10 ways Kelvin Star Trek is better than Prime, and 5 ways it’s Worse

Star Trek (2009) Vulcan destroyed – Copyright Paramount

14: Better: No Strange Vulcan Missions

One of the most universally panned movies in the Star Trek movie series is without a doubt Star Trek V: The Final Frontier in which a renegade Vulcan, and Spock’s half brother Sybok (Laurence Luckinbill) essentially forces the crew of the Enterprise A on a mission to find a planet from Vulcan mythology called Sha Ka Ree where he believes they will find God.

In Star Trek The Original Series season two episode Amok Time the Enterprise is forced to return to Vulcan because Spock is undergoing his Pon Farr, a biologically driven mating urge with a fair amount of ritual around it, as a result of this urge we end up seeing Captain Kirk and Spock fighting to the death. A fight Captain Kirk loses thanks to a misdirect by Doctor McCoy, which otherwise easily could have lead to the death of Starfleet’s best Captain.

Neither of these examples are what you would call official missions given to the crew by the Vulcan’s, we only really saw the Vulcan’s issue direct edicts to Starfleet during Star Trek Enterprise, most of which seemed designed to hold back humanity or to keep their own secrets intact, but none the less with the destruction of Vulcan the strange interactions between Vulcan and Earth wouldn’t have happened.

We can assume that without his home planet Sybok has other things to worry about rather than trying to capture a ship to go to meet his false god. Without his planet to go to for his Pon Farr, and with the addition of the Spock Uhura relationship in the Kelvin timeline we can assume there was not a fight to the death between Kirk and Spock.

As a result the lack of strange Vulcan missions can only be considered better for the crew of the Kelvin timeline, even though the loss of their oldest and most steadfast allies home planet cannot be considered better for them.