Transporting matter has always been a curatee for the science fiction writer. Kurt Neumann’s 1958 film The Fly conjured up horrific images of horror when its protagonist found his subatomic particles cut and dismembered with those of an insect after interfering with the untried technology. But there was also a horrifying plot hole: why did the machine split our scientist into a tiny fly-man and a giant fly-man, with both parts of the hybrid scaled to fit by just swapping a few atoms?
David Cronenberg partially solved this mystery with his appallingly gross 1986 remake, in which Jeff Goldblum’s eccentric scientist is genetically fused with a passing housefly and slowly begins to transform into a giant insect. But even that version had its quirks: Given the vast number of tiny non-human organisms that live on any human’s body, the poor fellow would likely have ended up as something far more complex than just a hybrid of human and fly.
Star Trek has always taken great care in the details of its transporter technology. We assume that every time the machine moves a human from one place to another, it saves a copy of that person before downloading it in a new location. Occasionally, as in the original series episode The Enemy Within (and Second Chances from Star Trek: The Next Generation), the quirks of matter transport have been used to suggest that it’s possible for multiple versions of the same human to be pumped out of the same machine. But if that’s the case, then why didn’t Kirk just download a sane new version of Spock after Spock succumbed to radiation exposure in 1982’s The Wrath of Khan? Instead, in The Search for Spock sequel, they had to go through all that resurrection nonsense on the Genesis planet to bring back the cherished Vulcan, and none of us will ever get those two hours of our lives back.
On the turn…Jeff Goldblum in David Cronenberg’s 1986 remake of The Fly. Photo: Moviestore Collection/REXIt seems that the deeper you get into this Star Trek, the more delicate things become. So it’s possibly a good thing that Rings of Power creators JD Payne and Patrick McKay announced their screenplay for the now-cancelled Star Trek film, which would star Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth as James T. Kirk and his never got through resurrected Father George. Because the writing duo finally revealed how they planned to bring the latter back from the dead (after he was killed in the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot while trying to ward off renegade Romulans). And yes, you guessed it… the plan was to revive the Starship pilot using the transporter’s magic.
“There’s an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Relics where they find Scotty who’s been trapped in a transporter for a few decades and they get to go on a cool adventure with him,” Payne told Esquire. “Our conceit was, ‘What if George Kirk had tried to beam himself to his wife’s shuttle, where his son Jim Kirk had just been born, just before the Kelvin crashed into this giant mining ship? And what if the ship hadn’t completely exploded – what if it left space debris behind?’ Remember that when you send a text message and you typed it but didn’t quite click send. On the other side, they see these three little dots that someone typed. It’s as if the transporter took its pattern into the pattern buffer but didn’t spit it out the other side. It was actually a saved copy of him that was on the computer.”
McKay added, “So the adventure is that, because of a mystery and a new villain, Chris Pine and the crew of the Enterprise must search the wreckage of the ship where his father died. On the ship, they come across his father’s pattern. They beam him out and he doesn’t realize that no time has passed at all and he’s looking at his son. Then the adventure starts from there.”
Considering how badly hardcore Star Trek fans reacted to the mahoosive plot holes in Star Trek Into Darkness 2013, one has to wonder how well this stupid conceit would have gone down even if it’s no more out there than some of these wacky episodes of the original series. Wouldn’t it have resulted in fans asking even more awkward questions about transporter technology? If every machine stores a copy of every human that passes through it, couldn’t enemies capturing Federation ships spit out entire crews, in some cases complete with dangerous military secrets? How would Kirk deal with a clone of himself being tortured by Klingons on one of those giant space screens, or worse, a living, breathing doppelganger of one of his beloved crew members?
Take a front seat at the cinema with our weekly email for the latest news and top movie action
Data protection: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertisements and content sponsored by third parties. You can find more information in our data protection declaration. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Suddenly, transporters are becoming not just a convenient way to get to the planet below without spending huge bucks on special effects (which is why Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry originally created them), but terrifying vehicles for the destruction of human civilization! Even scarier than waking up to discover you’re a tiny fly-man about to be devoured by a hideous giant spider. Even the prospect of a quirky cosmic buddy movie starring the two Chrises as Kirk’s father and son wouldn’t be worth it.