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?