There’s a neat bit of two-part history hidden there:
Part 1:
(Taken from an interview with Michelle Nichols)
Sometime during the original run of ST TOS, Michelle Nichols wanted to step back from playing Uhura. Roddenberry asked her to think about it on the weekend.
During that weekend, she happened to be at some fundraiser, where the host asked her if she could spare a minute for “her biggest fan”.
She said “of course… but hold on, there’s MLK right over there, I’ve got to take the opportunity to talk to him first.”
Host: “Yeah… um, that is your biggest fan. He wants to talk with you.”
MLK told her how much of an impact her role had (for pretty much the same reasons Goldberg mentioned later).
Monday, she rescinded her resignation.
Part 2:
When the staff of TNG heard that Whoopie Goldberg wanted had asked for a minor role, they thought it was joke.
(TNG wasn’t yet the juggernaut it’d become and Goldberg was a top tier Hollywood star.)
But she told them explicitly that she’d been inspired by the Role of Uhura from the start and just wanted to be part of ST.
So they tailored that minor role to her.
To me, she always looks happy as a clam on screen with that.
The story we see only follows one small village. As far as technology the village is more advanced than many places in rural American when people were walking on the moon in 1969 from the same country. Kataan didn’t even make it to Apollo level spaceflight as their probe was uncrewed.
We’re also told that they have lots of time (multiple decades?) of knowledge the planet won’t survive. A planet can move many mountains when it knows there’s no point in building for a future. The entire planets resources can go into the project to preserve the knowledge of the culture because they know none of them will survive.
If it is just a rural village, why take one of the bumpkins to represent your entire civilization?
If we were to pick the memories of one person in the entire world to represent our whole planet, do you think we’d go to Podunk, Arkansas?
I think any deeper meaning we’re going to find is going to be hard to come up with and I am going to chalk it up to “the writers didn’t really consider that.”
I think any deeper meaning we’re going to find is going to be hard to come up with and I am going to chalk it up to “the writers didn’t really consider that.”
I’ll easily concede that the real answer here is likely: “The writers were looking to make an interesting and compelling bittersweet story about sacrifice, and in that they succeeded. They did enough world building to establish the premise without losing track that the point was to tell the story with the 35ish minutes of screen time, and without resorting to too much exposition.”
Now that we’ve established that, lets explore some plausible reasons to explain it ourselves.
If it is just a rural village, why take one of the bumpkins to represent your entire civilization?
First, we don’t know they only launched one rocket. Perhaps they launched hundreds each in different directions and the probe that Picard encountered was the only one remaining.
Second, perhaps there was only the one (or few) rockets because the world was subdivided into different countries and others valued wealth and power and consumed themselves in hedonism while our protagonists were something like Quakers that had a distinct view on life and different values.
If we were to pick the memories of one person in the entire world to represent our whole planet, do you think we’d go to Podunk, Arkansas?
Well, we kind of did in real life.
The golden record we sent out in the Voyager probes contained only two works from the, then, modern 20th century with the rest being hundreds of years old or tribal works with roots older yet. Here’s the list.
Many works of fiction are “slice of life” which have a story whose main thrust is just to give the reader an immersive experience in the culture at that time in history. Twain’s Tom Sawyer books or Alcott’s Little Women are good examples. The story in the episode is that the residents felt it was more important to keep alive who the people of of Kataan were, instead of what they’d accomplished. That seems plausible in storytelling for me too because any race advanced enough to find the probe wouldn’t be impressed with the technology.
You have come up with some plausible ideas, but I still don’t think it works. The Voyager probes would not be a message only transferred to one single person and their memories. Even if there were a hundred probes, that’s only a potential of 100 people who will remember their civilization to the degree they appear it wanted to be remembered, and only until they die. And that’s only if all 100 probes are encountered by other spacefaring civilizations by chance. Maybe one or two of them have some way to transfer one person’s memories to some sort of archive, but that’s a hell of a chance to take. But I especially think the golden records is a bad example because, even if it were intended to show what we were like in a desperate attempt to save our culture when we know it’s doomed, one record could potentially be studied by countless aliens since it is a tangible thing.
As much as I love the episode dramatically, especially because Patrick Stewart really sells it, it just doesn’t really work rationally as a concept.
Which is fine, a lot of good Star Trek doesn’t really work rationally, especially all the times they just randomly encounter something like that probe in deep space where it’s just hoped it will be stumbled across at some point.
Perhaps the probes were meant to work against large crowds, and that the remaining functioning systems/power only had enough for one person. Perhaps the biology of those on the Enterprise weren’t compatible in the large group format or the distance from the probe to the ship to great. Since we’re making this all up, there’s no end to it.
I’ll posit an even more extreme set of in-universe events. The entire store of Kataan is in-universe fake. No one lived. No one died. The probe is a old culture’s version of Netflix and the Enterprise accidentally activated it. The flute in the probe is simply a mass market cheaply constructed souvenir for the customer consuming the experience. Silly humans thought it was real attributing meaning and experiencing loss for purely fictional characters in what is essentially a slightly different holosuite entertainment program.
That honestly works better for me than saying this is how they memorialize their civilization.
I mean at least in Voyager’s Memorial, the memorial was supposed to be something anyone visiting the planet would get affected by in perpetuity (until Tuvok turned it off, but that was obviously not a scenario they envisioned).
The probe in The Inner Light stops working after sending the dream (or whatever you want to call it) to Picard. It’s one-time use. So a DRM-protected ‘movie’ rental sure works better for me.
Michael Burnham and how stretched her story was. I’m more of an episodic fan too. Then you had a lot of subplots that made no sense or didn’t matter. Also annoying characters got way too much screen time. Not sure why so many of them must be quirky to be interesting? Overall my most disliked Star Trek.
There was this tardigrade episode that was fantastic, I wish STD had all been like that.
Which numbers do you mean, the numbers of people who enjoy it or the numbers of people who are willing to pay Paramount a monthly fee to watch it? Because the latter is the problem, and they think this will save them money, but they are fucked. Paramount Plus does not have enough programming for a lot of people, myself included, to justify their monthly fee. Their selection is paltry. I love Star Trek, but not enough for that.
This was always a problem and something that I fear is going to curse streaming until it dies. Everyone saw how well Netflix did for itself, and wants a cut of the pie, failing to realize that Netflix’s success was entirely because the pie was all in one place for people to enjoy.
All these smaller streaming apps that fizzle out after 2-5 years would have made more money for themselves if they had just negotiated out licensing deals with Netflix or any other major shareholder. Exclusivity is anti-consumer and sooner or later anti-consumer tactics will kill a product or service as soon as something better comes a long or the consumers decide they really don’t need it.
I’ve always outright believed the “Trelane is a Q” fan theory and adopted it as my own head canon. There are too many similarities between both of the characters to ignore. Honestly, one could even argue that they might be the same Q which is a theory I’m starting to enjoy more and more. Who’s to say that TNG Q isn’t just Trelane all grown up?
The similarities between Trelane and Q are pretty huge which is where the original theory came from but if you start analyzing specific events and comparing them further, there are things to suggest that Trelane was a child but our TNG Q was initially just a teenager. That we’ve been watching Trelane grow up over the course of the entire series.
Both of them are susceptible to rage when being laughed at, belittled, or ignored and both of them see themselves as Judge of all. Where Trelane started with kindness and hospitality, our Q knows none of it because he’s already given it to them as Trelane and seen what they were like. After what must be incalcuable amounts of time to a mortal, Trelane was no longer being punished by his parents. So he set off again with specific vengeance for humanity after what he’s seen from the Enterprise crew. Now older and with his powers fully developed, both of material control as well as now nearly full omniscience, he heads to the Enterprise again. Sure, he could alter time and go back and mess with Kirk but he had time to progress. He always gave them a “fair chance” (in his mind) so why wouldn’t he this time? See how far Humanity had advanced from the arrogant and backtalking savages that they were, pushing him into a position where he had to be punished by his parents.
So he rocks up on the Enterprise-D. Why introduce himself as Trelane though and start that all over again? Give them a “fair chance”, yet again, by saying who he is and what he actually is. No hiding. No illusions. So he toys with them. For the Enterprise crew (and viewers), this Godlike being is just unnecessarily and out of NOWHERE fucking with them. Dragging them around and impeding them just to annoy them. We’ve never gotten a proper reason as to why Q chose that moment and that time to start screwing with people or why he came with such intense hostility. Sure he uses the “You are too arrogant, pushing into the stars” but… he’s God. Humanity, and the Federation, barely know anything about the galaxy their in. He’s GOD. He’s got the whole universe and timelines he can fuck with but Humanity specifically is really that much of a threat? I mean, a decade later Voyager is about to be flung across the galaxy and struggle like hell to get home. Wouldn’t they be a better test of what Humanity is truly like? When pushed into these specific conditions and not just ripped from reality and dropped into a bath like a plaything?
But the more that Trelane/Q fucks with Humanity the more he realizes that he’s holding onto that petty grudge. He can’t really let it go now though because he’s set himself up as this judge and due to all that time focusing on them, and the realization that he might be wrong, he is starting to like these fucking backward apes. One in particular even. A captain who is similar enough to Kirk to bring out that hostility initially but different enough to make Q realize he was wrong. Despite being omniscient, it’s almost like Q is realizing and seeing things for the first time in that pilot episode. You can know stuff but ignore that information due to whatever emotional reason. Look at political opinions for more than enough proof of that. Ignoring reality and fact to suit your own needs or to suit a specific narrative that was pre-built. I say that’s what Q was doing. He might have known everything about humanity but he didn’t care or was ignoring it because he was frustrated that the crew of the original Enterprise fucked with him on Gothos.
I don’t know that I would go as far as Trelaine is Q, just because we’ve seen at least one other Q like DeLancie’s Q- namely, Corbin Bernsen’s Q that gives his powers back to him. Most Q seem to not give a shit. About anything if Voyager has anything to say about it. Maybe there are some who do and there’s plenty of reasons for them to toy with the various corporeal beings they encounter since apparently they have no real moral code.
That said, Trelaine’s parents behaved like Trelaine was doing something bad, so maybe that’s an argument against him being a Q.
Anyway, there’s a lot of room to discuss this I think.
I’m not seeing the comparison between Q2 and Q though. Q2 was tasked with stripping Q of his powers because the Q Continuum/Q2 got tired of constantly apologizing on behalf of Qs bullshit, the same thing that Trelanes parents had to do. He didn’t like humanity but I mean none of the Q in general seem to “like” them so much as tolerate as you mentioned. Some Q fuck with humanity but only now after Our Q has fucked with humanity. They seemed to have exactly zero interest in us until randomly during the Encounter at Farpoint one particular Q gets pissed for seemingly no real reason and starts toying with them like an asshole, Trelanes bit almost to the letter. Even going so far as to throw Humanities history in the face of them now while only understanding the form and not the substance (same as the food and fire).
It’s just bizarre to me that no one in the Q Continuum gives a fuck about humanity at all for millenia, then a child messes with them for a short period of time, everyone ignores them again and then randomly there’s an adult Q whos hellbent on fucking with Humanity at every opportunity.
When I picture Koenig, I think of Bester, not Chekov. He was amazing in Babylon 5.
I know TV was different then, and they were making Trek the Kirk/Spock and sometimes McCoy show, but man, Chekov should’ve been more than just a comedy relief character with a bad accent.
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