"Star Trek" 2009, Part I Trivia Quiz

Answer: George Kirk

Poor Captain Robau (Faran Tahir) had thought his ship was heading to investigate a lightning storm, but instead they run afoul of an extremely unusual ship. Vast, dark and spiky, the Narada takes the Kelvin by surprise, and Robau agrees to take a shuttle to the enemy vessel in an attempt to save the survivors among his crew.

When he gives command to a young, blond officer surnamed Kirk (Chris Hemsworth), we're meant to think that this is the James Tiberius Kirk we've come to know during decades of "Star Trek." But this is his father, George, and when the enemy murders Robau he knows desperate measures are called for to save his crew and especially his pregnant wife. After evacuating the ship, he steers it on a collision course for the center of the enemy vessel, and hears his newborn son's first cry over a radio link just before he dies to buy them time.

Answer: Over whether Kirk should be allowed to talk to Uhura

Through a brief scene of childhood rebellion and a shot of Kirk (Chris Pine) as a young man on a motorcycle, we establish that the fatherless Kirk is also something of a loose cannon. Drinking at a bar in his home state of Iowa, he encounters Uhura (Zoe Saldana) -- a xenolinguist on her way to Starfleet Academy in San Francisco -- and immediately attempts to flirt with her.

She turns him down quickly and firmly, refusing even to tell him her first name. A few other cadets doubt her ability to handle herself, and begin to fight with Kirk -- supposedly in her defense, but over her protests.

Heavily outnumbered, Kirk is receiving a serious beating when a Starfleet officer -- the one and only Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood) -- intervenes.

Answer: Leonard McCoy

Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy (Karl Urban) hates heights, space travel, travel in general, and essentially everything else that Starfleet stands for -- which Kirk finds surprising, given that McCoy has just signed on to be a Starfleet cadet. It turns out that the doctor has just been through a nasty divorce; his ex-wife, he claims, has taken the whole world and left nothing but space for him.

A cynical luddite, quick to anger and loyal to friends, this is clearly the real McCoy.

Answer: Spock

Spock (Zachary Quinto) is a recent graduate of the Academy, described as one of its most distinguished alumni. The Kobayashi Maru, a test which he has programmed for the last three years, is one of the Academy's enduring rites of passage, taking place in a simulator room evoking the command deck of a starship. The Kobayashi Maru is a simulated civilian ship in distress, and the cadet crew is ordered to go to its rescue -- but that rescue mission quickly dooms them to an unwinnable fight against multiple Klingon ships. The result is both a test of character and an effort to force future commanders to face and accept their fears of death and failure.

We see Kirk's third attempt at the test. Although he's failed the first two -- and although, as McCoy points out, no one goes back for a second shot -- Kirk is curiously unconcerned during the test, munching an apple in the captain's chair and responding nonchalantly to his officers' alarmed reports. It soon becomes apparent why: he has reprogrammed the simulation so that the Klingon ships spontaneously lower their shields, allowing him to destroy the enemy and rescue the crew and passengers of the Kobayashi Maru. It also raises interesting questions about his adherence to the cadet code of conduct ...

Answer: The planet Vulcan

Vulcan is a founding planet of the United Federation of Planets as well as homeworld to some of "Star Trek"'s most popular characters (the fascinating Mr. Spock among them); there is nothing Starfleet will not do to protect that world. Unfortunately, when Vulcan High Command sends a distress signal reporting a cataclysmic and inexplicable space lightning storm, Starfleet's main forces are much too distant to respond; instead, Admiral Barnett (a cameo by filmmaker Tyler Perry) scrambles the incompletely manned ships in Earth orbit, sending senior cadets to fill out their crews. Among these ships is the Enterprise, flagship of the fleet, commanded by Christopher Pike and making its maiden voyage earlier than planned.

Answer: McCoy

When the cadets' names are called out in the hangar deck, Dr. McCoy is the only one paired with the Enterprise. Uhura, assigned to a different and (in her view) clearly inferior ship, takes her complaint directly to Spock -- first officer on the Enterprise and one of the officers planning the mission. Reminding him that she is his best student and an exceptional linguist, she tells him that her new assignment will be the Enterprise, easily overriding his objection that this might be perceived as favoritism.

Kirk, meanwhile, never hears his name read at all: since there was no time to finish his disciplinary hearing, he's still on academic suspension and ineligible for the mission. McCoy sneaks him on board the Enterprise through some very shady dealings. Giving Kirk a vaccination against an exotic parasite, McCoy waits for him to develop adverse symptoms, then tells the guard on the Enterprise-bound shuttlecraft that, as Kirk's doctor, the transport of his patient is entirely at his discretion. A swollen, nauseous, half-blind Kirk is finally en route to the Enterprise.

Montgomery Scott, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen at the moment, which makes sense as his cadet days are long past.

Answer: Drilling a hole in the planet

The enemy ship -- a mining ship, as we discover -- has deployed a gigantic drill, stretching from the ship itself to the surface of the planet Vulcan below. It's attempting to drill into the planet's core, with predictably disastrous consequences for Vulcan.

The Enterprise has several advantages over the others in its fleet. It enters the scene late, thanks to a mistake by rookie helmsman Ensign Hikaru Sulu (John Cho), and its commander expects an attack, thanks to Kirk and Uhura -- Kirk recognizes the "lightning storm" of the distress signal from stories of his father's last action, and (thanks to her linguistic skills) Uhura is the first to correctly translate a similar signal from a Klingon fleet that was soon destroyed. But what saves the Enterprise is that Nero (Eric Bana), commander of the enemy ship, recognizes its markings, and has a special desire that Spock live through the battle -- saying that he has something to show him and demanding Captain Pike as a hostage.

The "show" turns out to be the destruction of Vulcan, via a black-hole generator dropped through the shaft drilled in the world. Kirk and Sulu manage to shut down the drill after a death-defying parachute jump to its platform, but it's too late. Billions of people and millions of years of history ... are history.

Answer: The destruction of the planet Romulus

Hundreds of years in the future, Nero explains, his homeworld -- the planet Romulus -- is destroyed in its entirety, and he himself is driven mad with grief for his people and his pregnant wife. He blames the Federation -- and especially one Ambassador Spock -- for Romulus's demise, and has come back in time to exact his revenge. He means to destroy every single one of the Federation's dozens of planets, and he wants Pike to help him by revealing the access codes for Earth's planetary defense system. (He does eventually get the codes by resorting to a mind-controlling insect, perhaps a relative of the ones previously used to great effect by the villain of "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.")

Later scenes in the movie fill in a more complex picture: it is natural disaster (a supernova), not malevolence, that destroys Romulus, and Ambassador Spock is just slightly too late to save it with his "red matter" to contain the explosion within a black hole. Nero's ship and Spock's are sucked back in time through that black hole, thereby creating an alternate universe, where history will unfold differently from the original "Star Trek" shows and movies.

Answer: Spock

Spock, left in command by Captain Pike, wants to rendezvous with the main fleet, in hopes that vast numbers will neutralize the enemy ship's vast technological advantage. Kirk, whom Pike had quickly promoted to first officer, believes that there isn't enough time for a rendezvous, and that they must chase the enemy to their next destination. It takes a Vulcan nerve pinch to get Kirk to stop arguing.

Kirk's one-man escape pod lands a relatively short distance from a Starfleet base, and he boldly goes into the icy landscape and quickly meets some large and carnivorous life forms. He's saved by ... Spock. But instead of being his old nemesis from the Academy, this Spock is, well, old: this Spock, played by the very same Leonard Nimoy who originated the role, has lived a long life and has come from the future. "I have been, and always shall be, your friend," he tells a stunned Kirk, before explaining Nero's history and goals and suggesting a course of action.

Answer: Using cutting-edge transwarp equations, Scotty beams them both onto a starship moving at warp speed.

When Spock and Kirk go to investigate the nearby Starfleet base, it turns out to be manned by -- of all people -- Montgomery Scott (Simon Pegg), much beloved future Chief Engineer of the starship Enterprise. Scotty is sympathetic to Kirk's plight, being rather tired of icy exile himself, but he maintains that you cannot use a transporter to travel to a starship moving at warp speed -- until Spock explains that, actually, a future Scotty invents that technology. Luckily, Spock has the necessary equations memorized, and transwarp transportation thus makes a somewhat earlier appearance in history than it otherwise would have.

With strict instructions not to let young Spock know of future Spock's existence in this timeline, Kirk and Scotty materialize in the engine rooms of the Enterprise, and the stage is set for the movie's final act.