Star Track
He's a comment about Star Trek from Lawrence King:
The cylindrical "universal translator" appeared once in the old show: in the second-season episode Metamorphosis.
Obviously, such a device is totally impossible, unless it uses telepathy [....] if all this were possible, then why couldn't this same device read the mind of someone who wasn't speaking? That would have been very convenient on many occasions.
And no matter how you slice it, a translator would contradict those occasions that the Enterprise crew encountered a semantic misunderstanding with the aliens they met.
As far as parallel development -- they encounted a parallel Roman Empire on one planet [....] (The Romans were expressly stated to be speaking ENGLISH, which is impossible if you think about the history of the English language and how it depended, in so many ways, on Britain not being controlled by a single empire.)
You could go mad trying to make Star Trek consistent. I think Gene Roddenberry was just happy to get a show out each week. Occasionally it might occur to him or some writer to try to explain some general question--like why there seem to be humanoids throughout the galaxy--but as long as the story was good, few people really cared.
In general, I think shows back them were less consistent. Why? I'm not sure, though maybe part of the reason was a smaller staff and more free-lance writers. Also, a feeling TV was more disposable--certainly no one figured we'd still be watching and discussing Star Trek 40 years later.
Star Trek was still one of the least consistent shows. I guess creating a whole new galaxy is trickier than something set in the real world. In one episode, the computer ran the whole ship, in another, different computers run different parts of the ship. On one show, Kirk will blow up the Enterprise without flinching, on another, he won't consider it. Sometimes the Prime Directive is everything, sometimes it's a joke. And their scanners would change in ability week by week.
As far as parallel development, they do take it to extremes. The worst case is "Bread And Circuses" which Larry refers to above. It's not enough they've got the Romans, they've also got the slave culture, whom Spock considers primitive sun worshippers. The big reveal at the end is they're actually worshippers of the "son." For some reason, this mightily impressed Kirk and crew. Whether you're a Christian or not, why would you care about what they worship on a different planet?
posted by LAGuy @ 12:23 AM
10 Comments:
I had always been amazed that "Bread and Circuses" had such a Christian message in it. On Roddenberry's show, f'pete's sake?
I finally learned the story at WorldCon in Anaheim last August. I was at a Star Trek panel where D.C. Fontana explained that it was the director's fault.
In fact, before that panel I never realized how a director can completely change the meaning of a film, even without altering a word in the script.
Here's the dialogue. Try reading it twice. Read it as if the lines are being delivered with awe and reverence (the way it was filmed). Then read it again, as if the lines are being delivered with scientific fascination -- the thrill of the time-travelling historian who is privileged to witness a famous event.
UHURA: I’m afraid you have it all wrong, all of you. I’ve been monitoring some of their old-style radio waves, the empire spokesman trying to ridicule their religion, but he couldn’t. Well, don’t you understand? It’s not the "sun" up in the sky. It’s the son of God.
KIRK: Caesar -- and Christ. They had them both! And the word is spreading only now.
McCOY: A philosophy of total love and total brotherhood.
SPOCK: It will replace their imperial Rome, but it will happen in their 20th century.
KIRK: Wouldn’t it be something to watch, to be a part of? To see it happen all over again?
Perhaps McCoy's line was intended to be religious in the original script. (Even Roddenberry might have allowed McCoy to have a tinge of a religious feeling.) But Kirk's final line hardly looks reverential. His excitement is that of the observer, not the believer. But when the director had them deliver their lines with reverence, it changed the meaning of the scene.
D.C. Fontana said that when Roddenberry saw the dailies, he was so upset that he wanted to refilm the scene, but there wasn't enough time.
This is pretty shocking to me. I guess that's because Trek is so canonical, thinking anything could have been done differently except City Of The Edge Of Forever seems ridiculous.
By the way, I believe some of the stuff Spock says about sun worshippers is unfair and untrue, but as we saw in last week's post, Spock's observations about Earth history can be a bit shaky.
PS At least in TV, director's change things without altering a word in the script--writers aren't so lucky in movies.
LAGuy also wrote:
Whether you're a Christian or not, why would you care about what they worship on a different planet?
I think this could make a huge difference. Some philosophies and theologies (e.g., Buddhism, Stoicism, and Kant's deism) are supposed to be totally independent of history. In theory, they could be deduced by anyone.
Other theologies (e.g., Judaism, Christianity, Islam) are intertwined with actual history. In theory, if a historian were to prove that Moses never existed, that would disprove all three of these religions.
So if we discover that other planets have people roughly similar to us, I think their own history will necessarily have some impact on our religion. Just to take an absurd example: Suppose we found that there are millions of planets almost exactly like Earth -- in our universe, or perhaps in parallel universes -- but each of them is slightly different due to minor factors. For example, in one of them the Emperor of Babylon caught pneumonia and died in 590 BCE, and therefore Babylon didn't conquer Judah, and so there was never any Babylonian Exile, and therefore no Book of Jeremiah. Yet on this planet the Israelites had worshipped idols with the same frequency as in ours. Surely that would cast serious doubt on the belief that our Judah had been conquered by Babylon because God was punishing them for idolatry!
In short, many religions are falsifiable. Not in the rigorous way of the physical sciences, but they are indeed falsifiable in the less-rigorous way of the social sciences. So any time we find new discoveries, whether archeological or on other planets, there is at least a potential impact on such religions.
"Whether you're a Christian or not, why would you care about what they worship on a different planet?"
Perhaps I should have written "who" they worship, not "what." If you're a Christian, there'd be no reason for you to think Jesus came to this planet and did the same things he did on Earth (regardless of parallel cultural development) unless you had direct evidence of this. So, with Kirk et al hearing that, rather than the sun being worshiped, some guy was beng worshiped (as so many have in our history), why would they suddenly feel so reverent?
Which of course Roddenberry himself would probably have agreed with. One story that he pitched over and over was the story where the Enterprise crew discover that God was just a crafty alien.
He tried to sell this in ST:TAS, but the network objected, but allowed him to rewrite this story as "the devil was just a crafty alien": this become the ST:TAS episode The Magicks of Megas-Tu.
He tried again in 1975 with The God Thing, a proposal for a Star Trek movie that was rejected. According to some accounts, he later hoped to reuse this script in the Star Trek: Phase II series revival. But when Star Wars came out, Paramount abandoned the "Phase II" series and decided that a movie was the way to go.
Oddly, this concept was similar to the one used in Star Trek V, a Shatner-dominated move that Roddenberry allegedly hated.
Of course, during the same time they discovered that the Greek gods and the Aztec gods had been aliens, so the point was being made. And the ST:TNG episode
Justice had a primitive planet ruled by a relatively benevolent alien as their "God". But whereas Kirk got to engage in fisticuffs with God in STV, Picard managed to persuade this planet's God to change his ways. Pretty persuasive, that Picard.
I agree with your last comment! (The previous two posts were apparently written simultaneously....)
Randsfd Prizzt
I'm so pleased this is still being discussed.
Back to the Universal translator, couldn't it be some souped neo-Chomskyan device that recognizes universal innate language structure, tone and delivery and spits out something approaching meaning. (I feel like this post should contain the footnote to scientific explanations contained on the old Hitchhiker's Guide Series "This, of course, is impossible.")
Hard to believe that the UT would be as accurate as portrayed in the series (even with all hard-to-believe assumptions) but you've got to give them credit for at least addressing the issue
I had always thought they ended "Bread and Circuses" with the Sun/Son statement and forgotten (or blocked) the overt Christian allusions. However I'm surprised they got away with the "total love and total brotherhood" line (I guess sisters gotta start doin it for themselves)-I suppose you could cherry-pick your way through to that angle (the Crusades, wars of religion, pogroms etc were just deviationists from the party line) but I think an episode based on a society based on total love and total brotherhood would have been great for the original series. (I'm imagining McCoy summing up at the end of another horrid utopia, "Its just that we need evil to balance us, Jim")
The Bread and Circuses discussion is fascinating, but as to the mechanics of the universal translator, and indeed all discussions of Star Trek technology, I would submit that you must either fall back to the Babel Fish or, more reasonably, just move out of your parents' basement and accept that when physical laws get in the way of telling the story, the story must win.
The stories were only the initial hook- its the ephemera that keeps us coming back for more.
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