Actually, she was Deltan!
ST:TMP-Why DID they think it was what fans waited for?
- Thread starter Mutara Nebula 1967
- Start date
Luke Lightsaber
Captain
I mean human as in the living sense.
But would you have said that Sonak or Spock were "human"?
Vejur was a living machine that had achieved consciousness. It saw God in its own image. Check out old history books and you'll find embarrassing quotes, from not that long ago, where naive, pompous, racist caucasians were unable to fathom that Africans, native Americans and Hawaiians, and Australian Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islanders were as human as themselves.
Luke Lightsaber
Captain
Kirk said everyone was human.
Sentient and sapience are not the same things as "alive". As I said in my previous post: "V'ger might look at the Enterprise as alive, but on the level of a ladybug: tiny and simple".
I think people are getting up hung up on the "life forms" thing. What Ilia-probe says is "carbon units are not true life forms." Just as some humans think we're special and not animals, V'ger recognizes machines as life forms, and these little carbon things as something lesser. Is a self-replicating molecule alive? Is DNA alive? From V'ger's perspective, carbon units aren't in the same league as its own life form.
Retcon alert!
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Ellison got it right in his review. No matter how much it knows, how smart is it if it doesn't have the wherewithal to wipe some dirt off its nameplate to know who the hell it is?
Luke Lightsaber
Captain
V Ger had to know what a Human was. He had all this knowledge stored inside of him. He knew his creator was on Earth.
V'Ger put an inordinate amount of effort into talking to the carbon units infesting Enterprise if it considered the Enterprise as the equivalent of an insect.
It seems we (humans) haven't really formulated a definition of what "life" is, however at the time I first watched TMP, my immediate reaction was that the Enterprise is not alive. What do you think?
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Except that as far as we know, V'ger's effort was nothing. It may have just thought, "huh, this life form that actually talked to me is stuffed with bugs...I'll copy one and stuff a probe in its ass to figure out what they're about."
Luke Lightsaber
Captain
And what did V Ger do to thank the "carbon based" units that gave it its creator? It dissapeared. Lame.
Brain the size of a planet but no opposable thumbs.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
good one! Though you'd think vger could configure those plasma energy bolts to 'wipe' or 'smudge' ... I mean phasers can stun (and if you read Diane Duane novels, phasers can even be set on 'tag'.)
To assume an alien life form is going to have the same concept of gratitude that we do is illogical.
Luke Lightsaber
Captain
But thanks to Decker and Ilia, Spock said it would have to deal with human emotions. Wouldn't the evolved V'Ger want to get in contact with Enterprise or Starfleet?
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Only human arrogance would lead to that line of thought (or deltan horniness.) If vger had become bestofboth, it would probably be beyond that, especially if you add what it already had into the mix. And I don't know that between vger, Decker, and Ilia that you have an enormous amount of WISDOM either. I mean, vger couldn't get any of what it needed from a meld with Spock? How friggin' dumb can it be, Spock can get what he needs from a mind rape and he is only halfvulcan, not that telepathic, if the meld went both ways, vger should have been able to get it all just right there, eliminating act III.
Luke Lightsaber
Captain
If it was the beginning of a new life form, we should have least seen what it looked like. Otherwise, the movie ends on this anti climatic scene that goes nowhere.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Use your imagination, do you think they needed to subtitle the thing in TVH when the tootsie roll with the soccer ball hanging out talks to the whales?
(The eerie sound from the probe (TOOTSIE) we hear becomes a blaring punk rock tune underwater.)
TOOTSIE: (screaming) HAY GUYS!!!
GEORGE: Mind turning down the stereo?
TOOTSIE: WHAT?
GRACIE: TURN THAT SHIT OFF, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!
(storms stop)
TOOTSIE: That's racist!
GEORGE: We're victims of genocide. Now where's that goddamm pizza?
Luke Lightsaber
Captain
I think the probe was lost, and it could only talk whale, and once the whales returned to the 23rd Century, the whales told the probe where to go.
V'ger had all this knowledge, but it didn't know how to imagine, how to think about things that could-be rather than what was. It was to man and man is to mosquito, and our thoughts probably didn't interest it. Only when it realized these tiny pests could be it's creator did it stop and go, okay, what do these things have that I'm missing?
Yes, there film is boneheaded on a number of points, including V'ger's ability to recognize the symbols making up its name but too stupid to clean off the dirt to see all of it. I'm not going to defend that.
On the other hand, my guess is when Spock mind melded it was more of a one-way thing...he had 8 bits of data to share with V'ger's 10,000 terabytes. It's more a one way data dump that nearly fried his brain. V'ger may have barely noticed it, and maybe went, "Huh? Plomeek what?"
Finally, once it merged, it had all this knowledge of the universe and the drive to be something more...what could it possibly have in common or to say to humans? You can learn something from ants, but that doesn't make them your peers.
Yes, there film is boneheaded on a number of points, including V'ger's ability to recognize the symbols making up its name but too stupid to clean off the dirt to see all of it. I'm not going to defend that.
On the other hand, my guess is when Spock mind melded it was more of a one-way thing...he had 8 bits of data to share with V'ger's 10,000 terabytes. It's more a one way data dump that nearly fried his brain. V'ger may have barely noticed it, and maybe went, "Huh? Plomeek what?"
Finally, once it merged, it had all this knowledge of the universe and the drive to be something more...what could it possibly have in common or to say to humans? You can learn something from ants, but that doesn't make them your peers.
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