Episode of the Week : The Savage Curtain

[Timo]

But Kirk did know - he knew who Green was, so both should know he came from Earth. He knew who Lincoln was, so that backstory should also be there, built into the fake, if Lincoln really is but a figment of Kirk's imagination.

That Green and Lincoln have only a vague idea of what happened to them is just as much (or little) in keeping with an abduction plot as with a figments-of-imagination-incarnated plot. Possibly the copies of Kirk and Spock will appear like that to future captives, too, if they see use (Captain Martok: "What devilry is this? Why did that floating Kahless direct us here? Ah, there's James T. Kirk with his despicable Vulcan henchman, back from the grave it seems! Okay, apparently it's one of those good vs. the ultimate evil things again. Forces of good, with me! Chaaaarge!").

Well, no, Spock was monitoring on the sensor as one of the rock creatures transformed into Lincoln.

He saw something he described in the vaguest of terms, and Scotty appeared unconvinced. For all we know, pure inert rock was transformed into Lincoln. And then, with a bit less effort and care, into the avatar of the Excalbian species, which actually lives far away and has no rock-like qualities.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[UnknownSample]

We know "Lincoln" was made from rock, possibly living rock, but we don't know. We are also meant to see "Lincoln" as, at least in some sense, "real"... either he somehow manages to have the actual spirit or mind of a long-dead Lincoln, copied and/or implanted into a copy made physically from molten rock...or this Lincoln personality is an idealized copy based on Kirk's image of him, so that it/he feels and broods and self-sacrifices, sincerely. It would not work for Lincoln to have been a play-acting rock alien. We get to know him in fairly intimate circumstances. His status may be the main interesting thing about this episode... In the end, he can't be fake, but we know he is fake. He himself knows he's real and fake at the same time. He was whipped up out of lava, he's never been to Earth, but his total being is as a 3-dimensional very "human", embodiment of Lincoln. He's totally Lincoln, he certainly is no one else besides Lincoln, but he knows he's not actually the original, either.

So all these "fakes" were promised things that the originals would have wanted very badly. These fakes are constructed so as to believe sincerely that they are the originals... though Lincoln at least suspects he's not real, and I'll go out on a limb and say Surak suspects too, at least after talking to Spock...

Unless they're fakes who think they're real, things don't work. The test requires that their "good" and "evil" natures and mindsets are being tested, and play-acting rock aliens wouldn't be any test of anything.

 

[Marsden]

Good point, they were trying to understand others, so having their own personalities wouldn't help them.

I'm wondering if those particular specimens were not actually Excalibans but something more akin to a rock golem that the Excalibans could create and program with the necessary personality. It certainly did not seem to be the first "spectacle" they've done and they might be able to create any number of attributes/species.

 

[mos6507]

It's the classic Blade Runner replicant trope. Or Toy Story. Buzz Lightyear emerges out of the box totally convinced he's the real and only Buzz, only to eventually find out he's a replicant, so to speak. Or think of Amelia Earhart in Night at the Museum 2. At the very end she figures out who she really is and she kind of makes peace with it. Same deal with Moriarty in Ship in a Bottle.

It's interesting both from the vantagepoint of the simulacra but also from ours, whether we're willing to treat these things as truly alive and autonomous.

 

[BoredShipCapt'n]

But Kirk did know - he knew who Green was, so both should know he came from Earth. He knew who Lincoln was, so that backstory should also be there, built into the fake, if Lincoln really is but a figment of Kirk's imagination.

That Green and Lincoln have only a vague idea of what happened to them is just as much (or little) in keeping with an abduction plot as with a figments-of-imagination-incarnated plot. Possibly the copies of Kirk and Spock will appear like that to future captives, too, if they see use (Captain Martok: "What devilry is this? Why did that floating Kahless direct us here? Ah, there's James T. Kirk with his despicable Vulcan henchman, back from the grave it seems! Okay, apparently it's one of those good vs. the ultimate evil things again. Forces of good, with me! Chaaaarge!").



He saw something he described in the vaguest of terms, and Scotty appeared unconvinced. For all we know, pure inert rock was transformed into Lincoln. And then, with a bit less effort and care, into the avatar of the Excalbian species, which actually lives far away and has no rock-like qualities.

Timo Saloniemi

The idea of abducting the villains needlessly complicates things.

Presumably the Excalbians started out by scanning the ship's computer banks and Kirk and Spock's minds, which is where they discovered the concepts of "good" and "evil" that were unfamiliar to them. Only at that point did they create the simulacrum of Lincoln as an embodiment of good. Later Surak appears on the planet as another incarnation of good, along with the four villains who embody evil.

All four villains are people known to the Enterprise crew as evil figures from history. If the Excalbians were previously unfamiliar with the concept of evil, they would have had no reason to have sought out and abducted representatives of evil at some earlier time, much less ones who were specifically known to Kirk and Spock. Secondly, we don't know that the Excalbians are capable of abducting people at all: they don't kidnap Kirk and Spock, but rather entice them to beam down. Thirdly, even if they can abduct people, there's no indication that they could abduct someone from a far distant planet incapable of spaceflight, like Genghis Khan's 13th-century Earth. Fourthly, even if they could abduct those four people, there was no need for them to go to such an effort, since they could so easily create fully functioning simulacra from Kirk and Spock's thoughts and the living rock around them.

With regard to "Colonel Green" specifically, he surely knew that he came from Earth, because Yarnek had just said so right in front of him. Where specifically on Earth he comes from is what he can't remember, and that is most likely because Kirk never knew it.

 

[UnknownSample]

I certainly don't start off from the assumption that aliens can go anywhere and do anything, as much as season 3 may sometimes have invited me to. This was a very remote place. We had information about Lincoln formerly being something like rock. So, at least by the end, abductions seem very unlikely.
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The improbable, unexplained thing for me was always why they had to include two real people, rather than creating eight people out of rock to fight. But as others have said, they didn't even have the concepts and of good and evil or the characters representing each to use, without Spock and Kirk... who naturally classed themselves as "good" so the rock people did too... and once they had K&S at their disposal, why not make them fight too...

 

[BoredShipCapt'n]

I'd like to know more about "those old space legends" of intelligent life on Excalbia that Bones alluded to. Though maybe it was no more than other ships getting scanned as they passed nearby.

 

[johnnybear]

Or the odd stray signal being picked up out in that area of space just like what Spock and Kirk allude to in Arena!
JB

 

[2takesfrakes]

Even when Bones chimed in with that, it sounded false. Like the story just needed to have that thrown in to help firm up Kirk's resolve. The dialogue, the delivery ... I just never quite believed it. Surely Martin Van Buren, or Millard Fillmore would've materialised on one of these ship's viewing screens with an offer they couldn't refuse.