Star Trek ... while stoned
Mar. 8th, 2023 04:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eerietomNote 1: Many spoilers ahead!
Note 2: The references in this blog entry to “god(s)” do not refer to the traditional concept of a being that is a creator and judge. Herein, it simply refers to a being or entity either of immense power, beyond human comprehension (or perhaps vice versa: a being unable to acknowledge or comprehend human existence or experience), or both.
PART 1
Last September I watched a Noh performance while stoned. Besides immensely enjoying it, I was completely blown away by the inclusion of a single pine tree on the stage. It seemed to represent a “meta pine tree” of all pine trees, embodied in a single tree. I struggled to understand why I saw it that way, especially since in the Noh play it really did only represent a single pine tree, not a whole forest or grove. I struggled even more to try to explain it.
I’m facing the same problem now with something else I’ve watched recently, an episode from the original Star Trek series, “The Changeling”. In this episode, the Enterprise beams aboard a small floating robot called Nomad. Unbeknownst to our heroes, Nomad murdered four billion people in a nearby star system because they were “imperfect” according to Nomad’s relentless, computerized definition of “perfection”. Can our heroes save the day before Nomad makes its way to Earth and decides everyone there is also imperfect? I’ve seen the episode at least five or six times over the years, and have read James Blish’s adaptation of the story at least a dozen times, so nothing in the episode is new to me. But this time it was the two scenes where Nomad kills security guards that blew my mind.
In one scene, Kirk leaves Nomad in the brig, behind a force field, through which the robot easily flies. The two security guards open fire with their phasers. The beams harmlessly hit Nomad’s own force field, and in response, Nomad vaporizes the guards with an energy beam. Later in the episode, Kirk orders Nomad to go with two more security guards and not to harm them. Nomad accompanies the guards briefly, then flies off in a different direction. The guards order him to stop, and when Nomad begins making an electronic noise, the guards open fire. Again, the beams hit Nomad’s force field, then Nomad vaporizes the guards.
In both scenes, when the guards fire and Nomad fires back, the images of the guards “freeze” and glow red, then the guards quickly fade out: no smoke, no ashes, no corpse, nothing is left. This special effect was probably due in part to the limitations of the budget or the special effects or both—it was far easier to animate the phasers and Nomad’s energy beams over a still shot of the guards in the corridor, then cross fade to an empty corridor. Judging by this depiction of the guards’ deaths, they probably had no idea what hit them, or even felt anything. They were just instantly gone, as if they had never existed.
Going, going, gone: time from impact of Nomad’s energy beam to complete vaporization of the guards: 2.002 seconds the first time, 2.045 seconds the second time.
I abhor robots or aliens in science fiction who claim they have no emotions, then display all kinds of emotions like impatience, gloating, triumph, etc.—I’m looking at you, Beta Cloud aliens from Space: 1999! But Nomad is an especially emotionless robot—it speaks in a flat, even tone, and its body is boxlike and made of grey metal. As robots go, this thing couldn’t be more cold and machine-like if it tried. Perhaps that’s part of the horror of these scenes: to be killed by some unfeeling, calculating machine who simply saw the guards as nuisances. Nomad killed them without malice or premeditation, in much the same way we humans reflexively swat at flies.
I’m reminded of a scene from The Man Who Would Be King (1975, dir. John Huston), when Daniel Dravot meets a beautiful young woman named Roxanne. He tries to approach her but she shies away. An interpreter tells Dravot:
In both Nomad’s power and ability—the size of a table lamp yet able to wipe out four billion beings, and heaven knows how many others before that, not to mention bringing Scotty back from the dead!—and its inability to comprehend basic aspects of humanity (that humans are life forms, the meaning of music, etc.) certainly make it “godlike”. And perhaps not unlike the Noh “gods”, whose actions and expressions were completely inscrutable to we mere humans, there is something fascinating and awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) and staggering and impenetrable and ineffable about them, that they are beyond our ability to understand them, and that’s what makes these “gods” so intriguing!
PART 2
And that would’ve been the end of the blog entry had I not, a week later, seen another Star Trek episode, “Wolf in the Fold”. A noncorporeal entity that feeds on fear and terror inhabits the bodies of people and uses them as agents to commit brutal murders. When the entity is eventually identified, Spock renders its host (a man named Hengist) harmless with a tranquilizer, then Hengist is put into the transporter and beamed into space at the “widest angle of dispersion” so that his atoms are separated and the entity is unable to cause any more harm.
Here I must say, I didn’t actually watch the full episodes of “The Changeling” or “Wolf in the Fold”, but their satirical versions on Star Trek Abridged, a series which condenses each episode to about four minutes in length and redubs them with satirical, often sarcastic and off-color humor. I mention this because there’s an important difference: in the original version of Wolf, Hengist is made helpless by the tranquilizer but when placed in the transporter, he is still talking and threatening the crew, whereas in the STA version, Hengist appears to be unconscious because his final lines weren’t redubbed.
The reason this is important here is, while watching the STA version, it struck me that Hengist, like the security guards in The Changeling, never knew what hit him. He was (seemingly) unconscious and beamed to his death—the transporter is used to kill him. Is this another case of a machine killing someone? Perhaps no, perhaps yes. No, because the transporter is operated by a person, and the machine is merely “following orders”. But yes, because the transporter is obeying its orders without considering the ramifications of what it’s doing. There’s not even a safeguard programmed into the transporter to prevent it from killing someone by “widest angle of dispersion”; why would there even be such a setting, aside from being a plot contrivance? And so, like Nomad, the transporter is reducing its victim to atoms with nary a concern or malice.
After watching a few more vids, I went to use the bathroom. And it suddenly hit me, so intensely and so immediately I struggled to retain the insight and write it down as quickly as possible, in some way that would make sense to me later!
I conceived of some (possibly mechanical) godlike “creature(s)”, unfeeling, thinking only in terms of pure logic; in binary, of zeroes and ones. They are unknowable to us, beyond human ken. The Noh gods are not mechanical, but their thoughts and feelings, if they have any, are far beyond human comprehension. What happens when Nomad or the transporter “attack” us and our bodies are vaporized or dispersed? We are reduced to atoms, pure and simple. We attain the pure perfection of zeroes and ones. We no longer have emotion or intelligence, at least not in a way measurable by humans. We have achieved, in a sense, a similar godhood, or a state like nirvana, of nothingness, of non-self.
And this actually explained my fascination with many things:
• Cyborgs: an attempt to fuse our humanity with mechanical resources.
• Announcements, such as those made in train stations and airports: a dispassionate voice calmly conveying information. It is the voice of something all-knowing, something with which one cannot communicate.
• Similarly, the computer entities from films like Dark Star, Logan’s Run, THX-1138: again, calm and dispassionate, even in the face of disaster.
• Retro computer graphics: simple, blocklike, unrealistic and pixelated depictions of people, trees, animals, etc.
• Electronic music and its various subgenres.
• Yuki Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: she is a mostly emotionless artificial construct created by the “Data Overmind”, “a conglomerate of data organisms”. Yuki often alters reality or probability by speaking in a rapid, machine-like chittering sound. My favorite episode of Melancholy is when Yuki battles another construct named Ryōko, then defeats her by re-booting local reality—how mind-blowing a concept is that?
• Similarly, Ruri Hoshino from Martian Successor Nadesico, a detached and seemingly wise beyond her years young woman who can interface with the computer telepathically.
• The episode of Space Dandy where he encounters the 2D universe. Actually, many SD episodes have some pretty mind-blowing concepts.
A few weeks earlier I had seen an action film, Blood Debts (1985, dir. Teddy Page), one of those “so bad it’s good” films. One scene caught my attention. Our hero walks through a park late at night. He passes a man who is sitting on a concrete bench. In the background there is the glow of some street lights. But when I saw those, I imagined they were the eyes of a giant cat, sitting quietly and absolutely motionless, watching the man on the bench. It was not necessarily benevolent or malevolent, for it was a god-cat. It’s probably merely a physiological reaction to the THC, but when beholding the god-cat, or the Noh gods, or the meta pine tree, or the destruction of the guards, I could “feel” energy radiating, as though through some other sense. This in turn reminded me of the “Italo-Japanese” I heard while watching Juliet of the Spirits: a form of Japanese only the characters in the film and I could understand, but not actual Japanese people!
Click image for larger view; opens in new window.
Street lights? Or the eyes of a giant cat? The cat image comes from an 1865 illustration of the Cheshire Cat by artist John Tenniel (1820-1914).
While working on this blog, I happen to be reading “The Diaries of Paul Klee”; Klee (1879-1940) is my favorite artist. By pure coincidence (or was it perhaps synchronicity?), I came across this entry:
I also looked up “nirvana” to be sure I was using the term correctly, as I know only a little about Buddhism. And lo and behold, Wikipedia says:
Non-self and emptiness? Sounds like vaporized guards and dispersed entity agents to me! Had I somehow unknowingly been tapping into Buddhist concepts all along? It bears further investigation, but another time—this blog entry is long enough already. But this is all very head-spinning trippy stuff. Am I just imagining all this while under the influence? Or am I able to perceive things on a different level than most?
Note 2: The references in this blog entry to “god(s)” do not refer to the traditional concept of a being that is a creator and judge. Herein, it simply refers to a being or entity either of immense power, beyond human comprehension (or perhaps vice versa: a being unable to acknowledge or comprehend human existence or experience), or both.
PART 1
Last September I watched a Noh performance while stoned. Besides immensely enjoying it, I was completely blown away by the inclusion of a single pine tree on the stage. It seemed to represent a “meta pine tree” of all pine trees, embodied in a single tree. I struggled to understand why I saw it that way, especially since in the Noh play it really did only represent a single pine tree, not a whole forest or grove. I struggled even more to try to explain it.
I’m facing the same problem now with something else I’ve watched recently, an episode from the original Star Trek series, “The Changeling”. In this episode, the Enterprise beams aboard a small floating robot called Nomad. Unbeknownst to our heroes, Nomad murdered four billion people in a nearby star system because they were “imperfect” according to Nomad’s relentless, computerized definition of “perfection”. Can our heroes save the day before Nomad makes its way to Earth and decides everyone there is also imperfect? I’ve seen the episode at least five or six times over the years, and have read James Blish’s adaptation of the story at least a dozen times, so nothing in the episode is new to me. But this time it was the two scenes where Nomad kills security guards that blew my mind.
In one scene, Kirk leaves Nomad in the brig, behind a force field, through which the robot easily flies. The two security guards open fire with their phasers. The beams harmlessly hit Nomad’s own force field, and in response, Nomad vaporizes the guards with an energy beam. Later in the episode, Kirk orders Nomad to go with two more security guards and not to harm them. Nomad accompanies the guards briefly, then flies off in a different direction. The guards order him to stop, and when Nomad begins making an electronic noise, the guards open fire. Again, the beams hit Nomad’s force field, then Nomad vaporizes the guards.
In both scenes, when the guards fire and Nomad fires back, the images of the guards “freeze” and glow red, then the guards quickly fade out: no smoke, no ashes, no corpse, nothing is left. This special effect was probably due in part to the limitations of the budget or the special effects or both—it was far easier to animate the phasers and Nomad’s energy beams over a still shot of the guards in the corridor, then cross fade to an empty corridor. Judging by this depiction of the guards’ deaths, they probably had no idea what hit them, or even felt anything. They were just instantly gone, as if they had never existed.
Going, going, gone: time from impact of Nomad’s energy beam to complete vaporization of the guards: 2.002 seconds the first time, 2.045 seconds the second time.
I abhor robots or aliens in science fiction who claim they have no emotions, then display all kinds of emotions like impatience, gloating, triumph, etc.—I’m looking at you, Beta Cloud aliens from Space: 1999! But Nomad is an especially emotionless robot—it speaks in a flat, even tone, and its body is boxlike and made of grey metal. As robots go, this thing couldn’t be more cold and machine-like if it tried. Perhaps that’s part of the horror of these scenes: to be killed by some unfeeling, calculating machine who simply saw the guards as nuisances. Nomad killed them without malice or premeditation, in much the same way we humans reflexively swat at flies.
I’m reminded of a scene from The Man Who Would Be King (1975, dir. John Huston), when Daniel Dravot meets a beautiful young woman named Roxanne. He tries to approach her but she shies away. An interpreter tells Dravot:
| If god takes a girl, she catches fire and go up in smoke. God’s heart a burning torch. His veins run fire, not blood. If god makes love to girl, she goes cha-chung! in one flash. Not even any ashes left. |
In both Nomad’s power and ability—the size of a table lamp yet able to wipe out four billion beings, and heaven knows how many others before that, not to mention bringing Scotty back from the dead!—and its inability to comprehend basic aspects of humanity (that humans are life forms, the meaning of music, etc.) certainly make it “godlike”. And perhaps not unlike the Noh “gods”, whose actions and expressions were completely inscrutable to we mere humans, there is something fascinating and awesome (in the traditional sense of the word) and staggering and impenetrable and ineffable about them, that they are beyond our ability to understand them, and that’s what makes these “gods” so intriguing!
PART 2
And that would’ve been the end of the blog entry had I not, a week later, seen another Star Trek episode, “Wolf in the Fold”. A noncorporeal entity that feeds on fear and terror inhabits the bodies of people and uses them as agents to commit brutal murders. When the entity is eventually identified, Spock renders its host (a man named Hengist) harmless with a tranquilizer, then Hengist is put into the transporter and beamed into space at the “widest angle of dispersion” so that his atoms are separated and the entity is unable to cause any more harm.
Here I must say, I didn’t actually watch the full episodes of “The Changeling” or “Wolf in the Fold”, but their satirical versions on Star Trek Abridged, a series which condenses each episode to about four minutes in length and redubs them with satirical, often sarcastic and off-color humor. I mention this because there’s an important difference: in the original version of Wolf, Hengist is made helpless by the tranquilizer but when placed in the transporter, he is still talking and threatening the crew, whereas in the STA version, Hengist appears to be unconscious because his final lines weren’t redubbed.
The reason this is important here is, while watching the STA version, it struck me that Hengist, like the security guards in The Changeling, never knew what hit him. He was (seemingly) unconscious and beamed to his death—the transporter is used to kill him. Is this another case of a machine killing someone? Perhaps no, perhaps yes. No, because the transporter is operated by a person, and the machine is merely “following orders”. But yes, because the transporter is obeying its orders without considering the ramifications of what it’s doing. There’s not even a safeguard programmed into the transporter to prevent it from killing someone by “widest angle of dispersion”; why would there even be such a setting, aside from being a plot contrivance? And so, like Nomad, the transporter is reducing its victim to atoms with nary a concern or malice.
After watching a few more vids, I went to use the bathroom. And it suddenly hit me, so intensely and so immediately I struggled to retain the insight and write it down as quickly as possible, in some way that would make sense to me later!
I conceived of some (possibly mechanical) godlike “creature(s)”, unfeeling, thinking only in terms of pure logic; in binary, of zeroes and ones. They are unknowable to us, beyond human ken. The Noh gods are not mechanical, but their thoughts and feelings, if they have any, are far beyond human comprehension. What happens when Nomad or the transporter “attack” us and our bodies are vaporized or dispersed? We are reduced to atoms, pure and simple. We attain the pure perfection of zeroes and ones. We no longer have emotion or intelligence, at least not in a way measurable by humans. We have achieved, in a sense, a similar godhood, or a state like nirvana, of nothingness, of non-self.
And this actually explained my fascination with many things:
• Cyborgs: an attempt to fuse our humanity with mechanical resources.
• Announcements, such as those made in train stations and airports: a dispassionate voice calmly conveying information. It is the voice of something all-knowing, something with which one cannot communicate.
• Similarly, the computer entities from films like Dark Star, Logan’s Run, THX-1138: again, calm and dispassionate, even in the face of disaster.
• Retro computer graphics: simple, blocklike, unrealistic and pixelated depictions of people, trees, animals, etc.
• Electronic music and its various subgenres.
• Yuki Nagato from The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: she is a mostly emotionless artificial construct created by the “Data Overmind”, “a conglomerate of data organisms”. Yuki often alters reality or probability by speaking in a rapid, machine-like chittering sound. My favorite episode of Melancholy is when Yuki battles another construct named Ryōko, then defeats her by re-booting local reality—how mind-blowing a concept is that?
• Similarly, Ruri Hoshino from Martian Successor Nadesico, a detached and seemingly wise beyond her years young woman who can interface with the computer telepathically.
• The episode of Space Dandy where he encounters the 2D universe. Actually, many SD episodes have some pretty mind-blowing concepts.
A few weeks earlier I had seen an action film, Blood Debts (1985, dir. Teddy Page), one of those “so bad it’s good” films. One scene caught my attention. Our hero walks through a park late at night. He passes a man who is sitting on a concrete bench. In the background there is the glow of some street lights. But when I saw those, I imagined they were the eyes of a giant cat, sitting quietly and absolutely motionless, watching the man on the bench. It was not necessarily benevolent or malevolent, for it was a god-cat. It’s probably merely a physiological reaction to the THC, but when beholding the god-cat, or the Noh gods, or the meta pine tree, or the destruction of the guards, I could “feel” energy radiating, as though through some other sense. This in turn reminded me of the “Italo-Japanese” I heard while watching Juliet of the Spirits: a form of Japanese only the characters in the film and I could understand, but not actual Japanese people!
Click image for larger view; opens in new window.
Street lights? Or the eyes of a giant cat? The cat image comes from an 1865 illustration of the Cheshire Cat by artist John Tenniel (1820-1914).
While working on this blog, I happen to be reading “The Diaries of Paul Klee”; Klee (1879-1940) is my favorite artist. By pure coincidence (or was it perhaps synchronicity?), I came across this entry:
|
143. The term “self-criticism” turns up for the first time. Then I philosophize about death that perfects what could not be completed in life. The longing for death, not as destruction, but as striving towards perfection. On the whole, a stage between striving and despair. (from Diary 1) |
I also looked up “nirvana” to be sure I was using the term correctly, as I know only a little about Buddhism. And lo and behold, Wikipedia says:
| In the Buddhist context, nirvana refers to realization of non-self and emptiness, marking the end of rebirth by stilling the fires that keep the process of rebirth going. |
Non-self and emptiness? Sounds like vaporized guards and dispersed entity agents to me! Had I somehow unknowingly been tapping into Buddhist concepts all along? It bears further investigation, but another time—this blog entry is long enough already. But this is all very head-spinning trippy stuff. Am I just imagining all this while under the influence? Or am I able to perceive things on a different level than most?
