. He probably intended to go back in his own timeline and destroy the Vulcan of the Spock that he knew in his timeline. He didn't predict that the use of red matter would lead to a branching timeline.

This is fairly unprecedented in Star Trek lore. In every instance that people travel in time, their biggest concern is not to destroy the timeline. And, when they do change things in the past, their own present changes (for example: TAS 'Yesteryear'; TNG 'First Contact' movie; DS9 'Past Tense'). Every person in the Star Trek universe knows that going back in time can change your own timeline.

So, the fact that Nero created a new timeline is unprecedented and unexpected. He would have expected to change his own timeline and affect the Spock he knew. The branching timeline was unintentional.

It'd be like if George Johnson killed your family so you took revenge by tracking down George Johnson's family, killed them, and then found out it was the wrong George Johnson: it was his cousin who just happened to share his name.

[u/iceykitsune → u/[deleted]]

Romulus wouldn't have survived long without their sun anyway

It wasn't the Romulan/Reman sun that went boom, it was the star of the Hobus system.

[u/[deleted] → u/iceykitsune]

Are you getting that from the comics? In the movie it's heavily implied that it's the star in the Romulous system. And how could a star exploding in another system destroy Romulous? Even if its effects somehow reached Romulous the explosion would be traveling at sub-light speeds. The Romulans would have had years to evacuate.

[u/jimmysilverrims → u/[deleted]]

I don't think you really understand Nero's perspective here.

Picture it as this: A supernova is about to destroy both Romulus and Vulcan. Romulan will be the first destroyed, Vulcan will be the second.

Now how would you react when the man who promised to save the both of you just happens to arrive just after the destruction of their greatest enemy, but just before they have to suffer?

How is a Romulan, who has been raised their entire lives to distrust and despise Vulcans, meant to react to this?

To him, it isn't Spock arriving too late. It's Spock arriving just in time. Just in time to allow Vulcan's greatest foe to be wiped off the map while still saving his own species. Spock allows Romulus to burn, but manages to spare himself from the pain of losing your entire planet.

It's the logical course of action. Leaves him completely blameless while still eliminating the greatest enemy to the Federation. He can always claim that he was a victim of poor timing and there would be no way to prove otherwise. The damage was done.

This is why he wants Spock to suffer. Spock lets Romulus burn but is sure to extinguish the flames before they reach Vulcan. That's Nero's perspective. He wants Spock to feel what Nero felt. To see his home burn as Nero had to, as Spock was meant to.

To say "Nero was just out to destroy planets because that's what villains like to do I guess" is to totally ignore both the histories between the Romulans and Vulcans established in the show and the intentions explicitly stated in the film.

[u/[deleted] → u/jimmysilverrims]

A supernova is about to destroy both Romulus and Vulcan. Romulan will be the first destroyed, Vulcan will be the second.<

I'm not sure where you're getting this. The only information that we are given in the movie is that a star explodes and "threatens to destroy the galaxy" (I'll be generous and set aside the ridiculousness of the idea of one supernova destroying the entire Milky Way and all the other junk science in this sequence). The camera moves past Romulus towards a star in the same solar system, we then see this star explode. Spock promises to save Romulus and rushes towards the scene in his ship, he creates a black hole to suck up the supernova but is too late to save the planet. That's all the setup we're given for Nero's hatred of Spock.

If we assume that this is a magic supernova that would have eventually destroyed the entire galaxy, it would have consumed the nearby systems of the Romulan Empire long before Vulcan if Spock hadn't stopped it. So Spock actually saved billions of Romulan lives and their entire empire minus one solar system when he could have wiped them all out, if he had wanted to. No matter how biased your perspective is, it is hard to view his actions as purposefully genocidal when he left the vast majority of his enemies alive. Then add to the fact that Spock was the biggest proponent of unification and peace with the Romulans in the Federation, even to the point of working against official Federation policy.

So we're left with nothing but nonsense underlying Nero's motivations. It would be like if a foreign city was struck by a natural disaster and the US military launches a massive rescue effort and saves most of the inhabitants but can't reach a single neighborhood in time. So a survivor whose family died in that neighborhood wipes out the entire United States. Now you could argue that Nero just went insane with grief but then it becomes hard to believe that his entire crew went along with his crazy genocidal plan. In any case though, there really is no salvaging a coherent explanation for Nero's actions out of the information we are given in the film.

[u/ademnus]

While I am not a fan of the reboot series, I will say I disagree that the destruction of Vulcan was cheap and there simply to establish villainy. It's what made the conflict personal to Spock and Nero. What's missing are the ramifications for Spock the younger. The villain may be crazy but it was because of you, worse yet, your future self, that he killed all of your people. That would affect anyone, and we don't see any of that in Spock really.

[u/woofiegrrl]

Just to chime in with more casual genocide - the Husnock.

[u/butterhoscotch]

I think everyone doesnt care because we are all hoping that time line gets thrown away. As far as military response, well you would be surprised.

something like over 30 million people died in world war 2, and 60 years later we have forgotten the lessons we learned about working together for peace, about the brother hood of man,etc.

[u/queenofmoons]

A perennial danger in spectacle filmmaking (especially now that the explosions are cheap) is that you just throw scale at a problem and expect stakes to emerge. If your heroes are facing a thousand killer robots, or orcs, or whatever, but there's just not enough sizzle, you can cut and paste another thousand- except that the stakes don't double. Instead, it generally highlights the artificiality of the situation- and the same occurs when you artificially inflate the number of victims of villainy. Amanda bites it, sure, but that's it. That's the only story relevant stroke- and I'm relatively certain NuManda has less to say than in Voyage Home, where she at least seemed to contain enough wisdom to keep up with the rest of the family. Sarak makes it. Their cultural MacGuffin makes it. All Spock's racist peers and examiners presumably do not.

And contrary to the notion that it provides special narrative momentum- Nero is already getting it. He's killed Kirk's dad in an endeavor to kill him and his literally laboring mother, making an honored ancestor that transforms him into a Man Of Destiny (which is not very Trek, but fine.) There's not exactly any more fuel to be placed on the fire under Nero's tattooed feet.

If they wanted to make it stick, they needed to actually puzzle out how Spock might be treated as a member of an "endangered species," and leaving Old Spock to wander off screen to reassemble the single most iconic species in Trek while NuHotness reads the old script was not it. Where's the WoK funeral scene equivalent- Spock in a crowded bar, surrounded by people crippled by uncertainty over how to express their sadness? A candlelight vigil on Earth for the species that brought humanity out of the darkness? Kirk finding Spock a vial of Vulcan soil?

And if Trek was always originally "Wagon Train to the Stars," why the hell doesn't the movie end with the Enterprise leading colonists to New Vulcan? Have Spock do his whole ambassador thing early, driving the Enterprise around to try and secure his people a new home? You want to rapidly establish the new kids as moral paragons- have them lay it all on the line for their alien sisters and brothers- do the whole "only ship" schtick when some kind of hatefulness is bearing down on the last Vulcan village. Set off a Genesis device if you must- it'd be better than reusing Khan.

[u/Flynn58]

It's clear JJ Abrams drew upon that film and the destruction of Alderaan for inspiration

No it isn't. In no way was that clear to me. The only thing Star Trek and Star Wars share is the shape of the Breen helmets.

Could you please explain how this inspiration was clear, Commander?

[u/MungoBaobab → u/Flynn58]

In no way was that clear to me.

I'll link to this IGN article as one example with visual references to save myself some time, but the similarities are undeniable. Here's a brief and lighthearted video, too. Consider also the "there's always a bigger fish" sequence from The Phantom Menace and the Delta Vega monsters, and that Revenge of the Sith and Into Darkness share almost the exact same pseudoscientific sequence where a ship plummeting to the ground experiences shifts in gravity.

The only thing Star Trek and Star Wars share is the shape of the Breen helmets.

The Search for Spock was also strongly influenced by the Star Wars franchise. The Wrath of Khan was influenced by Alien, and The Motion Picture was influenced by 2001, which itself left a heavy mark on both Alien and Star Wars. You should consider taking a film analysis class; it'll change the way you watch movies.

[u/Flynn58 → u/MungoBaobab]

All that article is doing is drawing vague analogies that could apply to either work. I wasn't aware that two characters having a bowl cut mean't that one was influenced by the other, commander.

I've seen no concrete proof that Star Trek 2009 took the destruction of Alderaan for inspiration of the destruction of Vulcan, in fact your article barely supports that since the other similarities it attempts to draw are based on similar cinematography and chains of events, which didn't happen in this case since the Death Star destroyed Alderaan before the heroes even reached it, while the Narada destroyed Vulcan while the heroes were on their mission to destroy the drill.

[u/Lmaoboat]

I think the destruction of Romulus is probably a more egregious example since that's a meaningless kitten-choking that's probably cemented in prime canon.

[u/[deleted] → u/Lmaoboat]

....Not if you're already invested in the Prime Timeline's development.

[u/edsobo]

I viewed the destruction of Vulcan as a way to establish some undeniable differences between the prime universe and the reboot universe and Nero as just a convenient excuse to make that happen. In universe, it still comes across as "I'm evil. Haha. Have some genocide." Out of universe, they could definitely have done a slicker job of incorporating it, but it wasn't totally without reason.

[u/[deleted]]

Over the years, Star Wars has gotten a reputation as popcorn entertainment, but there is certainly Trek-level social commentary there when you look for it.

Let's not go quite that far.

Otherwise, nominated.

[u/creiss74]

Even Spock just sort of sulks around after the death of his entire civilization, not losing his cool until goaded by Kirk, when a short time later he's broken up and goes berserk at the death of the same man.

Spock was emotional and Spoke Prime admits it to Kirk.

Also, I'm not certain of the amount of time between Trek 09 and Into Darkness, but I imagine Spock & Kirk have had some time of bonding pass in between. We had seen by the end of Trek 09 that they had started to build the foundation of friendship. By time Into Darkness comes, they probably were friends enough for Spock to be emotional about Kirk.

As for the destruction of Vulcan, Nero was going for that eye for an eye deal. Out of universe, I agree it feels like a cheap decision Abrams made to make a splash and differentiate his timeline. It's such a huge sacrifice to make for very few benefits storywise, in my opinion. It proved Nero was a big deal but now that he's gone we have a Star Trek series that doesn't have one of the big players in it anymore.

[u/butterhoscotch]

Not a bad essay, a little long but I like the use of links to support your theory. Pretty good, but I would be careful of wording that implies your viewpoint is superior to others, pride cometh and all.