STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE 9/24/'03: "Extinction" (1 Viewer)

[phil-w]

This puzzles me because I remember hearing that this was being filmed with High Definition cameras. It is in a widescreen format, I wonder if UPN just screws it up.

 

[Nelson Au]

Regarding picture quality, the UPN affiliate here in the SF Bay Area has only one problem where the video will break up and pixelate often, as if it was a defect on a DVD. That's annoying, mostly it was on Anolmoly. Extinction looked good. But I only watch Enterprise, so don't know if it haapen of other shows.

I figure it's the UPN affiliate uplinking the video from a source or it's problems with the Hi Def equiptment. But then I watch on standard broadcast TV on a regular TV.

Nelson

 

[Dan Hitchman]

Is it video taped on HD cameras, or is it filmed using 35mm cameras (probably Panavision and either hard matted to 1.78:1 or using 3 perf instead of 4 perf to get that wider ratio), telecined to HD 1080p video and then edited together with CGI effects rendered at 1080p?

That's how they did the photography of TNG, DS9, and Voyager (although not at 1.78:1, unless Voyager was "protected" for HDTV's ratio). Unfortunately for TNG and at least DS9 in order to look good for upcoming HD media they would probably have to re-telecine all of the 35mm footage to HD video and re-render all the GGI effects and digitally re-composite all of the model visual effects at a much higher resolution than 480i or it will look like crap.


Just another ho-hum episode!

Dan

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Will_B wrote (post #34):

Who said differently?!? I wouldn't care about it either if it were just scientific exposition. (Does anyone really care about the fate of Bowman or Poole in 2001? I doubt it. But in that case, the audience isn't meant to. The ideas are supreme, not the characters.) The difference is that I don't for a second believe that scientific plausibility and good drama are---or need be---mutually exclusive and don't at all go along with or accept the proposition: "just so we care about the characters, we don't need to care about whether what's on screen is believable or not". Like it or not---and many seem not to---, "science fiction" is first and foremost a literature of IDEAS, so if that's how you feel about it, just as well to watch 90210, ER, or The Bachelor, for that matter, instead. For me there's got to be some more compelling reason to watch something that labels itself "science . . ."-whatever than just office/ship/(wherever) politics and who's-"screwing"-who (literally or figuratively).

As far as I'm concerned, the events of this episode so crucially depend on communication, a communication enabled in the story in an impossible way---yes, impossible, given the biological nature of humanity (and anything like it portrayed in the Star Trek universe)---, that the outcome of the events portrayed is fundamentally false. It's a "pretend" journey to an artificially predetermined goal. And this kind of thing is a regular problem for the show.

If any literature, film, whatever merits being called "true science fiction" in my book, its unfolding is in good measure dependent on the science of its background story, so, why not get the science as right as possible? I know it's not possible to get everything right even some of the time. But why does it seem the people working on Enterprise don't seem to even try any more? This script is, and several others for Enterprise in the past two years have been, credited to the production's long-term science consultant. There are no excuses here.

For years I used to watch the reruns of TOS. At some point I came to realize that every single one of the episodes had at least one specific major flaw, scientific or otherwise, that would either have obviated the episode (made the situation presented impossible from the get-go) or have, at some point, brought a halt to the action altogether due to what I call false instrumentality (bad procedure, as in this Enterprise episode vis-à-vis linguistic adaptation). I've found no exceptions. Still, for the most part, I enjoyed them (and, generally, still do).

"Warp" (i.e., faster-than-light) travel, resurrection of the dead (à la Spock), living holography, transporters and replicators, etc.---you name it---are all "impossible", seen from the "scientific" point of view (but see, e.g., Bernd Schneider's Star Trek Page

http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/warp.htm). However, as we used to say, if they get the story right, all the rest can be forgiven (including sometimes bad effects). They're not getting the stories right these days. Hence, the prominence of the flawed details. Hence, the nitpicking.

If they take care of one, the other will take care of itself.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Rob Gardiner wrote (post #33):

[Hmmmmm] As the actor says in the TNG Companion, he had one week to get 4 or 5 different personalities down pat. I, for one, think Mr. Spiner did an excellent job.

The beautiful fluty, synthy pseudo-Amerindian score with its gentle backbeat that supports and complements the sense of impending doom with the awakening of Masaka that Mr. Spiner's many characterizations (to my mind and sensibilities) effectively convey makes this one outstanding, though not perfect, episode.

I still wonder whether the gender confusions in the story don't have a whole lot to do with turning a lot of people---American male viewers, in particular---off about the acting in the episode (in which case it's a "them-problem", not an episode problem).

"Identity Crisis" is, likewise, high on my list of very good to great TNG. Perhaps that it involves intimate and isolated settings as well as a good deal of scientific detective work, instead of a lot of gunplay and loud noises,---it's what I call a "what-done-it?"---has something particular to do with its unenthusiastic reception.

 

[Shea]

Isn't the transporter thing at least possible in theory? It's like sending a fax of yourself. Scientists have done it with energy but not matter..or something like that. It's just that it would take so much computing power that it couldn't be imagined in the foreseeable future. And you'd have to have a 'transporter' on both ends...you couldn't transport from a transporter to a random location as in Star Trek.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Yeah, isn't there a lab somewhere that is working on teleportation? Australia maybe? Can't remember.

That is a riot about the title. I guess I can't use that excuse anymore, and I'm also not sure that they aren't 500 years in the future.

I thought that the virus was kept just like we do today, so if it does come up again, we'll have a quick remedy.

We really have no idea exactly what that virus did to them, but I thought of this. When we are young, we have to learn how to pick things up. We have to control all of the muscles in an arm, know exactly where to move it, when to stop, and how to grip the item in question. It is a very complicated process, but we don't even think about it anymore. Who is to say that certain brain connections (epecially since we don't use 90% of it) aren't connected to a language?

Who knows what the virus did to their brains? What if it connected parts together and/or disconnected other parts that caued a reaction - such as the speech. What about the lumps on their faces, the changed complextion - what if it was designed to change their wild animals (dogs) in a human shape. Someone already in a human shape would be in trouble, really fast.

And for all of the impossible things in sci-fi shows in general, consider how we have advanced in the last hundred years. Wouldn't it be fun to bring Thomas Edion back to life and give him a tour? How many times would he say, - that's impossible!

Glenn

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Shea wrote (post #47):

For "the truth" about the implications of (de)materialization technology, you might want to check the thread "Anyone else draw the line with the Holodeck . . . .?

http://www.hometheaterforum.com/htforum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=137443", if you haven't already. We went over a lot about transporters and holodecks there.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Glenn Overholt wrote (post #48):

Again (and finally), plausibility, not possibility, is the real issue in these programs.

 

[TheLongshot]

Actually, I was thinking of another theory that could explain the language thing. How do we know that they were speaking the Lokeq's language? I was wondering if the alterations made to them could have also changed how they think and speak to the point that what was "English" (or whatever the Federation speaks) would be unintelligable to those who speak "English", but these folks who were altered, could understand each other.

Granted, this is a shot in the dark, but sounds more possible than them learning their language through the modifications. It also doesn't really explain why they lose everything else in their heads.

Jason

 

[Glenn Overholt]

Thank you, Jason. That is sort of what I was saying.

We are only uing 10% of our brains. What is the other 90% capable of?

If the virus was meant for changing a dog into a humanoid species, they would have taken into account what dogs know now. They communicate with each other through yaps and whatever. What if that was like dog speak, but altered because our vocal chords are different?

And not to make fun of the questions, but the Stargate TV series and the ends of both Men in Black movies should be noted here, however funny they came out.

Glenn

 

[derek]

Viewing the commercial previews I had expected a bad B-movie 50s evolutionary romp but the show had some redeeming qualities regarding civilization development, ethics and cultural control/influences. Did they ever explain who exactly were the 'guardian' race that eradicated these viral outbreaks? Seemingly they had superior technology (though gosh they must have something more advanced than flame throwers!) and mentioned a large homeworld/resources. Seemed like a big fish in the Expanse. Where is their homeworld? Why not ask them about the Xindi? Regarding the ethics of the created virus - Possibly it was meant to be used on non-sentient primates (ie lab monkeys) and it mutated out of control to affect any/all primate type species or even to be used on a volunteer sentient primate.

 

[Will_B]

Well, just to stick with our present example, it's already known that language is learned and not inherited.

Rex, you're making a classic mistake - the "rex is a dog, therefore all dogs are rex" mistake.

We know that language is learned and not inhereted.

But that has zero bearing on whether other methods are possible.

I mean, just off the top of my head - a pun is coming up, get ready for it - for example, grafting part of someone's brain onto someone else's brain. Might work. Might not. But the point is, if that method were to work, it does not contradict the fact that languages can be learned.

But I understand your general point that Trek should present plausible ideas - it is just we have drawn different lines about what we'll accept as plausible. For me, this was - here we go again - a no-brainer, because past Trek episodes have already shown memories having physical structures which Trek writers dubbed "memory engrams". There was an episode of Voyager, I think, where a virus masqueraded as a memory engram in order to live in its host. Enterprise writers were at least being consistent with their past Trek episodes by using the "memory engram" concept.*

*"Memory engrams" as far as I know are not real, they're just a concept Trek came up with. In the real world, we don't understand how or where memories are stores, though it seems that different aspects of memories are stored simultaneously in various parts of the physical brain, and then besides that there's also questions about whether memories of some form are stored elsewhere in the body (a subject that has come up because of strange experiences on the part of transplant recipients). In older times, it was beleived for a time that memories were stored in the chest area, or in the heart. I don't think the Trek writers are playing any faster or looser with their fiction view of reality, than we are with understanding actual reality.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Jason Birzer wrote (post #51):

It's not capable of programming-in a massively complex symbolic system that is totally contextually dependent, as natural human language is. Plato (I believe) tells already in the pre-Christian era about what he calls "names" and that the names of things are arbitrary. It is, for example, a mere accident of history that the phonetic sequence [dawg] came, in one specific language, to designate a domesticated canine, while the phonetic sequence [gahd] came to designate a supernatural being. ARBITRARY! Science will never(!!!) be able to overcome this fact---this feature---of the universe we live in. No amount of theory can "explain" it when it occurs, and, therefore, no predictions can be made to meet the contingencies of potentially billions of such strings that could be uttered among the many sentient humanoid intelligences that could be "out there". This renders the ability to program anything to match and master such contingencies highly improbable

and totally implausible, in my opinion. No "virus", natural or artificial, could do this.

(Oh, and please note that [gahd] (in standard American English (SAE)) is not [dawg] backwards! The vowel sounds aren't the same.)

This is the same reason that Trek's dealing with language encounters has always rung false when it comes to its various computer systems.

I know there's now something called "Babel Fish" used on the Internet that some people use to translate documents from languages they don't understand, but the history of machine translation has been abysmally bad. The Soviets tried it in the 1950s and '60s and had to give it up. (My college Russian teacher used to tell us about this and have a great big laugh at the whole idea.)

In addition to form and order, natural human (or humanoid) language is so much about cultural knowledge and about social and cultural context. Ever taken a foreign language? Ever then become immersed among speakers of that language, even for a short time, and discovered how totally unprepared you were by your classroom instruction in française, español, deutsch, or whatever, because the actual sounds of the language when spoken in normal conversation often seem nothing like what you did in classroom rehearsal or even what's enunciated on laboratory tapes? And ever found out that everyday speakers of the language you thought you'd learned no longer use certain expressions or idioms any more, but, instead, have new ones ("Cowabunga, dude!") that--[ahem!]---aren't in the dictionary? Well, that's the reality of how language works, not the easily teachable, supposedly easily programmable stuff.

Now multiply that complexity to the nth degree and you should be able to conceive of how infantilely simplistic (and unrealistic) all alien-language translation is presented in popular filmed SF, Star Trek included. We accept it because we all want to get to the story, but it shouldn't be taken seriously as "science". (See the "Darmok"-episode discussion, for a good example of this.)

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Will_B wrote (post #54):

Not just Trek, but all programming claiming to represent "science". And, yes, it's true, standards of "plausibility" will vary from individual to individual. I prefer to leave mine at the level where I can think why I should believe from week to week what the producers of these programs are telling me, even if that makes me out to be a "spoilsport

" in some people's eyes. If there's a "plausible" and valid alternative to what we've been shown on screen in popular Hollywood SF when it comes to linguistic communication, I have yet to see it (so far as I can recall).

 

[Patrick Sun]

This was a horrible episode, which served only to provide Archer that viral-Ace-in-the-hole later in this current Xindi storyline. Yawn...

 

[Qui-Gon John]

Isn't the transporter thing at least possible in theory? It's like sending a fax of yourself. Scientists have done it with energy but not matter..or something like that.

While I'm still up in the air about the theory of it, it's really not like sending a fax. With a fax the same piece of paper does not wind up on the other end. You just send an electronic image of one sheet of paper and then the machine on the other end "types" that image onto a new sheet of paper. Completely different.

 

[TheLongshot]

My point has been that actually speaking and understanding the Lokeq language is crucially dependent on learning (a social interaction), rather than solely on genetics (natural or artificial (programmed, resequenced)).

Rex, you totally missed my point. What makes you think that the language that they are speaking is Lokeq at all? We don't meet any "real" Lokeqs in this episode.

All that I was saying is the possibility that the genetic changes "remap" the brain, making thought processes different and the interperatation of language different. I mean, this virus would be pretty useless if you didn't keep some basic "learned" skills, like language.

Now, there isn't to say that that solves all the problems of this episode. The main problem that I see is that the crew that are infected seem to forget about their past and who they were, yet miraculously seem to get it all back in the end. It is possible that they were only able to block things, but if you truely wanted something like this virus to be effective, you don't want people to be able to go back.

Jason

 

[Jason Seaver]

Nah. The biggest idiocy is the basic premise - this alien race was able to create a virus that will convert a broad range of humanoid species into members of their race, involving massive physiological changes without much energy input and dumping a whole bunch of information into their heads (surely more than can even be stored in a very large retrovirus), but can't fix their own reproductive systems. The former seems like a much more daunting bioengineering project than the latter.

 

[Rex Bachmann]

Jason Birzer wrote (post #59):

Did you check out the thread I linked to above (post #49)? The whole thrust of the discussion there about "transporting" is that, although Trek assiduously avoids the implications of the theory (as usual), that (i.e., the "faxing" analogy) is exactly what you'd really be doing: re-assembling organisms (including people) and objects as close, but not exact or perfect copies of their original dematerialized selves. The person or object coming out of the process could and would never be exactly the same as the person or object going in.