They did. Data said it had a diameter of 200 million kilometers, giving it an internal surface area of approximately 250 million M-class planets.
'Relics': missed opportunity?
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^^ I stand corrected, thanks!
I think I would have expected something like "amazing", "incroyable" or else from Picard but the screenplay writer apparently didn't think this kind of discovery would have merited such a reaction.
What still leaves me puzzled is this:
SCOTT: Well, I was never actually a member of the crew. I was just a passenger. I was heading for Norpin Five to settle down and enjoy my retirement.
I would have thought that the Jenolan was using a well known route but no one ever reported this Dyson Sphere (because it's constructed around a star, I don't think that Dyson Sphere ever changed location
).
Bob
I think I would have expected something like "amazing", "incroyable" or else from Picard but the screenplay writer apparently didn't think this kind of discovery would have merited such a reaction.
What still leaves me puzzled is this:
SCOTT: Well, I was never actually a member of the crew. I was just a passenger. I was heading for Norpin Five to settle down and enjoy my retirement.
I would have thought that the Jenolan was using a well known route but no one ever reported this Dyson Sphere (because it's constructed around a star, I don't think that Dyson Sphere ever changed location
).Bob
Knowing Scotty, maybe there is another story to be told in here - like perhaps the Jenolan diverted to answer a distress call where he resolved an engineering emergency on the other ship, and thus they were coming at Norpin Five from an unusual direction after that?I would have thought that the Jenolan was using a well known route but no one ever reported this Dyson Sphere (because it's constructed around a star, I don't think that Dyson Sphere ever changed location
I choose to take the crew reaction to the Dyson sphere's size as "stunned awe", although you're right, the script/actors didn't really convey that, did they?
Or maybe their reaction to its immensity could be explained similarly to this?:
“...There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parent and his sister had gone. No reaction.He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.
He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it, He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every “Bogart” movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger.
He passed out.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
That sphere was just too bloody big to even fit in their imaginations.
“...There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parent and his sister had gone. No reaction.He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab: the supermarket was gone, everyone in it was gone! Nelson’s Column had gone! and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry! From now on Nelson’s Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.
He tried again: America, he thought, has gone. He couldn’t grasp it, He decided to start smaller again. New York has gone. No reaction. He’d never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every “Bogart” movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald’s, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald’s hamburger.
He passed out.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
That sphere was just too bloody big to even fit in their imaginations.
Sadly, though, wasn't it revealed that the star at the center of the Dyson's sphere was dying? I suppose it could still be hundreds of thousands or even millions of years away, but it would be interesting to see what happened to the sphere at that point...
It would be even more interesting to collect all of the energy from the surface and channel it into replicating creamy nougat to replace the star with.
The more I'm thinking about this, the gigglier I'm getting. Imagine it: you connect replicators to the interior surface to run off the power collected from the star. First, they replicate replicators until they've spread out across the whole interior surface, then, they switch to producing nougat, non-stop. And then... you just leave it. Leave it, and never come back. Don't even keep it in the logs.
In 10,000 years, some other interstellar civilization comes across it, and are all "My Zarquon! What kind of civilization could have built such a thing?" Then, they get the door open, and read that the entire inside is filled with nougat, and it changes to "What kind of civilization WOULD have built such a thing?!"
Turning a 200 million kilometer Dyson Sphere into a giant snack...
Just imaging the size of the being who could eat such a thing
Just imaging the size of the being who could eat such a thing
A special treat just for Galactus or Unicron for Valentymes Day.
Why would a civilisation so incredibly advanced choose a dying star to build such a structure? Like others, I find the idea of a Dyson Sphere fascinating and would have loved to have seen the exploration of it spread across a couple of episodes with or without the talents of a legendary Starfleet engineer to help.
IIRC it wasn't dying so much as it was just going into a phase of higher radiation, like more intense solar flares or something. Now our own sun does this from time-to-time and it's relatively okay we absorb a tiny part of it considering our profile vs. the sun's influence even considering what is absorbed by the ozone layer. But with the Dyson Sphere every inch of the surface is impacted. At once. Not just the part facing the sun as is the case with Earth. And not just that tiny percentage compared to the sun's surface, but EVERYTHING.
Presumably the surface of the sphere would have had sufficient shields to act as an ozone layer but was only capable of "so much" and some may have still gotten through as the sun went into a more intense phase.
What's astonishing, really, that's impossible to wrap your head around is how utterly fantastically, colossally, fucking HUGE this thing is.
IIRC the Enterprise, and even the Jenolan, finding this thing was pretty much "luck", so to speak. It was so big and generating so much gravity it overloaded the sensors making it almost undetectable. From the book, again IIRC, the Jenolan didn't even find it enroute to Norpin V and just happened to detect it and diverted to investigate it when it got trapped. When other ships make the (presumably) routine trip between nearby planets to the retirement planet it could be passing by the sphere at warp and doesn't pick it up. It just took being at the exact right place at the exact right time at the exact right speed for the sensors do deal with this 180 million mile wide sphere.
Bringing back Scotty for an episode was not an idea I would've listened to if I were in Rick Berman's shoes - I would've outright rejected it. But ... imagine if Jimmy Doohan had secured a recurring - almost regular - guest spot on NEXT GENERATION! Seriously, if this episode was something other than how defunct Scotty was in the future, or if there had been some kind of surprise follow-up, where he proved to be an asset to have around, it might've been sufferable to see Jimmy dipping from the STAR TREK well, whenever he felt like it. As shallow and undeveloped as Scotty always was, I can see how it would've benefitted him, but ... this show's called THE NEXT GENERATION for a reason, so ... maybe he should've just counted his blessings, at that point. And probably did!
Except that "Sarek" and "Unification" had been good for ratings and lots of free publicity. So, despite early claims that TNG would never delve into crossovers after the Admiral McCoy cameo in "Farpoint", we got several more. And lots of time travel stories, and then lots of Borg episodes, and lots of Brent Spiner playing multiple parts. Because they were all well-received.
But....but....were they well-received by Therin of Andor?
Yup. The purpose behind any crossover is to show the original character doing his thing in a new setting and interacting with a new cast.
"Unification" was about Spock dicking around in some caves.
"Relics" was about Scotty solving an engineering problem with his TNG counterpart and trying his best to fit in to a new century.
Relics was the perfect crossover.
It would have been, if Scotty hadn't been treated like a red-headed stepchild instead of the legend he should have been.
You weren't at my house when it aired. Perrin can die in a fire. (But no, they saved that for Picard's nephew that I liked okay.)
The real mistake was giving Sarek ANOTHER human wife, reducing a complex, inexplicable romance from TOS into Space Jungle Fever. Of course, "Relics" takes Scotty's obviously humorous remark from TSfS and makes it a literal description of his work habits. Likewise, in "Reunification," Data has a conversation with Spock about Spock's suppression of and disatste for his human half that leaves Spock visibly shaken when the films made it apparent--despite his brief reversion to full-Vulcan mode in TVH--Spock had resolved those issues roughly 70 years prior. And don't get me started on Generations--to me, TNG had a knack for getting TOS characters entirely wrong whenever they included one.
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I feel the same way about Thelin th'Valrass. I first read about him in the Myriad Universes series and later saw the TAS episode "Yesteryear" that originally depicted the timeline in which he served on the Enterprise. I liked his character and hoped he'd make an appearance in the primary timeline but later discovered that he died in an avalanche within a year of his posting to USS Ticonderoga as the ship's executive officer, as mentioned by Spock in the Crucible series novel The Fire and the Rose.
It's not clear when his death took place, so he may have lived for several years following the five-year mission. But it was disappointing that the death of his character was handled dismissively given his importance in another novel.
--Sran
Of course they were! "Sarek" is a brilliant episode. "Unification" was more of a promotional stunt for ST VI, and many people complained for all manner of reasons, but yes, Spock meets TNG was well received. And so was "Relics".
I'm sure the ratings spikes were noticeable.
There was a certain inevitability, inherent in TAS. I always expected that if there was a Thelin in the regular timeline, he probably died early. In fact, in an early fanfic bio I did for my Therin of Andor character, Thelin was a sibling who had died as a child.
There were some notable fanfics in the 70s and 80s regarding Thelin. Infamous filksinger, Leslie Fish, wrote some racy stories in which Thelin had a male human partner (and Shras of TOS was referred to as Thelin's Aunt Shras!), and New Zealander Frank Macskasy was writing Captain Thelin stories when I was writing about Captain Therin.
But the "Crucible" trilogy is deliberately not in keeping with the regular novels. It had its own continuity, answerable only to canonical TOS and TAS. And, in any case, "Crucible" came out in 2006, and the "Myriad Universes" story was 2008, so how was David R George III to know what Geoff Trowbridge would do with him two years later in "The Chimes at Midnight"?
Also, "an Andorian named Thelin appears in Star Trek Online as the captain of the USS Kirk in 2409 - it is unclear if this is supposed to be the same Thelin from the 23rd century."
http://memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Thelin_th%27Valrass
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I remember hearing that Scotty was going to become a recurring character on Deep Space Nine, I want to say around the time of the third season.
I wasn't into fandom at the time, so I don't remember where this came from. And I don't know if there were any truth to it at all. I suspect it was simply some fan's wish that got blown out of proportion and took on a life of its own.
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