gremlinbehaviour: whatwegrowbeyond: Okay, so I wrote last week about how much I love the little andr
gremlinbehaviour:whatwegrowbeyond:Okay, so I wrote last week about how much I love the little android “use your imagination to fix stuff” device, because how fucking blatant it is.I mean, all of the “scientific” problems on Star Trek require a magic solution, right? It’s all just nonsense words. The ugly fandom term is “technobabble”, but another word for it could be “incantation”. The crew of the Enterprise mutter a few magic words and they save the day; Jadzia Dax says the word “quantum” a bunch and breathes a universe into life; Sylvia Tilly flings a “dark matter asteroid” behind the Discovery and she saves the future.The whole franchise has been built on this nonsense. Zenite. Chronitons. Tritanium. Dilithium. Photons and forcefields.It’s wonderful that, after a visit to android Lothlorien, the show finally just shrugs and says, “Yeah, sure, it’s magic.” It isn’t a desperate plot fix-it, like the pointless universal transporter in Star Trek 2009, it’s just an embrace of the otherworldly, the mystical, the not-yet-explained. It’s Clarke’s Third Law. It’s beautiful.How does it work? Raffi and Cris give us the only explanation we need.“There’s no kind of trigger or switch.”“Hmm. Well, maybe what she meant was you have to imagine the fix.”“Have you been, um, hitting the horgl again?”“Visualise that it’s no longer fused. You know, see the hole patching itself.”What wondrous nonsense.I actually gave a lot of thought to this when I saw it because I’d been reading a book about how brain mapping, and the crazy thing I realized is that it actually could work for the androids. With enough monitoring, you can map someone’s brain in enough detail to actually be able to recognize certain thoughts, but one of the reasons we can’t actually read minds for humans is that everyone is different and that people’s brains can change, often drastically and sometimes even from one day to the next. But this wouldn’t necessarily be the case for positronic brains. So, theoretically, the device might work by monitoring electrical signals in the brain of the android holding it and translating that to real life. (Which doesn’t explain how Chris can use it but we’re ignoring that for now)Agnes explained the device later in the episode, didn’t she? She called it a ‘fundamental field replicator with a neurocotamic interface’ - so it does the replicating Rios said was needed, and achieves it with a neural interface, instead of a verbal command or manually entered instructions. And as a handheld device, it is independent of ship’s systems, which is the really critical component of this repair, since La Sirena is completely offline.So…magic, but still as much technobabble magic as anything else in Star Trek, just slightly more advanced! -- source link