Spock's vision of V'Ger's journey

[GeorgeKirk]

Uhh, didn't the montage of single frames in Spock's meld include images of Miss Piggy? Those images were never meant to be legible, so it's not necessary to believe the actual images were in V'Ger's database. They were just things the filmmakers chose to create a subliminal impression. It would be a mistake to take them literally.

So, in other words Miss Piggy isn't canon?

 

[Maurice]

No, no, a thousand times, no. There's no Vader or Piggy in that sequence. They're optical illusions. "Vader" is just the apparent shape of gap between sections of Epsilon Nine as the camera moves (and loses that shape after a moment as it does), and "Piggy" is just some grillwork and a couple of dark spots that give the impression of Miss Piggy...just as some clouds look like anvils or horsies.

See?

And See?

(click to zoom if necessary)

 

[Christopher]

^I think you misunderstand what we're referring to. Those are clips from Spock's journey through V'Ger. What we're talking about is the lightning-fast montage of images that are flashed onscreen after Spock begins melding with the crystal on the neck of the giant Ilia image.

 

[Maurice]

^I think you misunderstand what we're referring to. Those are clips from Spock's journey through V'Ger. What we're talking about is the lightning-fast montage of images that are flashed onscreen after Spock begins melding with the crystal on the neck of the giant Ilia image.

The "Vader" and "Piggy" images are popular myths and consistently reported to be right after Spock's line "But who, or what are we dealing with?", and constitute the images I posted (look at the black shape on the first).

The images that appear in Spock's visor during the mind-meld are are variations of the following (I just went through it frame by frame):

• Voyager
• Klingon Ship exterior
• Klingons
• Epsilon 9 exterior
• Epsilon 9 personnel seen at opening
• Ilia
• Pioneer 10 plaque graphic overlain on the other images

The portions of the images shown and how much they've been blown up vary, but those are all the images that flash over Spock's face.

 

[Mirren Audax]

In TMP, Spock travels through V'Ger and sees a representation of V'Ger's journey including the Epsilon 9 station (and the Klingon ships in some versions IIRC) as well as various planets, moons etc.

Do you think V'Ger had assimilated the planets as it had the Klingons and Epsilon 9?

There were never Klingons seen in the Spock Walk. It was in concept art and perhaps storyboards, but never in the film. Spock's spacewalk, from the moment he fires the thrusters til when Kirk catches him is exactly the same in every edit of the film.

It's an interesting question about exactly what those "dimensional images" were. There are images of galaxies and so forth, and it's beyond unlikely that V'ger "patterned" 400 billion stars. I'd say that the images represented everything V'ger saw, scanned or digitized (unless it zapped the planet that made it).

The next question is where were these images when the Enterprise was drawn through the same orifice? Did V'ger switch off its memories? Or was Spock not "seeing" as much as getting the mental impressions since he was flying through whatever constituted V'ger's memory?

The Klingons were described in the novel, and in the Marvel comic adaption, and freeze-frame if you had the DVD in 1979, but it was all in the mind of Robert McCall, bless 'im!

 

[Bones2]

It'd be something even more special if you had the DVD in 1979...

 

[TigerOfDarkness]

When did the VHS tapes come out?

 

[Christopher]

As near as I can tell, the first home video release was of the 1983 ABC-TV extended edition, which was distributed on videotape (probably Beta and VHS at the time) as well as laser disc (the progenitor to DVDs, optical discs the size of LP phonograph records). I used to have the laser disc edition; I think it took up both sides of one disc and one side of a second. The extended edition was the standard home-video version until the Director's Edition came out.

 

[Maurice]

TMP was also issued on Laser Disc in the theatrical cut.