Snapshots
SPOCK. They Lloyd Zeta hypergiant is the single most massive stellar object
ever detected by Starfleet. And according to calculations by both the Vulcan
Science Academy and Starfleet, within the next five minutes… it will
explode, emitting a high-yield gamma ray burst that will effectively
sterilize this entire sector. While this system is uninhabited, mass extinctions
will occur on any habitable plants within a ten thousand light year range of
the burst.
CAPTAIN KIRK. But instead of letting me read them, my dad would recite them to
me. That’s how it was meant to be done. That the ancients had to keep it all
in their head, so they could read it with total confidence. It seemed like magic
to me. How could one man remember all those words? Spock, sure, but a man of
ancient Mesopotamia? Memorizing hundreds of pages that he couldn’t even
write down? But when something looks impossible, there’s always a trick.
Homer had repeated phrases he could throw into the mix, in case he ever
forgot a line. They were always descriptions of the main characters. Zeus, who
loves lightning. Aeneas, that long-haired Achaean. Odysseus, experienced in
loss. All old Homer was doing was buying time to remember the next line… But
those descriptions lasted thousands of years. One man said it enough and that’s
what those people became to history. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t
say it. “Captain James T. Kirk of the U.S.S. Enterprise. I just don’t know who I
am if I am not.
SPOCK. Let us begin with the facts: Starfleet knows nothing about the Tholian
assembly. Our one encounter with them nearly proved fatal to both you and the
entire crew of The Enterprise. We do not know their societal structure, their
values, or their capabilities. Additionally, their weaponry has demonstrated
itself extremely effective against us. Lt. Uhura, one of the greatest living
human linguists, cannot decipher their language. As a result, we must rely on
their translators for communication. And yet you assume to judge them based on a
single attack, the circumstances of which are virtually unknown and project
intention on a child that could as easily want to kill us as it could desire
sanctuary. This is not suspicion, but caution. Not assumption, but reason. You
are following intuition into conflict where logic dictates a different path.
CHEKOV. эврика! A stasis beam! A phaser of sorts, capable of slowing
the energy that bonds molecules to virtually nothing!
CAPTAIN KIRK. On Earth, there were ten billion people. On Tarsus IV, only eight
thousand. You knew nearly every face you saw. The ruling council, the
governor – they weren’t some distant force. They were your friends. We had
the governor for dinner once. He brought me a toy he’d made with his own hands.
A little cup-and-stick game. I trusted him. And the one day, a fungus infected
the colony’s food supply. Federation supplies wouldn’t arrive for many days. We
only had enough food for half the colony. So my friend, Governor Kodos, marched
four thousand people into the town square and had them vaporized on the spot.
CAPTAIN KIRK. My mind keeps bringing me back to Odysseus, experienced in loss.
Did he have doubts, as I do, as he sailed across his frontier? Was he forced to
mask those doubts from those he called his friends? Did he dream of a
simpler life, even as he knew he was never built to have one? Did he wonder if
he could’ve saved his enemies along the way. Probably not. Stories talk about
him as a man unhaunted by such things. Because to Odysseus, history was barely
new. His stories were gods and monsters. His history had begun with a war. But
I am not Odysseus.
CAROL. Jim Kirk is many things. A charmer. A warrior. A man who’d rather
throw a punch than practice democracy. You’re an erratic bundle of
diametrically opposed emotions and there’s not a flesh-and-blood woman in the
galaxy that can keep you from chasing comets.
DR. McCOY. Look around. I’ve disturbed the societal evolution of an alien
world. We’re rolling the dice with the prime directive. Again.
CAPTAIN KIRK. The language database in Dr. McCoy’s lost communicator was
analyzed by the Iotian scientists, leading to an exploration of Terran history
with an emphasis on the growth of representational democracy. The Iotians
possess a flare for excessive simplification of complex ideas. They’ve created a
haphazard version of our electoral process where the slightest political whim is
voted upon and enacted. It is a mess of half-completed public service projects
and legislative gridlock, further muddled by leaders with abbreviated terms and
sensationalized electoral cycles that value personality over substance.
PRESIDENT JAMEK. Deny it? Isn’t this how you’ve operated for centuries?
Advanced civilizations are borne from the ashes of the unsophisticated.
DR. McCOY. Past tense. You’re cherry-picking examples from the vast history
of human dignity and progress.
CAPTAIN KIRK. A deeper exploration of our
past will show a marked trend toward justice and humanitarianism.
PRESIDENT JAMEK. Every instance of your vaunted “humanitarianism” was a remedy
for the spoils of conflict.
LT. UHURA. Bright Eyes understands the framework of math via the Fibonacci
sequence. I can attach numbers to a neurolinguistic system of symbols based upon
Pythagorean angles.
Math as a common base for communication with an alien is plausible, but Arrival (2016) based on Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998) had a more captivating exploration on how it’d be like to communicate with aliens . Maybe that’s because Arrival focused largely on trying to solve the language barrier, while Star Trek treats it as a sub-plot.
CAPTAIN KIRK. One can’t help to wonder what caused them to create such
technology in the first place. Was it a desire for connection? And was this what
led to their ultimate destruction? The answers, whatever they may be, don’t seem
to be ours to find.
References
- Star Trek: Year Five: Odyssey's End. #01. Jackson Lanzing; Collin Kelly; Stephen Thompson. memory-beta.fandom.com . Apr 24, 2019.
- Star Trek: Year Five: Odyssey's End. #02. Jackson Lanzing; Collin Kelly; Stephen Thompson. memory-beta.fandom.com . May 29, 2019.
- Star Trek: Year Five: Odyssey's End. #03. Jackson Lanzing; Collin Kelly; Stephen Thompson. memory-beta.fandom.com . Jul 3, 2019.
- Star Trek: Year Five: Odyssey's End. #04. Brandon Easton; Martin Coccolo. memory-beta.fandom.com . Aug 7, 2019.
- Star Trek: Year Five: Odyssey's End. #05. Jody Houser; Sylvia Califano. memory-beta.fandom.com . Aug 21, 2019.
- Star Trek: Year Five: Odyssey's End. #06. Jody Houser; Sylvia Califano. memory-beta.fandom.com . Sep 18, 2019.
- “The Sandman” 24 Hour Diner Scene: Neil Gaiman Explains. Drew Tewksbury. www.netflix.com . Aug 6, 2022. Accessed Jun 5, 2023.
- Arrival (film). en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Jun 5, 2023.
- Prime Directive. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Jun 5, 2023.
The Prime Directive is: