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)
It’s possible for there to be a 130-year-old Admiral Archer still living when Kirk commands the Enterprise, but not a 105-year-old Porthos. Medical science might increase the lifespan of pets, but not by that much.
Long ago, someone online posited that Archer just got into raising Beagles in retirement so the one Scotty lost was a likely a descendant of Porthos.
I don’t remember if it’s come up, does the federations/earths dislike of genetic and other such augmentation extend to animals? If not, I wouldn’t think it entirely impossible for them to have found an actual cure to aging, sufficient to make the lifespan of an organism indefinite until killed by some accident or infection, for some common species like a dog, but found that the technique requires the use of tech they aren’t willing to deploy in humans (though the aversion to it would have to be crazy strong to give up that temptation I’d imagine.)
Look at the animal testing on mice. We have cured so much for mice that we have not for humans. Maybe dogs have better medicine than humans?
If there’s so much dislike for it, it must have got pretty far along its development, which means extensive animal testing. If that were happening when my dog was still alive and I had any contacts in such programmes, I’d at least strongly consider signing him up for late stage trials that might prolong his life by that much. And can you imagine the value of whatever company figures this out? I think most people would agree dogs don’t live long enough. That’s my hypothetical head cannon.
I’m sure he was just on Porthos XIV or something at that point.
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.
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.
