10 Dumbest Things in Star Trek Beyond

In one of Beyond’s least-convincing effects shots, Scotty leaps from his improvised torpedo-as-escape-pod just as it plummets off a cliff. To my eye, the drop is clearly at least a kilometer. Scotty then hoofs it down to what remains of the torpedo, where he is threatened by aliens and rescued by Jaylah.

I’ve done hikes from a kilometer-high clifftop to a valley below, and it takes hours and can be pretty tiring even going mostly down. Scotty does this, with no water, and then manages to follow Jaylah up to the USS Franklin’s perch at the top of some mountain…a mountain from which said ship later plummets off the aforementioned impossible cliff. (VFX artists on the film pegged it at 5,500 meters (about 18,000 feet), which is taller than any mountain in the United States outside of Alaska, and four times higher than the highest point in the U.K.)

Even assuming the cliff Scotty’s pod fell off of was shorter than the Franklin high-dive, the Franklin is still on top of a mountain, so Scotty still had one hell of a climb to reach it. Is he a mountain goat? Is Starfleet fitness training just that good? Or did nobody really think this through?

I think we all know the answer to that.