The door controls in Ressik are sci-fi beepy dealies, as if the director realized at the last minute they needed something to visually indicate this is a space-age civilization. Because… look at everything else!
Is the anachronistic depiction of Ressik just an artistic choice, or is there some deeper meaning behind it?
The story we see only follows one small village. As far as technology the village is more advanced than many places in rural American when people were walking on the moon in 1969 from the same country. Kataan didn’t even make it to Apollo level spaceflight as their probe was uncrewed.
We’re also told that they have lots of time (multiple decades?) of knowledge the planet won’t survive. A planet can move many mountains when it knows there’s no point in building for a future. The entire planets resources can go into the project to preserve the knowledge of the culture because they know none of them will survive.
If it is just a rural village, why take one of the bumpkins to represent your entire civilization?
If we were to pick the memories of one person in the entire world to represent our whole planet, do you think we’d go to Podunk, Arkansas?
I think any deeper meaning we’re going to find is going to be hard to come up with and I am going to chalk it up to “the writers didn’t really consider that.”
Forgive me for reordering your statements:
I think any deeper meaning we’re going to find is going to be hard to come up with and I am going to chalk it up to “the writers didn’t really consider that.”
I’ll easily concede that the real answer here is likely: “The writers were looking to make an interesting and compelling bittersweet story about sacrifice, and in that they succeeded. They did enough world building to establish the premise without losing track that the point was to tell the story with the 35ish minutes of screen time, and without resorting to too much exposition.”
Now that we’ve established that, lets explore some plausible reasons to explain it ourselves.
If it is just a rural village, why take one of the bumpkins to represent your entire civilization?
First, we don’t know they only launched one rocket. Perhaps they launched hundreds each in different directions and the probe that Picard encountered was the only one remaining.
Second, perhaps there was only the one (or few) rockets because the world was subdivided into different countries and others valued wealth and power and consumed themselves in hedonism while our protagonists were something like Quakers that had a distinct view on life and different values.
If we were to pick the memories of one person in the entire world to represent our whole planet, do you think we’d go to Podunk, Arkansas?
Well, we kind of did in real life.
The golden record we sent out in the Voyager probes contained only two works from the, then, modern 20th century with the rest being hundreds of years old or tribal works with roots older yet. Here’s the list.
Many works of fiction are “slice of life” which have a story whose main thrust is just to give the reader an immersive experience in the culture at that time in history. Twain’s Tom Sawyer books or Alcott’s Little Women are good examples. The story in the episode is that the residents felt it was more important to keep alive who the people of of Kataan were, instead of what they’d accomplished. That seems plausible in storytelling for me too because any race advanced enough to find the probe wouldn’t be impressed with the technology.
You have come up with some plausible ideas, but I still don’t think it works. The Voyager probes would not be a message only transferred to one single person and their memories. Even if there were a hundred probes, that’s only a potential of 100 people who will remember their civilization to the degree they appear it wanted to be remembered, and only until they die. And that’s only if all 100 probes are encountered by other spacefaring civilizations by chance. Maybe one or two of them have some way to transfer one person’s memories to some sort of archive, but that’s a hell of a chance to take. But I especially think the golden records is a bad example because, even if it were intended to show what we were like in a desperate attempt to save our culture when we know it’s doomed, one record could potentially be studied by countless aliens since it is a tangible thing.
As much as I love the episode dramatically, especially because Patrick Stewart really sells it, it just doesn’t really work rationally as a concept.
Which is fine, a lot of good Star Trek doesn’t really work rationally, especially all the times they just randomly encounter something like that probe in deep space where it’s just hoped it will be stumbled across at some point.
Perhaps the probes were meant to work against large crowds, and that the remaining functioning systems/power only had enough for one person. Perhaps the biology of those on the Enterprise weren’t compatible in the large group format or the distance from the probe to the ship to great. Since we’re making this all up, there’s no end to it.
I’ll posit an even more extreme set of in-universe events. The entire store of Kataan is in-universe fake. No one lived. No one died. The probe is a old culture’s version of Netflix and the Enterprise accidentally activated it. The flute in the probe is simply a mass market cheaply constructed souvenir for the customer consuming the experience. Silly humans thought it was real attributing meaning and experiencing loss for purely fictional characters in what is essentially a slightly different holosuite entertainment program.
That honestly works better for me than saying this is how they memorialize their civilization.
I mean at least in Voyager’s Memorial, the memorial was supposed to be something anyone visiting the planet would get affected by in perpetuity (until Tuvok turned it off, but that was obviously not a scenario they envisioned).
The probe in The Inner Light stops working after sending the dream (or whatever you want to call it) to Picard. It’s one-time use. So a DRM-protected ‘movie’ rental sure works better for me.
And they suddenly have the ability to download memories into alien species! This would make schools obsolete, and potentially give them the ability to train the entire population on chemistry/biochemistry/biology. They could have built Silos and possibly survived underground if everyone could be insta-programmed with long term survival skills.
The correct answer of course is “don’t think about it!”
On top of that, ‘give one person memory of our civilization that they can’t really share with anyone adequately except knowing how to play this flute’ may not be the best way to memorialize a planet.
