Star Trek: Voyager Rewatch: “Spirit Folk”

All I can think to say is that it’s surprising to see Bryan Fuller telling such a banal story as this. I would’ve thought that the future creator of Wonderfalls, Dead Like Me, and Pushing Daisies would’ve been able to find some kind of edgy, surreal, or macabre twist to a fluffy holodeck story.

Although I do kind of wonder if the sheer ridiculousness of it was something of a deliberate satire of everything wrong with Trek holodeck stories. If so, though, it didn’t work.

@11/benjamin: We’ve seen holodeck characters reacting to “real-world” events since “The Big Goodbye,” although that may also have been due to a glitch in the program. After all, it’s their job to be interactive and to respond adaptively and convincingly to whatever the players might say or do. So it makes sense to me that their basic responses would be designed to be inclusive for maximum realism and flexibility, and that a filter saying “Disregard out-of-character conversations and actions by the players” would be laid in separately on top of that.

@26/bgsu98: “Maggie somehow has vague memories of being a cow when the Doctor changes her back. This is a big can of worms that should never have been opened. Holodeck characters retain some memories of their previous “existences” as holographic objects or characters? They remember being a rock? Or Sandrine? Or Captain Proton’s robot?”

Of course not. Maggie is a character within this specific MMORPG; she wouldn’t exist within those separate programs, any more than a Pokemon would exist within a Sonic the Hedgehog game. They’re not real entities with independent existence, just illusions created through a series of computations. Presumably what happened here was that the character of Maggie within the open-world MMORPG was basically just reskinned as a cow. You can do that with game characters, alter their appearance in various ways, while the program still operates them as if they were the same characters. You can find online videos of glitches where that happens accidentally, e.g. where a human character in Red Dead Redemption is mistakenly skinned as a horse so you get a bizarre horse monstrosity moving and talking like a human.

In this case, the Maggie NPC within the program was modified to behave like a cow as well as look like one, but it’s still the same NPC within the MMORPG, so it’s reasonable that the NPC would retain a memory of what occurred to it within the game. But there is no reason whatsoever why that should have anything to do with separate holodeck programs, any more than an edit I make to a Word document should affect my browser.

@37-39: Ian Abercrombie was also one of the best screen incarnations of Alfred Pennyworth, in the otherwise mediocre 2002-3 Birds of Prey TV series.

@48/cap-mjb: “Possibly it’s to allow for their effect on non-holographic objects the participants might have brought onto the holodeck with them (eg someone’s hat being shot off).”

Well, that makes no sense. There are other ways to simulate such effects without actually violating every sane standard of public health and safety by having live projectiles in a recreation area. Holodecks use force fields and tractor beams, so it would be ridiculously easy to yank someone’s hat off without actually endangering their life. And presumably nobody would bring a real possession to the holodeck actually wanting it to be damaged by a bullet.

Anyway, the Mythbusters showed once that it’s actually next to impossible to shoot someone’s hat off with a bullet; it’s a pure Hollywood invention. So if you wanted to create that effect in a holodeck, a “real” bullet would be the last thing you’d want.

 @51/cap-mjb: Of course it matters what we think a story should do. We’re not forbidden to criticize the creative decisions of a story’s creators. We’re not required to blindly, unquestioningly accept whatever bad and stupid decisions they make. Internal consistency is NOT the only permissible standard by which to analyze fiction. It is by far the most superficial, least important level of analysis, merely cataloguing what happens in a story rather than actually thinking about the ideas conveyed, their merits, and their flaws.

Would you say it doesn’t matter whether a meal at a restaurant is cooked well or badly, that the customers should just swallow down whatever slop they’re served without a peep of complaint? Would you say that if your computer came with a defective hard drive (or whatever computers have these days), you should just accept that without question rather than complaining to the manufacturer? As consumers of fiction, we have every right to complain when its quality falls short. Of course it matters. It always matters.

@63/noblehunter: I wasn’t trying to start a “which is better” argument. I was saying that if TNG had come along a few years later, or if its creators had been more up to speed on cutting-edge concepts, they might never have imagined a system as cumbersome as holodecks in the first place but might instead have gone with a simpler VR-based system of the sort that was already being depicted in fiction like William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer. They might not have reinvented the wheel if they’d known about the existing option that was already out there.

@64/garreth: Oh, come on, The Matrix did not invent virtual reality. It didn’t even invent the term “Matrix” for a virtual reality — it was beaten to that by William Gibson’s Neuromancer in 1984 (the seminal cyberpunk novel and a hugely important influence on The Matrix) and by Doctor Who: “The Deadly Assassin” in 1976.

@66/garreth: Well, as a general rule, you can always safely assume that any idea you see in film or television science fiction was already around in prose fiction at least a decade or two earlier. Film and TV rarely innovate SF concepts; they distill and popularize them.

Heck, the earliest depiction of virtual reality I can think of is in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel The City and the Stars from 1956. It opened with a rather prophetic sequence of a group of teenagers participating in an immersive virtual role-playing game from their respective homes.

@70/cap-mjb: “Okay, well now you’re just talking in the abstract instead of addressing the point.”

No, I’m saying that I already thought it was a stupid idea when “The Big Goodbye” first did it back in 1987. I complained about it then, and I was annoyed when they repeated it here 13 years later. That is not “abstract” — it was my real-life experience as a television viewer being annoyed by an implausible plot point. The purpose of fiction is to entertain its audience, so whether or not a viewer is satisfied is not an abstract question, but a concrete one. Abstractions are things that don’t exist. You’re the one being abstract by talking solely in terms of the imaginary continuity of the fiction.

” it seems possible that, in computing terms, it’s easier to just have the bullet as part of the simulation and have it behave like a bullet except on people, than to calculate what a bullet would do if it was there and simulate the effect.”

First of all, that’s not the case at all. In terms of the raw numerical calculations, yes, the computer would need to simulate the trajectory and impact effects of the bullet; but there’s absolutely no reason why it would then have to generate a “solid” force field construct to represent the bullet when the pure mathematics would tell it everything it needed to know. You can see this all the time in computer simulations — look at any behind-the-scenes video of digital visual effects in movies or TV, where they selectively add and remove parts of the animation so you can see the different layers. Every version of the image is computed from the same calculations, but the animators choose which parts of the calculation to render visually and which to leave invisible. It would be just as easy for a holodeck to calculate and simulate every physical effect of a bullet without needing to render the bullet itself. Even if there were some species whose visual perceptions were so accelerated that it would be possible for them to see the bullet in flight, then the holodeck could project it as a purely visual image without force-field solidity. There’s just no reason whatsoever to go to the additional trouble of making it solid.

Second, even if it were somehow harder to do it without the bullet (which it wouldn’t be), any remotely sane approach to safety design would require doing it anyway. It would be easier to build cars without seatbelts and airbags, but obviously that’s no excuse for neglecting safety.

@79/KatFisher: That’s true, of course, but again, I’m not arguing whether one or the other is better; I’m just saying that if the timing had been different, it’s conceivable that the creators of TNG would’ve had the idea to use VR instead of inventing the holodeck concept, in which case the evolution of the franchise would’ve been quite different. After all, a ton of other science fiction films and shows have used VR in the past several decades, so TNG is kind of the odd one out in that it doesn’t use the same idea everyone else uses. So that’s kind of weird if you think about it. It’s probably a function of when TNG came along, while portrayals of VR in the mass media were still in the nascent stage and hadn’t become as ubiquitous as they were by the turn of the century.

Really, though, the concept of holographic entertainment in Trek significantly predates TNG. And I’m not just talking about the holographic rec room in the animated series’s “The Practical Joker.” That was the first onscreen depiction of the concept in Trek (though TNG’s makers ignored or were unaware of it, since they treated holodecks as a novelty in “Encounter at Farpoint”), but the first mention of the idea in a Trek context was in 1968’s The Making of Star Trek, which asserted that the Enterprise‘s recreation complex had holographic chambers that could be used to view immersive 3D movies or lifelike recorded “letters” from loved ones back home. The book was written with the cooperation of the production staff, so presumably the makers of TOS had that idea, making me wonder why they never used it. It would’ve been easy to simulate holograms the same way TNG did, by doing a simple dissolve or jump cut and have an actor appear in the shot, or have a “virtual” location materialize around the actors, not unlike how the Talosian illusions were shown in “The Cage.” Perhaps they just never found the right story. Or maybe they thought it would be too difficult to explain to the audience.

@82: Not every observation is a value judgment. I don’t care whether it’s “good” or “bad.” I’m just saying it’s interesting to consider what might have been.