Mind you, I don't mean the one that gets crushed by Rojan, I mean the rest of the crew that gets transformed and is lying around on the deck. What if one is scratched or rounded off by accident during ship maneuvers or someone tripping over them? They didn't seem durable to me.
In By Any Other Name, what if a dodecahedron gets damaged? Do they get scarred, incapacitated or die?
- Thread starter MarcKyle1964
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Well, first off, they aren't dodecahedrons, which are regular solids made of 12 equal pentagonal faces. They're cuboctahedrons, irregular solids with 8 triangular faces and 6 square faces (14 in all, so they're a type of tetradecahedron).
As for the rest, though Rojan says they're the flesh distilled into that form, they're clearly much lighter than a human body. Perhaps Bixby and Fontana were thinking of some kind of dehydration process like in the 1966 Batman movie, where dehydrating people reduced them to a few ounces of powder. But then where does the water go?
I'd imagine the solids are really more some kind of storage medium containing the person's molecular pattern. That would make them analogous to transporter buffers, in a sense. If they store that pattern the same way a transporter does, then there's probably some redundancy and robustness against pattern loss, since we've seen people able to be restored intact from transporters even when their patterns suffered considerable degradation. I suspect transporters use quantum error correction, which involves spreading information redundantly among multiple entangled qubits (quantum bits), so that the complete information can be recovered as long as enough qubits survive. The cuboctahedrons might work similarly.
Alternatively, they might have holographic storage -- not in the vernacular sense of a "hologram" as a volumetric image, but in the literal sense of a storage medium where information about the whole is encoded in each part, so even if parts are damaged or lost, the complete information is still recoverable.
Even if we assume that the solids are constituted from the victims' own biomass somehow, I doubt there's a one-to-one correspondence of volume to volume, so that there's a piece to break off that would cause someone to reform without a hand, say. Let's say the pattern information is stored throughout as I suggest, but damage could cause the person to lose part of their mass. Then they'd probably be reconstituted with a loss of weight, say, maybe with some mineral deficiency. But I'm skeptical that they're literally constituted from biomass. Then they'd presumably be mostly carbon, in which case they'd probably look like lumps of coal. So I'm sticking with my storage-medium idea.
As for the rest, though Rojan says they're the flesh distilled into that form, they're clearly much lighter than a human body. Perhaps Bixby and Fontana were thinking of some kind of dehydration process like in the 1966 Batman movie, where dehydrating people reduced them to a few ounces of powder. But then where does the water go?
I'd imagine the solids are really more some kind of storage medium containing the person's molecular pattern. That would make them analogous to transporter buffers, in a sense. If they store that pattern the same way a transporter does, then there's probably some redundancy and robustness against pattern loss, since we've seen people able to be restored intact from transporters even when their patterns suffered considerable degradation. I suspect transporters use quantum error correction, which involves spreading information redundantly among multiple entangled qubits (quantum bits), so that the complete information can be recovered as long as enough qubits survive. The cuboctahedrons might work similarly.
Alternatively, they might have holographic storage -- not in the vernacular sense of a "hologram" as a volumetric image, but in the literal sense of a storage medium where information about the whole is encoded in each part, so even if parts are damaged or lost, the complete information is still recoverable.
Even if we assume that the solids are constituted from the victims' own biomass somehow, I doubt there's a one-to-one correspondence of volume to volume, so that there's a piece to break off that would cause someone to reform without a hand, say. Let's say the pattern information is stored throughout as I suggest, but damage could cause the person to lose part of their mass. Then they'd probably be reconstituted with a loss of weight, say, maybe with some mineral deficiency. But I'm skeptical that they're literally constituted from biomass. Then they'd presumably be mostly carbon, in which case they'd probably look like lumps of coal. So I'm sticking with my storage-medium idea.
There's an error on the Memory Alpha page that irks me. It's in the paragraph for the 1985 SNL skit, for no reason known to man:
memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/By_Any_Other_Name_(episode)#Continuity
That's false. The girl-cube is picked up in Hanar's left hand, because he goes around behind the cubes to pick them up. It is then transferred to Rojan's right hand, and then it is crushed. The episode clip (bizarrely age restricted) is on youtube:
The scene was worked out with deliberate care, in a way that would get it right but still shock "fairly attentive" viewers because it was all turned around, and they crushed the white girl and it was 1968. It was subtly brilliant.
The theatrical staging and flair for drama make me wonder if Shatner choreographed it himself.
memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/By_Any_Other_Name_(episode)#Continuity
That's false. The girl-cube is picked up in Hanar's left hand, because he goes around behind the cubes to pick them up. It is then transferred to Rojan's right hand, and then it is crushed. The episode clip (bizarrely age restricted) is on youtube:
The scene was worked out with deliberate care, in a way that would get it right but still shock "fairly attentive" viewers because it was all turned around, and they crushed the white girl and it was 1968. It was subtly brilliant.
The theatrical staging and flair for drama make me wonder if Shatner choreographed it himself.
Dang, now that's an answer better than I expected, so a restorable fractal or holographic image of your mind and body including thoughts at the instant of transformation, right? The rest is commonly synthesized elements and water.
Like a visual transporter pattern.
Shatner certainly acted the hell out that scene, that's for sure, and with restraint and totally believable emotion. It's an amazing sequence—and subversive as you pointed out. (And you're right; there's no continuity error.)
I'm not surprised the clip is age-restricted. It's grisly, graphic, and sad. And as I've said here more than a few times, it's outrageous that the Kelvans got away with it. In my headcanon, after getting Drea to turn the ship around and figuring out how to restore the crew, Kirk and Spock incapacitated the remaining Kelvans (Tomar had already been taken care of by Scotty) and imprisoned them to face the Federation justice system for Rojan's brutal murder of poor Yeoman Thompson. They could enjoy their fun newfound humanoid sensations in a work colony.
It more than makes up for the opening when Rojan taps his neural neutralizer and everyone is fully motionless, except for Kirk who's darting his eyes around the area. Kirk may be a great captain, but seriously that opening scene needed a retake.
Kirk was really thinking into the situation in opening to friendship despite it all (on edit: maybe to prevent worsening it?). Even with negligence or misunderstanding, the Kelvans did kill. Without the neural neutralizer (holy alliteration, Batman!
), the Kelvans aren't any different - apart from being intergalactic squid who took humanoid shape despite lacking blueprints (I may have misremembered or had forgotten why they took human form on that planet they were stuck on.)Rojan appreciated Kirk being responsible for those under his command. It'd be safe to say that Rojan believed the same philosophy. He would be the sole one responsible, surely?
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No, that was intentional, to show that they were unable to move but fully conscious (otherwise why would Rojan have talked to them?). "Motionless except for the eyes" is a standard trope for depicting that someone is paralyzed but still conscious. It may not be realistic, since eyes have muscles too, but it's necessary to convey to the viewer that the person's mind isn't frozen along with their body.
Presumably they were able to scan the Enterprise as it approached and determine the physiology of its crew. They knew that if they wanted to commandeer a human ship, they needed to adopt forms that could operate it.
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