1.12 — “The Big Goodbye”

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4 responses to “1.12 — “The Big Goodbye””

1. 

   Randi Cohen

   November 13, 2014

   You are so right!  Don’t even remind me how much better TOS is than 1st season TNG… augh.  I would pass one of the 13 episodes so far.  I really hope this will get better or it will be a long couple of years we spend on this…

   For a supposedly advanced culture, crew are awfully blase about a crewmember being almost dead (sticking around to chat while holodeck doors are open instead of rushing him to the hospital).  

   The episode seemed not to know what it was going for… it did not take itself seriously enough to be gripping but was not funny enough to work as a comedy.  I do think Krusher is very pretty with that 40’s hairdo, and it was a kind of neat but tragic idea that holodeck programs might become self-aware.  But those were the only positive points for me.  There just was not much here to interest me at all.

   What made TOS work so well (one of the things) was the clear sense of who the characters were and the relationship between them.  So far, on TNG that is just not happening.   The prior episode came the closest, but still overall the series needs to pay so much more attention to this aspect of things, because without knowing who the characters are, it is really hard to care what happens to them.

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2. 

   Michael Hanscom

   November 13, 2014

   Oooh! Okay, so I’m not actually watching these with all of you right now, but I am still lurking, and some of your complaints hit my geek buttons. 🙂

   I often don’t think a lot of the holodeck episodes because they generally devolve into (or seem to be created through) lazy writing. Lots of magic and hand-waving, yes. But, that said…

   The holodeck uses much of the same technology as the transporter system does. When operating normally (so, you know, like, once a month on the third Tuesday from 3am-7am if Daylight Savings Time is in effect on Rigel 7), nearly everything in the holodeck aside from the visitors and their costumes is truly holographic. However, in order to effectively convey the illusion of a real environment, some things need to be “real”, at which point the holoemitters use transporter technology to create actual matter for those items. There is some (assumedly finite) amount of raw matter stored somewhere for such operations (possibly the same matter bank that forms the raw material for use in the matter replicators elsewhere around the ship).

   Obvious things in this category will be tables, chairs, glasses, food or drink, walls to lean against, characters to physically interact with, and so on. Generally, this is done “on the fly” — items will be holograms until briefly before they are likely to be interacted with, at which point the matter version is seamlessly created and integrated into the environment.

   (One less-obvious but very important aspect is the floor/ground immediately underneath or around users. This actually works like a “treadmill”, scrolling underneath the users as they move. This is how you can get an apparently infinite environment within the relatively small confines of the holodeck room. Further, a well-programmed holodeck environment for adventures involving multiple users will generally have a lot of rooms/walls/cliffs/caves/etc. This is so that if parties split up, they must move out of each other’s line of sight. This allows the environment around each individual user to be altered so that it appears that they’re moving much further from the other users than they actually are. The entire environment doesn’t have to exist in the holodeck at one time, only those areas within the line of sight of each user.)

   So, knowing that much:

   > How exactly could living people get deleted, if the program is erased?

   In normal operation, when a program is cancelled or entirely erased, either the holodeck is empty of users or it isn’t. If it’s empty, then the system simply turns off; with no users in the room, there should be no matter-based items, so when the system turns off, the holograms disappear, and the room is empty.

   If the room isn’t empty, the system can easily deactivate all holograms, but that still leaves any matter-based items the users are in contact with. This could mean anything from items they have picked up to the very floor they’re standing on. In this case, the system must be able to distinguish holodeck-created matter from “natural” matter (the users and their outfits), and only deconstruct the holodeck-created matter. If the safety protocols are disabled or malfunctioning, the system might simply assume that all matter within the holodeck is ripe for reclamation, and deconstruct anything and anyone still in the room, adding it to the raw matter storage area. Obviously, for sentient beings, this would be a Bad Idea.

   > How do you get a bullet wound from a hologram?

   Again, the system assumes that everything is holographic until such time as it is going to physically interact with a user, at which point the hologram is replaced with real matter. Under normal operating parameters, this would notably exclude items that would cause actual physical harm to the user: bullets, falling/flying rocks or debris, etc. However, those safety protocols can obviously be adjusted or overridden even in normal operation for things like Worf’s “calisthenic” programs, or the episode where he goes through a gauntlet of holo-Klingons zapping him with pain sticks; if the holodeck was at full safety settings, these programs would be ineffective.

   So, with safety protocols overridden or disabled, suddenly that holographic bullet is a very real, very physical bullet, and very able to wound or kill.

   (Of course, this doesn’t address the question of getting the kinetic energy into the bullet during its transformation from holographic-only to real matter while in flight so that it doesn’t drop to the ground immediately after the transition and instead continues on the same trajectory and at the same speed as the holographic representation. I assume the system could assume that there’s a high probability of a bullet being fired in particular circumstances, and “load” the holographic gun with matter-based bullets ready to be appropriately accelerated when “fired”, or even just create an entire matter-based gun. Not quite sure how this part works.)

   > Look–either holograms can walk out of the Holodeck (like the holographic Doctor on Voyager), or they can’t. It doesn’t make sense for them to walk out, then slowly fade away.

   The Doctor’s a special case. For the first few seasons, he was entirely unable to leave the sickbay, as there were no holoemitters anywhere else on the ship (he could transition from the sickbay to the holodeck, but that was it). He was only able to leave sickbay after the Voyager acquired some alien technology that allowed him to wear what was essentially a portable holoemitter device. (All very hand-wavy and highly questionable even for treknobabble if you put too much thought into it, but it at least got the Doctor out of sickbay.)

   So no, holodeck characters can’t leave the holodeck, and yes the “fading away” bit is pretty ridiculous. However, here’s my best guess at an “explanation” for that: The holoemitters closest to the entrance have enough range to extend a short distance into the hallway. This would allow items (or people) picked up in the holodeck to be carried (or walk) a short distance outside of the holodeck. Then, I can see an argument that if someone had picked something up in the holodeck and unthinkingly walked out with it still in their hand or pocket, it would be less jarring for the item to slowly “beam away” as the holodeck recognized that the item had left the holodeck boundaries and the system reclaimed the matter, than it would be for something someone was holding or carrying to suddenly (for whatever value of “suddenly” the holodeck’s matter-transference system can manage) pop out of existence.

   Assuming all that is the case, the questions then become 1) why would a holodeck program allow its characters to walk outside of the boundaries of the holodeck in the first place, and 2) why would they be sentient enough to realize that they had done so and that they were dematerializing? In both cases, and in the context of this episode, I think that just gets chalked up to “holodeck malfunction”.

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3. 

   sunny jim

   November 13, 2014

   I have to agree with the stupid plot complaint – and that the writers are too lazy to make the mystery in the holodeck anything other than a placeholder.  (Do you have the item?)

   It also bugs me how clumsily they’re playing the Crusher/Picard romance storyline.  Another example of the writers not understanding what women are, or how to write them. 

   However – the problem with the safety controls on the Holodeck is one that can be addressed.  The whole point of the holodeck is that it uses the same technology as transporters and replicators.  Things created by the holodeck aren’t “real”, per se, but they do have mass – they’re created out of energy, and are converted back to energy when no longer needed.  That’s how you can sit on a chair in the holodeck without falling through it to the floor.  There are supposed to be safety controls that would make the bullet bounce off, or dissolve before impact, or something, but the safety settings were apparently broken by a power surge from the aliens.  So the gunshot could totally have killed the guy – since an item with the mass of a bullet, travelling at the speed of a bullet, is basically a bullet, no matter what it’s made of.  Similarly, without the safety controls on, if the holodeck simply converted all mass in the room back into energy, without separating out the people first, our crew members would get converted to energy too. 

   All that said, I don’t know why the gangsters got two feet outside of the holodeck before vanishing.  Perhaps that’s as far as the hologram projectors can project? (The doctor on Voyager could only exist in Sickbay for a while, until they worked out some technical fix so he could go other places – until then, he had to be in the same room as the hologram projector, I think.)

   At any rate, it’s nice to have an episode where the costumes and/or hair don’t make me break out in hives. (Angel One – here we come!)

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4. 

   Michael Hanscom

   November 13, 2014

   Apparently SunnyJim and I occasionally share a brain. 🙂

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