Captain archer was linked with his own future, and he was almost religiously against transporter tech straight out of the gate, to a degree that seems weird if he didn’t have a reason to be.
I understand the narrative reasons for this, but looking at him as a person, he seems overly Luddite with respect to this specific tech, in a way he isn’t with most others we can see. He’s actually pretty progressive with respect to his society in many facets.
That’s a bit weird, unless we consider his life includes time travel as a core concept, so he knew Scotty would lose Porthos, and though he couldn’t do anything about that, he had an almost innate distrust of transporters.
Does that make sense?
(I mostly mean the events of ENT and some TNG, VOY, all new movies since 2009, etc in that timeline, but perhaps the other, too)
That’s an explanation where none is needed tbh. Sometimes, people just don’t like or fear stuff, even to a religious degree, for stupid or even no reasons at all. We’re humans, not vulcans after all (and even vulcans behave irrational very frequently).
And let’s be clear. In ENT, the nxo1 was the first ship to have a transporter. They had a few accidents. It was likely that they use it for things that didn’t matter and only people as a last resort.
Remember, even by TOS, they were still having the occasional accidents with them.
In ENT it was quite literally bleeding edge tech.
Did they ever stop having accidents with them? Even in LDS they have problems. The transporter is really a plot device masquerading as a suicide machine.
TNG cloned Ryker. DS9 had that mirror universe arc. I forget if voyager had anything.
But the Ryker thing raises the question… is it really a transportation device or if they’re just flash-cloning a new copy? Like. Think about it. The accident was that a second Ryker showed up. A second flash clone.
Voyager had all sorts of weird shit.
I still really love it.
Oh. Right. Now I remember. Tuvix.
That was only the most obvious.
Shit was wild, and that was the point.