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A Whole Lotta Proto-Pulaski
From: Marc Thomas
Hi Trek TV Friends, Wow, I can't wait to hear what you had to say about Return to Tomorrow. I wonder if you said this… Once again, the cast pulls out the stops, we see Diana Muldaur for the first time (Hot but Haughty) Kirk issues his greatest ever, pep talk, and Nimoy gets to camp out and get wicked, resulting in Chappers-The Torpedo Lady finally getting together with her man. Also, Sulu's back out from under John Wayne's gigantic right wing. Welcome back George. (he's been filming The Green Berets) There is an episode of TNG which recapitulates this notion of a trans-galactic Johnny Genetic Appleseed. I can't wait to watch it again with Trek TV, and write an eMail which, in turn, recapitulates this.... I have a handful of problems with the 'progenitors spreading intelligence around the galaxy' trope. It's not original to Trek, most creation myths have wisdom being bestowed whole-cloth upon humanity, and much of 50's magazine pulp told roughly the same story. Aliens standing in for genesis. I take issue with the supposition that intelligence sprouts from a single transplantable germ that will develop almost identically irregardless of its environment. (My Alien Ape Men Fan Art was inspired by this episode) Once again, I believe Trek is stepping close to the fallacious tar pit was goal driven evolution. My main gripe with the conceit however, is not scientific, but artistic. A universe whose sentience derives from one source is less interesting than one whose various incarnations of sapience sprang from different evolutionary back stories. It's convenient when explaining the lack of morphological diversity, but I always imagined that the aliens of Star Trek were more alien than they appear on the screen. What I do like about the Sargon story, is that Muldaur states, for the record, humanity's genetic kinship to our Earthy co-specis. This really saves the day for me. It shows that Star Trek is not stupid. And it presents an interesting picture of Vulcan paleontologist's grappling with there own discontinuity within the preponderance of Vulcan biology. That's something to think about. Imagine you learn to read DNA and then discover a species that doesn't fit. A lot of times Star Trek buries the potential for a really great sci-fi story inside the more mundane drama played out in bulk of an episode. And that's all I'm going to say about Return to Tomorrow. Such restraint! Bursting at the 'seems' Marc Thomas