One of the few things that still seems out of place, given the originality of TOS, was their repeated of Terran cultures developing independently on other planets (the Romans, a parallel East/West cold war) even a complete duplicate Earth. Should we simply ignore these cultures/worlds...or is there a valid explanation for them. How do you account for the duplicate Terran System in Miri?
TOS and the duplicate Earths
- Thread starter Gotham Central
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I think ignoring it ruins a lot of the fun. I like to believe that the TOS universe is a fractured mirror with one timeline that went through some kind of cosmic
diffraction grating resulting in a number of parallel Earths.
It may even be a continuing process--one day, the Enterprise may come across itself during its travels.
diffraction grating resulting in a number of parallel Earths.
It may even be a continuing process--one day, the Enterprise may come across itself during its travels.
You beat me to it.
IIRC, this was a big selling point for the series - the idea that they could tell different stories about vastly different cultures from remote places, yet still have them cosmetically resemble our Earth so as to be cost effective and accessible to viewers.
I think it's actually a pretty clever idea, myself.
...Of course, our heroes don't believe in that law in most episodes. They consider parallel development impossible or incredible in, say, "Miri" and "Patterns of Force", before the single reference to the law - and in "Paradise Syndrome", after the reference!
Even when this one reference is made, in "Bread and Circuses", Spock remarks how the planet is an "amazing" example of parallelism. In Spockspeak, that means "something is badly wrong here"...
Perhaps Spock was being sarcastic about the Earth "scientist" and his utter nonsense of an explanation, quoting the pseudo-Roman planet as the one that will finally discredit Hodgkins for good and force Federation science to look for better answers. It's just Kirk who seems to take the law halfway seriously, and he, too, uses the definer "amazing" there.
Timo Saloniemi
Even when this one reference is made, in "Bread and Circuses", Spock remarks how the planet is an "amazing" example of parallelism. In Spockspeak, that means "something is badly wrong here"...
Perhaps Spock was being sarcastic about the Earth "scientist" and his utter nonsense of an explanation, quoting the pseudo-Roman planet as the one that will finally discredit Hodgkins for good and force Federation science to look for better answers. It's just Kirk who seems to take the law halfway seriously, and he, too, uses the definer "amazing" there.
Timo Saloniemi
The parallel earth settings was something I real enjoyed in TOS due in most part to the social commentary. I found TNG and most other Trek incarnations lacked the political and social issues presented inTOS.
Really? I always felt TNG took even less effort to differentiate the forehead-bump-heads from American Earthlings.
Generally, I agree that there was often a lack of originality in trying to come up with races that were 'different' beyond their appearance.
Miri's planet does present the one case that's VERY hard to explain.
The others, you can swallow the idea that "there's only so many ways to make a shoe". The Roman world having developed a language that was EXACTLY like modern day English was hard enough to explain, but when an entire planet's coastlines match up EXACTLY with those of Earth, something's going on.
I really wish it'd been explained in a later episode. Even in one of the 24th century series.
The others, you can swallow the idea that "there's only so many ways to make a shoe". The Roman world having developed a language that was EXACTLY like modern day English was hard enough to explain, but when an entire planet's coastlines match up EXACTLY with those of Earth, something's going on.
I really wish it'd been explained in a later episode. Even in one of the 24th century series.
Yeah, human cultures on faraway planets are fairly easily explained, because the Star Trek universe is teeming with cultures that are capable of moving around largish populations across interstellar distances, and have been capable of this throughout the existence of the human species. Moreover, we have seen two possible motivations for doing this: abduction of a small community for use as slave labor, or abduction of a small community for preservation. (Although I really suspect that the latter motivation was only the imagination of our heroes in "Paradise Syndrome", and the Preserves in fact hijacked the Americans for slave labor.) The slavers could impose specific languages on their slaves, and these languages could then survive unmutated if the slaves were introduced to a modern records-keeping system that tends to preserve language.
Terraforming is also within the technological grasp of many cultures. It's probably not the same slaver folks doing it, though: the slave labor thing is relatively petty and not worth the terraforming effort. Another, older and stronger group or culture could have done the terraforming for colonization purposes aeons ago.
Time travel is also almost trivially easy in the Trek universe, so it wouldn't be difficult to assume that a driven individual from Earth might go a thousand years to the past of planet Omega IV and decide to introduce the US Constitution there, for idealistic reasons. We saw many a driven individual mess with the fates of entire planets in the 2260s by using mere starships; give these guys a timeship and something like "Omega Glory" is bound to be the result.
It is only with exact duplicate Earths like in "Miri" where we really start to rattle the limits of plausibility. But let's not forget that "Miri" really is a unique case, the only perfect duplicate Earth ever encountered in Star Trek. I think we could allow for this single mystery, even if it is a very mysterious mystery...
Frankly, the only thing I find amiss here is that we don't see enough duplicate Vulcans or Andors or Tellars. But we do see or hear of some non-Vulcan Vulcan cultures, like the Romulans or the Mintakans or the Debrune or perhaps the Rigel V folks. It's a good start...
Timo Saloniemi
Terraforming is also within the technological grasp of many cultures. It's probably not the same slaver folks doing it, though: the slave labor thing is relatively petty and not worth the terraforming effort. Another, older and stronger group or culture could have done the terraforming for colonization purposes aeons ago.
Time travel is also almost trivially easy in the Trek universe, so it wouldn't be difficult to assume that a driven individual from Earth might go a thousand years to the past of planet Omega IV and decide to introduce the US Constitution there, for idealistic reasons. We saw many a driven individual mess with the fates of entire planets in the 2260s by using mere starships; give these guys a timeship and something like "Omega Glory" is bound to be the result.
It is only with exact duplicate Earths like in "Miri" where we really start to rattle the limits of plausibility. But let's not forget that "Miri" really is a unique case, the only perfect duplicate Earth ever encountered in Star Trek. I think we could allow for this single mystery, even if it is a very mysterious mystery...
Frankly, the only thing I find amiss here is that we don't see enough duplicate Vulcans or Andors or Tellars. But we do see or hear of some non-Vulcan Vulcan cultures, like the Romulans or the Mintakans or the Debrune or perhaps the Rigel V folks. It's a good start...
Timo Saloniemi
It makes you wonder if there may be one or more duplicate or parallel Earths out there, even in another Galaxy, that is technologically identical to presesnt day (23rd/24th century) Earth and has there very own version of Starfleet and go about in similar looking Starships.
Well technically A Piece of the Action and Patterns of Force are cultural contamination.
The Omega Glory is more problematic as it is a world where the United States and Communists evolved independently.
Miri's world COULD have a reasonable explanation if one tried hard enough. For instance, we know know that the interphase in Tholian space leads both back in time and to parallel universes. Its possible that the interphase is naturally occuring, in which case, one may have been large enough to snatch a parallel solar system into the the main universe. Magna Roma is also nearly identical to Earth, so the same might be true in that case as well.
However without this explanation or even speculation it just looks kind of silly.
I used to dislike the parallel Earths episodes when I first saw them - I wanted to see aliens and exotic landscapes (which TOS couldn't afford much I realised later).
However some of them are fun and the fact that the parallel Earth in Miri is pretty much impossible makes its apearance more interesting. Just suppose what the reaction would be if we sent out an intersteller space probe and it did find an exact Earth duplicate or several such planets.
It suggests there is more to the TOS universe than our current understanding would allow.
If you accept the premise that the Preservers (or whomever) took the sample groups from Earth and other worlds to establish preserves for those species, then maybe their own version of something like the Prime Directive meant that they kept those sample groups in holodecks, thinking they were still on their own worlds, until they brought them to worlds that they had altered to be like our world - in some cases right down to the coastlines.
Maybe they weren't even abducting sample populations. Maybe they were using transporter duplication. If they shipped enough duplicates to another "Earth", the ancestors of the Yangs and Comms could have been copied hundreds of years before the U.S. or U.S.S.R. were ever thought of, and still emerged on that world more or less like they did here.
Or maybe we can carry that farther: the Preservers were the Dyson Sphere builders, and had plenty of energy available to do transporter duplication - on a planetary scale!
Maybe there's some odd reason that every game of Civilization we play really does result in an entire parallel Earth being generated somewhere out in space.
Maybe it's the Q, screwing with us.
Maybe they weren't even abducting sample populations. Maybe they were using transporter duplication. If they shipped enough duplicates to another "Earth", the ancestors of the Yangs and Comms could have been copied hundreds of years before the U.S. or U.S.S.R. were ever thought of, and still emerged on that world more or less like they did here.
Or maybe we can carry that farther: the Preservers were the Dyson Sphere builders, and had plenty of energy available to do transporter duplication - on a planetary scale!
Maybe there's some odd reason that every game of Civilization we play really does result in an entire parallel Earth being generated somewhere out in space.
Maybe it's the Q, screwing with us.
I believe the novelization by James Blish explained it as being a lost Earth colony that had deliberately terraformed the planet to look like that. Of course, that story also placed the episode about 700 years in the future.
There was also a sequel novel (The Cry of the Onlies) that posited a different explanation from the episode, though not the same as Blish's. In this case, I believe it was interference from on high - specifically, Richard Arnold (spit), who ordered that all references to Miri's world being a duplicate of Earth be deleted.
Pity. I would have liked to see an explanation. Perhaps with the new permissiveness among novels, they can do. There's already been one:
In the excellent novel Ex Machina I think the explanation for Magna Roma - the planet from "Bread and Circuses" - is that the Preservers are responsible.
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