TMP is the best film. It is not 'tedious' at all

To quote McCoy "Why is always called a thing?"

 

Because that's how it's presented I'm trying to determine if there's a satisfying way to make it a person and still retain its non-human-ness.

 

Sorry that was meant as a joke

 

Not a problem. I was thinking about the same line when I wrote it

 

I dunno, I feel that part of the mystique of TMP is that to some degree by the end of the film V'ger remains unknown and unknowable. To some degree I think the same goes for the Whale Probe. As the Borg Queen demonstrated, sometimes making an implacable antagonist more relatable is a misstep.

 

It's very zen In terms of the Whale Probe, the difference for me is that the Whale Probe is more of a MacGuffin. It sets up the conflict, then it's out of the story for the most part. V'Ger more or less IS the story.

There was a story I read decades back. I don't recall the title or the author. In the story this huge "thing" (there's that term again) lands on the earth, like something as big as an American state. Nobody can figure it out.They're not even certain if it's alive. Then it jumps away, is gone for a few years, and comes back. Thing is, that story is about humanity, and human reactions (people form a religion around it is all I recall). So yeah, it's unknown and unknowable, but we're not meant to be concerned about it. And it may be that we're not meant to git a rat's about V'Ger, but I think it would improve things for me if I could root for it on at least some level.

And "yes" on the Borg Queen.

 

V’ger is essentially a child that ventured into the unknown and came back unrecognizable and unknowable. I think that taps into a fear that ran particularly deep in the 20th century. (No doubt fueled by WWI and WWII, where technological progress forever changed the boys who left.) We see this in the anxiety among rural parents about college education as it became common — that going off to college would turn junior into an atheist and cause him to abandon the family farm — and it’s all over mid-century sci-fi, with its endless stories about how space travel will transform men into monsters or somehow cost us our humanity.

For TMP, I tend to think it’s important for V’ger to maintain its otherness; losing that would push the story in a very different direction and undercut the birth of a new life form marrying man and machine in the climax.

 

I agree with that part.

I agree with a lot of this too. The problem for me is that I'm (in the spirit of this thread) desperately trying to find a way to improve the depiction to a point where I'll care about V'Ger and about the movie itself as anything other than a philosophical treatise. As I watched it last weekend I was thinking "Decker's father takes a shuttlecraft ride into a similar piece of equipment to try to destroy it. If Decker Jr were to load up a shuttlecraft with antimatter..." I think that I'm supposed to be happy for V'Ger at the end, but instead I was thinking "Yeah, I guess that works too."

 

That's a good question...are we supposed to be happy for V'ger?

I don't recall ever feeling that way. I'm glad the Earth is no longer in danger, and I guess it's cool that Decker and Ilia found a way to be together and spawn a new life in the process, though Decker's inability to get over Ilia's loss always kind of bugs me as well (perhaps inherited from his father?). Not saying he shouldn't mourn her, but given the crisis they were in the middle of, I might have liked a bit more professionalism on his part at the time. Maybe I'm a V'ger too.

I like that the solution to the V'ger problem wasn't destroying it, though the movie kind of foreshadows that from the very beginning.

But am I happy for V'ger? Eh. I guess part of the problem is that V'ger plays no active part in the solution to its conundrum. Our Heroes figure out the problem and solve it for V'ger. Perhaps a more interactive solution would have made me care more?

 

Maybe "happy for V'Ger" is the wrong way to phrase it. I do get the impression that I'm supposed to feel that events as portrayed are a Good Thing (TM), though (birth of a new life form and all that), and like I said, I just don't care. I'd have been just as satisfied if somebody had found a way to reduce V'Ger to a large amount of cosmic dust. The result is the same: Earth saved. Now if V'Ger is a character...

Maybe the point of the Ilia and Decker elements of the Starchild (and there's no comparison to 2001, nothing to see here, move along ) were that they make it a character. Ilia is really a cypher, though. In typical Roddenberry fashion, she's an excuse to have an actress parade around in a skimpy outfit and say things like "I'm supressing my incredibly high sex drive," but she's not a character in the sense of someone we're invested in. Decker comes the closest, and I remember feeling sorry for him on opening night when Kirk relieves him of command. I think that making the connection between him and his father explicit, and making it a part of the conflict, would have been a huge step forward.

 

I agree. Decker is quite well realised. Ilia is there to give HIS story meaning. She's beautiful, she's unattainable. This is a trope often used in TOS whether it's inappropriate crewmen, doomed British women, or sexy robots. Our nerdy male fans don't get women and our nerdy female fans are just in it for the Spock candy so forget about the women.

 

Yeah, I wish they hadn't cut the direct association between Decker and Decker, Sr. It would have added a little more flavor and for non-fans it's a throwaway line.

I wish there was a way for real Ilia to survive longer before being probed. Her one non-professional conversation with Decker is the beginning of giving her some significant characterization, but other than that and some showing off of the ways she's different from humans, she's gone before we get any chance to get to know who she is, and replaced with a robot it's hard to feel much for either way.

Just imagine if TMP was a TNG film instead, and Troi got probed after 7 years getting to know (if not necessarily like) her. Or if it had been Rand or Chapel who got probed instead...

 

I strongly agree with you. It's what makes "tone poem" compilation videos like these so hypnotic and effective:

Firstly, congratulations on the re-watch. I hope you enjoyed seeing the movie again.

I don't think V'Ger needs to have a strongly-defined "personality" to be compelling -- and, to be frank, I'm not sure how that would even work. It's meant to be a vast object enshrouded in mystery, far beyond the strictures of conventional human functioning and understanding. In any case, as you have half-identified, the film employs proxies to "explain" V'Ger, much as something as esoteric as the concept of God can only be grasped by allegory and metaphor:

First Ilia when she is snatched from the bridge, and then, in response to Ilia's patterning, Spock completing his personal journey through the V'Ger orifice. Spock is also V'Ger's unofficial emissary from the moment he arrives on the Enterprise as a "courier". Which is particularly well-chosen wording on Chekov's part.

The film's dialogue is frequently laced with more meanings than are first apparent. Like any good film, TMP functions like a deceptively simple poem: what may first elicit a chuckle or a shrug both conceals and reveals a whole apparatus of interlinked meanings that one is ultimately beckoned (much as V'Ger beckons Spock and the Enterprise) to grapple with and resolve into a deeper whole.

It obviously wants to be "human" on the level of the latter. It's been doing the former all its operational life, since it was just the baby Voyager probe. However, a foundational part of human sentience is the component of our being that looks up at the night sky and ponders its origins. This naturally entails data-gathering, and much else. In that vein, V'Ger is unable to shake off its original programming and cannot move beyond its present anxieties or transcend until it recognises its own sentience and longing (much as Spock does when he journeys into what he considers V'Ger's inner mechanism and attempts his mindmeld).

In that way, it actually goes beyond its origins and its original mission, since it has "learned all that is learnable" and returned that information (in a kind of embodied form: its own consciousness) to its "creator" (i.e., humans). But now there's a new goal: seeking out the creator behind the creator, discovering new modes of being, traversing other dimensions. Could we achieve something comparable one day? It's unclear, but the movie gives us hope. V'Ger finally moves onto the next level when Decker melds with Ilia at the climax. One can interpret it as a moment of joy. The very fact we get to witness V'Ger's transcension, or "the birth of a new lifeform", is in itself a joyous event.

You could also argue that V'Ger has learned a degree of humility at the end, coming to see the limitations of its own thinking, and the emptiness of its earlier (now patently false) sense of completion ("I have everything I need" kind of mentality that leads it to conclude that "carbon units are not true lifeforms"), which is a trait many religious people argue is necessary to truly experience the divine. Yes, there's something quite pantheistic about TMP and the whole "Star Trek" ethos, truth be told.

To quote McCoy: "Why is any object we don't understand always called 'a thing'?"

I think it's a little arrogant of us, with all our human folly and limitation, to designate something we don't understand a "thing", denying it personhood and even beinghood. We're going to have to learn to do better than that if we want to truly embrace what might be out there in the larger universe -- a universe we only recognised anything like the true scale and composition of barely a century ago (it's humbling to think that Edwin Hubble only settled the great debate about whether we were the only galaxy in the universe or one of billions in 1929: around 35 years before TOS aired and only a mere 50 years before the release of TMP). The fact that the characters struggle to name what they're seeing beyond even he most basic of terms is a critical part of TMP's allegorical makeup.

V'Ger is most certainly a being once we move through its cloud layers and begin to get a sense of its inner structure. Granted, it could still be mistaken for a traditional starship stocked with an alien crew, in a strong and rather mundane mirror of the Enterprise, but we learn through Spock and Ilia it's something far grander than that.

So perhaps ignorance is a decent excuse -- to a point. But it becomes folly to put V'Ger down as a mere "thing" once the characters begin to relay important insights back to us. "Things" don't have needs, desires, or longings. The "thing" of V'Ger begins to dissipate and is replaced with "being" after the first act of the movie. I think we should be sensitive to that and recognise a process of discovery that allows V'Ger to be embraced as a unique being in its own right.

When I'm watching, I root for V'Ger -- because I feel the vessel's emptiness and loneliness the moment the passage through its dense cloud layers begins. Here is something imponderably vast, beautiful, oceanic, and alone. Jewels of plasma, sheets of energy "of a type never before encountered". And maybe no-one having ever observed V'Ger and seen this gorgeous majesty before. No companion, no friend, no lover on this lonely voyage. All hidden away -- and for what purpose? It pricks my emotions and makes me sad.

Those feelings of sympathy and awe only intensify when the transit over V'Ger's inner vessel begins. The impressive, basilica-like design of V'Ger's internal mechanism lends a dark, ominous mood to the film as subtle emotions swirl and bubble up, clarifying V'Ger's immense loneliness on its journey through the forbidding emptiness of spacetime. Once more, all this beautiful structure has been hidden away, unshared, and now, finally, someone is swooping by and taking a good look -- beginning to glimpse and acknowledge the beingness of V'Ger at last.

That sounds a little vindictive. V'Ger is an entity: a lonely entity "empty, incomplete, and searching". It deserves some measure of a viewer's sympathy -- even their empathy and understanding. Lucky that turning V'Ger into space dust isn't Kirk's first impulse or his last (though, as a precautionary measure, he does order the Enterprise to prepare for self-destruct, should a way not be found to pacify and resolve V'Ger's condition).

Ilia is also intended to teach the audience about their empty standards of beauty and perfection -- and is a lesson in how "base" our own sexual notions are, with regard to the supposedly "sophisticated" (but in actuality: markedly oppressive) society we've built instead (where treachery, greed, prejudice, violence, and exploitation are the norm). Deltans are meant to be the Hare Krishnas of Star Trek and well beyond that simian nonsense. It makes perfect sense that V'Ger would pick Ilia to be patterned and chosen as its representative.

While Ilia herself doesn't get much screen time before being patterned (she would surely have been a more developed and interesting character if the Phase II television series went ahead), she's a character I'm still invested in due to her sweetness with Decker, and the underlying mystery of their bond. Persis Khambatta is note-perfect in that short scene where the two bump into each other in the corridor following Kirk's admonition of Decker. I love how she sells their connection in a fluid gesture of concern, gentility, sadness, and just a touch of frustration/anger as she walks off. A few more scenes wouldn't have hurt, but we do get Ilia returning as a probe, and those little flashes of the old Ilia that remain.

There is some truth to that, but idealism has its place in Star Trek, after all -- yes, even sexual idealism. And Ilia is not entirely unattainable for Decker. He had her before. They had each other. But Decker broke away. However, there is still a chance for them to repair things; and sometimes, given how difficult relationships can be, especially when people seemingly want other things and split apart, that has the right measure of realism/idealism to me. That Ilia is key to the whole V'Ger mystery (consider the "Spock Walk" sequence) just heightens the erotic ambience and visionary scope of the film for me.