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Okay, I expect that this might have been obvious to everyone but me, but here goes anyway (forgive me if I'm light on the details--I haven't seen the film in quite a while).
So we're in the Enterprise's transporter room, and we witness, along with Kirk et al, the accident in which two people--one of them Vulcan--fail to materialize successfully and get yanked back to the Starbase's transporter, where they promptly die. When I first saw the scene, back when I was eight or so, it really horrified me. Good stuff!
But very recently it occurred to me that the Starfleet transporter techie sneaks in a joke at the newly-deceased Vulcan's expense.
Sez the transporter guy: "What we got back didn't live long... Fortunately."
Now, here's why I'm inclined to read this as a deliberate joke. The accident happened just seconds before, so even if the victims died at the very moment that the guy made the announcement, it makes no sense to say that they didn't "live long." I mean, three seconds isn't "long" by most people's standards, and you'd be more likely to say that they had "died immediately" or "died as they materialized" or something similar.
But this was a Vulcan, for whom we all know the common greeting to be "Live long and prosper." So I figure that the transporter techie deliberately chose his words to get in a zinger before mopping up the Vulcan's remains. Sure, he could've said "what we got back didn't live long or prosper," but that would have been too obvious.
What do you think? Should the techie have been reprimanded for inappropriate snarkiness?
And is this a joke that you all figured out decades ago?
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