"Future Imperfect" - Riker gets it all wrong

[TheQman]

Gonna admit, I didn't read all the replies. But, what it ultimately comes down to is the fact that the program was lost when the information from the Binars was purged from the Enterprise computer. I mean...it is Star Trek however, almost anything is possible. Riker could have gone back to Bynaus in the future and discovered that the Minuet had been downloaded into their mainframe on the planet. But, that is highly unlikely. The first response of a man from 2364 (not 2404 when we know canonically that marriages between holograms and humans take place) would be that it had to be a deception. Not to mention the fact that he seemed to have a child that was biologically related not only to him, but to Minuet. So, it makes sense that when combined with all of the other issues he would finally see through the deception with this one fact.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Even if Riker could be convinced that somehow he resurrected the Minuet he fell in love with, made her real outside the holodeck, and married her, two problems with that. 1) They had a child. I suppose some kind of DNA donation artificial womb thing could have happened, okay. But then Jean-Luc would have mentioned this when describing his mother. And 2) If Minuet can be brought back, she can also not die. You can come up with technobabble reasons that maybe her program could be corrupted and lost forever, but then, this would be part of the story for how she died.

All of these things, you can come up with explanations, but even if you do it, you can not explain why none of his friends told him "Oh by the way you married a hologram".

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Mainly the time lag thing and having a holographic wife convinced him it looks like. Peace with Romulans, Ferengi in Star Fleet, Data figuring out how to use contractions are plausible but he acted like those were tip offs too.

I think peace with Romulans and Ferengi in Starfleet were two of the more convincing parts of the simulation because it flatters Riker's worldview of continuing peace and diplomacy with former enemies. Any Starfleet officer in 2366 would believe that. (Heck, Nog was way higher ranked than that by 2382).

But his friends being incompetent is hard to swallow. He also could have questioned why so many of his closest friends didn't receive a single promotion in that time.

 

[Valenti]

Maybe the child was adopted and the crew were medically advised not to talk to him about certain subjects for his own mental health.

 

[marsh8472]

Gonna admit, I didn't read all the replies. But, what it ultimately comes down to is the fact that the program was lost when the information from the Binars was purged from the Enterprise computer. I mean...it is Star Trek however, almost anything is possible. Riker could have gone back to Bynaus in the future and discovered that the Minuet had been downloaded into their mainframe on the planet. But, that is highly unlikely. The first response of a man from 2364 (not 2404 when we know canonically that marriages between holograms and humans take place) would be that it had to be a deception. Not to mention the fact that he seemed to have a child that was biologically related not only to him, but to Minuet. So, it makes sense that when combined with all of the other issues he would finally see through the deception with this one fact.

EMH had a son in "Blink of an Eye" so it is possible for a hologram to have a son of some kind. Torres recovered Tuvok's deleted holonovel in "Worst Case Scenario".

Even if Riker could be convinced that somehow he resurrected the Minuet he fell in love with, made her real outside the holodeck, and married her, two problems with that. 1) They had a child. I suppose some kind of DNA donation artificial womb thing could have happened, okay. But then Jean-Luc would have mentioned this when describing his mother. And 2) If Minuet can be brought back, she can also not die. You can come up with technobabble reasons that maybe her program could be corrupted and lost forever, but then, this would be part of the story for how she died.

All of these things, you can come up with explanations, but even if you do it, you can not explain why none of his friends told him "Oh by the way you married a hologram".

1) could have been an adopted child
2) if artificial lifeforms can be alive, they would be dead when they cease being alive. They said she died in a shuttlecraft accident. If she had a mobile emitter on it could have been wiped out in that explosion.
3) a lot was going on. They can have their reasons for not telling him. Maybe they didn't want to move too fast. Look how he reacted when he saw her.

But his friends being incompetent is hard to swallow. He also could have questioned why so many of his closest friends didn't receive a single promotion in that time.

Given his alleged condition why should he assume that everyone's incompetent instead of his judgement of them being impaired? Especially if he's debating whether reality is real or not.

 

[Herbert]

Oh no please don't do that! I see you making so many wonderful contributions to discussions around here.

Well, I'm not sure about that but thank you for the compliment.

 

[Tosk]

This is one hell of a thread, I'll tell you what.

 

[Timo]

It seems to me the entire premise here is beside the point - neither the original idea or the attempts at rebuttal touch upon what is actually happening to Riker.

Riker is not caught in a holodeck charade that was set up wrong and therefore failed. He is caught in a charade inside his own mind, one that his own mind iteratively corrects. Nothing in there is real even to the degree stuff inside holodecks is real. Therefore it cannot be objectively evaluated by Riker. If he sees something wrong there, suddenly it is in fact right and always has been.

Until he decides it should be wrong. And if he does, it does not matter one iota whether it in fact is actually quite right. Say, Data uses contractions all the time. But if Riker decides this is wrong, then it becomes wrong, because Riker is the god of this local universelet.

The same goes for Minuet. And of course Riker was married to nobody in particular until he decided he was married to Minuet. There is no causality to Riker's universe unless he decides he wants some. So he would not worry about anything until he wanted to.

It is thus probably a personality quirk of his that saved him here: he gets suspicious when things go well. At that point, he finds faults, regardless of whether they exist.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Dukhat]

This is one hell of a thread, I'll tell you what.

That’s what happens when someone won’t take no for an answer.

 

[Herbert]

That’s what happens when someone won’t take no for an answer.

Actually, this is what happens when you over analyze stuff because apparently you don't have anything more productive to do.

And now Timo is saying that Riker really wasn't in an elaborate holodeck simulation, it was just his own mind. Okay.

 

[Marynator]

I very much disagree Timo, it was so much like a holodeck! It was not created in Will's mind, but it was all created by Ethan using simulators he controls. He could read Will's thoughts and try to use that, but it was all Ethan's doing trying to create something for him, and it was deeply flawed because he didn't have enough experience to make it perfect. I definitely feel Will is certainly not the god of this local universe, but Ethan is! And he's totally fallible which is why there are so many mistakes. It's like if someone tried to do this to you, they might have the important details but they'd probably be missing so many little things that everything would just seem so wrong to you the longer you're there.

I am so sorry @marsh8472 that we all didn't like your idea so much. I felt it was a very cute thought, but I really don't feel that it makes much sense when you really think about it. I feel that the biggest confusion is about what happened in the Voyager episode. It's not that people are marrying holograms, it's that the Doctor was recognized as a person with rights and he was able to marry like anyone else could do. It's not like people in that time are taking their favorite fictional characters from the holodeck, turning them into real people, then marrying them and having babies with them. Doesn't that sound so very strange? That's what would've had to happen for the Minuet thing to work. I feel you're confusing a holographic person with a person who's a hologram, they are very different things! I feel that everything else you're dismissing is just trying to hard to make it fit.

It's ok when sometimes we have an idea that really doesn't make sense! This happens to me all the time, lol. I think of something and am like "Oh this is so brilliant!", then someone points out something I missed and for a moment I face-palm myself, it happens to everyone! Your idea was definitely fun to share, but don't you feel it might be time to accept that it really doesn't make all that much sense, and that Will was clever for solving the mystery in that episode? No one will feel any less of you at all, we'd love to hear and discuss more interesting ideas, that is always the fun part of discussions.

 

[ItIsGreen]

This is a silly thread.

 

[Dukhat]

It’s not that I don’t like his idea. It’s that it doesn’t hold up based on what we saw. OP thinks that Riker has some sort of bias against holograms because OP is taking something completely out of context based on an episode of another Trek show made years after the fact.

 

[Mutai Sho-Rin]

I think this thread has gone far enough down a convoluted rabbit hole as to emerge somewhere in the Discovery Mirror Universe. I'm going to close it before there is any collateral damage.