Star Trek Ruminations

While Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country wove issues of translation and communication into the story, in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home issues of translation and communication are the story. More than any of the other movies, and more than all but maybe a handful of episodes, the drama of this story grows directly out of the complexities of communicating with alien life-forms. In his book I Am Spock , Leonard Nimoy provides some insight into the creative process behind this movie. Early on he consulted with three scientists involved in the SETI program, including Philip Morrison. Morrison argued strongly that communication with an alien life form would be virtually impossible: In addition to the mechanical problems of having radically different speech organs, the thought process and shared experience from a totally alien environment and path of evolution would leave even a translated sentence incomprehensible. Of course, in the Star Trek universe we are dealing with a lot of hum...

I recently saw "The Changeling" for the first time. I had read summaries of it before, and basically knew what to expect - V'Ger -lite - but I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of its execution. When Scotty was pronounced dead and it cut to a commercial my attention was captured. Sure, I knew Scotty would come back somehow, and I could guess that Nomad would be the one to bring him back, but somehow it still managed to be shocking. Scotty was dead! And perhaps in an even more daring move for which Nomad did not have a magic reset button, Uhura's mind had been erased! I also enjoyed some of the camera work - particularly when the camera followed right along side Nomad . On one hand it was smart from a technical standpoint because Nomad could appear to be floating without having to find some way to conceal the strings or rods that held him up. But from an aesthetic standpoint it created a very eerie almost claustrophobic feeling, a very real sense that this dead...