From: hal@rain.org
Date: Sat Jun 12 1999 - 20:03:30 MDT
There was an episode of Star Trek Voyager this season with a similar
idea, but I didn't care at all for how it was handled.
The crew of the Voyager discovers that the ship and crew are starting to
fall apart. The matter they are made of is beginning to decay somehow.
At the same time we notice that recent events which the crew describes
do not match the Voyager timeline we have been watching this season.
Tom and B'Elanna are suddenly getting married, for example, which has
only been hinted at in the series.
Upon investigation the crew discovers that they are not the "real" crew.
They are duplicates, made of "bio-mimetic" material which Voyager had
encountered last season. At that time a couple of the crewmen had been
duplicated, causing some confusion. Eventually Voyager had departed
the planet where this material existed, but not before it had mimicked
Voyager and the entire crew. The imitation crew members were unaware
of their artificial state and took on the motivations of the original
crew, trying to head back for the Alpha quadrant and home. This had
gone on for a year or two but now the bio-mimetic material was becoming
unstable and starting to revert to its original form. In a short while,
indications were that the material would become completely unstable.
It was a terrible shock to the crew to learn that they were not "real"
but mere imitations. Some of them reacted with existentialist despair,
considering lives to be futile and without purpose. Others focus on the
practical problems that would arise if both they and the real crew were
to make it back home. In the end the instability of the mimetic material
forces them to turn back for their planet of origin.
On the way back they and the original Voyager cross paths. But just
as the two ships detect each other on long range sensors, the imitation
Voyager goes completely unstable and explodes into a structureless fog.
The real Voyager crew never learns that they had duplicates who had
existed on their own, with their own triumphs and failures, for over
a year. The copies had made an attempt to launch a message buoy which
would at least record their stories for posterity, but it failed and
was destroyed with the rest of the ship.
This was a really sad story. It was bad enough that the crew felt so
miserable about being "only copies". I don't recall any of the crew
members pointing out that it doesn't matter what they are made of, what
matters is what they make of themselves. It was inconsistent that people
who pride themselves about being open minded about superficialities,
treating their holographic doctor as a real person, would be so upset
to learn that they are not made of meat.
Then, the fact that they ultimately fail, not only to make it back to
their planet but to even get word out about themselves, was a terrible
frustration. Their ship explodes mere seconds from making dramatic
contact with the original voyager. What a disappointing ending.
I don't know who wrote this episode but it seemed to me to be contrary
to the spirit of the Star Trek series. The only lessons you can learn
from it are the opposite of what the writer seemed to intend.
Hal
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