Magic to Make the Sanest...confirmed "bottle episode"

[Spot261]

Here's a clue;

None of it is real, none of it makes sense, all of it is ridiculous.

You can't accept aliens with the power to redefine reality, jewellery that makes spaceships go faster than light and torpedoes which instantly create life on a planetary scale then claim a magic mushroom is just silly.

 

[dahj]

You can't accept aliens with the power to redefine reality, jewellery that makes spaceships go faster than light and torpedoes which instantly create life on a planetary scale then claim a magic mushroom is just silly.

Especially since the last one actually exists...

 

[Jadeb]

The notion that nothing can be too stupid for Star Trek, that we should just accept any idiocy served up, no matter how ludicrous it seems or how divorced it is from actual science, because it's all pretend -- that just baffles me. Sounds a lot like the old argument that sci-fi didn't need to make sense or be well done because, hey, it's just kids' stuff.

The giant space amoeba is stupid too, but that was 48 minutes of a show produced over 50 years ago, alongside stuff like Bewitched and the Beverly Hillbillies. TV has changed since then, as the Discovery showrunners love to tell us, and viewers are right to expect a bit more. Especially when it comes to a central conceit of the show.

 

[BillJ]

The notion that nothing can be too stupid for Star Trek, that we should just accept any idiocy served up, no matter how ludicrous it seems or how divorced it is from actual science, because it's all pretend -- that just baffles me. Sounds a lot like the old argument that sci-if didn't need to make sense or be well done because, hey, it's just kids' stuff.

The giant space amoeba is stupid too, but that was 48 minutes of a show produced over 50 years ago, alongside stuff like Bewitched and the Beverly Hillbillies. TV has changed since then, as the Discovery showrunners love to tell us, and viewers are right to expect a bit more. Especially when it comes to a central conceit of the show.

I definitely understand where you are coming from. But the science of Discovery is just more make believe. Star Trek has always been fantasy wearing a sci-fi cloak. It will never be the hard (or even soft) sci-fi some people imagine it to be.

 

[eschaton]

No, it’s not realistic at all. It’s pure fantasy, like everything else on Star Trek. Space fungi, warp drives, time crystals, teleporters. It’s all bullshit invented purely to justify a story set in space. They’re plot devices and nothing else. It doesn’t matter how they work because they don’t exist. I care about the story and I don’t really care how realistic fantasy elements of it are. I love Star Wars too and the fact that the Force is entirely fantasy doesn’t bother me in the slightest. This is because Star Trek isn’t a realistic examination of future technology, worlds and history. It’s about people dealing with various issues and the setting happens to be in the future and in space. I really don’t understand this bizarre obsession with plot devices. It’s like watching Friends and getting obsessed with the coffee house and trying understand how it works.

I fully recognize that the reason the transporter was introduced in Star Trek was because the TOS production crew didn't have the budget for shuttle landings in every episode. That does not mean that it would be impossible for a far future culture to do. As I said, it's basically a matter of processing power and bandwidth. Provided a computer is advanced enough to "record" your entire body to an atomic (or perhaps subatomic) level, transmit the resulting data, and rebuild you elsewhere, there should be a person on the other end who believes they are you. Whether or not they are you - or if you died when your initial body was disassembled - is a philosophical question.

Remote transporting, however, is likely impossible. Basically you'd need something like a replicator on the receiving side to "print" your new body. It couldn't just materialize out of thin air.

More broadly it's basically become a meme now that so many Star Trek inventions have become real tech. Communicators look a lot like older cellphones. PADDs look a lot like modern tablets. 3D printers are basically crude replicators. Prototypes of real cloaking devices have been made. So have real force fields. So have real tractor beams. Even warp drive doesn't seem like it's totally impossible. One could argue that at the time all of these were "fantasy" contrivances - and they were. Nonetheless, early 21st century technology already has crude versions of many of them. In a lot of ways, the Trek world is actually less technologically advanced than our own.

More broadly, Trek is not fantasy, it is science fiction. Not hard science fiction of course, but they set out to be a pretty rigorous science fiction show compared to contemporaries when TOS was made - to the point that it was beloved by published science-fiction authors, many of whom penned individual episodes. Trek moved away from this in time because canon kinda froze the science aspect, and the self-referential aspect made it become more of its own thing. But it's never been space fantasy.

 

[eschaton]

I definitely understand where you are coming from. But the science of Discovery is just more make believe. Star Trek has always been fantasy wearing a sci-fi cloak. It will never be the hard (or even soft) sci-fi some people imagine it to be.

Trek is at its core a sci-fi show, not a fantasy show, because much of its repertoire comes from two core sci-fi concepts:

1. Let's take ordinary people and put them into hypothetical scenarios which are impossible under current technology and see how they'll react.

2. Let's use aliens, or other groups unrecognizable to us, as allegory to explore contemporary social issues.

Star Wars is space fantasy, full stop. The robots and rayguns are just trappings which are put over a fundamentally fantasy story with swords, wizards, royalty, and destiny.

In Star Trek, a lot of the plots don't make any sense whatsoever if you take out the "sci fi" element. Where they do make sense, they just become mundane contemporary drama/action shows. There's really no thematic connection with fantasy whatsoever.

 

[Jadeb]

I definitely understand where you are coming from. But the science of Discovery is just more make believe. Star Trek has always been fantasy wearing a sci-fi cloak. It will never be the hard (or even soft) sci-fi some people imagine it to be.

Agreed, and I wouldn't want it to be hard sci-fi. From my perspective, there are two issues here: One is scientific accuracy/fidelity, which I think most people care about only in a minor way -- interesting for a few minutes while reading about how a show got it wrong. The second issue is much more important to me, and that's reasonable plausibility. Can I, as a viewer, buy this concept long enough for it not to take me out of the story? That's where the spore drive fails for me. It's less a sin against science than a sin against good writing.

If you tell me an ancient, super-advanced civilization built a portal through all time and space, I'll go with you on that, because I'm agnostic about the possibility (and, if your story is done in 48 minutes, have little time to consider it). If you take an existing Earth creature, blow it up a zillion times its actual size, give it magic superpowers and tell me it can now teleport through time and space, surely you will understand when I express incredulity. And to then make that a central conceit of your show? You've lost me. You've stretched a goofy idea too far, given me time to think about it and broken my suspension of disbelief.

 

[Greg Cox]

I think you are misremembering the jellyfish. They are basically shape shifting replicators.

I stand corrected. Haven't seen that episode in decades.

But the point is, when the wacky sci-fi stuff goes too far is really subjective, but I still don't see how "time crystals" and "spore drives" are somehow a bridge too far, compared to protomatter and space amoebas and such.

And, yes, I love all that wild, sixties-era craziness: Apollo, Jack the Ripper, transporter beams splitting people into two, salt vampires, etc. God forbid Trek ever takes its "science" so seriously that you lose that sort of colorful, pulp fun and imagination.

 

[Jadeb]

Yeah, it's rather subjective. Time crystals bother me not at all -- other than their tremendous in-universe implications -- but the spore drive drives me nuts.

I think one of my complaints with the spore drive is that stuff that passes for "magic" in the Trek-verse is typically explained as tremendously advanced intellect. (The Talosians, for example, are so powerful because they literally have giant brains.) The tardigrade, though, is basically a cow with magic powers. Without that veneer of intelligence, its capabilities pass into the realm of pure fantasy. I don't care for fantasy much in general but especially dislike it in Trek, which ought to be a champion of reason.

 

[Greg Cox]

Spock is a champion of reason. I'm not sure McCoy agrees.

Again, these are judgement calls. A exotic alien lifeform with strange biological properties (the tardigrade) doesn't seem any more unlikely that, say, a shimmering guy in a toga with god-like powers, as in "Arena."

The line between fantasy and sf has always been a blurry one, particularly when you're just employing both as myth and metaphor and allegory. Fantasy, SF, horror . . . all equally valid ways to explore the human condition. And STAR TREK has dabbled in all of them, much like THE TWILIGHT ZONE before it.

 

[jaime]

I stand corrected. Haven't seen that episode in decades.

But the point is, when the wacky sci-fi stuff goes too far is really subjective, but I still don't see how "time crystals" and "spore drives" are somehow a bridge too far, compared to protomatter and space amoebas and such.

And, yes, I love all that wild, sixties-era craziness: Apollo, Jack the Ripper, transporter beams splitting people into two, salt vampires, etc. God forbid Trek ever takes its "science" so seriously that you lose that sort of colorful, pulp fun and imagination.

Part of it for me is presentation. Technobabble is part of Treks presentation, and has been around a looong time. It’s the SF wrapping around the fantastical concepts. It’s why Transporter is Trek, and Teleporter is not, and is a bit cheesy. It’s why Cloaking Device works, and Invisibility Shield does not. Ignoring any real or unreal science, Treks presentation is part of its overall mis-en-scene. Another example from an earlier Trek that doesn’t quite sit right is Wormhole Aliens. Wormhole Inhabitants or similar would have worked better, rarely does Trek use the word ‘aliens’, at least in my memory...largely because the federation is made up of so many disparate species that the word has no meaning in that sense...’alien to x place’ yes, but it’s hard to recall any dialogue than leans into ‘the aliens’ especially when they aren’t alien at all, because they are in their native place.
Harry Mudd can call it a Time Crystal, and maybe the heroes can grudgingly take it on, but Starfleet has loved its techno babble for many years. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but teching the tech is part of the package I feel. It’s also nowhere near as opaque as some people seem to think.

 

[cultcross]

Trek is at its core a sci-fi show, not a fantasy show, because much of its repertoire comes from two core sci-fi concepts:

1. Let's take ordinary people and put them into hypothetical scenarios which are impossible under current technology and see how they'll react.

2. Let's use aliens, or other groups unrecognizable to us, as allegory to explore contemporary social issues.

Star Wars is space fantasy, full stop. The robots and rayguns are just trappings which are put over a fundamentally fantasy story with swords, wizards, royalty, and destiny.

In Star Trek, a lot of the plots don't make any sense whatsoever if you take out the "sci fi" element. Where they do make sense, they just become mundane contemporary drama/action shows. There's really no thematic connection with fantasy whatsoever.

I agree. Star Wars (canon SW at least) is fantasy, Star Trek is science fiction. I think it all comes down to how the property tackles the speculative world it creates. Is it a swashbuckling heroic story about great deeds, romances, destiny and family? Are the details of the technology and fantastical elements sketchy, largely left to the tie in books and feel oddly out of place when they do pop up? Probably fantasy. Does it engage intellectually with the fictional world, problem solve, present practical dilemmas arising from the speculative elements and focus fairly heavily on the specific details of technology and space travel? Probably science fiction. There is a grey area of course, but Star Trek is pretty solidly sci-fi for me most of the time. Especially TOS, TNG, VOY and ENT. DS9 and DSC contain more fantasy elements, certainly, but still stay this side of the line in my book.

 

[Greg Cox]

On the other hand, playing devil's advocate, does it really make that much difference what jargon you use if the plot function is still the same? You can call a flying carpet an "anti-grav textile" but it's still basically a flying carpet . . ...

 

[XCV330]

"anti-grav textile"

for the love of all that's good, please put this in a book.

 

[Mudd]

Star Wars is no more or less science fiction than Star Trek. Science fiction is just a label for a certain subgenre of fantasy.

 

[jaime]

On the other hand, playing devil's advocate, does it really make that much difference what jargon you use if the plot function is still the same? You can call a flying carpet an "anti-grav textile" but it's still basically a flying carpet . . ...

One is made, technologically, engineering, research teams, discoveries of a scientific nature, implied in its name. (Because there’s a lineage of names, even if you get to things like USB ports via something silly, they make up something not so silly later.) The other might be the same, but, the research is going to be ‘magical’ which very very rarely works the same way (Discworld and Thaumaturgy springs to mind. But there’s good reason for it there. Narrativium reasons that shine in solid octarine) The failure of such an item would also be different. I think there’s a set of rules that is at play between creator and audience, and when the rules get broken rather than bent, that’s when you lose your audiences support. We see some of that at play here. Mushrooms and crystals are very much fantasy items, magic, especially when the whole series was painted head to toe in Alice in Wonderland. (Do people really think that Andorian mask was an accident? Or was Mudd late, late, very very late for an important date?)

 

[cultcross]

On the other hand, playing devil's advocate, does it really make that much difference what jargon you use if the plot function is still the same? You can call a flying carpet an "anti-grav textile" but it's still basically a flying carpet . . ...

I think it does make a difference how things are presented. Magic engine which makes us get somewhere fast can be presented a very wide variety of ways. At the core, they're all a magic engine. But some take the effort to make them seem at least plausible, if not with actual science then at least with a semblance of seriousness and internal consistency. Others are literally just plot devices. Usually a franchise does one or the other. Trek and BSG talk about fuel reserves and reaction calculations and travel times, Star Wars, until recently anyway, just pressed go. Firefly just pressed go. It creates a different atmosphere, I feel. Focuses the story differently.

 

[jaime]

Star Wars is no more or less science fiction than Star Trek. Science fiction is just a label for a certain subgenre of fantasy.

Good, and early, SF and Fantasy writers, would disagree with you. Even Shelley was very careful to fill Frankenstein with medicine.

 

[Greg Cox]

Good, and early, SF and Fantasy writers, would disagree with you. Even Shelley was very careful to fill Frankenstein with medicine.

On the other hand, Verne criticized Wells for not being scientific enough, what with the time machine and invisibility serum and anti-gravity Cavorite. So this is an old debate.

But are we really going to argue that H.G. Wells of all people wasn't a proper science fiction writer?

Personally, I've always preferred authors who aren't easily pigeonholed as SF, fantasy, or horror: Matheson, Sturgeon, Lovecraft, Serling, Leiber, Bradbury, Burroughs, etc. Bending genre boundaries is more fun than keeping everything in tidy little boxes.

I guess it depends on what your priorities are. Some folks are really into Science Fiction, while some of us put the emphasis on Science Fiction.

 

[Agony_Boothb]

You can call a flying carpet an "anti-grav textile" but it's still basically a flying carpet . . ...

It worked for that song in Aladdin

I can show you the world
Shining, shimmering splendid
Tell me, princess, now when did
You last let your heart decide?

I can open your eyes
Take you wonder by wonder
Over sideways and under
On a Anti-grav textile