Star Trek Blog, Supplemental: Actually, It's Gonna Bug Me if I Don't

Picking up from last week's post:

So the pithy thought is, "Why can't we cure the Vidiians with the transporters," and it only takes me about a minute to put more thought into this than the original poster.

In Star Trek, the transporter is not a replicator. I know there's an entire farm of people braying, "suicide machine," about the transporter when it demonstrably isn't. It converts the patterns of humans into energy and beams that energy somewhere else in such a way that it reintegrates as matter.

Consciousness is even maintained (TNG: "Realm of Fear"). More tellingly, none of the people using it, who know how it works, gives one jot about using it. Except Leonard McCoy, who gets the heebie jeebies from it. He's the guy in Star Trek who declares things dead and he never identifies it as a "suicide machine."

I don't recall this ever happening.

And copying human neural patterns is a pretty big deal in the TNG-era. Ira Graves had to develop an entirely new technology for it (TNG, "The Schizoid Man"). DS9 had to clear its whole computer system out for it (DS9: "Our Man Bashir").

The transporter system is not like a computer digitizing a person and creating a file you can Ctl+C and Ctl+V. It's more like a fax processes the document into a one-shot signal that's sent to the source. It can even insert and remove thing from that signal (TNG: "Unnatural Selection" and "Shades of Gray.")

That said, the physical pattern shouldn't be so difficult. Whatever kind of quantum bucket we stick consciousness into, why can't we create replacement parts? They can. In DS9's "Only a Paper Moon," Nog gets a cloned leg with psychosomatic pain. In "A Man Alone," a whole dude gets cloned.

But there's limits. TNG's "Ethics," shows us that using a replicator to create organs is risky. Ribosomes needed for a Romulan have to be donated in "The Enemy." Even in the episode which introduces the Vidiians, Voyager's "Phage," Neelix's lungs can't be cloned.

So let's talk about episodes with transporter nonsense. In TNG's "Unnatural Selection," the crew restores Dr. Pulaski from backup. They beam her up and use the buffer's records to rewind her aging and remove a virus from her. In "Rascals," a really bullshit anomaly reverses the ages of four people (and then conveniently re-ages them).

Most famously, in TNG's "Second Chances," the episode I personally blame for most of this, we learn that several years ago, a difficult transport through a planet's strange atmosphere created a duplicate Riker. It happened again in Lower Decks' "Kayshon, His Eyes Open" (Not to Riker, to someone else).

By locking onto Riker with a second transporter beam, the transporter operator hoped to replace Riker's failing transporter signal. Then the system created two Riker signals, beamed one up to the Potemkin and saw the other getting reflected to the planet's surface.

Something similar happened to Jim Kirk when he beamed up with yellow dust on his boots. It created a "good" duplicate on the pad, and then after everyone left created a second, "evil," duplicate. (TOS: "The Enemy Within")

When Janeway aborted Tuvix a whole other body mass appeared out of nowhere. It wasn't like Tuvix had the combined mass of Tuvok and Neelix. Where did the extra person come from, if not using matter replication supplies and a transporter pattern to make a Neelix/Tuvok? All good and fair questions.

So, I've got to ask: when considering the Star Trek universe as a place where competent, intelligent people know their equipment works. In a place where transporters aren't used as cloning machines and people don't treat it like a suicide booth. Where multiple instances of slow, vat-grown cloned organs are–sometimes–grown:

Are the episodes where the transporter works that way the product of dramatic license to tell compelling stories, or is everyone in Star Trek stupid?

CORRECTIONS Episode 157

 

Canons Reloaded

"I heard a rapper once say there's a message in everything."
-Piebald, "Sex Sells and (Unfortunately) I'm Buying"

So canon isn't just the technical body of work creators reference when making new work. It's also the blobby circle of that work which the public draws from when referencing it.

 

Behold. A canon.

What these things mean–Star Trek, Christianity, The Boys–is determined by how it's discussed and treated by us. And also a few hundred thousand bots run by marketing companies and hate campaigns.

But let's pretend we're engaging in an internet that's only terminal and not dead yet. An internet where people read things that other people want to read (I've got personal stock in that premise).

The 1997 film Starship Troopers is today lauded as a satire of fascism. When I watched it in 1997, it was a messy, flat, action film with some boobs and bugs in it. More funny than actiony, and certainly not cerebral.

I don't know if "it's a satire, bro" is as contemptible as, "it's a prank, bro," or whether Paul Verhoeven really wanted to make a satire, but at the end of the day, if you need cliff notes to tell people your satire is a satire, it's not a good satire.

But, uh, thanks for stopping the fascism, Paul.

We get together, we talk about things, and in so doing create a less-than-rigrous social canon. Like all the folks defending the artistic merit of a movie they've never seen because of an internet factoid, not all of that talk is based on firsthand experience, personal consideration, or even honest opinion.

Consider these two exhibits of this socially-constructed canon. The Scylla and Charybdis of bad Star Trek takes:

Let's do the first skeet first. It's about the 2026 Wuthering Heights film, but that commbadge in the profile picture lets me loop it in here.

The faithfulness of an adaptation doesn't have to be important to you. You're a free person. How you interact with media is your choice. Tilt your head back, relax your throat, and swallow as much content as the youtubes can pipe down there.

On behalf of the rest of us, who do not see the world as a series of amorphous, undefined shapes which randomly coalesce into pleasing shapes and sounds, I'd like to say a piece.

Words mean things. It's their primary purpose. All these loops and lines you're looking at are linked with ideas in the reader's head. Decoding them and encoding them is a way that we smelly, mean, beautiful apes connect with one another.

You say, "I love you," and it means something to the recipient. You say, "I'm going to the store for cigarettes," and you're saying something else.
 

"Maybe Man" by AJR

 

Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek: Part II

Intro

A big reason I left Magic: the Gathering was the creation of the Universes Beyond brand imprint. I mean, if I have to say the phrase "brand imprint,' things aren’t going great. I should be able to buy my Magic cards and play Magic and not think about branding, intellectual property, or any of the cursed phrases I’m about to say —

Magic was going to use that brand imprint to create cross-corporate synergy with AMC's The Walking Dead franchise. It was going to be a dozen, maybe two dozen, cards representing the The Walking Dead television series. There’s a lot of reasons not to like that.

As cynics and hypemen predicted, The Walking Dead Magic product was just the beginning. It was immediately followed by Stranger Things, Street Fighter, Warhammer 40K, and, honestly, most of the The Ultimate Showdown (of ultimate destiny).

Not pictured.

And I was unhappy at the time, but I did have to ask myself, "What if they did this with an intellectual property I liked?" I couldn’t think of any at the time because the ones I thought were unthinkable, but late last year Wizards of the Coast revealed they'd broken the genre/taste barrier: Magic: The Gathering: Star Trek.

My response at the time was unenthusiastic, but in the creation of those Universes Beyond and other products in the time since I left Magic, Wizards of the Coast had done some creative work. I kept up to poo-poo the bad ones and ignore the good ones, but I'm a bitch. 

Matt Berry reads a letter from Robert Crumb

 

Movie Trailers for August

The story is that I wanted to watch a movie in August, but when it came down to it, it was either spend 3 hours watching The Odyssey or watching Spider-Man, and neither one of those propositions appealed to me.

I usually do just ten of these, plus some honorable mentions for TV series. This month is gonna be different because...there are some patterns. I'll group movies with similar elements with a title.

Our House. In the Middle of Our--OH GOD WHAT IS THAT!? 

The Last House (August 7th)

The End of Oak Street (August 14th)

 

I listed The Last House first because it just looks better and it reminds me less of the 1997 The Outer Limits episode, "Feasibility Study."

It also looks a little more horror than action, with a mystery that slowly unravels. As opposed to The End of Oak Street, which concedes we're on an alien planet with murder dinosaurs and I guess you're just fucked.