Tomorrow is Yesterday
- Thread starter Magellan
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Another thing that makes no sense. Earth and the sun are supposed to be eight light minutes in distance from each other, correct? Even at just light speed it would only take eight minutes for the ship to fly there, and they are going up to warp nine (I'm basing this on the 4th movie as well). Wouldn't they over shoot?
Maybe the sun's gravity is slowing down their actual speed, and the high warp factor is partly to fight the gravity?
That was a huge problem for me until the CGI fx version came out, which visually implies (or at least allows you to figure out) that the ship is circling the sun at warp 9, and then spiraling in for the slingshot manuever.
The original fx, and the dialogue, leave you thinking the ship is heading straight for the sun at Ludicrous Speed, and somehow taking a long time to get there. And that's not the case.
In other words: it makes not a lick of sense.
Pretty much.
Episodes like this make me seriously hate time travel stories and wish they would never do them because there's always something that doesn't make sense or is downright stupid.
I'm even annoyed by TVH. Kirk is selling his glasses. Spock questions this. "Aren't those a gift from Dr. McCoy?"
"And they will be again, that's the beauty of it" Kirk says.
No. No they won't be. Not for this version of you. Maybe for an earlier version of you. Argh.
I'm even annoyed by TVH. Kirk is selling his glasses. Spock questions this. "Aren't those a gift from Dr. McCoy?"
"And they will be again, that's the beauty of it" Kirk says.
No. No they won't be. Not for this version of you. Maybe for an earlier version of you. Argh.
Ok, that makes sense.
I always thought that meant the glasses are a gift to him again because he is able to sell them for the money they need. Actually what else could they have sold but the glasses?
I took it as Kirk thinking he will still receive those same glasses in the 23rd century, despite parting with them in the 20th century.
That, and the scene with Scotty trading the formula for transparent aluminum, reveals an entirely unserious approach. They used ST IV's comedic aspects as a license to get silly.
On TV, when they worried about accidentally changing history it gave the show at least an air of "real people dealing with real problems." Time travel was still bogus, but it was portrayed as a serious thing. Not so in ST IV.
It's also playing with the predestination paradox that crops up in time travel stories.
From the glasses point of view, they will be a gift from Dr. McCoy to Kirk again in the future. The glasses are caught in a time loop. The antique shop owns the glasses for 300 years. McCoy buys the glasses and gives them to Kirk. Kirk goes back in time 300 years and sells them to the antique shop. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Of course, this assumes it's the same pair of glasses and that they came from this antique shop and that they survive the 300 years. Another possibility is that after TVH there were 2 identical pairs of glasses on Earth and McCoy buys one of those two pair in the 23rd Century. Well, not exactly identical, since Kirk's glasses have a broken lens. It's not often you can find a pair with the lenses intact.
Such a predestination paradox (maybe I'm using the wrong term) creates another unique problem. We see the same situation come up with the watch in Somewhere in Time and the medallion in Timerider. The first time I heard this problem was a quote from James Doohan at a convention. If the glasses (watch, medallion) from the future go back in time, are left in the past, and then make it back to the future again to be acquired by the time traveller who takes it back in time, thus creating this repeating loop for the glasses (watch, medallion); then this raises one big question - how did the glasses (watch, medallion) come into existence in the first place?
Actually in the novelization of Star Trek 4, didn't Scotty tell McCoy that Dr. Nichols did invent transparent aluminum. So they were actually just helping things along. I guess that would be a predestination paradox, correct? I know in the film version though it seems like he's just cavalier about it when he says, "Well how do we know he didn't invent the thing"?
Never mind about that, what kind of amazing metal are the glasses made of? By perpetually looping through the timeline, the glasses would quickly become billions of years old!
FWIW, I just took it as Kirk employing a bit of verbal hyperbole.
He probably was. McCoy probably had new frames made to order in an antique style to fit with Kirk's penchant for them. The pawnbroker wasn't up on manufacturing, and didn't, even couldn't, tell the difference.
Couple of quick comments (might have been mentioned before).
-"The Enemy Within" establishes that you can combine two bodies into one using the transporter.
-"The Naked Time" showed the Enterprise spiraling into Psi 2000 before the time warp so I thought that they were doing that in this episode as well.
-The episode treats the flow of history as a singular thing so what I think is happening by the beaming is a diverting of the flow back into its proper channel, so to speak.
-"The Enemy Within" establishes that you can combine two bodies into one using the transporter.
-"The Naked Time" showed the Enterprise spiraling into Psi 2000 before the time warp so I thought that they were doing that in this episode as well.
-The episode treats the flow of history as a singular thing so what I think is happening by the beaming is a diverting of the flow back into its proper channel, so to speak.
I would maintain that THIS Kirk is not going to be receiving the glasses from McCoy again because that happened in THIS Kirk's past. THIS Kirk is not again going to have the birthday in which McCoy gives him the glasses.
Bingo!!!! Damn, I said I wasn't going to look at the thread again! But your summation seems so cogent, logical, and short that I couldn't resist.
I don't think so. In "The Enemy Within," the two faux-Kirks are physically dissolved by the transporter. Then their patterns (which are just data sets) are used as the basis for re-creating Kirk-prime's pattern (plus the memories of both sub-units).
Two bodies are not combined. Two bodies are dissolved, and their patterns are interpolated to make the pattern for a single body, which is then assembled.
In an early draft of the script it's basically stated that each "half" has half the original's molecules. Yeah. Exactly.
An early draft doesn't mean beans. We know that's not how the story ended up, because if Evil Kirk had only half the mass of Kirk-prime, then Janice Rand would have had 45 lbs. on him, and their wrestling match would have gone very differently. It might have been hilarious.
In the final version, the transporter got extra mass from somewhere for two Kirks, and then disposed of the extra mass when it was time to re-create Kirk-prime.
There's also the fact that both Kirks were physically unstable and actually dying as the result of being split apart! In other words, the Transporter combined two unhealthy (partial) people to make a single healthy (complete) one. Plus, it seems all the memories were retained.
In Captain Christopher's case, the Transporter was being asked to combine two healthy (complete) people into an already complete body. Plus remove all the memories of the older one of them.
You know what also does that? Killing the older one outright!
In terms of the extra mass needed to create a (temporarily stable) Kirk duplicate, a Transporter machine automatically did the same thing with Riker a century later. But even in the original TOS episode there are indications of a massive energy transfer, which Scotty's panel reads as something like a burnout (presumably a result of the extra energy being converted into matter for the duplicate Kirks).
In Captain Christopher's case, the Transporter was being asked to combine two healthy (complete) people into an already complete body. Plus remove all the memories of the older one of them.
You know what also does that? Killing the older one outright!
In terms of the extra mass needed to create a (temporarily stable) Kirk duplicate, a Transporter machine automatically did the same thing with Riker a century later. But even in the original TOS episode there are indications of a massive energy transfer, which Scotty's panel reads as something like a burnout (presumably a result of the extra energy being converted into matter for the duplicate Kirks).
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