First Impressions of The Changeling...
- Thread starter royalfan5
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The jokey endings of Star Trek's second and third seasons were really typical of televisions shows of that period.
Don't mind RAMA... he says he likes TOS, but the more he says about it the more I doubt him.
I, too, sometimes get that impression.Don't mind RAMA... he says he likes TOS, but the more he says about it the more I doubt him.
Robert DeSoto
Lieutenant Commander
I kinda lol'd when Kirk said "We come in peace" AFTER he fired a photon torpedo at them.
I also lol'd when the two security officers were like "yo nomad where u think ur going?" and pulled out their hand phasers. Nomad withstood a photon torpedo blast and cut down the shields of a Constitution class starship. You think hes scared of your hand phasers?
Great episode though. Loved it.
Don't mind RAMA... he says he likes TOS, but the more he says about it the more I doubt him.
The point is they have to have the machine come complete with binary thinking (despite being centuries more advanced than the Ent) and it simply has to attack anything not machine like because it has already been pre-conceived as being "bad" and unable to think. Remember, computers in the 60s were thought to be a threat...they were going to steal jobs and make men like something of Metropolis, when in fact, the reverse has happened, industrial age jobs may be lost, but whole new industries and jobs were created. We are likely to have human level thinking machines by 2030 on Earth! By contrast, V'Ger absorbs information, essentially destroying who it "attacks", but it is capable of understanding and reasoning, and eventually overcomes its programming. Kirk goes the extra mile into understanding why V'ger is doing what it is...he never needs to convince it to kill itself (probably an insult to V'ger's intelligence anyway). If Changeling had been written more like this, it would have seemed less like "Robot vs the Aztec Mummy" in plot.RAMA
But essentially that's exactly what Kirk in fact did. True, Vger's consciousness might have persisted in some other realm, but Vger's physical body, with it's ability to kill every carbon based lifeform (Human) on earth, did seize to exist.
Kirk convinced Vger to commit suicide.
But essentially that's exactly what Kirk in fact did. True, Vger's consciousness might have persisted in some other realm, but Vger's physical body, with it's ability to kill every carbon based lifeform (Human) on earth, did seize to exist.
Kirk convinced Vger to commit suicide.
Um, if you call evolving into a totally different advanced life form "suicide"...that was V'Ger's decision, it could easily have still destroyed humanity if it wanted to before that...and the process was different. V'ger didn't use binary thinking, it actually leaped beyond pure logic.
RAMA
LOL exactly!! It just boggles the mind. Was it some kind of weird editing that Shatner and the others didn't see the idiocy of these lines?
It boggles the mind, every time I watch the episode.
Perhaps the alien probe Tan Ru that Nomad combined itself with possessed an organic brain, wet ware. Using organic material in computers is old stuff in science fiction, even in TOS's era.The idea of telepathy working with machines annoyed me so thoroughly in this episode that I never got over it - and worked in a sort of "rebuttal" in the one chance I got.
Nomad could have had actual living though processes for Spock to tie into.
I loved "The Changeling" when I first saw it back in the 90s. Since then, I've become a hardened TMP fan. Consequently, I tend to dismiss this episode as something of a poor man's Star Trek I. It is a pretty good episode, in fairness, despite the corny solution Kirk devises to defeat Nomad. It's just that the story comes nowhere close to the level of sophistication displayed in the 1979 movie, which is basically a re-working of the same story.
A.V.I.A.F.
Captain
I hear what you all are saying. I think the fact that Kirk shows astonishment at Nomad's defensive capabilities even though he has already been told that Nomad's offensive capabilities are 90 times those of Enterprise (well, at least as far as photon torpedoes go) could be attributed to the fact that he is still in a state of disbelief. Also, just because an alien ship has stronger offensive offensive capabilities does not necessarily mean its defensive systems are proportional. Case in point: The Romulan ship in Balance of Terror; this ship's plasmatorpedoes were far stronger than Enterprise's weaponry, but they were also much slower than Enterprise. Superior offensive systems does not presuppose superior defensive systems.
I didn't like this episode much. I did as a kid, but as an adult, it's just so hard to swallow.
As a number of people have pointed out, there are some glaring inconsistencies in things said, especially concerning the absorption of energy by the Enterprise (c'mon, 90 photon torpedos? forget about suffering any real damage in Klingon conflicts, then!). Also, you have something as extraordinary as the probe Tan Ru... even assuming it had an ultra sophisticated means of interfacing with any alien computer systems, why would it bother to combine its own programming with Nomad, then even physically merge with it? The idea is curious, but there's really not much of a foundation for it to work given how a US launched probe so early in our history is the "other half" of this thing. The approach taken in ST:TMP is a bit more palatable, of a probe that manages to expand so much information, happen upon a little benefaction of some alien upgrades by curious encounters that gives Voyager the seeds of AI with which to use that knowledge and become something much more... still a serious stretch, but at least not limited to just one alien encounter.
And yeah, the casual air of joking around when Nomad destroyed billions of people... just doesn't fit. It's almost as if the writer gradually forgot about it over the course of the script writing, then expected the audience would do the same.
As a number of people have pointed out, there are some glaring inconsistencies in things said, especially concerning the absorption of energy by the Enterprise (c'mon, 90 photon torpedos? forget about suffering any real damage in Klingon conflicts, then!). Also, you have something as extraordinary as the probe Tan Ru... even assuming it had an ultra sophisticated means of interfacing with any alien computer systems, why would it bother to combine its own programming with Nomad, then even physically merge with it? The idea is curious, but there's really not much of a foundation for it to work given how a US launched probe so early in our history is the "other half" of this thing. The approach taken in ST:TMP is a bit more palatable, of a probe that manages to expand so much information, happen upon a little benefaction of some alien upgrades by curious encounters that gives Voyager the seeds of AI with which to use that knowledge and become something much more... still a serious stretch, but at least not limited to just one alien encounter.
And yeah, the casual air of joking around when Nomad destroyed billions of people... just doesn't fit. It's almost as if the writer gradually forgot about it over the course of the script writing, then expected the audience would do the same.
A.V.I.A.F.
Captain
With all of the nasty stuff one has to deal with on a mission like theirs, they have to learn how to laugh a little for their own mental health. Just think of real-life war veterans who exchange horrible tales of what happened to them (sometimes laughing facetiously), I think it is a coping mechanism.
See, I never took it that V'ger was Voyager 6 at all. I always took it that the machines that found Voyager said, "Hey, look, this little tyke is supposed to collect data and get it back to its creator. Well, let's build her up into something that she can actually do it." The only thing Voyager was to V'ger was the messenger who carried the original instruction and the transmitter used to say "yo, creator".
To the contrary, I find this very easy to believe. A primitive sublight probe puttering through the galaxy would have to be capable of extremely advanced self-repair and possibly self-replication, including improvisation when local resources limit the probe's repair options. There'd be no point in launching NOMAD in 2002 unless its onboard automatics were extremely advanced to compensate for its supposedly primitive propulsion.
Tan Ru would follow the same basic philosophy even though it apparently possessed the secrets of warp drive. Friendship 1 might be a bit more primitive in this regard, although its vastly greater intended range would probably return things to square one and necessitate complex onboard resurrection capabilities.
This is what space exploration probably really is going to be like, with new artificial life evolving and expanding at the original behest of biological masters but seldom in a fashion they could have predicted. Trek inserts a hefty dose of fantasy by introducing warp-driven crewed spacecraft, which essentially preempts the rule of the automated probes. But the early days of each Trek civilization could still see their share of self-resurrecting, self-developing probes that provide as many surprises through their own existence as through the discoveries they make.
Timo Saloniemi
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