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)
Doesn’t it say in ENT that the transporter had only just been approved for transfer of biological matter?
Seems very normal for him to be sceptical of it, given that. Especially for transporting his own crew, for whom he is responsible for their safety.
I imagine he really didn’t want to tell families that he told [crew mate] to use the transporter and it killed them in some gruesome way, or to have that memory torturing him at night.
And it’s not like he wasn’t vindicated, either. Weren’t there multiple instances of transporter incidents in ENT?
The first time they use the transporter is to save Archer during the pilot. Its second use is two episodes later when Archer himself orders a crewman to be beamed up for the first time. That person instantly gets fused with the local flora and dies. The captain has plenty of reasons to be skittish about the tech.
You would think they’d have the bio-filters tuned to absolutely erase any kind of flora after that but nope and now there’s a Tuvix
ENT Explanation: Oh snap, we should DEFINITELY add some kind of filter for biological things so that never happens again.
VOY Explanation: A specific plant confused the LLM that filters shit out and it hallucinated a Tuvix.
I just watched it. He wasn’t even “religiously” against it. He was skeptical at first, and then accepted it pretty quickly when he was eventually forced to use it.
It wasn’t newer than the entire ship he was on, though, and he didn’t have that reaction to any of the other tech – including the insanely powerful warp engine that was likely even less tested and capable of destroying anything in a significant radius.
I’m not saying he was phobic, but he’s more cautious than anyone else in the scenes where this is emphasised, like it’s a character trait.