Jesus Hubert Christ. The need of the 21st century fanboy to tie everything together astonishes me.
It's a big fucking universe. IDIC, remember?
Is the gaseous entity for "obsession" a less evoled crystal entity
- Thread starter Tcsfan
- Start date
Jesus Hubert Christ. The need of the 21st century fanboy to tie everything together astonishes me.
It's a big fucking universe. IDIC, remember?
Don't get so excited grandpa, it's just someone possibly over-thinking things a bit. He has the right to his own thought processes.
I don't see any particular connection between the vampire cloud and the Crystalline Entity. They do have a few things in common such as their ability to travel at warp factors, but the differences far outweigh the similarities.
"Obsession" always has been one of my favorite TOS episodes (which I suppose is obvious), but I've always wondered - If contact with the cloud was enough to give Kirk and Ensign Rizzo some kind of connection with it to where Kirk felt he could sense it thinking and planning and figure out where "home" was, it just seems to me that Spock should have gotten some kind of connection when it tried to drain his blood on the Enterprise. I guess the different hemoglobin composition must have had something to do with it, but it's always bugged me.
Of course, maybe Spock did get some kind of insight from the contact and it just wasn't mentioned onscreen - maybe that's why he said that the creature would spawn into thousands at Tycho IV. But it just seems to me that something like that would have been mentioned.
It would have been nice if they could somehow manage to capture the cloud and learn to communicate with it or at least study it in detail - assuming that there were others of its species around, a study might have revealed another weakness that would have allowed a defense against it that didn't involve ripping away half a planet's atmosphere - that was fine for Tycho IV, but if a cloud showed up on a populated world I don't think that would be a very viable solution. I wonder if it would have been possible to get a transporter lock on the cloud somehow, perhaps when it was in the act of drinking a jar of blood or something, and transport it into some kind of a sealed container. I know the creature was able to penetrate the Enterprise's shields but a duranium container or something similar should have worked since the only reason the cloud could get inside the hull was through an open impulse vent. I guess the constraints of time (the creature was about to spawn) prevented them from working on a better solution.
"Obsession" always has been one of my favorite TOS episodes (which I suppose is obvious), but I've always wondered - If contact with the cloud was enough to give Kirk and Ensign Rizzo some kind of connection with it to where Kirk felt he could sense it thinking and planning and figure out where "home" was, it just seems to me that Spock should have gotten some kind of connection when it tried to drain his blood on the Enterprise. I guess the different hemoglobin composition must have had something to do with it, but it's always bugged me.
Of course, maybe Spock did get some kind of insight from the contact and it just wasn't mentioned onscreen - maybe that's why he said that the creature would spawn into thousands at Tycho IV. But it just seems to me that something like that would have been mentioned.
It would have been nice if they could somehow manage to capture the cloud and learn to communicate with it or at least study it in detail - assuming that there were others of its species around, a study might have revealed another weakness that would have allowed a defense against it that didn't involve ripping away half a planet's atmosphere - that was fine for Tycho IV, but if a cloud showed up on a populated world I don't think that would be a very viable solution. I wonder if it would have been possible to get a transporter lock on the cloud somehow, perhaps when it was in the act of drinking a jar of blood or something, and transport it into some kind of a sealed container. I know the creature was able to penetrate the Enterprise's shields but a duranium container or something similar should have worked since the only reason the cloud could get inside the hull was through an open impulse vent. I guess the constraints of time (the creature was about to spawn) prevented them from working on a better solution.
They already knew how it behaved: it warped around killing people and drinking their blood. As for how it can be defeated, they learned that too: by blowing it up. That's all they need to know.
It doesn't really matter "why" the alien does what it does. It eats blood and kills everyone it can. That's all it does - it can't change. That makes it a threat. And threats must be destroyed.
That will get them nowhere, because they have absolutely no idea how to find the creature. That is, if they destroy this first one before they know how it migrates, spawns or chooses its victims, they will not be able to protect anybody from the attacks of further clouds. Remember that starships assisting colonies always arrive a bit after the nick of time - the only way to protect targets that are not hermetically sealed would be to predict the behavior of the creature.
There's no way to know that. And we already know it doesn't kill everyone it can, as it only attacks specific people among those beaming down in the episode, and only killed half the Farragut crew in the backstory. Learning more about why that is would do a lot more in protecting the Federation from the beast than blasting this single individual to bits.
Kirk seldom destroyed threats unless they were clearly exceptional individuals, such as NOMAD or Landru or Vaal. Really, the only time he destroyed Klingons who definitely are a threat was in the teaser of "Errand of Mercy"; for the body of the episode, he switched to merely stunning them instead.
This is why it's all the more jarring to see him behave so irrationally in handling a member of a generally threatening species. Destroying the Space Amoeba was a regrettable case of fighting for self-survival. The Vampire Cloud was no threat to Kirk or his crew, though...
Timo Saloniemi
Maybe I'm missing something, but the vampire cloud killed a number of crewmen. It also killed Captain Garrovick and members of HIS crew. It was going home to spawn, and therefore threaten the lives of untold numbers of humans. If Kirk had been confronted by the cloud in the beginning of the episode, before he knew phasers wouldn't stop it no matter how fast he fired, he would have been attacked and killed too. It was a clear and present danger to anyone on the planet or in its path. When a life form runs out of food, it hunts. There was no means to communicate with it and since the thing didn't hang around and give anyone a chance before striking, Kirk did the only possible thing he could to safeguard lives.
Where in the episode is there even a hint that there was no threat posed by the cloud? The script stacked the deck pretty heavily in favor of having to kill it before it reproduced. Spock and McCoy needed convincing, not the audience.
The episode was also about revenge, guilt and obsession. That dictated Kirk's behaving in a way we never saw before.
Now if you want to talk about Kirk killing something that had the intelligence to be reasoned with, I direct you to the Salt Vampire on M-113. All he had to do was give the thing a bucket of salt and have a confab.
...And after all this, our heroes learned that the deaths were due to their own stupidity, and simple steel (?) walls and sliding doors will stop this strange monster that can waltz through combat shields.
And here the writers completely dropped the ball: the bit about it reproducing, something they no doubt thought upped the ante, actually undid the threat posed by the individual. If the creature was capable of spawning, then killing it would automatically be futile.
Indeed. So I don't fault Kirk for acting against UFP interests here. Although I do fault Spock for falling into the same pattern of behavior when logic would have dictated otherwise.
This one was known to be a unique individual, so killing it would do no harm. Except to the creature, that is, but as Mr. Laser Beam tells us, where's the problem with that?
Whether the Vampire Cloud could be communicated with and perhaps reasoned with was hardly established in the course of a few hours of action, most of which involved our heroes being unable to even see the creature...
Timo Saloniemi
Why? Killing it before it spawns solves the problem. Waiting means they have more of these things to deal with. I'm just not tracking with your line of reasoning.
The problem is they are killing the last of an intelligent species that could easily been reasoned with. Once the creature's hunger was satisfied with a salt lick, they could have sat down, reached an understanding as Crater did, and sent it home with a big salt stash. The killing of this creature was a far greater crime than the Vampire Cloud since the cloud could NOT be reasoned with and was just killing people wherever it found them. Professor Crater lived with the Salt Vampire for around two years without a problem.
One killed to survive because it had no choice, but left alone on a planet would pose no threat to the galaxy at large. The other killed to survive because if fed on human blood and attacked people and ships when it went to eat.
Really, unless I'm totally lost, I just don't see why killing the cloud is bad but killing the Crater Creature was a-okay.
But it has already spawned. It's a lifeform capable of spawning (although how Spock figured that out, we are never told), therefore it's an entire species already. Killing one beast leaves a trillion alive to do their worst.
At least Kirk and friends realized this much at the conclusion of "Immunity Syndrome", where they explicitly discussed the great likelihood of future encounters with the devastating Space Amoeba. Of course, that episode comes some 800 stardates later than the encounter in "Obsession"; perhaps our heroes learned something in between.
What good would the reasoning have done? This Lonesome George was doomed to go extinct anyway, unless she was actually Georgina and pregnant at the time.
And the Salt Vampire definitely had a choice: it was offered free salt, and it chose to kill instead. So it was a malevolent or perhaps deranged individual if it was sapient in the first place. Those can be reasoned with, yes - but those can also be killed in cold blood because they have forfeited their right to live.
The really interesting thing here would have been if Crater had actually learned something relevant about the biology or culture of the Salt Vampire and chose to argue with our heroes for the continuing survival of the creature on the basis of these facts before the beast killed him. Unfortunately, Crater either didn't have any useful facts on his side, or didn't want to reveal them - he just said the creature needs salt and is the last of its kind, doomed from the outset. With no argument for the continuing survival of the creature available (and the critter itself was involved in the argument, in the disguise of McCoy!), Kirk gave no specific orders to avoid killing the beast, and finally a desperate struggle left no other option but a panicky firing of a death ray.
...I'd actually consider that downright humane all the way, whereas killing the Vampire Cloud was a serious strategic blunder but morally a fairly indifferent occasion of putting a potentially non-sapient creature to death after hostilities.
Timo Saloniemi
Crater could have called for aid early if he was really interested in the Salt Vampire's welfare. But I think he was too afraid of losing his own private little heaven to risk it. If anyone else had found about the creature they'd have certainly stepped in and Crater wouldn't have gotten to win all the arguments anymore. So instead he kept the creature so hungry that it had to do what he wanted, which resulted in a situation where it was so desperate that it acted against its own long-term interests when the Enterprise showed up by murdering Kirk's men out of sheer desperation. By the time it made it onto the ship where salt was plentiful without killing, it was just a matter of time until it got backed into a corner. Too bad it couldn't have gotten aboard somehow without killing anyone first and arousing suspicion, it might have been able to hide out for months just disguising itself as nondescript crewmembers until it could get off the ship at a colony world or something. Sure, it would have died anyway eventually but an intelligent creature would have seen that (and from the ruins on M-113 prove it to be an intelligent species, assuming that it's species did in fact create those ruins). But Crater's selfishness changed all that.
It does make one wonder how the creature survived on the planet all alone before the Craters showed up, though. Sure does seem like an incredible coincidence that the Craters showed up just during the relatively brief time that there would only have been a single living specimen. I guess it's possible that the creatures have a lifespan on the order of centuries, or perhaps the creature wasn't in fact native to the planet but was a solitary traveler who crashed on the planet or something.
It does make one wonder how the creature survived on the planet all alone before the Craters showed up, though. Sure does seem like an incredible coincidence that the Craters showed up just during the relatively brief time that there would only have been a single living specimen. I guess it's possible that the creatures have a lifespan on the order of centuries, or perhaps the creature wasn't in fact native to the planet but was a solitary traveler who crashed on the planet or something.
I guess it's also theoretically possible that the creature is capable of hibernation, and this individual was awakened by the sudden presence of edibles; further creatures might remain on the planet, hidden from sensors by their hibernation, and unlikely to ever wake up.
Considering the creature's extreme predisposition towards getting its salt from humanoids rather than from salt shakers, we might also easily speculate it survived through cannibalism, and for that reason literally is the last vampire standing. Perhaps the species could have survived for several generations through cannibalism, until only small and isolated family groups were left here and there, and ate themselves to death. Crater just happened to stumble onto the most survivable location on the planet because that coincided with the best-preserved ruins...
The cannibalism interpretation for the beast's survival allows us to believe it wasn't the very last survivor, as if would have had a good motivation to lie to Crater about being one!
That is, if we can credit the creature with things as complex as lying. It's also possible it wasn't sapient enough for that, and merely made people see and hear what they wanted to see and hear: all the thinking would have been done by the victims, who'd put words in the illusion's mouth. If sapience is not part of the Vampire's makeup, then it may not have been the builder species - perhaps it was the local cattle, bred for a very simple diet, or the local bioweapon, bred for deadliness and also for control through a scarce resource like with the Jem'Hadar? Or then it (individual or species) may have deranged at some point.
In any case, I'd think going back to the Craters' dig would be relatively high up on the list of things to do for the scientifically curious arms of the UFP. Starfleet's military mission would no longer be affected by the planet, though. Unless the Vampire really was an outside agent... If it was an indigenous bioweapon, it's probably harmless because the ruins didn't suggest a starfaring culture; thus no examples would have spread offworld. Unless previous unwary archaeologists from other cultures carried them to the stars... Lots of possibilities there.
Timo Saloniemi
Considering the creature's extreme predisposition towards getting its salt from humanoids rather than from salt shakers, we might also easily speculate it survived through cannibalism, and for that reason literally is the last vampire standing. Perhaps the species could have survived for several generations through cannibalism, until only small and isolated family groups were left here and there, and ate themselves to death. Crater just happened to stumble onto the most survivable location on the planet because that coincided with the best-preserved ruins...
The cannibalism interpretation for the beast's survival allows us to believe it wasn't the very last survivor, as if would have had a good motivation to lie to Crater about being one!
That is, if we can credit the creature with things as complex as lying. It's also possible it wasn't sapient enough for that, and merely made people see and hear what they wanted to see and hear: all the thinking would have been done by the victims, who'd put words in the illusion's mouth. If sapience is not part of the Vampire's makeup, then it may not have been the builder species - perhaps it was the local cattle, bred for a very simple diet, or the local bioweapon, bred for deadliness and also for control through a scarce resource like with the Jem'Hadar? Or then it (individual or species) may have deranged at some point.
In any case, I'd think going back to the Craters' dig would be relatively high up on the list of things to do for the scientifically curious arms of the UFP. Starfleet's military mission would no longer be affected by the planet, though. Unless the Vampire really was an outside agent... If it was an indigenous bioweapon, it's probably harmless because the ruins didn't suggest a starfaring culture; thus no examples would have spread offworld. Unless previous unwary archaeologists from other cultures carried them to the stars... Lots of possibilities there.
Timo Saloniemi
Knight Templar
Commodore
Has anyone wondered if the sudden change in the Salt Vampire's diet changed its behavior, intelligence or ability to reason dramatically?
Assume the Salt Vampires consumed salt from another species. Which is a given considering how they were equipped physically and how they learned to prey on humans.
Then, the last survivor murders Nancy Crater in order to live. Then switches to salt tablets apparently for a couple of years, then starts preying on Kirks crew.
It is possible that the original species the Salt Vampires preyed on had not only salt that they consumed but trace elements that were important to the Salt Vampires health and mental stability and abilities. This would seem likely as the episode makes clear that the SVs desperately prefer obtaining salt from a living creature than eating tablets or crystals.
In any case, careful dissection of the Salt Vampire would be warranted.
Assume the Salt Vampires consumed salt from another species. Which is a given considering how they were equipped physically and how they learned to prey on humans.
Then, the last survivor murders Nancy Crater in order to live. Then switches to salt tablets apparently for a couple of years, then starts preying on Kirks crew.
It is possible that the original species the Salt Vampires preyed on had not only salt that they consumed but trace elements that were important to the Salt Vampires health and mental stability and abilities. This would seem likely as the episode makes clear that the SVs desperately prefer obtaining salt from a living creature than eating tablets or crystals.
In any case, careful dissection of the Salt Vampire would be warranted.
You missed the part where they used blood as bait?
They can hardly afford to wait until the cloud changes its mind (assuming it has one), lest more people die.
The only reason there were survivors in either of those cases is that there wasn't time for the cloud to kill everyone. Eventually it would have.
Tell that to Ensign Garrovick and Spock, who were there when it attacked them! The cloud is a threat to all life with iron-based blood. We've seen it.
Then take the Immunity Syndrome with the giant amoeba creature. They shouldn't have destroyed it, based on your rationale. Yet, the thing was about to divide and Spock calculated that in a few decades these creatures would consume the entire galaxy. You still want to push on the "let it live" idea?
Ok, let's tone it down a bit and compare the vampire creature with an endangered species of wolf. In more primitive times, the human being would be focused on survival and just kill it off, because of the threat. A more advanced human can easily protect itself from a wolf. But the vampire creature is not like a wolf. It is far more versatile and capable of much greater devastation. Kirk and company tried all they could to communicate with it, but to no avail. They also didn't detect any attempts for it to communicate with them either. "But they fired phasers at it." Yes, but the phasers had completely no effect. The creature was hungry and attacked the away team to feed. It didn't stop to say "hey, these creatures appear to be sentient." Thus, you are at a stalemate. You can't communicate with the creature and it's dead set on eating you when hungry. It can penetrate deflector shields and enter into spacecraft. It's very hard to stop this thing from attacking people. So, letting it spawn thousands is SUICIDE.
One can wonder where it came from... if there is one, then perhaps there are thousands elsewhere. Yet, in all of Starfleet recorded travels, you have just TWO reported incidents with the creature. It is rare indeed. And yet very deadly.
Yes, I do believe it a good idea to preserve rare forms of life, but it has to be tempered with compatibility. If it's extremely difficult to guard yourself against a creature that considers you a very viable form of food and has tremendous capability to elude your defenses, then... I think the answer is pretty clear.
...What?
Did a Vampire Cloud come rushing in every time Kirk tore more than his shirt? The blood bait only works on creatures that have already been located, as it has to be deployed in extreme proximity. To get to that proximity, Starfleet would need to go Jane Goodall on the creature(s), not Buffalo Bill. (The time for Buffalo Bill would come later, when he had a memo from Goodall on how to locate the prey to be slaughtered.)
What possible time constraint could have existed there?
If the creature could eat 200 Farragut crew before running out of time, it's very, very difficult to imagine how it would be incapable of gobbling up the sum total of Kirk's landing parties. It clearly wouldn't be sated by just two or three victims!
Yes, then they'd be totally protected. All they'd need to do is wear sufficiently thick hermetically sealed suits.
The impotence of the creature was well established at its most desperate hour: it can only be destroyed by the most extreme measures, but it can be rendered harmless trivially easily. The real trick in dealing with it is finding and outsmarting it. Which Kirk never really learned to do, because he was working under (self-imposed) time constraints.
That was a self-defense situation. Regrettable, as Kirk had to act against UFP interests, but unavoidable.
With the Vampire Cloud, there was no self-defense situation; furthermore, there was no hurry, as the creature did not yet threaten any inhabited world of UFP interest.
And of course Spock was speaking out of his ass. If this were possible, the creatures would already have done so. A hundred million times over, as they would have that many "few decades" available to them.
I don't. If they can't make it in this universe, they should be let to die. The reasons for not killing the Vampire Cloud are completely opposite: if we kill one, we will never learn how to kill another.
Timo Saloniemi
So Timo, based on your "If they can't make it in this universe, they should be let to die," statement, are you one of the folks who believes the Prime Directive shouldn't be violated to save a species endangered by, say, an asteroid strike?
I realize I'm going rather off-topic there, I just found it a somewhat curious statement.
I realize I'm going rather off-topic there, I just found it a somewhat curious statement.
Close proximity seems to trigger its attack, yes. But remember this thing can jump to warp speed in seconds and outrun a starship. Which means it can jump anywhere on the planet in moments to attack anything. VERY dangerous, if you ask me.
Hermetically sealed? I doubt it. The haemoplasm was in a sealed jar, which the creature penetrated with ease. So, it doesn't look like a crewman in a space suit has much of a chance. I don't see how the creature can be rendered harmless with trivial ease... please explain.
You forget how fast it can move. If it can travel faster than a starship, it can threaten any world of UFP interest. We just don't have any idea as to how extensive because the episode was too short.
A lifeform can be rare due to circumstances beyond its control. Yet, you still think it shouldn't be preserved, even if we could learn a great deal from it? And um... if we DO kill one then we know how to kill another, btw!
I'm canon-powered at heart, so for TOS I must believe that the PD would not come in the way of such salvation ("Paradise Syndrome"), but for TNG I must believe the opposite ("Homeward"). Yet altruism never seemed to power Kirk: he remorselessly eradicated some species in order to make life better for others, chiefly because these others either were like him, or had the potential to become like him. So some sort of vanity would seem to be the primary motivator here, and that should be compatible with letting die any creature or species that did not directly contribute to the welfare of Kirklings.
But our heroes would have had every motivation to prepare the bait so that it would be easily penetrated. In contrast, a sealed starship proved impenetrable, so that the creature had to channel itself through an actual opening - which led it, to its detriment, to a cabin occupied by a Vulcan. It probably mistook the entire innards of the ship for inedibles because of that... Remarkably, it did not even penetrate the apparently less than airtight doors of the cabin (see the crack below?) to seek for tastier stuff. So even "faking" a barrier should be of help.
How does the beast choose an edible target? If it failed to realize there were edibles inside the starship, just a few feet away, it probably needs to smell the prey. So a "penetrable" spacesuit (or even a TAS style life support forcefield) should again suffice for protection. That's how you survive in the battlefield, too: flak jackets don't really help against bullets, but camouflage uniforms do!
It can, but it didn't. For eleven years it hid. For untold years before that, it hid. It would be absolutely crucial to know why this was, and where it hid, and why, when and how it decided that it was time to feed on humanoid blood.
Depends on the effort required. Our heroes never engaged in any effort that would put human(oid)s at a disadvantage; any preservation cheaper than that would probably indeed be done, out of sheer scientific curiosity.
With the Borg, that's the exact opposite of the truth.And um... if we DO kill one then we know how to kill another, btw!
Intriguingly, the Vampire Cloud appeared to be a master of adaptation, too - fortunately, we saw no signs of a collective mind that would let other members of the species learn from the death of one. But if we kill our potential Judas goat, then the herd cannot be killed. At the conclusion of "Obsession", our heroes had no idea how or where or when to find further Vampire Clouds. That's the crucial step in killing them: once located, they can apparently be lured to become opaque to antimatter blasts for the duration of feeding on a blood bait. And a blast somewhat smaller than the impracticable one used in the episode might well be devised, once our heroes learned more about the creature. (Except now they can't.
)Timo Saloniemi
That's a pretty interesting take on things, and in my experience an uncommon one. I have to admit I'm honestly not sure what my own feelings are regarding the PD...on the one hand I'm in no way a proponent of Starfleet interventionalism, but on the other I'm not keen to let entire species go extinct simply because they didn't meet a "standard" for preservation. That last being said, the reality is that sh@t happens, and maybe it really shouldn't be Starfleet's place to start picking and choosing who gets to live and who gets to die.
It occurred to me that, while it would be more than a bit self-interested, perhaps one reason for the PD is that SF doesn't want to ever create a situation where one of its captains is in a position to think they just saved the next Khan Singh.
Happy to discuss further, but most certainly not looking for a confrontation on the matter.
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