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Hollow Pursuits Revisited

Doug Otte

Doug Otte

Fleet Captain
Fleet Captain
Following from my revisit of The Nth Degree a few weeks ago, I went back in time to watch Hollow Pursuits last night. A few notes:
1) This is of course a wonderful episode, with a great performance by Dwight Schultz. But, the regular cast turned in wonderful performances, too. The humor poked gentle fun at some of the tropes in TNG, but in a loving way.
2) Geordi's engineering team was usually diverse, but this time it seemed to be entirely white males.
3) The holodeck stage was gorgeous, with a lot of detailed landscaping and a platform that looked similar to the one used in ST's Who Mourns for Adonais? I especially appreciated the surrounding sky. I assume this was the "alien planet" set with a painted backdrop?
 
^I think it was Barclay's team (I mean the one he was assigned to). There are likely more than a few teams within engineering, and Geordi would be having meetings with them, like he did with those guys in this episode.... But, yeah that looked weird...no women, no aliens, etc.
 
So I suppose the situation is analogous to you finding out your colleague is not only not doing his job, but watching porn during working hours on the laptop issued to him by the company. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to be not just any porn, but a deep fake in you and your coworkers are starring. (Of course what they showed on TNG would be a strongly toned down 'family friendly' version of this). But that's seriously messed up.
 
at Quark's said:
So I suppose the situation is analogous to you finding out your colleague is not only not doing his job, but watching porn during working hours on the laptop issued to him by the company. Upon closer inspection, it turns out to be not just any porn, but a deep fake in you and your coworkers are starring. (Of course what they showed on TNG would be a strongly toned down 'family friendly' version of this). But that's seriously messed up.
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Good analogy! There was a line about there not being a rule about it. How could a crewmember be allowed to use all those ship resources (power etc.) for such an unsavory purpose? I liked Geordi's acknowledgement about his own misuse of the holodeck referencing the Leah Brahms episode.
 
It’s a great Barclay episode; very funny and interesting and it’s one of the best, in my opinion.
 
Oddish said:
Well, the holodeck should have been programmed to preclude that from its inception. Of course, it should have also been hardwired to auto-shutdown as soon as the safety protocols failed.
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Were it not for the Leah Brahms holocharacter creation scene in Booby Trap (where we actually see how easy it is to create such a program), my head canon might have included that such restrictions actually were in place and Barclay managed to circumvent them. He's a very capable engineer, after all.
 
at Quark's said:
Were it not for the Leah Brahms holocharacter creation scene in Booby Trap (where we actually see how easy it is to create such a program), my head canon might have included that such restrictions actually were in place and Barclay managed to circumvent them. He's a very capable engineer, after all.
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It does seem a bit of a violation. What if Barclay's fantasies about Troi and Crusher had included a bit more than sucking face with them?

However, Geordi stated that it wasn't against the rules, to which Riker replied: "Well, it should be" or something of that nature, then attempted to end and erase the program.

On the other hand, Geordi created the Leah hologram strictly to save the ship. Things only got sticky when he tried to give her a personality.
 
Oddish said:
It does seem a bit of a violation. What if Barclay's fantasies about Troi and Crusher had included a bit more than sucking face with them?

However, Geordi stated that it wasn't against the rules, to which Riker replied: "Well, it should be" or something of that nature, then attempted to end and erase the program.

On the other hand, Geordi created the Leah hologram strictly to save the ship. Things only got sticky when he tried to give her a personality.
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Given how astonished Picard is about the holodeck in early TNG (or at least about its level of sophistication), perhaps it is still too new an invention to have such rules (i.e. we see the 'wild west era of the holodeck').

Then again we would expect such rules to already be in place for its cruder predecessors, much like these things are even becoming an issue today.
 
at Quark's said:
Then again we would expect such rules to already be in place for its cruder predecessors, much like these things are even becoming an issue today.
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Today.

Not when the ep was written.

The writers knew such tech WOULD exist, and wrote a story which we today can see as discussing issues such as porn addiction and deepfaking.

Star Trek is a morality play - it doesn't have to say "well, they had PornHub in the early 2000s so we have protocols against this", it has to SHOW us why such protocols are needed.
 
It's the only Holodeck episode I like, because it's the only one that uses the holodeck in a clever way instead of "look we're putting the main characters in costumes and have them play pretend!"
Holodeck addiction is something I can totally see happening in the Star Trek universe.
 
Orphalesion said:
Holodeck addiction is something I can totally see happening in the Star Trek universe.
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Especially in a post scarcity economy. Imagine someone like Nick Lacarno... his opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the galaxy is gone. Now, life is only wake up, use the replicator three times a day, go to sleep. So he retreats into a life of fantasies, and since no one needs him to come out and report for duty, nothing deters him. Like a lifelong hardcore gamer, he's lost in his addiction to fantasy worlds.

Not as awful as my head canon that he slowly drank himself to death in some place like Sandrine's... but not exactly rosy.
 
Oddish said:
Especially in a post scarcity economy. Imagine someone like Nick Lacarno... his opportunity to make a meaningful contribution to the galaxy is gone. Now, life is only wake up, use the replicator three times a day, go to sleep. So he retreats into a life of fantasies, and since no one needs him to come out and report for duty, nothing deters him. Like a lifelong hardcore gamer, he's lost in his addiction to fantasy worlds.

Not as awful as my head canon that he slowly drank himself to death in some place like Sandrine's... but not exactly rosy.
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I would like to believe that Locarno got a 2nd chance somehow.
Also, I would like to believe that there are other ways to contribute to the galaxy outside of Starfleet, so that that 2nd chance wasn't necessarily in Starfleet.
 
Its basically suggesting that 24th century humans are more trustworthy with deepfake tech than 21st century humans. Which then suggests it happens far less outside Barclay’s and Geordi’s use of it. Since what stop users from even deepfaking historical figures for the same purpose other than humans are better in the future? Since not all the users of the holodecks (and holosuites of DS9) are humans.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, how would the 21st humans from "The Neutral Zone" handle the holodeck? Considering celebrity crushes, personal crushes and so forth from their century.
 
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at Quark's said:
So I suppose the situation is analogous to you finding out your colleague is not only not doing his job, but watching porn during working hours on the laptop issued to him by the company.
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Now this part I can't really agree with. Holodeck isn't a tool that is issued by Starfleet with the goal to do your job. It's a recreation device that people aboard Enterprise have access to. So it would be more like discovering that your collegue is late for work because he obsessively visits strip clubs. In Barclay's case: strip clubs that allow you to put super-realistic masks of your collegues from work onto the strippers ;)

It's an interesing topic, though. Most people do that on a daily basis nowdays, except in their imaginations only. We don't have holodecks, after all. With the rise of deepfakes and AI generated imagery - we might face a change in how we perceive these fantasies. I mean, we don't frown upon Riker for his frivolous approach to sex; a few decades ago people would be shocked and disgusted that a guy bangs so many women without marrying any of them, right? Times changed, society changed, and the "one night stand" approach is generally accepted as normal. Same with sending nudes - it was unheard of in the 90s when TNG aired, but is pretty common nowdays.

We might be faced with similar change when it comes to deepfakes. Up to this point we accepted that there are people out there who fantasize about us in the intimacy of their own bedroom as we couldn't do anything about it. After all: you can't really check someone's imagination and "turn it off" if you don't like it. And now - you can't really demand to check the hard drive of any person you suspect of having deepfakes of you. We will probably just have to accept it as something that's a part of life in today's society at some point. And if someone invents a holodeck some day - we will need to adapt again.

What I was always scratching my head about is the apparent lack of privacy control on holodecks. In many episodes people were casually walking in during someone's session - and that's what really bothered me. Barclay's program was really just an extension of his imagination, and I find Riker and the gang invading his privacy way more disturbing than his program.
 
I would think that a guy with Barclay's smarts could whip up a failsafe in his programs, securing the holodeck doors and causing the program to immediately terminate whenever anyone overrides the lockout... but you'd also think Geordi would either delete that Leah Brahms hologram or at least ensure that only he could fire up the program.
 
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