Both of which winning the temporal cold war as they are so ancient that the temporal weapons actually repair the ships.
Star Trek: Picard
- Thread starter SHIELD Agent 47
- Start date
I think Picard Season 3 was a great example of how deep fans are into easter eggs nowadays. I think people have forgotten that when easter eggs started being a thing it was workers having fun and it was not intended that the audience would even notice them.
I just saw a clickbait article about why Kirk's body was in Daystrom Station, according to show runner. It didn't answer the question. No answer wouldn't be bizarre, really, but there were those saying he would be involved in the finale somehow. And it was just an easter egg. I don't pay close attention to the screen when watching a show, usually. I had to go rewatch that whole sequence because I was just listening and glancing. Having Kirk's body was silly. Calling it "Project Phoenix" was next level silly.
But I don't really remember thinking before how silly it was to begin with that Picard just covered his body with large rocks and walked away. Did he cover up Kirk's involvement altogether? If not, why deny him a funeral?
I just saw a clickbait article about why Kirk's body was in Daystrom Station, according to show runner. It didn't answer the question. No answer wouldn't be bizarre, really, but there were those saying he would be involved in the finale somehow. And it was just an easter egg. I don't pay close attention to the screen when watching a show, usually. I had to go rewatch that whole sequence because I was just listening and glancing. Having Kirk's body was silly. Calling it "Project Phoenix" was next level silly.
But I don't really remember thinking before how silly it was to begin with that Picard just covered his body with large rocks and walked away. Did he cover up Kirk's involvement altogether? If not, why deny him a funeral?
I do wonder how long they were on the planet before rescue came. Maybe they had to rough it a few days or even longer before Star Fleet could get out there. Maybe Picard just wanted to give him a proper burial there where Kirk made a huge difference saving millions of lives.
I remember this being a thing people got upset about at the time. The real explanation is of course that it would have been awkward and less meaningful for the movie to change locations suddenly to show Picard at a grave in Iowa or whatnot. I'd also assume that Kirk already got a funeral in 2293. Edit: And IDW says Spock came later to retrieve the body I guess?
The easter egg thing is a pendulum swing. In four and a half seasons, Trek went from "we can't sell this again without completely reinventing it" to Guinan selling Pop! Vinyls of the TOS crew or whatever. I haven't read it, but I wonder if "Project Phoenix" is a reference to the Shatnerverse somehow.
The easter egg thing is a pendulum swing. In four and a half seasons, Trek went from "we can't sell this again without completely reinventing it" to Guinan selling Pop! Vinyls of the TOS crew or whatever. I haven't read it, but I wonder if "Project Phoenix" is a reference to the Shatnerverse somehow.
It makes sense that they'd remove his body if they are going to all the trouble of removing the D saucer. Eventually those Earthlings are going to Mars and they'll find a non-Earthling body. I hope they appreciate having an actual class-M planet adjacent in their system. They probably think that always happens.
But removing the body so Veridians won't find it is one thing. You bury it somewhere. You don't put it in a managerie of horrors.
But removing the body so Veridians won't find it is one thing. You bury it somewhere. You don't put it in a managerie of horrors.
100% agreed. Especially about those lucky Veridians, probably think it's normal the way we think it's normal to have a giant moon that's as big in the sky as the sun and makes it easier to find your way around at night once a month. I can't think of any possible reason for keeping his body in a stasis pod in Daystrom. Of course, I can't actually think of a good reason for Picard's body either. At most it'd be sent to some medical research facility to study irumodic syndrome, after which the changelings had it sent to Daystrom so they could ... make it a bigger heist to cover up. Maybe Daystrom just collects Enterprise captains.
I was thinking that Soong was actually working at Daystrom. It doesn't explain why he is allowed to keep the body, just because he's curious about it, but then we are on strange territory here. The robot got to start out at Starfleet with Picard's seniority and Picard's son treats the robot like he is his dad or something. So having a funeral would be weird.
Maybe Soong and the Robot agreed it was a fair trade.
Maybe Soong and the Robot agreed it was a fair trade.
Last edited:
I still insist that if you think positronic Picard doesn't count as Picard, then the same logic still applies to the transporter, because it is still exactly the same handwave.
Yeah, you are kinda quoting me in your quote AND in your response. But I don't think it is the SAME handwave.
It's still an Easter egg and the TOS biobed actually doubles down on it. Kirk died in the 2370s. They wouldn't keep him alive with a 100-year-old biobed just because he is that old. To me the egg is super dumb and super disrespectful. If they actually build it into a plot, change the supers to ultras. How did they bring him back to life? Unicorn blood? Scifi tech that resurrects people usually brings them all the way back. It doesn't leave them where they have to be on a breathing unit for...what 30 years?
I can't tell the sound apart from the TNG medical tricorder or find any TOS clips that use it. If there's a TOS sound effect in there, it's purely for the member berries and anyone involved would say it's a coincidence in-universe, but I just can't even find it.
I ran into an article talking about Terry Matalas's comment on Kirk's body while I was looking up the clip for comparison, and he says he included Kirk's body and the on-the-nose "project" name as a plot thread for someone else to pick up later if they wanted, without committing to it himself. This series has a lot of those. I cringed the second time I watched the series and noticed Jack's line on the bridge of the former Titan-A now Ent-G while playing Captain to set a course for the M'talas system. Somehow I don't think this is because Jack had an in-character connection with M'talas Prime (Planet Crime from Raffi's story).
So Kirk's body is probably an attempt to do an early MCU thing. Like the Infinity Gauntlet in the background in the first Thor movie. I can't wait to see the retcon that Kirk's body in Daystrom was fake actually, after we find out in a future series instead that Kirk's real body was nabbed and resurrected by the Borg before Spock got there.
I can't think of any in-universe reason Kirk's body might be significant or any easier to resurrect than anyone else. Picard's dead body was at least in a uniquely ideal situation for preservation. Kirk had been dead in a hole for what must have been days at least.
I would still say that any technology that claims to "transfer consciousness" to avoid this line of philosophical quandary is the same handwave. There are other handwaves with the transporters, like the Heisenberg compensator, but technical details don't address the philosophical question, or explain why people can be conscious during the transport, or explain that one time Picard got transported into space as energy and could still talk. You can have all or none of those things and "consciousness" is still not normally a thing that can be "transferred". The real handwave is just magic: souls exist in Star Trek, and you can transmit them wirelessly or by cable, or via telepathic facepalm and any number of other one-off methods for a particular plot. Because they're an undefined "energy".
The real social pragmatism is with Data. The one that died in S1 was quantum nonsensed with the one that died in Nemesis, but the new one is very explicitly a copy with none of the usual handwaves.
I ran into an article talking about Terry Matalas's comment on Kirk's body while I was looking up the clip for comparison, and he says he included Kirk's body and the on-the-nose "project" name as a plot thread for someone else to pick up later if they wanted, without committing to it himself. This series has a lot of those. I cringed the second time I watched the series and noticed Jack's line on the bridge of the former Titan-A now Ent-G while playing Captain to set a course for the M'talas system. Somehow I don't think this is because Jack had an in-character connection with M'talas Prime (Planet Crime from Raffi's story).
So Kirk's body is probably an attempt to do an early MCU thing. Like the Infinity Gauntlet in the background in the first Thor movie. I can't wait to see the retcon that Kirk's body in Daystrom was fake actually, after we find out in a future series instead that Kirk's real body was nabbed and resurrected by the Borg before Spock got there.
I can't think of any in-universe reason Kirk's body might be significant or any easier to resurrect than anyone else. Picard's dead body was at least in a uniquely ideal situation for preservation. Kirk had been dead in a hole for what must have been days at least.
Quoting you in my response in the sense that what I said was implied in what you said? I guess that if everyone who steps out of a transporter is a copy of a person that just died, the fact that they're treated the same is a form of social pragmatism in the same way that the other relationships Picard maintains after becoming a robot would be, if that's what you mean.
I would still say that any technology that claims to "transfer consciousness" to avoid this line of philosophical quandary is the same handwave. There are other handwaves with the transporters, like the Heisenberg compensator, but technical details don't address the philosophical question, or explain why people can be conscious during the transport, or explain that one time Picard got transported into space as energy and could still talk. You can have all or none of those things and "consciousness" is still not normally a thing that can be "transferred". The real handwave is just magic: souls exist in Star Trek, and you can transmit them wirelessly or by cable, or via telepathic facepalm and any number of other one-off methods for a particular plot. Because they're an undefined "energy".
The real social pragmatism is with Data. The one that died in S1 was quantum nonsensed with the one that died in Nemesis, but the new one is very explicitly a copy with none of the usual handwaves.
In the sense that I've talked about it recently in this or another Star Trek thread. I am particularly fond of thinking about how Riker talks in an episode about how he spends the time cooking because replicated food is just not quite the same when the same technology is okay for his brain. And that everyone just seems to be okay with having themselves totally obliterated twice a day as long as a copy with all their memories and boyish charm will continue the adventure.
If you've read the followups to Ender's Game, they give a more holistic approach to transporters. They just say we found out you really do have a soul and it can be transmitted instantaneously by the same sort of technology that allows instantaneous communication across the galaxy. They just kinda disentangle your soul from this matter, transmit it, then entangle it to new matter and what is really you makes the whole trip. I think Star Trek is a little reluctant to go into the territory of all of us actually being a non-physical essence because a lot of the fandom would feel like it was affirming religious concepts when Star Trek has generally treated religion as something that a society eventually grows out of or eventually finds out is aliens. And maybe they are stuck with that. A lot of fans would probably feel betrayed if they retconned that a transporter moves your soul around and the body it is in is no more important than the uniform it is wearing. But it is a strange position to be in when they've ALSO explicitly shown us that Vulcans have some form of soul that is pretty well understood by a society ruled by logic. The Katra may not exactly be your real self piloting a body, but it something closely related and would certainly be enough for transporter technology. It can be transferred through a mind meld, so I would think a computer could do it too. Spock was still Spock after putting his Katra in McCoy, so it seems to be something that is just copied. Then he died and was dead and the genesis wave created a new body from the genetic material and that body seemed to be totally conscious. Naturally grew a new Katra? But the new one could be copied over when it was time and the new Spock was regarded to be the old Spock.
It would also help explain how so many species eventually evolve to non-corporeal beings if they've REALLY been souls the whole time, but souls that hadn't gained the ability to live a useful life without connecting to a body.
----
But specific to Picard.... Star Trek has a few times given us alien technology that can transfer a consciousness and Vulcans in fact for sure have souls and we've had those moved around. And the transporter in a non-explicit way keeps you being you in a way that everyone is comfortable. But Picard Season 1 didn't give us any soul transference machine. To the best I am aware, Picard went up there and died and they brought back his body because it was the respectful thing to do instead of eject it into space and the eggheads said, "Wait, we don't have to bury it." I don't see any explicit implication that his consciousness was transferred somehow. The copy was more complicated than Data's but wasn't it copying nonetheless? They didn't have a backup. I mean maybe some novelist will come in and say they used a recent transporter log, but I think the straight read is that they just scanned his brain and copied all of his memories and personality and whatnot onto a positronic net and built a body that looked like him. Isn't that what I am supposed to be seeing? So he is copy just like Data is a copy.
The Vulcan soul, specifically, was proven to exist for us-the-viewers back in the Genesis Trilogy films, though in-universe there were apparently skeptics prior to Spock's resurrection and refusion.
We never do learn, at least within the 24th century setting, what effect that may have had on Vulcan society.
The straight read at the time was that they weren't sure such a thing was really possible. I just refreshed myself on wikipedia and it was Sarek that told Kirk to go get his body back and take the Katra to Vulcan. The wiki summary believes that it wasn't to resurrect him, but to properly lay him to rest. Maybe in the long forgotten past, they actually used to resurrect bodies someone and stopped ethical reasons. Maybe they used to give living bodies to old katras for keeps and stopped that for obvious ethical reasons. It is an unusual circumstance to have a perfectly good body that already belongs to the katra, right?
In Enterprise, we learned that a katra could be store in a pot and someone could commune with their wisdom and that was just a hundred years before, not the long forgotten past. So at least in retcon form, katras aren't considered mythical. I think it was just that putting a katra into a body for keeps hadn't been done in a long, long time.
He was taken bodily into the Nexus and returned after nearly a hundred years. I'd imagine scientists would want to take a close look at his tissues (Picard's too, for similar reasons, but there's a whole host of weird things going on with Jean-Luc's carcass, so they'd probably want Kirk's remains as a "control").
Yeah I can buy that. I’m not as familiar with TOS compared to latter shows, but Kirk was also stuck in that in between state with the Defiant. Maybe those two events made his body worth preserving/resurrecting. AFAIK, Kirk and Picard are the only dead (and in tact) bodies to have been in the Nexus and return (whereas Guinan is alive, Soren went boom, and we haven’t touched on the other 45 El-Aurians to know).
TM may have left it as a thread for others, but it is interesting that the Nexus is a fire like energy ribbon. A Phoenix also is associated with fire. The Bring Back Kirk campaign from the 2000s seemed to think there would be an echo of Kirk in the Nexus, which I don’t think is the case. But who knows, maybe that’s how they’ll do it. Would fall into fanfic territory, and would probably suck, but we also have Discovery fighting for that honor so who knows.
TM may have left it as a thread for others, but it is interesting that the Nexus is a fire like energy ribbon. A Phoenix also is associated with fire. The Bring Back Kirk campaign from the 2000s seemed to think there would be an echo of Kirk in the Nexus, which I don’t think is the case. But who knows, maybe that’s how they’ll do it. Would fall into fanfic territory, and would probably suck, but we also have Discovery fighting for that honor so who knows.
If you're looking for a loose rationalization, that works as well as any. There are a whole host of weird things going on with everyone's bodies in Star Trek and Kirk is not even top tens material. Barclay turned into a spider. If the logic held, they'd have to send everyone's bodies to Daystrom as a matter of course.
And to be clear, the katra transfer was the telepathic facepalm I referred to. I think you're right that even the Vulcans didn't know it could be done until it was, until it was retconned in Enterprise, but either way, it happened, so souls work.
Gotcha! There is a wrinkle with this though. Replicators are consistently referred to as being "programmed" as if it's a manual or at least deliberate process. Replicator patterns are of reasonable size, like holodeck programs, so a replicator on a shuttlecraft can have a decent selection of meals for some number of species. Meanwhile, transporter matter streams have a data component to them, but it's massive - the transporter buffer is special, volatile memory of some kind that Scotty had to force into a self-diagnostic loop to retain a pattern indefinitely, and even then it had a 50% success rate. I think this is actually spelled out in the technical manuals? We've never seen someone put a sandwich *into* a replicator and beam it "up" to create a program, and I really think that just isn't how it works. We've seen chemicals replicated after analysis, and objects replicated from scans of their physical features, and those both sound like god-mode versions of technologies (sequencing and 3D printing) that exist in the real world with finite amounts of data.
I think in TOS they had those little nutrient cubes, and over time they figured out how to approximate various foods in a compressed computer language of nutrient bits. So I think replicator food isn't just not real in the sense that a replicated hamburger was never a cow, it's not real in the sense that it's the 24th Century equivalent of an Impossible Whopper.
Pulling out this bit first to say, if you have souls, you have to have an explanation of where they come from, because new people are being made all the time. The new body wasn't just the old body brought back to life, it had to grow up all over again, so I assume it got a soul the same way babies do, I.e. magic.
In the case of Picard, you'd have to assume that Data and Picard's bodies just sort of came with them too, or they spontaneously generate when you turn on a new brain or whatever.
Yep. I was a hair away from mentioning the Traveller in my last post. If human vibes can shape warp fields and fold space, they have to be made of something.
I thought it was explicit. AI Soong built the machine to transfer his consciousness into a new body, and then they plugged Picard into it instead.
Reminding myself that Picard S1 is only the second worst season of Star Trek ever aired, I went back to the source. What Data says in the simulation is this: "Before your brain functions ceased, Drs. Soong and Jurati, with help from Soji, were able to scan, map, and transfer a complete neural image of your brain's substrates." The word "transfer" is in there, but in the seemingly in the same sense that "transfer" is often used in sci-fi with reference to digital data that's really being copied and destroyed. The word "substrate" is odd, since it literally means the "layer below" with respect to something else on top of it. Metaphorically, a digital memory medium is a substrate wrt the data it contains, so it implies that something's getting left out, but brains don't record memory in the same way a chunk of digital memory does in any case and the physical arrangement of the network matters.
Working backward, Soong's computer says that the golem is ready to "receive engrams" when it finishes cooking earlier in the episode. I know "engram" as just a generic sci-fi word for brain data, originally coined in a wrong idea of neuroscience. But looking it up, though, I see that Wikipedia associates the original concept of engrams with a "substrate" as well.
Going back to the first appearance of the golem, in the previous episode, Jurati asks Soong if he's "cracked mind transfer" and Soong says that no, the guy Jurati killed was the "substrates man", which is why he needs her help.
So what's absolutely explicit there is that despite dying of a brain condition, Picard wasn't actually braindead. (Not that I expect braindeath in particular to be the line of metaphysical significance, since that's just the medically conventional line of no return that almost no one comes back from and if they do they generally wish they hadn't, but it does happen historically and it'd be a little precious to insist that those individuals had received new souls in the process. Anyway.) Picard was explicitly still alive when they plugged him into the machine. What's explicitly missing is any reference to consciousness or a soul as some kind of invisible energy that's being zapped around like we get elsewhere in Trek, except implicitly in Jurati's phrase "mind transfer", something that Data seems to describe more verbosely still using the word "transfer" to refer to classic rip & burn.
The difference is insignificant from my perspective, since I'm in the real world and get along fine without a soul at all, but I have to concede that within Trek context, you're mostly right (except the part about him being dead.) The most natural reading of that dialogue is that simply copying brains by any means other than a Vulcan mind meld or a transporter accident is such a difficult task that it took the brightest minds of the 24th Century to do it, it had never happened before, and it was done for the very first time with Picard, and nothing of particular metaphysical weight was taken out of Picard's old cranium, so a sufficiently advanced medical technology could have resuscitated the dead Picard after the process and there'd just be two of them.
And that's philosophically distinct from Spock giving his katra to McCoy and then going off to do other things before he died, because souls are magic and don't think about it. Even if they'd both been around at the same time. Don't worry about it, they're the same guy.
I ran out of characters.
But to go back where we started....
(I mean, if I was in Starfleet Command's position and had their best interests at heart, of course. After the synth ban, the complete lack of concern for the XBs and Romulans, and Project Proteus, I would be happy to invite the fifth column over for tea.)
Jack has a line to Riker about Picard being a synth when he's angry about Riker pushing him to accept Picard as his father, though, so that one feels like it's explicitly addressed. He got over it.
But to go back where we started....
The idea that anyone in Starfleet would care about the philosophical wiggle is a bit of an ask, especially considering that the far bigger hurdle at the end of Picard S1 is that regardless of whether he's a copy or a katra/paste, Picard is now a synth, and Starfleet hates synths, but they hopped over that one during a commercial break. Putting myself in their position, I think I'd be less trusting. Like, a perfect copy of Picard would be perfectly qualified for the same job he was in, but we just picked up a robot duplicate of the admiral from the planet of robots we've been murdering. Not sure I'd trust it was an unadulterated Picard without some key adjustments in there regardless of the method involved in creating him.
(I mean, if I was in Starfleet Command's position and had their best interests at heart, of course. After the synth ban, the complete lack of concern for the XBs and Romulans, and Project Proteus, I would be happy to invite the fifth column over for tea.)
Jack has a line to Riker about Picard being a synth when he's angry about Riker pushing him to accept Picard as his father, though, so that one feels like it's explicitly addressed. He got over it.
Have you heard of the Shatnerverse?
To me it would have made FAR more sense to keep it a secret that Picard is a robot. But everyone seems to know. Even people that haven't seen him for 20 years. Like it was the cover story of every magazine on the newstand one week.
The scene where Jack asks the robot how he survived Iromodic Syndrome is REALLY weird. I thought so even at the time. Because for a second I thought Jack didn't know and then it suddenly dawns on him when the robot says he didn't. WHEN DID HE FIND OUT? Does Beverly keep tabs on them all and just stay hidden? Or did Jack find out earlier today and then forget? In either case, I would think that as he sat there, "Oh my gosh this is an amazing robot" would be really close to his front burner.
The scene where Jack asks the robot how he survived Iromodic Syndrome is REALLY weird. I thought so even at the time. Because for a second I thought Jack didn't know and then it suddenly dawns on him when the robot says he didn't. WHEN DID HE FIND OUT? Does Beverly keep tabs on them all and just stay hidden? Or did Jack find out earlier today and then forget? In either case, I would think that as he sat there, "Oh my gosh this is an amazing robot" would be really close to his front burner.