Would you get attachted to...

...your cloned baby (as quickly) seeing him/her at the age of 6 months for the first time as T'Pol&Trip did? Not being a father myself, I find that odd that you can really love a child just because it has your genes!? I rather believe that you need to build a relationship for that. I find the end of Terra Prime overly dramatic/emotional.

 

I'm not a father, so I really don't have a credible perspective on this. But I guess we're all different, so our propensity for sentimentality and emotional attachment presumably varies significantly between each of us.

As for the episode, it's a TV show. It's a strong "emotional hook" for the audience - and certainly not rare in mainstream entertainment.

 

I always liked that scene in the Space:1999 episode Alpha Child, where a new mother shrieks in terror seeing her newborn baby, suddenly a small boy. It seemed like a very realistic reaction...she wouldn't go near him.

And I'm not a parent, either, for what it's worth!

 

I love that Space: 1999 70's trippiness, which many of the epiodes are swathed in! I recently picked up the S1 Blu-ray set for a snip.

 

But Troi still loved her child in that TNG episode based on a Phase II script. So I guess it depends on the person. So long as the child isn't being used by aliens to kill everyone so they can steal their bodies to use as meat-puppets.

 

On tv people seem to magically bond with their magic cloned child. I think IRL it would take a considerable amount of processing for some people to get to that point.

I think the T/T baby bond was also about their feelings for each other. Here were their feelings, made manifest in a miracle infant (remember they didn't think at the time that Vulcans and humans could breed). Add in that the infant was in danger and the powerful feelings they had towards her make sense.

They had also met and said goodbyes of a sort to another child of theirs in E2.

 

There's no doubt about it, "Terra Prime" was emotionally manipulative on many levels, but this is not at all unusual for Hollywood. With the exception of RAIDERS, most of the best Steven Spielberg movies are very manipulative. In some ways, you want to resent it, because you might find yourself suckered into caring, almost against your will. There is also a shorthand involved, in doing so, to get us through the movie faster. But it's charming to see T'Pol not having a terribly difficult time drawing upon her motherly instincts here. And Trip's (mistaken) suspicions of her having excluded him from the conception process, also touches on a lot of things in which it can act as a metaphor. When it's clear what the baby's fate will be and the lights are dim in sickbay, the doctor actually had me choked up, a little bit, there. Understand, I don't care for Phlox, but yeah ... a lot of emotional manipulation going on here. But, hey ... That's Entertainment! What we crave for, inside ....

 

So if you clone a child, you should automatically feel an emotional attachment. If you a clone is made of yourself, you vaporize it with a phaser without remorse?

 

OR you fall into an orgy of mutual self experimentation..

That's my plan anyway. When I meet my clone. And I'm pretty sure it's my clone's plan too 'cause, clones.

 

Not my plan. Me and my clone would be each other's wing-man; go out "trolling" for women.

 

I don't find it that odd. If I discovered I had a child out there I didn't know about, I have no doubt I would rapidly come to love him or her. The baby would be a part of me. I'm sure I'd be conflicted about how the baby just suddenly came into my life, but I know I would quickly come to love him/her and grow very attached.

 

Oh for God's sake yes. I wouldn't hesitate for a second. You don't "build relationships" with children, they are just there. You love them unconditionally.

I LOVED this episode for many reasons, one being we got to see the "motherly" side of T'Pol.

 

So if you meet your cloned child without knowing it's your DNA you'd still and immediately love it as your own child? Or is it just the "knowing" that it's yours that will make you love it immediately?

 

Plenty of men have found out they have a kid they never knew about. Some of them will start to bond and love that kid before they even meet them.

Of course it is if you know it's your clone, it's not magic DNA.

 

How is that applicable here? How do you know it's cloned? Doesn't DNA reveal that?

It did in this episode. Remember the "I wasn't pregnant" thing between Trip and T'Pol?

 

If I got a call from a lab one day that I had a kid I had never met I would assume cloning. It would be scary, but I would do my best to find out if my new piece of family needed anything. I wouldn't feel as strongly about a clone as I would offspring, but maybe that would change with time.

Jango certainly loved Boba but he chose to love him, and not all the zillions of other Jangos. Of course the zillions were altered and Boba wasn't, but there is still the choosing element. At some point I might have to choose to love a clone, or at least feel responsibility towards a clone whereas if if the person was actual offspring it would be much more automatic.

Picard had a little emo fit over Shinzon but he got over it. Maybe if Shinzon had been a bright young man at the academy when he met him it would have been different.

 

Vulcans being touch telepaths, and with Trip and T'Pol being bonded, they and the kid could have been very emotionally connected mentally in ways that could make such emotions quite believable as seen in the end of Terra Prime.

 

But what if the Terra Prime folk had cloned one thousand T/T babies? It would utterly dilute their emotional response. That's one of the creepy things about cloning. Jango had to single out a clone and make him different than the thousands, that way he could love him.

It's weird to think you are standing in a massive space with thousand of your cloned babies in pods and you are not emotionally connecting. But if you just put one or two of the same babies in front of you, with the rest unknown to you, it's OUR BABY.

We are not salmon

I don't know, this worries me somehow. What would I do if faced with a cloned warehouse of me? It would piss me off, just give me a couple me and I will crank up the maternalism.

 

We aren't salmon but Spock did make the comparison about Vulcans.

 

Ah yes but that was the doing of it, not the results of it.