Spoilers for TNG S04E14 Clues
!The Enterprise encounters a planet inhabited by an isolationist species who uses a fake wormhole to knock people out so they can somehow mask their presence. OK, I'm with it so far.
This trap fails on Data who revives the crew and the aliens say they need to destroy the Enterprise to stop people finding out about them. Picard points out that if the Enterprise is destroyed Starfleet will come looking for them. Again, so far so good.
The aliens agree to let the crew live if they can wipe everyone's memory and order Data to never say what happened. This memory wipe takes 24 hours so they modify the computer records to make everyone think a day hasn't passed and they were actually out for 30 seconds. Then they do it again when the crew realises after finding some unforseen clues, so now at least 48 hours has passed. This is where it lost me.
I can understand them not realising straight away if they're in deep space and not communicating with Starfleet, but surely they're going to figure out their chronometer is 2 days off eventually and go back to try and figure out what went on?!<
This is a great topic!
There's a multipart Voyager series where they manage to email the holographic doctor back to Starfleet to check in. It's fantastic overall. But at the end there's a nail biting plotline where they send the doctor back.
I feel like “downloading a file removes it from the computer you’re downloading it from” was a weirdly common misconception in the 90s. I’m sure I remember some Star Trek episode that felt the need to specify that a bunch of data had been “copied and downloaded” from the hero ship’s computer so that the audience wouldn’t think that the data was now gone. Maybe the desktop metaphor where files are presented as physical objects that can be moved around contributed to this belief. Maybe also all the anti piracy PSAs that likened downloading music to stealing a car
I'm sure part of it was audience understanding, but the surely bigger part is that it just made for better television.
If the doctor COULD be copied, then any time the medbay was busy they'd just fire up a second one of him, or a third. And if he "died" they would spin him up again from a backup, no biggie!
It massively reduces the dramatic stakes when one of your main characters is easily replaceable.
Of course, there are always exceptions - but only when the plot benefits from exceptions - like the backup Doctor in the future, or when (human) Riker got cloned in a transporter accident.
So I suppose we can say the general storytelling rule across all of fiction is "There is only one of any character, unless there is a interesting plot reason for there to be more."
Yep. That's definitely why. And they made the right call. A lot of media does it, and usually I can just ignore it.
But having a full plotline of "I'm getting my file back" was just too much for my immersion. Lol.
I wish they would have cut away and handwaved over getting him back.
And let's not even get me started on how the return trip could have been just the diff files for a few days of experiencs, and so should have been orders of magnitude easier than the original transfer. Lol.
there's a very believable anecdote about an early p2p file sharing system, i think audiogalaxy - "just downloaded an mp3, then see that the uploader is connected and getting the same file. send a message asking why, replies "getting my song back, dick""
The doctor's program could be a quantum state that just can't be copied, only transferred. They do it all the time, to the mobile emitter, to the holodeck, etc. And if the state degrades too much during transfer, it can't be recovered, so all that makes sense.
Then there is that episode with the EMH backup set hundreds of years after Voyager...