Star Trek The Original Series Rewatch: “The Ultimate Computer”

I think Commodore Wesley is probably the sanest, least evil guest starship captain we ever saw in TOS. He’s in a somewhat antagonistic role, but in a way that doesn’t serve him badly as a character. It’s also a reminder of something else. We tend to think of Kirk as being the one legendary captain of the 23rd century, the one name that everyone in the 24th century seems to know and revere, but in TOS, he was the youngest captain of a capital ship, the least experienced member of his breed and probably the least prestigious. The other commanders we met were usually his elders or his superior officers, and in at least one case (Garth), his own idol.

And yeah, William Marshall’s performance really makes this episode shine. This is a classic example of the 1960s pattern of building TV episodes around their guest stars. For all that Kirk’s anxiety over being rendered obsolete is a driving thread, this is really Daystrom’s story and is designed to give Marshall the big bravura performance. It’s also very powerful to see a 1968 television episode portray the most brilliant mind of his generation as a black man, given how many people at the time (and, sadly, today) stereotyped black people as unintelligent, lazy, and genetically predisposed to failure.

You know, for all that the episode makes speeches about how computers aren’t as good at leadership as people, it doesn’t really prove its point, because the reason M-5 goes wrong is because it has the personality of an unstable human. So essentially M-5 screws up because of human fallibility, not computer limitations. So the episode tries for the message of “computers can’t replace people,” but it ends up with the message of “people can’t replace computers.”

And what Daystrom did is like the type of artificial intelligence called whole brain emulation — creating a model that replicates the human brain’s functioning, rather than building intelligence from first principles (known as de novo AI).

Engrams are a real concept in neuropsychology, but the application here is a bit off, since the term specifically refers to the patterns in which memories are theoretically stored, not to the basis of personality or cognitive processes. So a computer with Daystrom’s engrams wouldn’t necessarily think or emote like Daystrom, it would just have his memories.

“(presumably they all fell into the swamp…)” — No, M-1 through M-3 all blew up, and M-4 disappeared in a time warp. (Does anyone still recognize Babylon 5 in-jokes?)

@35/DonRudolphII: Well, part of the reason TNG had only one officer doing the work of both helmsman and navigator — and had no dedicated communications officer, and no featured chief engineer in season 1 — is because it was assumed that the ship’s computer was so advanced that it could do much more of the work itself. So despite what I said earlier, maybe this is one instance where the technological advance was fixed and adopted after all. Although the TNG Technical Manual describes the Enterprise-D’s optical processors as “quadritronic” rather than “multitronic.” So presumably it’s a descendant of duotronics, but whether it’s a refinement of multitronics is unclear.

Oh, God, this corny ’60s terminology. Why did so many Trek writers assume that everything in the future would be something from the present with a number prefix attached? Dilithium, duotronics, tricorders, tritanium, trititanium, tri-ox, tricobalt, trimagnesite, trilaser connector, tetralubisol, quadrotriticale, quintotriticale — we’re so used to hearing these terms, but they’re really silly when you think about them. And I never realized there were so many of them. And it wasn’t just TOS. The later shows gave us duonetic fields (probably derived from “magnetic”), trilithium (two contradictory versions), triadium, trianic energy, triceron, tricordrazine, tricyanate, trigemic vapors, trinimbic interference (which sounds like it means “three clouds in the way”), trionic initiators, tripolymers, tetryons, quadroline, and hexaprismatic fields.

It seems the motto of Star Trek‘s technobabble coiners must have been “Tri, tri again.”

@37/Jana: No, there was no regular “science officer” character in TNG, though Data filled that role by default. They were trying not to exactly duplicate the job assignments of TOS. Still, the original idea was that a large portion of the crew was scientists, including civilian ones. The E-D was meant to be essentially a university village in space, a roving research institution. But that idea pretty much got lost in the shuffle of producers, with pretty much all of the show’s developers pushed out or sidelined by the second season.

The TNG writers’ bible talks about the governing philosophy of the 24th-century Federation being “Technology Unchained” — the idea being that technology has taken over all the routine drudgework, thus freeing the human mind to concentrate on discovery and creativity and self-enrichment and the like. (Which is also why the bridge was designed to have fewer consoles and blinky lights and look more like a conference lounge — it was supposed to be more a place for discussion and decision-making than for the mechanical operation of the vessel.) So those thousand people weren’t there to open hailing frequencies or plot courses or scrub the decks or whatever, they were there to research the planets they visited and conduct experiments in the ship’s labs and write papers and monographs to advance the cause of science and just generally achieve important and enriching things while the ship managed its own routine operations and maintenance. Although instead we got a show where the same half-dozen command-crew members did all the exploration and those hundreds of scientists rarely got to do much of anything.

@39/krad: Good point. Babylon 5 was huge for a while there. It was seen as, basically, the next Star Trek in a lot of ways. And really, that wasn’t undeserved. It did break new ground in SFTV, and in TV storytelling in general, and there’s a lot it deserves credit for. I believe it was the first dramatic series to introduce the now-routine model of having each season be a complete, self-contained narrative arc with a clear beginning and end. We’d had serialized shows before, but they didn’t treat their seasons as distinct “volumes” in the same way. B5 was also the show that revolutionized TV special effects by introducing a technology that allowed creating digital effects much faster and more inexpensively than before. We find the results crude by today’s standards, and even at the time, they were recognizably unrealistic; but they were still more elaborate and versatile than conventional effects shots, and they made it possible to create far more extensive and ambitious effects than had previously been practical on a TV budget and schedule — which led to an explosion in the number of SF/fantasy shows overall. So the modern SFTV landscape owes a lot to what B5 pioneered.

Given that, I’m kind of surprised that B5’s popularity has fizzled so much since then. But honestly, though I respect what B5 achieved and have thought about revisiting it sometime, I’ve never felt a compelling need to rewatch it. It was more something I respected for its ideas and ambition than something I really loved. However revolutionary its FX may have been, its production values otherwise weren’t that impressive. I never found its actors as compelling as the Star Trek casts, aside from a few like Andreas Katsulas and Peter Jurasik. And I never liked its music at all. So maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that the bloom has faded.

@51/kkozoriz: It would make no sense for the other crews to be kept in the dark about the parameters of the war game. That seems like it would be rather dangerous and foolish. Though you’re right that it might’ve made more sense to give them reduced crews.

And even small bodies can be orbited. There are asteroids that orbit other asteroids. Orbit is, by definition, an unpowered trajectory where one body is held by another body’s gravity. I addressed this question in a TrekBBS thread once, with regard to K-7 in “Tribbles.” Here’s what I worked out:

The usual figure given for the Enterprise‘s mass is 190,000 metric tons, though that’s disputed. But let’s go with it for convenience. K-7 has been alleged to mass 451,000 mt. Using those figures and the 2 km separation in your graphic above, this orbit calculator gives an orbital period of 31.4470 days, or 754.729 hours. With a circumference of 4*pi kilometers, I get a orbital velocity of 0.01665 kilometers per hour, or 0.0046 meters per second. So yeah, the ship would have to move very, very slowly to orbit the station, but an orbit is absolutely a physical possibility. And that month-long orbit is consistent with what we see in Lurry’s office with the ship hanging motionless outside the window.

…

If the ship actually were in orbit of the station, it’d be moving at mere millimeters per second. That’s barely distinguishable from holding station, and it has the advantage of letting you maintain a constant separation from the station. If you were totally stationary… again, let’s do the math. The force of gravity between the ship and station will be the universal gravitational constant G times the masses of the two objects divided by the square of the distance between them. If I’ve done the unit conversions right, that comes out to a mutual attractive force of 1.43 newtons. Force = mass x acceleration, so to get the acceleration acting on the ship, I divide that by 190,000 mt (190 million kg), getting 8 x 10^-9 meters per second. Since d = (1/2)at^2, at that acceleration and distance it would take 729,304 seconds or 8.44 days for the ship and the station to collide.

Sure, if you’re only planning to be there for a few days, it’d be simple enough to keep station and use slight puffs on the maneuvering thrusters to cancel out the tiny gravitational attraction — but why bother, when you can just go into orbit? Just apply enough thrust to move half a centimeter per second laterally to the station, and you can maintain your separation from it indefinitely without needing further thrust. It’s a slight difference, but there’s no reason not to do it. If two objects in space want to maintain a constant separation, going into orbit is the simplest, most natural way to do it, unless there’s some specific reason to maintain a constant orientation relative to some outside reference point.

@52/Jana: The new FX shot in the Remastered edition replaced the stock footage of K-7 with a new station labeled “Starbase 6” on the side.

@56/kkozoriz: The distance doesn’t matter. I chose it (or rather, the poster I was responding to did) because it was consistent with what was shown in “Tribbles.” Gravitational fields have no cutoff point. An orbit at 500 km would still be possible, it would just have a much longer period (340.3 years, in fact).

And I explained “why bother.” Sure, the thrusters could cancel any deviation, but if you use an orbital trajectory, you don’t need to use thrusters, so it’s more energy-efficient. So I’d turn it around: Why bother to waste thruster fuel fighting gravity when you can just use gravity to your advantage? (There’s further discussion of this in the thread I linked to.)

The problem is that we’re trapped by Earthbound thinking. We consider it the default for things to be stationary relative to each other, so orbit strikes us as an unusual thing that needs to be justified. But in space, it’s the other way around. Everything is in orbit of something. Moons orbit planets, planets orbit stars, stars orbit the center of the galaxy. Orbit is the most natural way for two things in space to maintain a steady physical association with one another.

Not to mention that, even granted that transporters have a larger range, I’m sure it would take a lot less power to beam someone 2 km than 500 km. Asking “why bother to save effort” is getting the definition of “bother” completely backward. (Although, really, it would make even more sense to dock directly and just walk across.)

@65/Jana: But like I said, it doesn’t have to be read as “a story inside a story.” Just that it’s a real-world work of fiction pretending to represent another “reality,” and occasionally having inconsistencies in its presentation thereof. The point is simply that not every detail has to be treated as absolutely “real” within the fictional universe, that some bits can just be chalked up to the filmmakers’ errors or differences in interpretation. It’s the “Doylist” or extradiegetic view, where inconsistencies can be justified in real-world terms as imperfections in a work of fiction, rather than the “Watsonian” or intradiegetic view where every detail has to be given an in-universe explanation.

@72/mroktober:

1) That’s why those 20 people were aboard in the first place — as the emergency backup. But the whole point was to test whether M5 could run a ship without a full crew aboard, and how else are they going to test that?

2) Wesley is a commodore, after all, so he has authority over more than one ship. He could get a starbase posting, say. And we know from the animated series that, less than two years from now, he’s going to retire from Starfleet and become governor of Mantilles. Maybe he was already planning to retire at this point.

3) Kirk had an override switch that was supposed to let him take control away from the M-5. Wesley didn’t know that the M-5 had found a way to neutralize that override. And can you blame a starship commander for being upset and maybe not thinking clearly when faced with the shocking and unexpected death of many of the people under his command?

4) That’s pretty much standard rules of engagement. It’s the same as with the police when there’s an active shooter — you don’t risk the lives of your own team or innocent bystanders by trying for a disabling shot that might fail, you shoot to kill in order to end the danger as soon as possible. In police usage, it’s called priority of life: preserving the life of the armed subject is a lower priority than preserving the lives of innocents or responding officers.

@74/mroktober: Sure, but having a full crew aboard creates a temptation to fall back on using that crew, especially given Kirk’s reluctance (which any other captain would probably have shared). So it wouldn’t have allowed M-5 to get the full, no-training-wheels test it needed. Not to mention the PR factor. No doubt Starfleet Command and others were monitoring this test closely. If you want to convince them that M-5 can take the place of a starship crew, you have to show it actually doing that. Sure, maybe they should’ve had, say, 100 people aboard (nearly a full shift’s worth, more than enough for emergencies), but it wouldn’t have been as potent a presentation to the brass as showing them a ship functioning successfully with only 20 people aboard.

And the whole “target engines and weapons only” practice is something that didn’t really crop up until TNG and after, so I assume it’s the result of improvements in targeting systems. But really, compare it to an episode like “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” where Kirk is willing to destroy the ship rather than let it fall into enemy hands. A Constitution-class starship is capable of laying waste to an entire planet. Starfleet therefore has a zero-tolerance policy about letting one fall under hostile control.

@90/Paladin: I don’t think Kirk really believed it, he was just hoping M-5 believed it.