Tuesday, May 21, 2024

A Voyager returning home

I believe last week I found a cure for anyone who might be suffering from insomnia.


Sit down to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture and based on my own experience you should be completely out cold in no time.


I've posted a bit on some Star Trek movies and themes before, and realized I had never watched the original movie (I haven't watched Search for Spock either).  I liked Wrath of Khan and got some good mileage out of some things in it for our purposes here, so I figured I would give it a shot.


No joke, I tried watching it 3 nights in a row and fell asleep each time.  The first night I made it about halfway through, but then the next two nights I fell asleep about 10 minutes into it.  And I never fall asleep watching movies.  It was a pretty busy week, and I was tired, but that is not usual for me.


Anyway, after the the 3rd try I finally made it through, and man, that was a very boring and somewhat incoherent mess.  But, I can try and pull a story out of anything these days, or at least some connection, and the silver lining was there was a small connection to some other things from last week.


Last week I wrote a post asking the question as to whether Pharazon can repent, which also incorporated, strangely, the planet Europa.  In the post, I found myself legitimately wondering whether the planet/ moon itself could actually be Numenor.  Previously, I had brought it up as a type of what Numenor might have become (a world surrounded by water and ice) but hadn't really put sufficient thought into it to actually wonder whether it was the actual plant.  But now I found myself actually taking this possibility seriously.


I shared an image of Europa in the post, and mentioned that the image had been captured by Voyager II which, along with its twin spacecraft Voyager I, flew by Europa in 1979.


Spoiler ahead relative to the major plot reveal of Star Trek:  The Motion Picture (but which is the tie to the Voyager mention, so necessary for my post).


The movie involves an entity in the form of a very powerful cloud that is travelling toward Earth, and destroying/ vaporizing ships on its way there.  The Enterprise intercepts it, makes contact, and ultimately enters the cloud.


The cloud surrounds an object within that calls itself V'ger.  What we learn, however, is that V'ger is a smaller part of an actual name:  Voyager.  The "oya" has been obscured by time, dirt, whatever, and you can only make out V---ger.  Thus, the name the energy cloud goes by.


So, it turns out V'ger is a Voyager spacecraft that was believed lost in a Black Hole.  This isn't Voyager I or II, though, but VI (apparently some writer thought that the Voyager program was going to keep going...).   An alien race of living machines discovered it (after it went through the Black Hole?), fixing it up with some upgrades and sending it on its way to compete its mission, which was to gather data.  With these upgrades, it collected so much information and data that it gained sentience.  It however, lost any sense of meaning or purpose in doing so, and was going back to Earth to find its Creator (who, we realize, is the human race).




I find myself almost going to sleep again as I am typing this, so I will leave the plot summary off there.


I just thought it was interesting that I had just written about a Voyager spacecraft on May 15 (Wednesday of last week), and on either Friday or Saturday night (the 17th or 18th... I can't remember exactly - it was that bad) I finally got to the reveal of this energy cloud being a Voyager spacecraft.

1 comment:

  1. That movie was also released in 1979, a few months after the Europa flyby.

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