The theme from the new Star Trek movie has been grinding relentlessly through my head for the past two weeks, which tells me that there is something buried deep within my brains that wants to get out, so I’m going to see whether or not a little drivel therapy will help this demon to escape. Drivel therapy is almost exactly like talk therapy, the one difference being that I do not have to give truckloads of money to a trained specialist who will listen to my drivel. I merely have to type it into my laptop, and my legions of loyal readers will take up the job of reading it at no charge to me. What a deal.

Let’s get to the spoiler alert before I go any further: Have you seen Star Trek Into Darkness yet? If not, and the surprise hasn’t already been ruined for you by another blogger, then you probably don’t want to read any further because I don’t want to be the blogger who ruined it for you. If you’ve seen it and weren’t particularly surprised by the surprise, join me, won’t you, in trying to figure out why.

If you haven’t seen it but spoilers don’t bother you in the least, you and I are probably the only two people on the internet not affected by spoilers. We should start a club, or maybe start a life insurance agency for critics who give away too much of the plot of popular movies.

Just about every one of the main characters gets killed in the opening scenes of new Star Trek movie, titled Star Trek Into Darkness but which I will refer to as STD because every Star Trek movie has to have a three-letter abbreviation (or TLA, if you will). Kirk and McCoy are being chased by aliens who are trying very hard to kill them; either that, or they say Welcome! by throwing spears at newcomers. They throw about a million spears but every one’s a miss, so it could be merely a ceremonial attempt to kill our intrepid captain and his plucky sidekick. I’m not counting that out.

While this is going on, Sulu and Uhura are dangling Spock from the end of a rope hanging off their shuttle craft as they try to drop him into the heart of an exploding volcano. The rope breaks because, duh, the heat from the volcano burns it, but Spock rather fortuitously lands on a rocky island without breaking any bones or being incinerated even though he’s surrounded on all sides by fountains of molten lava, I guess because he’s wearing a shiny red space suit that apparently makes him unbreakable and unburnable.

Spock wants to be in the pit of an exploding volcano because he’s going to use a bomb to stop it from exploding. Five hundred years in the future the art of high-altitude aerial bombing has apparently been lost and the option to try it didn’t occur to them. No, only hand-carrying the bomb into the volcano will do.

Why does Spock want to stop the volcano from exploding? Because if it explodes it will kill all the natives who live on the planet. He can’t let that happen. And while he’s planting this bomb that will save the inhabitants from cataclysmic destruction, he’s lecturing Kirk and McCoy on the importance of the Prime Directive, Starfleet’s doctrine of not interfering in any way with the lives of native people, a doctrine so strict that they’re not even supposed to get within eyeshot of the natives. So while Spock is testily berating Kirk and McCoy for allowing themselves to be seen and possibly giving away the big secret that people from another world are messing with the lives of the spear-throwing natives, he’s simultaneously using a great big bomb to stop the volcano from messing with the lives of the spear-throwing natives. So the Prime Directive is ironclad, except when it’s not.

Sort of like the transporter. There’s this understood rule in the Star Trek universe that the transporter will beam a crew member into trouble but not out of it again, unless he’s one of the main characters. So why doesn’t Spock beam down into the volcano? There’s some babble about magnetic fields that prevent him from beaming down, but apparently not from beaming up because that’s how they get him out of the volcano. This seems like unnecessarily tweaking a rule that has always worked in the past. I call foul.

Just before that, though, Kirk and McCoy jump off a cliff and fall about a thousand feet into a pounding surf along a rocky shoreline. Do they break any bones? Of course not, don’t be a fool. They’re wearing some kind of scuba suits and not only make them unbreakable, they also come equipped with propeller boots that zip them even deeper beneath the surface to a waiting submarine – no, it’s the Enterprise! The Enterprise is not only a starship that can fly through space, it’s a starship that can swim! Now, why would they design a starship to do that? Mmmm.

Because it looks really, really cool when sea water cascades off the saucer as it surfaces minutes later, that’s why. Also, it was their first chance to crank up the volume on the new Star Trek theme that’s been stuck in my head for two weeks. They played it whenever the Enterprise was being majestic. It came roaring up out of the water, turning to head for the volcano so they could beam Spock up before zooming off into the clouds. When the natives saw that, they all froze in their tracks and stared in drop-jawed wonder. Who wouldn’t, right? And because they’re spear-throwing natives, they were also naturally inclined to chuck whatever supernatural belief they had before and worship the Enterprise which one of the natives made a perfect drawing of in the dirt with a stick, in spite of the fact that it was pivoting through the air over his head with seawater cascading from it.

When Spock finds out that Kirk let the aliens see the Enterprise he gets really pissed. If I’d been Kirk, I would have pointed out that Spock’s bomb was probably a bigger oopsie than flying the Enterprise over the heads of the spear-throwing aliens. Maybe then Spock wouldn’t have ratted Kirk out later.