My biggest claim to fame is that I share a birthday with Captain Kirk.
Mine is that I had a drink with Scotty, at least in my imagination.
My favorite part is that Riverside embraces it.
I wouldn’t say “coincidentally”. Sometimes characters are intentionally given the same birthday as their portrayer. Elizabeth Henstridge’s character Jemma Simmons on Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD comes to mind as another example.
Just like how Jonathan Frakes shares a birthday with William T. Riker.
(Coincidentally, it’s the same birthday as Gene Roddenberry.)
Oh come on… next you’ll tell me that 24 hours in a day and 24 beers in a case is just a coincidence!
Now that’s how you ‘coincidentally’
Ok, but when is Thomas’s Riker’s birthday?
Whatever star date he was generated on.
Which is… sometime in 2361, approximately 26 years after William Riker was born.
Whatever star date he was generated on.
no man, that would mean it’s William Riker’s birthday too. Thomas’ birthday is the same as Wills , it doesn’t matter how many times they died and got “revived” by teleportation.
Yes, the current theory on how transporters would work in the real world is duplication and digitization, but in Star Trek it is a literal matter transference. Transporter signals and confinement beams act like radio waves, they can only go so far and through so much before they fall off, and whatever matter got disassembled at point A is what gets sent out and reassembled at point B.
…At least until the transporter chief does something unorthodox like making a second confinement beam around the first to prevent matter leakage, only to have that second beam be unnecessary AND get mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles to build an effectively complete duplicate of the person being transported without the knowledge of that person or the ship doing the transporting in the first place.
Thomas Riker was given the same memories of William Riker, but he didn’t exist before that incident.
Okay but whatever matter materialized as Thomas Riker wasn’t sucked up from the planet by the transporter. The beam is just information. Everything transported gets assembled from new matter - or plasma or whatever - which means they could deliberately replicate as many Rikers as they wanted to. Or brilliant scientists, philosophers, redshirts, etc. To duck this reasoning they decided to make it a moral issue, like they did with cloning and genetic enhancement in Strange New Worlds.
The transporter is a great example of sci fi tech that isn’t fleshed out and applied in ways that would be obvious if it were real. That happens a lot when something is invented for production reasons - in this case to avoid shooting too many shuttle takeoffs and landings.
I disagree that the transporter is creating matter. Didn’t Gene himself go to the trouble to say that transporters and replicators are not the same tech (even if they share a lot of the same principles of operation)?
If a transporter was creating people, it would have to also be an industrial replicator, tech that didn’t exist during Kirk or Archer’s day. It would also mean that replicators can create (complex) life, which is repeatedly said to be impossible. The episode Ship In a Bottle had to trick Moriarty into thinking it was possible to beam him and his partner off the holodeck and into the real world, because it wasn’t possible by any stretch of the imagination.
Thomas Riker is a miracle. The rogue transporter confinement beam and the accidentally duplicated pattern signal should have failed every step of the way but somehow didn’t. AND it miraculously acquired the necessary matter to resolve the signal into a living person. The matter belonging to William Riker proper made it back to the Potemkin. Who knows, maybe neither of them are pure. Maybe William is 1% planetary dust and Thomas is 1% William.
I’m sure Starfleet R&D ogled over Picard’s report to Starfleet Command for a long time. But I think the fact that the Moriarty program was still just a hologram in a lab at the turn of the 25th century suggests they couldn’t find a way to replicate that accident.
Now this is some quality nerding.
mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles…
I always wondered about that. Where do all the extra atoms come from?? Most rooms don’t have ~80 kg of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen lying around. (Yes, some of those are in the air, but nowhere near enough.)
Unless, by coincidence, Thomas was beamed into existence next to a walk-in freezer full of meat.
Inb4 Star Trek / Delicious in Dungeon crossover.
Air is more stuff than you would think. If you were able to isolate a cylinder of air around the Eiffel Tower the air would weigh more than the tower.
It probably all came from the distortion field around the planet that caused the issues in the first place. It was strong enough to disrupt a transporter beam, so it might have been made up of physical matter swirling around in the upper atmosphere.
Having the beam reflected back to the surface took with it enough junk for the transporter signal to repurpose into a new Riker. :P
We’ll say that’s the reason Thomas acted a little cockeyed compared to William.
Inb4 Star Trek / Delicious in Dungeon crossover.
Isn’t that essentially what Neelix’s cooking was?
Breen, you say? 🤔
Happy Shatday!
Yet the Kelvin timeline (Star Trek 2009) suggested he was born in the aftermath of Nero arriving in the past.
If he was canonically born in Iowa on Earth in TOS, does that mean the Kelvin timeline actually splits much earlier than Nero’s arrival?
Yes, but not for that reason.
Premature birth induced by the high stress situation? Kelvin must have been planning to get back to Earth in pretty short order if so.
Premature birth induced by the high stress situation?
Works for me! Obviously the real explanation is the writers wanted an efficient way to tie the Nero story into Kirk’s story within the movie’s restricted runtime - I think they handled it well enough.
Nah, not enough fog monster for me.
Abrams should have added some random polar bears in too. Gotta work in more “mystery box.”
I get that it’s fashionable to hate JJ for the mishandling of star wars and it’s fashionable to hate the 09 trek movie, but when the movie goes out of its way to go HEY WE ARE A WHOLE SEPERATE CONTINUITY CAUSALLY DISCONNECTED FROM THE TIMELINE SPOCK AND NERO CAME FROM… you look like a fucking jackass for whining.
Dude literally did everything he could to go 'this does not invalidate the trek you grew up with. ’
Im calling out Abrams habit of dumping unsolvable “mysteries” in his work as cheap bait to maintain engagement instead of building cohesive stories that engage based on merit. He does this with every single property he works on, and once you see it you cant unsee it.
Its the same garbage Moffat did with Dr. Who/sherlock/etc. Besides a small scattering of standout episodes, his shows are inane, plotless garbage full of “mysteries” that have no pay off at all. Hbomberguy has a long but excellent video about this.
You should read the link i posted. I goes more indepth with the growing issue in entertainment media.
How do you feel about Lord of the Rings? Nobody has ever put more mystery boxes into a story than JRR Tolkien.
JJ Abrams didn’t invent putting mysteries into stories, he just gave it the name “mystery box” in a TED talk. The insane internet hatred of JJ Abrams has resulted in people hating a part of world building that has always existed in stories. Just the Youtube videos you’re watching won’t point it out in the things you like and say things like “LOTR sucks because there’s too many mystery boxes!” because they don’t get any monetization that way. They just point it out in things you’re preconditioned to dislike to create a narrative.
Tom Bombadil is a bigger mystery box than anything JJ Abrams has ever done.
So you haven’t read the article or watched the video then?
Okay.
