Episode of the Week : What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Any man would be invisible standing there. There's a good anecdote in Inside Star Trek (Justman, Solow) about how the studio commissary was suddenly hushed as Sherry Jackson entered for lunch in that costume.

 

So--what do we make of Roger Korby committing suicide? (and Andreacide). Was this proof that the process was so sophisticated/advanced that whatever constitutes the identity of Roger Korby was in the android, and it was not merely a copy? Or that he was still just a copy of the real Korby, but sophisticated enough to despair unto "death"?

Korby sure thought he was Korby.

Personally I've always felt that this was deliberately left ambiguous, and like the episode better for that; but maybe some folks can reason out something more definitive. The existence of two Kirks simultaneously supports the they-are-only-copies thesis...but I always thought something was different about Korby's case. For one thing, I assumed he got the more sophisticated treatment (by Ruk) that Ruk did in his creation by the "Old Ones."

 

I'm not quite sure - why would "only a copy" be different from "he is the android"? Surely being a copy means being identical, I mean.

Then again, the machinery must be capable of some fine-tuning, as it made the second Kirk willing to engage in deception and actions directed against Starfleet and his friends, even when it retained all of his wit and charm and initiative. We don't really know of a reason why Ruk would fine-tune Korby... But Ruk had initiative of his own, and might have seen it useful to turn the copy of Korby into a passionate fan of the Old Ones and of android existence, while the original Korby might not yet have possessed those qualities.

Ultimately, we're left wondering whether the Kirk copy was in any way related to the Korby copy, or the henchmen copies. After all, Kirk was made of a lump of goo, while Korby and his assistants had circuitry and mechanisms inside them, just beneath the skin. Did that goo transform into mechanisms inside the second Kirk, too? Or were there mechanisms inside the goo all along? Those of the Korby bunch being so close to the skin make that a bit unlikely, as the lump wasn't Kirk-shaped to begin with, but that's something we can easily handwave away.

Timo Saloniemi

 

Korby was persuaded he had his "soul" in the machine. He said himself the Kirk android was a sophisticated imitation without the "soul". That explains why the android has been caught by the "I'm sick of your half-breed interference, do you hear?". But for Korby? That's weird because it seems he realized himself by saying he can calculate anything that he was more a computer than he believed. In fact, his suicide seems to prove he still had a part of Korby's humanity. It wasn't a logical suicide like M-5.

 

Was it cold in that cave?

... Oh, never mind. Just forget I was here.

 

Yeah, something tells me Andrea cut have cut diamonds!

Sincerely,

Bill

 

I volunteer to go back in time and find out!

 

In fact, Nurse Chapel too. I suppose they turned down the thermostat to avoid to explain why Ruk was sweating under his ugly coat.