The Human Adventure is Just Beginning: Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture at 40

Larry Klaes loves science fiction movies. Those of you who have read his deep dives into such films as Forbidden Planet, Avatar or The Thing from Another World can understand why I think of Larry as the Robert Osborne of the SF movie (if you don’t know who Robert Osborne was, then you’re not as passionate about old movies as I am). Larry’s latest is a resource-laden look into two films of the late 1970s that illustrate our evolving ideas about potential encounters with extraterrestrials. Although we don’t get into films that often here on Centauri Dreams, I always like to keep an eye on how our culture comes to grip with new scientific ideas, and that’s a place where popular movies become prime sources. Herewith two films that help us see how the idea of contact continues to change.

by Larry Klaes

The Big Picture

The year 1979 was a dynamic one. It was the chronological end of the 1970s, essentially the “aftermath” decade of the previous one, the 1960s. Those earlier years saw multiple revolutions on multiple fronts across the globe and beyond that radically changed our society.

One of the bigger “aftermath” effects was with space, both its real and its fictional elements. In the case of reality, although the official Space Age had begun in October of 1957 with the launch into Earth orbit of the Soviet artificial satellite they called Sputnik 1, the era (also known as the Space Race) literally took off in the following decade.

The biggest space highlight of the 1960s saw human beings physically leaving our planet for the first time. Tentative steps which began in 1961 in low Earth orbits rather rapidly evolved into first circling and then landing astronauts on the Moon in 1969.

Many naturally thought – spurred on in no small part by years of announcements from America’s space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – that the Apollo missions would lead to permanently manned lunar bases. Then would follow expeditions to the Red Planet, Mars, and other worlds with human-crewed spaceships. The ultimate presumed goal was the colonizing of the whole Sol system, then moving on into the wider Milky Way galaxy in what would be known as the Final Frontier, thanks to one particular science fiction television series of the era. This was a perpetual migration which our ancestors had begun generations ago on Earth and would carry on to the farthest stars indefinitely.

However, the social and economic changes and issues of the 1960s brought about some rather crushing realities to the Space Age of the 1970s. Manned expeditions to the Moon ceased abruptly after the Apollo 17 mission in December of 1972. Crewed lunar bases and missions to Mars were largely left in the minds of the people who conceived them for decades after.

Space stations did get their start in the 1970s: The Soviet Union sent up the first ones into Earth orbit, which they named Salyut. That series of human habitats lasted until 1986, when they were replaced first by the much larger Mir station and then the current International Space Station, or ISS. These latter stations were and are in literal part continuations of the Salyut program begun in 1971.

The United States had their own parallel space station, which they called Skylab: One of the few projects based directly on Apollo technologies that made it to reality, Skylab hosted three missions of three astronauts each between 1973 and 1974, breaking previous manned space endurance records for their time.

Skylab spent the rest of that decade crewless: NASA had moved on to developing their next generation of manned space vehicles, the Space Transportation System (STS), better known as the Space Shuttle. The American space agency had hoped the Space Shuttle would begin launching in the late 1970s, where it would play a key role in establishing a permanent manned presence in near Earth space, among other tasks.

Included in the early missions for the STS program was the rescue of Skylab. However, thanks to an unexpected increase in solar activity in the latter half of the decade and the subsequent heating and therefore rising of Earth’s upper atmosphere, the thin but not unsubstantial air created a drag on the space station. As a result, Skylab began a slow but steady descent towards our planet several years sooner than first predicted.

Left unchecked, America’s first “home” in space would eventually burn up upon entering our planet’s atmosphere. Being such a large vessel, it was likely that at least some of Skylab’s bigger and more resilient parts would survive the fiery encounter and hit the ground intact, threatening a wide swath of both property and people with damage and even death.

As the station was left in both a functional and communicative state, NASA could control it, but only to a limited degree: Thus their hope and plan to send up a Space Shuttle carrying a specially-designed booster module which they would attach to Skylab. The module would push the station into a higher and safer Earth orbit. Shuttle astronauts might even enter Skylab either during that rescue mission or on later flights.

None of this came to be. The Space Shuttle program had technical issues that pushed its first test launch into 1981. Indifferent nature and physics proceeded with their own schedules and Skylab came back to Earth on July 11, 1979. The station broke apart over Western Australia, where some of its larger and more durable components did survive re-entry to the surface. The only reported Skylab debris casualty was a wandering jack rabbit.

How far the manned portion of the American space program had fallen since its peak was reflected in the cover story of TIME magazine for its July 16, 1979 edition.

On the upper half of the publication’s cover is depicted an artist’s rendition of Skylab plunging Earthward in pieces, which are glowing red as the cylindrical station is torn apart by the surrounding air. Beneath this image is a painting based on the iconic photograph of Apollo 11 astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin standing on the surface of the Moon during the first manned lunar landing in July of 1969 (Buzz is incorrectly shown holding the United States flag that he and fellow explorer Neil Armstrong would plant at Tranquility Base, so I will consider this artistic license).

Slicing diagonally between these two images is a large yellow banner that declares “Here Comes Skylab! – Ten Years After the Moon Walk –.” The stark visual message of these two real and program-related space events just one decade apart is quite clear and symbolic of where things stood – and how many people felt – in regards to American manned space exploration at the very end of the 1970s.

Robots on the Rise

On the unmanned side of space during the 1970s, things were decidedly going far better. While the 1960s had paved the way for robotic explorers of the Sol system with the first successful missions to the Moon, Venus, and Mars, the more ambitious ventures in the 1970s truly transformed these places into real worlds for both scientists and the general public.

Although the United States had largely turned away from their lunar agenda after Apollo, the Soviet Union had taken what was left of their own abandoned manned lunar mission program and turned them into a fairly impressive robotic effort to learn more about our neighbor world.

Between 1970 and 1976, the Soviets conducted three successful missions to return samples of the lunar regolith (granted, the samples were measured in grams compared to the hundreds of pounds brought back by Apollo astronauts) and planted two automatic rovers on the Moon named Lunokhod. Humanity’s first successful extraterrestrial robot rovers spent months being remotely driven around the lunar surface, exploring the Moon far longer and farther than all of the Apollo missions combined.

The Seventies may not have possessed any serious endeavors to mount crewed expeditions to the nearer planets of the inner Sol system, but those alien worlds were anything but neglected via our machine representatives.

Thanks to some of the first deep space probe missions sent in the 1960s, scientists had discovered that Venus was neither a world covered in humid jungles crawling with strange dinosaur-like creatures, nor oceans of liquid water, oil, or seltzer as had been imagined before (and even into) the Space Age.

Instead, the entire surface of the second world from Sol was hotter than the highest temperature setting on a conventional kitchen oven. This was due to the very thick atmosphere whose layers of optically-impenetrable clouds conspired to trap solar radiation in what is called the Greenhouse Effect.

The dense atmosphere of Venus also made its surface air pressure unbearably heavy: Ninety times that of Earth’s, the equivalent to what a submarine experiences on its hull over half a mile deep in one of our planet’s oceans.

A typical terrestrial organism or insufficiently prepared artificial probe attempting to land on Venus could expect to be crushed and roasted before they even reached their destinations – which is exactly what happened with the first robot landers as their unexpected demises made their makers back on Earth learn the extent of the real nature of our nearest planetary neighbor.

Despite these environmental hostilities, which precluded any manned expeditions, let alone a permanent colony, to Venus for the foreseeable future, the two main rivals of the Space Age still pursued this fascinating if apparently biologically deadly planet with their instrumented machines throughout the 1970s and into the next two decades.

The Soviets took the lead in this area, with both the first probe to reach the surface of another planet intact, operational, and able to return scientific data (Venera 7 in 1970), and the first probes to return images from and of the surface of another planet (Venera 9 and 10 in 1975). In all, the Soviets had multiple successes at Venus through the 1980s, ranging from landers that took color images and direct surface analyses to balloons carrying instruments to study the planet’s upper atmosphere to more in-depth radar data of the Venusian surface from orbit.

In comparison, America may not have seemed quite so daring, yet they did send their own space vessel that took the first close-up images of the mysterious Venusian cloud tops in various wavelengths. This flyby by Mariner 10 in 1974 also allowed the probe to utilize the planet’s mass to perform the first gravitational slingshot to reach a second world and become the first ever mission to the innermost planet, Mercury, in the process.

Mariner 10 was followed in 1978 by the Pioneer Venus expedition, comprised of two main craft: One probe circled the planet and made the first radar maps of the Venusian surface from orbit. The other vessel dropped four smaller conical probes into the planet’s atmosphere, where they contributed yet another fact to increase that world’s hostile reputation: The air was saturated with concentrated sulfuric acid, possibly from the exultations of the many active volcanoes scientists suspected covered the surface of Venus. As a bonus, although the Pioneer Venus atmosphere probes were not designed to survive their impacts with the ground, one did just that and transmitted for 127 minutes before succumbing to the surrounding intense heat.

With Mars, the situation was reversed in the aforementioned “aftermath” decade: The United States had much better luck exploring the Red Planet than the Soviets and consequently focused more of their mechanical attention on that world. That the fourth world from Sol was far more conducive to future manned exploration and colonization than Venus was a significant factor for NASA to send robotic explorers there.

The first mission to orbit another planet was secured by Mariner 9 in late 1971, which revealed to planetary scientists that Mars was not the geologically dead and therefore dull and probably lifeless world they had been led to expect by three previous Mariner probe investigations.

Among the many findings of Mariner 9 were clusters of enormous volcanoes and a canyon far longer and deeper than anything like it on Earth, plus numerous channels that intimated liquid water once flowed across the face of Mars, perhaps whole seas of water or even oceans. The logic then followed that if the planet once had water in a liquid state, its surface must have been warmer in the past and was therefore capable of evolving and sustaining organisms.

These revelations about the fourth planet from Sol ensured the production and launch of the twin Viking probes to Mars in 1975, landing on the Red Planet thousands of miles and several months apart in the following year. The first space probe mission with the deliberate purpose of searching for extraterrestrial life, Viking was a scaled-down version of a similar robotic project named Voyager begun in the previous decade.

Scientists assumed and hoped that at least microbial life might still exist either on or just under the Martian surface, though a few held out for more complex native organisms. Viking was designed to search for both forms, with a focus on the microbial using an amazing and compact automated biology detection laboratory.

The two Viking landers were the first probes to truly explore the surface of Mars directly (the Soviet Mars 3 lander did arrive on the planet intact and functioning almost five years earlier, but stopped transmitting very shortly after landing, returning only part of an unintelligible image). The results of their biological analyses were ambiguous and sparked controversy, but in almost every other aspect the voluminous images and data from the Viking mission were on a par with the impact their predecessor, Mariner 9, had in terms of revealing the Red Planet.

Sadly, after Viking the United States would not make a successful return to Mars until over two decades later. The very mixed bag of results from the flotilla of robot orbiters and landers the Soviet Union sent to that planet in 1973 and the subsequent success of Viking kept that nation from trying to explore Mars again until the late 1980s, also with mixed results.

By Jove! And Saturn!

The 1970s also witnessed the first deep space explorations of the many worlds of the outer Sol system. In this arena, these vanguard missions were exclusively American and 1979 was a particularly fruitful year, as we shall see.

Being the closest of the gas giant worlds to Earth at a mere 400 million miles on average, Jupiter was the natural initial target for humanity’s first space mission through and beyond the Main Planetoid Belt. Pioneer 10 was launched from Earth in March of 1972, arriving in the Jupiter system in December of 1973. The space probe’s near twin, Pioneer 11, was sent aloft just over one year later, where it too successfully reached the massive planet in December of 1974.

Both robotic explorers would eventually become the first human artifacts to escape the gravitational pull of Sol and leave our Sol system, thanks to the “slingshot effect” from their flybys of Jupiter, and, in the case of Pioneer 11, the ringed planet Saturn. That probe was redirected after its Jupiter mission to become the first vessel to explore Saturn, reaching that world in late 1979. Pioneer 11 and its sister probe were the advance scouts for a more sophisticated and ambitious outer worlds mission that would soon follow in their paths and beyond named Voyager.

Rebranded members of the Mariner family of space probes, Voyager 1 and 2 were what remained of an earlier plan to explore the outer Sol system planets and their moons and rings called the Grand Tour. These nuclear-powered robots would return images and data of these alien places far surpassing the efforts of the Pioneer probes.

Image: The Voyager 1 and 2 deep space probes as they looked before departing Earth in 1977. Note the Golden Record (the cover, actually) on the main bus.

The Voyagers would also be flung out of our celestial neighborhood into the wider Milky Way galaxy. This historic fact led to their carrying “messages” bolted to their sides in the form of metal Golden Records for any future beings, alien or terrestrial, who might one day come across these probes drifting in interstellar space. These disks contained carefully selected images, sounds, music, and greetings in 55 human languages (plus one from a humpback whale).

The Pioneer vessels also had scientific “greetings” for their finders in the form of small golden plaques attached to their antenna support struts. They depicted nude male and female representations of the species that built and launched these ambassadors into the galaxy, a diagram of our Sol system with the probes’ trajectory through the planets, and a map showing fourteen pulsars that was hoped to indicate where and when the Pioneers were sent from. Certain items from the Pioneer Plaque would later find their way onto the Voyager Interstellar Records.

Launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida just weeks apart in 1977, the twin Voyagers would collectively spend the next dozen years visiting every world from Jupiter to Neptune, taking many thousands of unprecedented images and revealing much about these neighboring bodies and their companions, including some unexpected surprises.

These scientific revelations came relatively early in the Voyager mission, in 1979 to be exact. This was the year when both space probes flew through the Jovian system in March and July. Astronomers and the general public alike were astonished to learn from the Voyager flybys just how much Jupiter’s four large Galilean moons were complex worlds in their own right.

Perhaps the most surprising find was the discovery that the innermost of these moons, Io, had multiple active volcanoes continually spewing hot sulfur hundreds of miles into space! Its nearest satellite neighbor, Europa, appeared to be very quiet in comparison – until it was realized that under that seemingly placid icy surface was a global ocean of liquid water, later determined to be twice the volume of all of Earth’s oceans combined and perhaps sixty miles deep. It did not take long to wonder if Europa harbored native life forms swimming in its alien seas.

Almost overnight, science’s concepts of what such moons were like and where and how life might exist in our Sol system and beyond were transformed, thanks to the Voyager probes’ data and images of Jupiter and the other giant world systems they would visit in the next few years.

Rise of the Aliens

Speaking of alien life, the science and the search for it, especially the intelligent kind, slowly began to gain widespread acceptance in the 1970s. What would become known as SETI, or the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, was also largely born in the 1960s, although speculation on the concept goes back to the ancient Greeks over two millennia ago.

Scientific conferences on the subject grew in the 1970s. Even NASA held one in 1979 titled Life in the Universe at its Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, for two days in late June of that year. You may read the full conference proceedings online here: https://www.history.nasa.gov/CP-2156/cp2156.htm.

Actual SETI programs also began to come into their own in that decade, though most were still relatively low-budget and largely private/university efforts that focused on the radio spectrum. Among the most famous of them from that era was conducted at Ohio State University (OSU) with their Big Ear radio telescope. This was the long-running search that found in 1977 what became known as the Wow! Signal. Although it would be probably be dismissed as terrestrial interference by modern SETI standards, the signal is still listed as one of the best candidates for a detected transmission by an alien civilization over four decades later.

Close Encounters of the Fictional Kind

Compared to the reality, aliens in fiction in 1979 were far more abundant and readily accessible, at least on the big and small screens and in literature. This was in no small part thanks to the phenomenon which burst upon our culture just two years earlier known as Star Wars (and at the time was known only by that title and nothing else).

Star Wars may have been a relatively straightforward story about the forces of good and evil battling it out for domination “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away,” but it was undoubtedly that seemingly simple setup combined with fantastical elements which made it both so popular and so profitable.

The film turned science fiction into big business. However this came at a price: The derailing of decades of intelligent and literate science fiction cinema that made important social commentary, replaced by flashy (and increasingly expensive) special effects and easy-to-digest plots. Less than one decade earlier, the era of smart and artistic science fiction had reached a pinnacle with 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now Hollywood saw a new source of revenue and stuck to that winning formula.

In the immediate decades of the post-Star Wars era, there were a few notable genre exceptions to the “popcorn flick,” but only in recent years have we seen the slow but steady return of “smart” SF cinema and television series, even in the face of that other domineering genre, the superhero film.

By 1979, Star Wars had indeed taken Hollywood by storm and its effects were quite noticeable, for both good and ill. Perhaps one of the best examples of this influence from that year was the Walt Disney film The Black Hole.

The first PG-rated effort by that company had the potential and some moments of being at least a good story: A manned interstellar exploration vessel, the U.S.S. Palomino, on a mission to “discover habitable life in outer space,” comes upon a formerly presumed lost starship named the U.S.S. Cygnus improbably perched on the edge of “the largest black hole… ever encountered.”

Image: The theatrical poster for Disney’s attempt to cash in on the Star Wars tidal wave, the 1979 film The Black Hole.

The crew investigates the much larger and more intricate ship and discovers it is inhabited by one man, a famous and brilliant scientist named Dr. Hans Reinhardt, and a collection of robots and faceless, robed androids serving as the crew.

Reinhardt tells his guests that the original human crew abandoned the Cygnus after a “meteorite” storm struck and damaged the vessel, leaving him alone aboard the starship for the last twenty years. The scientist also reveals that he intends to send the Cygnus plunging into the black hole to discover its secrets.

The Palomino crew eventually discover that Reinhardt has been lying to them about the fate of the Cygnus’ human crew: In reality they had mutinied when the megalomaniac scientist became obsessed with the black hole and refused to return to Earth; Reinhardt had the ship’s robots defeat and subsequently lobotomize the crew and turn them into essentially mindless drones.

Not wishing to share their fate, the members of the Palomino attempt to escape, damaging the Cygnus in the process and causing the craft to be pulled towards the black hole, where its powerful gravitational forces begin to tear the giant ship apart. Reinhardt is trapped and eventually meets his end on the bridge when a large view screen falls on him, pinning him to the bridge floor. The survivors of the Palomino board a small probe vessel from the Cygnus, but discover its controls are set to go into the black hole.

At this point The Black Hole takes a page from the famous Stargate Sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, featuring a mystical, frightening, and often wordless journey through the collapsed star. The remaining crew eventually emerges from the black hole via a white hole and arrives elsewhere in space at an unknown planet, their fates also left unknown to the audience.

As I said earlier, the essential plot of The Black Hole as just described is not bad and would have made for a serviceable, even a good cinematic effort, had it been left at that. However, the long shadow of Star Wars made its influence on Disney: Attempting to grab a piece of that saga pie (which they would ironically succeed at completely decades later), the producers threw in numerous elements that worked for Star Wars but seemed forced and out-of-place in The Black Hole.

Attempting to appeal to the younger viewers, the story became a jarring mix of juvenile silliness via the various robots and much darker and even violent scenes and themes. The result was a generally critical panning and less than sterling box office returns. However, in the ensuing years, The Black Hole has gained a cult status as often happens when memories turn nostalgic.

In summation, there was a decent story in The Black Hole that got lost in the chase for those Star Wars profits. The result was a cinematic mashup of two different types of science fiction films that when merged together only lessened the whole product. There were other science fiction films in those following years which either tried using aspects from Star Wars or copy the film wholesale. Sometimes they worked, but most often these efforts resulted in either diminished returns or outright forgettable pabulum.

Two Aliens, Two Starships Crews, Two Different Approaches, Two Different Futures

Not every science fiction film from 1979 was either damaged or sunk by Star Wars, however. There were two notable examples that managed not only to survive the growing wave of simplistic plots and snazzy special effects, but actually used the emerging franchise to their advantages. Looking closely, one can see that these two films were still products of that earlier golden era of cinematic SF, despite the best efforts of the studios to turn them into their own versions of the Star Wars cash machine.

The existence of Star Wars managed to make these particular films possible and reach the theaters, yet they had come from the previous genre era which Star Wars had dethroned and it showed, to the overall benefit of contemporary and future audiences. Cinematic science fiction had not completely lost its higher brain functions to the Hollywood Id.

I am referring to Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (ST:TMP). Released just months apart forty years ago, the two films appear to have little in common outside of their core science fiction plot elements: Set several centuries in the future, two starship crews encounter powerful and dangerous aliens and must find a way to defeat them or risk not only their own lives but the fate of the entire human race and possibly all living beings in the Milky Way galaxy.

Their diametrically, even radically, opposed takes on humanity interacting with a very different form of life intrigued me greatly, especially since they had both emerged from Hollywood so close together in the same year.

I have had a life-long interest in extraterrestrial beings, including and especially the intelligent kinds that may exist somewhere out there in the Cosmos. As we have yet to discover any real aliens, smart or otherwise, our society has had to make due with creating our own in various fictional media.

Existence has had a long habit of surprising humanity’s expectations. This should not be considered shocking in itself, as we are a species that has spent most of its history confined to one planet. Only relatively recently have we become intellectually aware of the much vaster, populated, and complex realm beyond Earth.

Even with this knowledge and evidence, humanity still leans towards seeing itself and its home world as cosmically special and unique. Our instincts and emotions continue to respond to our terrestrial surroundings first and foremost; so far as our baser selves are concerned, the stars might as well be the medieval version of the light from Heaven shining through holes in the black celestial dome hanging over our world.

Our confinement has had a similar effect in regards to our concepts of alien life and minds. Intellectually, thanks to scientific progress, we no longer see beings from other worlds only as members of a fantastical supernatural realm, be they spirits, angels, demons, or deities.

Nevertheless, with just one world’s examples to go on, we tend to think and assume such life would not be so different from us in terms of base motives and needs. This attitude occurs even when we imagine aliens to be radically physically different from terrestrial creatures – and especially when we do not see them as dwelling in bodies all that dissimilar from our own, a rather common occurrence both with their fictional creators and even professional scientists.

Naturally, our fiction reflects these aforementioned views, and Alien and ST:TMP are no exceptions here. If anything, they serve as excellent examples of two of the main types of aliens conceived by humanity, and the most polar opposite ones at that: The deadly monster in the case of Alien and the enigmatic godlike being in ST:TMP.

For the record, other extraterrestrial types found in our fiction include angelic saviors, the conquering and/or destroying warriors of some Galactic Empire, altruistic scientific explorers, and beings who might as well be humans, where they allow an author to safely make various social commentaries on their own species. For cinematic aliens of this type, they also serve to save film budgets by forgoing expensive makeup, costumes, and special effects.

Just as the nonterrestrial beings in Alien and ST:TMP reflect two strong variations of our assumptions and fears of what may be out there in the vast darkness of space, the human societies depicted in these two stories also mirror two radically different types of civilizations for our species.

Like their main nonhuman characters, one society is a dystopian version of our own current culture, while the other reflects a much more hopeful and optimistic path for our descendants. These societies exist either in spite of or because of being technologically more advanced than the contemporary cultures which created them.

We will look further into these two worlds, touching upon such ideas as whether their particular type of alien exists because of the attitude and outlook of that particular form of human society, or whether human society is influenced and molded by the surrounding Universe they encounter. Or perhaps it is a combination of the two.

This essay will also look into how much or how little our attitudes have changed about extraterrestrial life and future society in the ensuing four decades since the premieres of these landmark films. We will also explore whether Alien or ST:TMP will influence our views and approaches as our species expands into the Milky Way galaxy. Or will they somehow keep us from moving beyond Earth at all?

Contrast and Compare

Even if you have somehow managed to keep from seeing either film in the past forty years for whatever reasons they may be, you are probably at the very least aware of the basic premises behind these two cinematic classics. This is particularly true in the case of ST:TMP, as that film has an extra decade of exposure over Alien, thanks to Star Trek‘s origins as a three-season television series in 1966.

ST:TMP may have been the very first film of the Star Trek franchise, but it came not only with two television series under its belt (don’t forget the animated series shown for two seasons on Saturday mornings on the National Broadcasting Corporation, or NBC, from 1973 to 1974), but also a large and rabid fan base that was savvy and loud enough to get the first Space Shuttle named after their beloved Starship Enterprise in 1976. There was also a bounty of novels, manuals, blueprints, comic books, toys, models, and fan fiction permeating the culture, with no end in sight.

In contrast, Alien was practically a newcomer on the cinematic scene, though the basic concept of an unearthly monstrosity terrorizing a spaceship crew of humans was hardly unfamiliar to audiences, whether they were into science fiction or not.

Unlike Star Trek, Alien has a much more obscure yet far more amusing origin story: The horrifying and deadly creature that has come to be so well known from the film began its life as… an orange beachball with two clawed feet and a penchant for mischief.

In 1974, a very low-budget satiric science fiction film calling itself Dark Star made its major theatrical debut. The story focused on the exploits of a hapless crew aboard a starship whence the film’s title came from whose jobs revolve around exploring the Milky Way galaxy specifically to find unstable exoplanets and blow them up with artificially intelligent (AI) and very powerful thermostellar bombs. This objective will ensure that the members of humanity who are actually colonizing the galaxy will not end up settling these deemed unsafe worlds.

Image: The surprising origin of the alien in Alien – a painted beach ball with clawed feet from Dark Star.

A subplot in Dark Star involves the exploits of a strange alien creature brought aboard the vessel to serve as the ship’s “mascot”. The alien looks very much like a large orange beachball with two clawed feet. It also emits sounds that resemble farts, possesses and can express a range of emotions despite lacking any discernable face, and seems to have a measure of intelligence.

When crewmember Sergeant Pinback, played by the film’s co-creator Dan O’Bannon (1946-2009), reluctantly goes to feed the alien and clean its makeshift living area in a converted storage room, the creature manages to escape its confines, overpower Pinback with a broom, and run off into the bowels of the ship.

Pinback goes after the alien in an attempt to get it to return to its cage. Instead, the extraterrestrial beach ball manages to temporarily trap the human first in a long elevator shaft and then in a floor hatch of the elevator car itself. While Pinback is preoccupied trying to escape the elevator, the alien spends its time exploring the Dark Star, where it unintentionally causes further and ultimately disastrous technical problems for the vessel, which has already been slowly but steadily deteriorating over the last few years of its mission.

Eventually, Pinback corners his adversary and attempts to render the alien unconscious and therefore catchable with a tranquilizer dart from an anesthetic gun. Instead, the dart punctures the creature like a balloon, where the alien proceeds to rapidly release an interior gas from its wound and fly comically about the room before crashing to the floor completely deflated and presumably deceased.

Despite the obvious absurdity and overall silliness of this alien, which was also introduced to pad the length of Dark Star from its much shorter original college film version co-created with John Carpenter (born 1948) so it could go mainstream, O’Bannon was nevertheless inspired by this bloated orange gasbag “to do a scary movie on a spaceship with a small number of astronauts…. Dark Star as a horror movie instead of a comedy.” O’Bannon was also “inspired” to change up the alien when he saw that audiences watching Dark Star were not laughing at its intentionally humorous scenes. “If I can’t make them laugh, then maybe I can make them scream,” he said.

That movie would eventually become Alien.

It would be easy to assume at first glance that Dark Star and Alien inhabit very different universes. The former is a deliberate example of existentialism (John Carpenter referred to Dark Star as “Waiting for Godot in space”) and as has already been pointed out, that film’s alien is definitely amusing and hard to take seriously at all, let alone as much of a threat. In comparison, there is relatively little humor or outright absurdity in Alien: The xenomorph, as the creature is later referred to in the first sequel, Aliens (1986), is a nightmarish extraterrestrial organism that anyone who encounters it takes very seriously.

However, the two cinematic efforts have much more in common than one might think. Both involve starships with specifically utilitarian purposes: Dark Star’s mission is to obliterate unstable alien planets; the United States Commercial Star Ship (USCSS) Nostromo of Alien is a “commercial towing vehicle” hauling 20 million tons of mineral ore through interstellar space back to Earth. They also have in common some type of communications/command base stationed in Antarctica.

In both films, the crews are the opposite of the astronauts and cosmonauts who were often portrayed in the early days of the Space Age as near demigods serving as our brave and noble vanguards into the unknowns of the Cosmos.

Instead, the majority are decidedly “blue collar” types. For them, exploring space is just a job. The crew of the Nostromo are in many respects the equivalent of long-haul truckers, although in their case it is a very long haul. There is a distinct division between the officers and the rest, both in terms of class structure and educational background.

When we first meet the crew in Alien, their overwhelming topic of conversation has the guys who maintain the ship demanding to get a share of the profits from their mission equivalent to the officers’ pay. Even when they detect the mysterious transmission that is first thought to be a distress call of human origin, but later turns out to be a warning signal from a derelict extraterrestrial ship on an uncharted world, the engineers insist that rescuing others is not part of their job and that they should get paid extra if the ship does go out of its way to help a stranded spacecraft and its crew. They only recant when they are told that “any systematized transmission indicating intelligent origin must be investigated… on penalty of total forfeiture of shares.”

Once the Nostromo crew learns of the origin and nature of the distress signal, there seems to be only one character who is openly excited about exploring the alien vessel – and he later becomes the first crewmember to pay the ultimate price for that genuine curiosity. The members of the Dark Star also pay the price for allowing an alien onboard their ship: It is not nearly as violent and confrontational as in Alien, but their desire to learn about an alien life form ends up being fatal for them just the same.

The governing bodies found in both Dark Star and Alien see the ships’ crews (and undoubtedly most other citizens) as commodities at best. They serve a purpose for the society until they no longer can, or get in the way of the plans made by those in charge.

In the first scene in Dark Star, we meet an official representative of their authorities via a video message. On the surface he seems like a very caring and understanding fellow, but it takes little time to pick up on the reality that his various concerns for the crew of the Dark Star are for show at best. He politely and apologetically rejects their genuine requests for vital supplies and repairs (budget cuts, he informs them) while simultaneously telling the men what a great job they are doing in the service of humanity and to “keep up the good work!”

The Nostromo crew in Alien does not even get that measure of courtesy from their bosses: In an infamous and chilling scene, a brief readout on a computer screen lets them know just how little the Company actually thinks of these employees and their lives. Power and profits come first, second, and last in this future society. Science and technology exist primarily to serve those two goals. All other considerations are secondary.

Now look at the Star Trek universe: As already pointed out, the film’s plot also involves a starship and its crew encountering a mysterious and potentially dangerous alien life form in deep space. Yet most everything else about this reality stands in glaring contrast to Alien, almost literally in fact.

The future as envisioned in Star Trek, both this first film and most of its other iterations, is an overwhelmingly positive and peaceful one for humanity. Yes, there are plenty of hostile aliens in this franchise, but the residents of Earth have largely overcome many of the major social issues that still plague us at present. This includes poverty, racism, gender inequality, unemployment, pollution, nationalism, and (terrestrial) war. Governing bodies appear to be just and fair, sharing their responsibilities with other species in a collective known as the United Federation of Planets (UFP), much like the United Nations (UN) on Earth. Citizens are free to realize their full potential as human beings.

While the organization that manages interstellar exploration and migration, Starfleet, is run much like the United States Navy (USN), their militaristic ambitions lean towards defense and police actions, not aggressive expansion into the galaxy. There are also frequent claims of their society functioning without a monetary system, although the franchise has brought up the term credits in regards to Federation financial transactions and material worth.

Granted, later and more recent members of the Star Trek franchise have been playing with darker themes. It has also become hard sometimes to distinguish between this series and Star Wars when it comes to the amounts of interstellar conflicts on display. However, when ST:TMP premiered in late 1979, Star Trek’s idealism and optimism were still the presiding temperament. In fact, I will argue that of all of this franchise’s cinematic versions that have come since, ST:TMP embodies the original character, goals, and messages best.

The protagonist alien in ST:TMP is about as physically different and far from the malevolent creature in Alien as one can get. In the film’s very first scene, we see that the being is enveloped in a massive cloud that we soon discover is over 82 astronomical units (AUs) in diameter! Or a mere two AUs if you prefer the alternate description in a later director’s version of the film.

One AU is the average distance between Sol and Earth, or about 93 million miles. That means the cloud is roughly 7.626 billion miles across, much longer than the distance from our yellow dwarf star to the orbit of Pluto.

While we do see the alien, which we later learn calls itself V’Ger (pronounced Vee-jurr), appear to destroy the first starships it comes across at the start of the film with white balls of plasma energy as a defensive response, it turns out that this is actually the method V’Ger uses to store information about the objects it comes across – reducing the entire subject of its “study” to data patterns, to be frank. Plus, the starships in question belonged to the Klingons, who shot at V’Ger first without so much as a how-do-you-do and surprisingly seemed surprised when their paltry photon torpedoes had no obvious effect on a cloud larger than a typical solar system.

One issue to be discussed in depth in this essay is just how dangerous and deadly V’Ger actually is. While it may not look or act like the xenomorph in Alien, V’Ger does hold a mindset very different from that of the humans and humanoids in ST:TMP due to both its original nature and how it ultimately came to be a massive and highly advanced Artilect, or Artificial Intellect, a term coined by Hugo de Garis for sophisticated and aware machine intelligences.

V’Ger’s response to the beings, starships, and worlds it encounters on its journey through the galaxy, while ostensibly part of its mission and not a deliberate and wanton spree of death and destruction, may nevertheless have made this alien far more dangerous than the creature in Alien could ever be. Ironically, both beings are operating from a place of “innocence” or at least a lack of human corruption.

Before We Engage…

Before we take those deep narrative dives, let us first get an idea of what we are dealing with via full plot summaries of our two featured films. Although it is my opinion that spoiler warnings are rather superfluous by this stage, if you have yet to view either film, you may want to do so before reading the rest of this essay. If you have seen these films before, a refresher viewing never hurts.

No one here should be terribly shocked at my viewer warning that Alien contains scenes of graphic violence, a liberal helping of gore, a few genuine jump scares, and the type of foreboding atmosphere generally found with most films of its genre, the science fiction horror film.

As for ST:TMP, while no one would ever mistake it for a horror film, there is one scene involving a transporter malfunction that I distinctly recall finding very disturbing at my initial viewing more from what is implied and reported than actually shown. There are other moments of destruction, death, and the threat of both throughout the film, although these scenes are far “cleaner” than in its cinematic counterpart, Alien.

Even in the future, exploring and utilizing space remains fraught with dangers despite our protagonists having more sophisticated knowledge and technology – and sometimes because of them.

Plot Summary: Alien

In the year 2122 (the date is never actually given in the film so far as I could find; it has been determined from other later reliable sources), the USCSS Nostromo, a “commercial towing vehicle” resembling a four-spired Gothic cathedral in space, is on a mission to bring 20 million tons of mineral ore across the Milky Way galaxy to Earth. The ship’s crew of seven people are in hypersleep, a form of suspended animation, to save resources for the long journey home when the vessel’s main computer, named MU-TH-UR 6000 (pronounced “Mother”), awakens them earlier than planned.

Image: Alien theatrical film poster.

It seems that a repeating distress signal has been detected and they are the nearest Company interstellar vessel to its location. Chief Engineer Parker complains that it is not his job to be part of a rescue party, unless they want to pay him for the extra work. Science Officer Ash informs Parker that it is company policy that all such transmissions be responded to, or the entire crew will lose all of their shares of the profit from this haul.

The signal comes from the surface of a small alien world circling a ringed gas giant exoplanet named either Acheron or LV-426 (take your pick). Once they are in orbit, a smaller craft detaches from the larger Nostromo and the entire crew heads down to the exomoon.

Image: The USCSS Nostromo makes its fateful, Company-ordained approach to the moon Acheron.

The landing is rough due to the moon’s harsh landscape and “primordial” climate and the ship sustains some damage as a result. While Parker and Engineering Technician Brett work on fixing the Nostromo, Captain Dallas, Executive Officer (XO) Kane, and Navigator Lambert leave their craft to find the source of the mysterious transmission. Of the three members of the landing party, only Kane is eager to explore this strange new world.

The spacesuited “rescue” party comes upon something most unexpected: A giant alien ship shaped like a horseshoe which appears to be derelict. They enter through one of several large openings in its base and discover in a huge open chamber the mummified remains of a large being sitting at some kind of strange console atop a tall platform. One of them notes that the alien (which the film makers refer to as the “Space Jockey”) seems to have “grown out of the chair.” They also note that the individual’s chest bones “are bent outward. Like he exploded from inside.”

Kane then exclaims to the other two crewmembers to come see the large burned out hole he has found in the platform supporting the Space Jockey. Kane volunteers to be lowered down into the dark opening on a tether, where he finds a vast chamber full of large leathery eggs.

Noticing that one of the eggs has something moving inside it, Kane moves closer to it. The top of the egg opens up like the petals of a flower. As Kane peers into the object, a creature suddenly springs through the opening and forcefully slams into his helmet’s faceplate, knocking the man over.

Sometime later, Dallas and Lambert return to the Nostromo carrying Kane, who is unconscious: The creature from the egg has broken through his suit helmet’s faceplate and attached itself directly to Kane’s face. The group desperately wants to get back into the vessel to save Kane before it is too late, to say nothing of just getting off this unsettling and uninviting rock.

Warrant Officer Ripley, who has been left in charge of the ship while they were gone, refuses to let them back onboard until they have gone through 24 hours of decontamination. Suddenly, Ash opens the inner airlock hatch of his own volition, allowing the landing party to reenter the Nostromo and take Kane to sickbay.

In sickbay, Dallas and Ash attempt to remove the “facehugger” creature from Kane’s head. Finding they cannot simply pull it off his face, they try to cut off one of its “legs” (or arms?) with a laser scalpel. This results in a yellowish liquid spewing from the digit and splashing onto the sickbay floor, where it immediately eats through the metal plating and several decks below sickbay. Realizing they cannot remove the facehugger without killing Kane in the process (and making a fatal hull breach in their ship), whom the creature is keeping alive for some reason, they keep the XO isolated in sickbay.

Sometime later they notice that the facehugger is no longer “hugging” Kane’s face and is shortly found dead in another section of the sickbay. Not long afterwards, Kane awakens, seemingly fine. He cannot recall what happened to him on the alien derelict. He does, however, know that he is famished and would love to have one more meal before the whole crew goes back into stasis for the return to Earth, now that the Nostromo landing craft has been repaired well enough to fly and is back in space redocked to the larger refinery ship.

As the crew sits around the common table eating and chatting, their moods much improved, Kane suddenly begins coughing and choking. Falling on his back onto the table in convulsions, a snakelike creature rips through Kane’s chest, killing the man and spraying his blood on the surrounding shocked and terrified crew.

The alien facehugger had implanted an embryo inside Kane while attached to him, using the unfortunate XO’s body as an incubator for the next stage of its development, the “chestburster”. With a screech, this abomination runs off the table and scatters into the depths of the Nostromo.

The crew “bury” Kane’s body by ejecting him into space and then set about capturing their most unwelcome “guest”. During their search, Brett becomes the first one to discover to his horror that the alien has metamorphosed yet again, this time into a towering dark humanoid creature with an elongated head and two sets of very sharp teeth – one set being attached to an inner mouth that can rapidly extend from and retract into its version of a face.

The xenomorph kills Brett, leaving virtually no remains. Dallas becomes its next victim when the captain attempts to flush it out of the air ducts with a portable flame thrower.

Ripley, now permanently in charge of the Nostromo, attempts to get answers and help directly from the ship’s computer. Long suspicious of Ash, she no longer trusts the Science Officer to assist them; the only information he has so far supplied the crew with regarding any useful substance is that his autopsy of the dead facehugger showed it has “an outer layer of protein polysaccharides…. a funny habit of shedding his cells and replacing them with polarized silicone, which gives him a prolonged resistance to adverse environmental conditions…. an interesting combination of elements, making him a… tough little son of a bitch.” Otherwise, Ash says only that he and Mother are “collating” data when Ripley repeatedly asks him what he is doing to find a solution to stop the alien.

Via the main computer, Ripley discovers Special Order 937: The Company had previously detected the “distress” transmission from the alien derelict and determined that the signal was actually a warning message about the species that had attacked and killed the extraterrestrial crew and was now onboard the Nostromo. They then secretly sent Ash to replace the vessel’s previous Science Officer just days before the ship left for Earth and instructed him to secure the xenomorph for corporate purposes. The Company considers this action “priority one” over everything else, including the lives of the crew.

Image: Special Order 937 via the Nostromo computer Mother. A pretty good indication that it is time to find a new line of work.

Ripley angrily confronts Ash directly about this secret Company directive. Ash responds by attacking her with almost superhuman strength and attempts to choke Ripley to death. Parker and Lambert arrive on the scene and try to stop Ash. Parker is able to strike Ash in the head with a club, where it is almost completely removed from his shoulders, revealing that Ash is actually an android (later on in the Alien franchise, they will be known as an “artificial person”, or “synthetic” in their society’s slang).

The surviving crewmembers revive the head of the now otherwise disabled Ash to see if he can provide them with any help or clues as to how to defeat the alien. Ripley guesses the Company wants the alien for its weapons division. Ash only responds that they cannot stop this “perfect organism,” noting that he admires “its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”

The now former Science Officer adds one last comment that he “can’t lie to you about your chances, but… you have my sympathies,” before Ripley pulls the plug on him (and Parker uses his flamethrower on Ash’s body for good measure).

The three survivors intend to blow up the Nostromo with its self-destruct mechanism to rid themselves of the alien once and for all while escaping in a small shuttlecraft called the Narcissus. Ripley activates the main ship’s Emergency Destruction System, which will destroy the Nostromo in just ten minutes: The process cannot be stopped in the last five minutes of the countdown.

Parker and Lambert are gathering supplies for their escape when the alien suddenly appears and kills them both. Now the last remaining crewmember (if you don’t count her cat, Jones), Ripley tries to reach the shuttlecraft, but discovers that the xenomorph is in the corridor between them, waiting.

Ripley runs back to the Emergency Destruction System control panel and desperately tries to stop the process, but she is too late. Having no other choice, she heads towards the shuttle bay and finds the alien is gone.

With a matter of seconds to spare, Ripley flees in the Narcissus just as the Nostromo explodes in an impressive and non-typical display of such an event in space compared to most science fiction films which have explosions in space. However, the multiple explosions are accompanied by sound: This is most ironic in a film whose famous tag line is “In space, no one can hear you scream.”

As Ripley prepares herself and her cat for hypersleep, she suddenly discovers that the alien has escaped the destruction of the Nostromo and is in the shuttlecraft with her! The creature lies almost dormant among the interior ductwork, biding its time since Ripley literally has nowhere else to go.

In a panic, the Warrant Officer hides in a closet where spare spacesuits are stored and quickly puts one on. She goes back out into the ship carrying a grappling hook and straps herself into a chair at a command console, where Ripley automatically releases a series of toxic gases on the alien.

Sprayed by these gases but unharmed, the creature furiously awakens and comes after Ripley, who responds by opening the ship’s airlock. The alien is almost sucked out into space by the huge release of interior air, but it manages to grab the airlock framework. Ripley then shoots the alien with the grappling hook, forcing it out into space.

However, this action causes the hook to be pulled from Ripley’s gloved hands, where it catches in the airlock door just as it closes. The xenomorph, still attached to the Narcissus by this tether and seemingly unaffected by direct exposure to space, proceeds to regain entry to the vessel through one of the engine exhaust ports. Ripley sees this through the airlock window and immediately activates the shuttlecraft’s engines: The resulting powerful blast hits the alien and sends it careening off into the void, presumably defeated at last.

The final scene shows Ripley sometime later sitting and holding Jones while recording the following log entry before they both go into stasis to await a rescue:

“Final report of the commercial starship Nostromo. Third Officer reporting. The other members of the crew – Kane, Lambert, Parker, Brett, Ash, and Captain Dallas – are dead. Cargo and ship destroyed. I should reach the frontier in about six weeks. With a little luck, the network will pick me up.

“This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.”

Plot Summary: Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Sometime in the 2270s (I could make an argument that this story should occur one full century earlier, based on a number of canon statements made in the original Star Trek series, but this is not the place to debate this particular subject), a massive and mysterious blue-green nebula is detected moving rapidly through the interstellar regions of the Klingon Empire.

Image: Star Trek: The Motion Picture theatrical film poster.

Three Klingon K’t’inga class battle cruisers intercept this intruder. The lead cruiser, the Imperial Klingon Ship (IKS) Amar, fires three photon torpedoes at it. Their signature red spheres disappear one-by-one into the cloud’s interior, showing no effects on their target.

Image: Star Trek: The Motion Picture theatrical film poster.

The “cloud” responds by launching much larger white balls of plasma energy at the warships, which are presumably destroyed as the energy bolts hit them: Waves of what look like electrical lightning forcefully stream up their hulls until the ships simply vanish from space.

Unbeknownst to the participants of this event, the entire incident was being intensely observed by the Starfleet monitoring station Epsilon 9 of the United Federation of Planets (UFP) near the border of Klingon space. The station personnel determine that the cloud is “on a precise heading for Earth” and will arrive there in less than three days!

The scene switches to the desert planet Vulcan, where a long-haired Spock has been undergoing his culture’s ancient Kolinahr ritual to purge his emotions and attain a mental state of pure logic.

Spock is just about to fulfill his training in Kolinahr and receive a necklace symbolizing this accomplishment from several elder Vulcan masters present, when he suddenly senses a very powerful consciousness from somewhere deep in the Milky Way galaxy. Spock’s reaction to this, due to being half human (his Vulcan father married a Terran woman), plus a mind meld from the female master, causes her to declare: “You have not yet achieved Kolinahr,” adding that “his answer lies elsewhere. He will not achieve his goal with us.”

We then travel to Starfleet Headquarters located on Earth, specifically in the city of San Francisco. There we meet James Tiberius Kirk, who is now an Admiral and has spent the last 2.5 years as Chief of Starfleet Operations. His previous job title was as Captain of the United Star Ship (USS) Enterprise, sent on a five-year space mission to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations… to boldly go where no man/one has gone before!”

Aware of the vast alien cloud heading straight for Earth and believing he is the best person to lead the inevitable encounter with this entity, Kirk pulls some strings to get himself reassigned to command the Enterprise again, demoting the starship’s current Captain, Willard Decker, to Executive Officer. The starship has also been undergoing eighteen months of upgrading, redesigning, and refitting: All these facts combined with the vessel somehow being the only Federation starship in intercept range of the cloud make it the best choice for the mission.

Things do not run smoothly at first: Decker is understandably not pleased with having to play second fiddle to a man he considers not only far less knowledgeable about the many infrastructure changes to the Enterprise than he, but also someone who wants to take command of the starship again because he considers her his to do so, even though Kirk has not “logged a single star hour in two and a half years.”

The various technical bugs and other issues with the refitted Enterprise, now being rushed for launch from drydock in Earth orbit in just twelve hours, have also not been entirely worked out. Kirk and the rest of the crew are given a shocking reminder of this when a transporter malfunction brutally kills two people in the middle of beaming aboard the ship. One of those unfortunate accident victims was a Vulcan named Sonak, who was to be the Enterprise’s new Science Officer. Kirk gives this rank and its responsibilities to Decker until a replacement can be found.

Before they depart, Kirk assembles the Enterprise crew in the large, open recreation room to brief them on the situation they will soon be facing, as the cloud is now just “fifty-three point four hours away from Earth.” The ship’s new Captain is interrupted by an urgent transmission from the Epsilon 9 station, projected onto the large viewscreen at the front of the room.

The station’s commander, Branch, reports that they have been studying the cloud, which is approaching their position in space. Their scans have determined that the cloud is over 82 Astronomical Units (AUs) in diameter (or just two AUs in a later rendition)! They have also learned that there is an object at the heart of the cloud, but all of their attempts to scan it have been reflected back. The station crew have tried to communicate with who or whatever is inside that cloud, but without success.

Branch becomes alarmed when he thinks that their scans may have been interpreted by the intruder as a hostile act. His fears are soon confirmed as the cloud responds to Epsilon 9 in the same manner as it did with those three Klingon battle cruisers.

The Enterprise crew watch in horror as the Federation station disappears before their very eyes. When the station has completely vanished, Kirk tells Communications Officer Lieutenant Commander Uhura to shut off the viewscreen. He then simply informs the undoubtedly now less than enthusiastic crew that “pre-launch countdown will commence in forty minutes.”

At the appointed time, the Enterprise leaves its drydock in Earth orbit. Wanting to encounter the cloud as soon as possible, Kirk orders the warp drive to be engaged while they are still within the Sol system, even though both Decker and Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott warn him that their method of moving at faster-than-light (FTL) velocities requires further simulations studies, especially on the flow sensors.

The Enterprise no sooner goes into warp than an engine imbalance throws them into a wormhole and affects the bridge crew’s ability to control the ship. Worse yet, a small planetoid is trapped in the wormhole with them and on a collision course. The starship and the day are saved by a well-aimed photon torpedo just seconds before disaster, which destroys the space rock and removes them from the wormhole.

As Mr. Scott and his engineering team are attempting to repair the warp drive system, a Starfleet shuttlecraft approaches and requests permission to dock with the Enterprise. Aboard the vessel is Spock, who offers his services as Science Officer, the position he famously held during the starship’s last five-year interstellar mission. Spock also offers to help Mr. Scott with their warp engine issues, being the very smart, capable, and multitalented person that he is.

Thanks to Mr. Spock, the Enterprise’s warp engines are soon fixed and the starship is put on its way at Warp 7 to intercept the cloud while it is still over one day from Earth.

Spock then meets with Kirk and his old friend, Chief Medical Officer Doctor Leonard McCoy, to explain his presence aboard the Enterprise.

Spock: “On Vulcan I began sensing a consciousness of a force more powerful than I have ever encountered. Thought patterns of exactingly perfect order. I believe they emanate from the intruder. I believe it may hold my answers.”

McCoy: “Well, isn’t it lucky for you that we just happened to be heading your way?”

Kirk: “Bones! We need him. I need him.”

Spock: “Then my presence is to our mutual advantage.”

As it is obvious that Spock has a level of telepathic connection with the presence inside the cloud, Kirk orders Spock to immediately report any thought patterns he might sense from it, “whether they appear to affect you personally or not.”

Kirk then dismisses Spock, whereupon Dr. McCoy expresses his concern that if the intruder is as personally important to Spock’s quest for life answers as he thinks it is, might the Science Officer place his own interests ahead of them and their mission? Kirk replies that he “could never believe” his most trusted officer and friend would jeopardize the ship and crew for his own agenda. McCoy simply adds that anyone might do such a thing, given certain circumstances.

Uhura informs Kirk that they are now in visual range of the cloud. Kirk rushes to the Enterprise bridge, where the Communications Officer informs him that she has been sending the intruder continual “friendship messages on all frequencies” in linguacode, but with no response.

At his science station, Spock informs Kirk that the cloud is scanning them; Kirk, recalling what happened to Epsilon 9 when they tried scanning the cloud, ordered that they perform no scans of their own. The Captain even refuses to activate the ship’s deflector shields as Decker suggests or take any other kind of defensive action that the alien might interpret as a threat.

Spock reports that the scans are coming from the heart of the cloud, which is generating “twelfth power energy,” a level that Decker declares “thousands of starships couldn’t generate that much!”

The Vulcan then senses a thought from the intruder: “I sense …puzzlement. We have been contacted. Why have we not replied?” Before Spock can reply to Kirk’s inquiry on this, a white plasma energy bolt appears from the cloud aimed directly at the Enterprise. The starship’s revamped shields and deflectors are immediately raised, which save the vessel and crew – this time.

A second energy bolt emerges from the cloud. Mr. Scott informs the bridge that the Enterprise cannot withstand another such attack. Spock determines that the intruder has been attempting to contact them on a frequency of “more than one million megahertz, and at such high rate of speed their entire message lasts only a millisecond.”

Spock reprograms the computer to transmit their initial friendly greetings again, but at the alien’s frequency and speed. This action appears to work, for the energy bolt suddenly disappears. Safe for now, Spock recommends that they take the Enterprise into the cloud to investigate what lies within it, a plan which Kirk agrees with over Decker’s protests. Spock notes that while “we are obviously confronted by a highly advanced mentality… yet they cannot understand who we are, or what we want.” The Science Officer adds that from the mind of the intruder he senses “no emotion, only… pure logic.”

The starship penetrates the many interior layers of the cloud and eventually arrives at its center. The cloud’s core contains what appears to be a huge, complex-looking, and roughly cylindrical-shaped vessel. Kirk orders Uhura to send a report with images of the alien vessel to Starfleet, but she responds that all of their transmissions are being reflected back. The Enterprise is placed on a course moving well over and along the alien ship to examine it further.

Image: The USS Enterprise deep inside the massive and complex V’Ger.

The bridge crew is suddenly blinded and deafened by a very loud vertical bolt of plasma that appears among them without warning. A probe sent by the alien, it moves around the bridge until it stops at Spock’s science station. The probe releases tendrils of energy across the station’s consoles to access the starship’s computers and all of its data. Spock tries to stop this intrusion by smashing the consoles with his fists, only to receive an electrical shock from the probe that knocks the Vulcan to the deck.

The energy bolt then moves to the bridge’s navigation station, where it envelopes the Deltan navigator Lieutenant Ilia in electrical tendrils until she disappears from the ship. The bridge crew is naturally shocked and upset at what has just taken place, especially Decker, who it was earlier revealed once had a relationship with Ilia when he was stationed on her home world.

The alien vessel then emits a powerful tractor beam and pulls the Enterprise into another chamber, then seals them off with its aperture. The bridge crew, quickly realizing they can use neither their weapons nor their warp engines to escape, decide to keep exploring the alien ship, but are prevented from moving ahead by an aperture at the other end of the massive chamber, which closes up.

A computer alarm voice suddenly blares “Intruder Alert!” multiple times. Sensors indicate something has appeared in a crewperson’s quarters on Deck Five, in their sonic shower to be specific. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and a security detail rush to the location.

There they are confronted by… Ilia, the Navigation Officer who was taken so brutally and abruptly from them. Or, as it is soon learned, this is an almost exact copy of Ilia, created and sent by what she calls “V’Ger” to “observe and record normal functioning of the carbon-based units infesting U.S.S. Enterprise.”

The Ilia probe repeats the words “carbon units” several times: This turns out to be the alien’s term for human beings. Ilia tells Kirk that V’Ger seeks the “Creator,” which is apparently located on Earth, to join with them where they “will become one.” When the officers try to get more information from the V’Ger probe, however, Ilia responds only with circular and vague answers.

Dr. McCoy suggests that he examines Ilia in sickbay in an attempt to learn more about who and what they are dealing with. Ilia agrees to this only after she is told it is part of the “normal functioning procedures” of the carbon-based units “infesting” the ship.

In sickbay, they learn that Ilia has been duplicated by V’Ger down to the molecular level. The copy is so precise, in fact, that it even retains many of Ilia’s memories. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy enlist Decker to interact with the alien probe. Their hope is that Ilia’s strong memories of Decker from their relationship, along with “her feelings of loyalty, obedience, friendship… might all be there,” allowing them to better communicate with the alien and perhaps find a way out of this situation before they all reach Earth.

Reluctant at first, Decker takes the Ilia probe around the Enterprise, showing and explaining various objects and even attempts to play a favorite recreational game in an effort to awaken Ilia’s memories. However, nothing seems to register with the probe, who then asks Decker the following:

Ilia Probe: “…Why does Enterprise require the presence of carbon units?”

Decker: “Enterprise would be unable to function without carbon units.”

Ilia Probe: “More data concerning this functioning is necessary before carbon units can be patterned for data storage.”

Decker: “What does that mean?”

Ilia Probe: “When my examination is complete, all carbon units will be reduced to data patterns.”

Decker takes the probe to what were once Ilia’s quarters and shows the mechanism more personal items in an effort to awaken Ilia’s memories stored within. The effort succeeds, but only briefly: Ilia says she cannot help the Enterprise crew make direct contact with V’Ger, nor does even the alien really know who or what the “Creator” is that it seeks.

Meanwhile, Spock secretly leaves the Enterprise wearing a spacesuit and a thruster pack on his back to fly through a small opening in the aperture and access an even deeper chamber to see if he can learn more about V’Ger. Recording his observations for Captain Kirk in case anything should happen to him, Spock witnesses an immense imaging system, a three-dimensional record of V’Ger’s journey through space.

First Spock encounters what he believes is a representation of V’Ger’s home planet, a world covered in organized grids of light. Moving through the chamber, Spock encounters highly realistic visual records of “planets, moons, stars, whole galaxies” and then the Epsilon 9 station, “stored here with every detail.” Spock becomes “quite convinced that all of this is V’Ger. That we are inside a living machine.”

The Science Officer then witnesses a huge representation of Ilia, complete with an oval pink-colored mechanism at the base of her neck like the one attached to the probe version currently aboard the Enterprise. Convinced it has a “special meaning,” Spock attempts to mind meld with the mechanism, only to become overwhelmed by the vast amounts of information and images flooding his far smaller organic brain. He is rendered unconscious and sent back into the chamber where the Federation starship is being held.

Kirk goes out and rescues his friend, taking him to sickbay. Spock soon awakens and starts to softly laugh, surprising all those present. He tells Kirk that V’Ger is a living machine from a world of living machines and that it considers the Enterprise to be one as well. Spock also notes, with personal understanding, that while V’Ger “has knowledge that spans this Universe” and has a mind of “pure logic… V’Ger is barren, cold, no mystery, no beauty.” The Science Officer then clasps his Captain’s hand and says that “this simple feeling is beyond V’Ger’s comprehension. No meaning, no hope… and, Jim, no answers. It’s asking questions. ‘Is this all I am? Is there nothing more?’”

Just then Uhura interrupts from the bridge to inform Kirk that they have been able to pick up faint signals from Starfleet, enough to learn that the cloud surrounding V’Ger is rapidly dissipating as it approaches Earth, which the alien vessel will begin to orbit in a matter of minutes.

Everyone, including Decker and the Ilia probe, arrive on the Enterprise bridge. The probe informs them that “V’Ger signals the Creator” using “a simple binary code transmitted by carrier-wave signal. Radio,” informs Spock, with some surprise, given the highly advanced nature of the alien.

When no response is received, V’Ger shuts down Earth’s entire planetary defense system and sends a flotilla of its energy bolts, “hundreds of times more powerful” than the ones which reduced the three Klingon ships and the Epsilon 9 station to data patterns for storage, hovering over the planet. When Kirk asks why V’Ger is doing this, he receives the following answers:

Ilia Probe: “The Creator has not answered. The carbon units’ infestation is to be removed from the Creator’s planet.”

Kirk: “Why?”

Ilia Probe: “You infest Enterprise. You interfere with the Creator in the same manner.”

Kirk: “The carbon units are not an infestation. They are a natural function of the Creator’s planet. They are living things.”

Ilia Probe: “They are not true lifeforms. Only the Creator and other similar lifeforms are true.”

McCoy: “Similar lifeforms. Jim, V’Ger is saying its Creator is a machine.”

Kirk: “Machine!”

Spock points out that V’Ger, for all its superior technology and vast knowledge, is still the emotional equivalent of a human child. He suggests to Kirk that he treats the alien just like he would a child.

Thinking on his feet, Kirk tells the Ilia probe that “the carbon units know why the Creator has not responded.” The probe demands that Kirk release this information, but he says he will do so only when V’Ger removes all the orbiting devices that threaten Earth and its inhabitants. The alien becomes frustrated when the carbon units do not comply and begins to rock the Enterprise with energy bolts to force an answer.

“Your child is having a tantrum, Mister Spock!” notes Dr. McCoy.

Kirk tells the Ilia probe that he will not reveal the information that V’Ger so desperately wants and needs to its probe, but only to the alien directly. Suddenly the Enterprise is pulled forward by a tractor beam to eventually settle in a new chamber where the “central brain complex” of V’Ger is located.

Kirk informs Scotty to set the starship to self-destruct, in case his plan fails, in a last chance to keep V’Ger from wiping out every living thing on Earth. Then he leaves through an airlock in the main hull of the Enterprise with Spock, McCoy, Decker, and the Ilia probe to meet whatever is producing those beams of bright blue lights ahead of them in the vast chamber.

The party soon reach and walk over a short rise which is the rim of a large pit-like area. There they at last see V’Ger – which bears an amazing resemblance to a particular old Earth space probe.

They walk up to the object, where Kirk finds a tarnished golden nameplate attached to its side. Some of the letters of the name on the plate have been covered over by dark smudges of unknown origin, leaving only the letters V, G, E, and R still visible. Kirk attempts to rub away the material with his fingers and is eventually able to read and then speaks aloud the full name of the machine before them: Voyager 6.

Decker chimes in that this is a NASA space probe “launched more than three hundred years ago.”

Kirk: “Voyager series, designed to collect data and transmit it back to Earth.”

Decker: “Voyager 6 disappeared into what they used to call a black hole.”

Kirk: “It must have emerged sometime on the far side of the galaxy and fell into the machine’s planet’s gravitational field.”

Spock: “The machine inhabitants found it to be one of their own kind, primitive, yet kindred. They discovered its simple Twentieth Century programming. Collect all data possible.”

Decker: “Learn all that is learnable. Return that information to its Creator.”

Spock (OC): “Precisely, Mister Decker. The machines interpreted it literally.”

Spock: “They built this entire vessel so that Voyager could fulfill its programming.”

Kirk: “And on its journey back it amassed so much knowledge, it achieved consciousness itself. It became a living thing.”

This revealing conversation is interrupted by the Ilia probe, who now demands that Kirk do what he promised back on the Enterprise bridge. Kirk contacts Uhura to look up information in the ship’s computer library on Voyager 6, specifically the “old NASA code signal that instructs the probe to transmit its data.”

V’Ger had earlier transmitted to Earth that it was ready to deliver all of the data it had collected as programmed to do and was awaiting the proper response to perform and complete this function. The problem was that no one living there in the late Twenty-Third Century would have been able to detect and interpret a radio message over three centuries old, a situation that V’Ger would not have recognized.

Kirk decides to tell V’Ger through the Ilia probe that the carbon units are, in fact, the Creator it has long been seeking. Ilia reiterates this cannot be possible, as V’Ger does not see humans and other organic beings as true life forms. Kirk responds that they can prove it by making it “possible for you to complete your programming. Only the Creator could accomplish that.”

Uhura soon finds the NASA code and sends it to the group surrounding the Voyager 6 probe. The code is almost sent completely through when there is a sudden flash of light on a side panel of the robot craft. V’Ger has purposely stopped the transmission to send all its data to Earth by melting its antenna leads.

The Ilia probe reveals that V’Ger wants to do more than contact the Creator: It wants to physically join with its presumed maker. McCoy asks how V’Ger thinks it can “capture God” without being “in for one hell of a disappointment.”

Spock informs the party that “V’Ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this Universe and it must evolve. What it requires of its God, Doctor, is the answer to its question: ‘Is there nothing more?’”

McCoy: “What more is there than the Universe, Spock?”

Decker: “Other dimensions, higher levels of being.”

Spock: “The existence of which cannot be proved logically, therefore V’Ger is incapable of believing in them.”

Kirk: “What V’Ger needs in order to evolve is a human quality. Our capacity to leap beyond logic.”

Decker: “And joining with its Creator might accomplish that.”

McCoy: “You mean that this machine wants to physically join with a human? Is that possible?”

Decker: “Let’s find out.”

Decker rushes up to Voyager 6 and repairs the antenna leads so the code transmission sequence can be completed. Then Decker finds himself being enveloped in a column of light. Ilia joins him and the two disappear together into this glow, which begins to expand outward.

Kirk, Spock, and McCoy quickly leave the area and return to the Enterprise.

High above Earth, a brilliant flash of light appears where V’Ger had been. The starship Enterprise emerges from the fading light, intact and unharmed.

On the bridge, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy ponder if they have just seen the beginning of a new being and what this may mean.

Kirk: “Spock! Did we just see the beginnings of a new lifeform?”

Spock: “Yes, Captain, we witnessed a birth. Possibly a next step in our evolution.”

Kirk: “I wonder.”

McCoy: “Well, it’s been a long time since I delivered a baby, and I hope we got this one off to a good start.”

Kirk: “I hope so, too. I think we gave it the ability to create its own sense of purpose. Out of our own human weaknesses and the drive that compels us to overcome them.”

McCoy: “And a lot of foolish human emotions. Right, Mister Spock?”

Spock: “Quite true, Doctor. Unfortunately, it will have to deal with them as well.”

Uhura cuts in and tells Kirk that Starfleet is requesting any casualty reports and a complete vessel status. Kirk replies that he wants Decker and Ilia listed as “missing” instead of casualties and that the Enterprise is “fully operational.”

With the Enterprise now ready for a “proper shakedown” cruise, Kirk is asked for the ship’s next heading through space. The Captain playful gestures towards the main viewscreen with his hand and replies: “Out there. Thataway!” The starship colorfully and loudly warps out into the wider Milky Way galaxy. The scene ends with the words “THE HUMAN ADVENTURE IS JUST BEGINNING” and the credits roll.

The Soundtracks

I was surprised to learn that the soundtracks for both Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture were both composed by the late great Jerry Goldsmith (1929 – 2004)! This certainly showcases Mr. Goldsmith’s talents, as the music for these films are as different as the films themselves are from each other. That neither soundtrack was even nominated with an Oscar for the category of Best Original Score had far more to do with Mr. Goldsmith’s issues with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences rather than their quality.

The opening credits in Alien set the mood for the rest of the film. As the camera pans across some unknown world from space and the title slowly begins to forms, the audience is made aware from the start that something ominous is going to happen. Of course anyone attending Alien when it first premiered should have had an inkling that this cinematic event was not going to be another Star Wars with relatively lighthearted violence and scares.

Not every moment of music is completely ominous and foreboding. Alien does have action scenes with swelling dramatic pieces similar to those of other films with comparable moments. Among my favorite pieces include the one accompanying when the Nostromo first descends towards the moon Acheron. The music makes you feel their long drop from space to the mysterious world below.

There is just a hint at this point that something may not be right, that something may go wrong, but for the moment the ship’s crew assumes they are on a rescue mission to assist another Terran interstellar vessel with a human crew much like them. For me it is also faintly reminiscent of the music that accompanied the first time we are shown the USS Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).

In summation, the Alien soundtrack does its part very well to pull you in with the visuals to an existence that you do not really want to be a part of outside of the 117 minutes you had to experience it either inside a theater or in your home.

Now compare and contrast the music from Alien with the soundtrack for ST:TMP. Before we see so much as one moment of this story, the opening credits begin with a very dramatic and uplifting piece that makes you feel like you are about to embark on an exciting adventure. The opening theme for the first Star Trek film became so popular, in fact, that it was used as the theme for Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first live-action series of the franchise after the original one.

The music used for V’Ger throughout does tend towards the ominous, but this is largely to make the alien more mysterious than terrifying. Both the audience and the Enterprise crew spend most of the film plot wondering exactly who or what they are dealing with when it comes to V’Ger. Once we learn that the alien is actually an ancient Earth probe – with some serious modifications and upgrades, granted – and a way is found to help V’Ger fulfill its mission and evolve into a higher life form, thus relieving its existential angst, the music becomes more ethereal.

Unlike the alien in Alien, V’Ger was never a true monster, or at least not intentionally. The issues that arose from the Enterprise crew’s encounter with it were more from misunderstandings on either side rather than actual threats or real malevolence. This kept well one of the main themes of the franchise that started with the original series: That communicating rather than reaching for a weapon is a much better way to handle potential problems and avoid outright conflict. Of course there was no real reasoning with the xenomorph terrorizing the Nostromo crew, but that is usually the point in a horror film.

One of my favorite music selections and scene in ST:TMP comes right at the beginning of the film with the three Klingon battle cruisers making their first (and last) meetings with the V’Ger cloud. The “clicking” aspects of this music would become representative of the Klingons in general throughout much of the franchise afterwards.

This scene also demonstrates my earlier statement on how Star Trek prefers diplomacy and understanding over warlike responses to unknown beings and situations. We never once get the impression that the Klingons confronting V’Ger ever seriously considered trying to communicate with the alien cloud. Instead, they fired upon the intruder in their realm, with unfortunate results only for themselves.

I will note that since we later learn in the film that V’Ger did attempt to communicate with the Enterprise but was doing so at a frequency and rate much higher and faster than what the Federation starship crew was used to, there is the possibility that the alien did try to contact the Klingon vessels, where they missed V’Ger’s transmissions for similar reasons. Not receiving any discernable response from a strange massive cloud moving through their space with impunity would easily trigger into offensive actions a warrior race like the Klingons.

In contrast, the Enterprise did its level best not to antagonize V’Ger and were ultimately rewarded for their nonbelligerent behavior. As a result, you very much want to be onboard that starship, interacting with its crew as they explore the galaxy and encounter those strange new worlds, new life, and new civilizations. That so many people were and are very active fans of the franchise to this very day and relish such thoughts further proves the point made here.

One surprise and disappointment about the ST:TMP soundtrack: There was no recreation of the famous original series theme (which included bongos) except for a few brief notes scattered throughout the film. Perhaps they wanted a “fresh” start and to give the film its own unique musical signature, to emphasize that these are the new adventures of the starship Enterprise.

Still, I wish they had made the original theme song more prominent, at least as a tribute to the series that made the film even possible, and a thank you to the fans who kept the franchise from fading away. The latter were already looking for the film to appear more like the original series, even though the 1960s television sets, special effects, and uniforms probably would not have carried over well onto the big theatrical screens. Having the original scores could have been one type of bridge between the old and the new for the reasons stated above.

In my research on the soundtrack for the first Star Trek film, I learned the following relevant items I would like to share here:

Gene Roddenberry (1921 – 1991), the man who created the franchise and was the Producer for ST:TMP, originally wanted Goldsmith to create the score for the very first Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” but he was too busy with other projects at the time.

Although the makers of ST:TMP wanted to ensure their film was neither a copy nor clone of Star Wars and largely succeeded on that score, Goldsmith was influenced by that 1977 film’s soundtrack. He said:

“When you stop and think about it, space is a very romantic thought. It is, to me, like the Old West, we’re up in the Universe. It’s about discovery and new life. It’s really the basic premise of Star Trek.”

Gods, Old and New

There are those who have said, and I happen to agree with, that science fiction (and fantasy) are our modern replacements for the ancient mythological stories about gods and their supernatural subordinates in a strongly Judeo-Christian (one God) modern culture.

In this genre, one could safely “worship” (enjoy) a wide variety of unworldly beings without getting into big trouble with your social units, as few would take such undoubtedly fictional characters seriously. They are often deemed by certain folks as just another form of entertainment and escapism, after all.

One thing science fiction does reflect is how, after all these generations and the strong influence of current religions that have one major deity (or none at all in the case of Buddhism), there is still a “need” for multiple deities and other forms of supernatural entities. Not so much as for actual worship, please note, but rather to fill several key needs in our storytelling that having one omnipotent God who knows everything, can do anything, and is invulnerable tends to take away in terms of dramatic tension.

We can also see this in our culture’s current fascination with superheroes. Not only are many of these characters very much like the demigods of ancient Western mythology, they sometimes are those very beings and more (think Thor, Son of Odin, from Norse mythology). The old gods have not died off, they just went to the movies and occupy literary niches outside classical sacred texts.

For all the claims of adherence to science and secularism in the Star Trek franchise, that universe has more than its share of beings which are just this side of the supernatural and mythological. Now one might reasonably argue that humans could find much more advanced alien species with their superior knowledge and technology, which may also have developed very differently from ours in the process, to be difficult to distinguish from actual deities existing in another realm (dimension, plane, etc.). However, the behaviors and attitudes of such Star Trek species as the Q Continuum, with their seeming omnipotence and arrogant reactions towards any creatures they consider to be lower than themselves, strike me as very similar to the gods and goddesses of Greek and Roman mythology.

Unlike the God of Judeo-Christian culture, who is beyond all human and material wants and needs as well as being all-knowing and wise, the ancient deities of Western culture were often much like humans in both our strengths and weaknesses. If nothing else, that made them better characters for stories where drama and excitement were required: Refer to Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey as just two of many examples where the gods and humans directly interacted with each other.

In many respects, V’Ger can easily be considered one of the “deity aliens” of the Star Trek universe, although in its case, it is more often akin to the Judeo-Christian God of the Old Testament in the Bible than the other ancient gods and goddesses.

V’Ger arrives on the scene shrouded in a massive cloud. It moves through space at incredibly rapid speeds, traversing large swaths of the Milky Way galaxy in mere days. It does not respond to the inquiries of the comparably tiny creatures it encounters. V’Ger then removes them from existence using what look like bolts of lightning when these beings somehow displease it or otherwise get in its way.

V’Ger is the embodiment of enigmatic. The Federation and its chosen representative, the crew of the Enterprise, wrack their comparatively tiny organic minds trying to figure out what this alien intruder wants from them. Even when they penetrate the alien’s cloud cover and see the giant vessel at its heart, none of them can make more than guesses as to what its various features are for. Initially, they have no idea why such an entity is heading on a very deliberate course for Earth, the home world of humanity, and V’Ger offers not so much as a hint for them.

We soon learn that not only is V’Ger very much unlike the organic beings that dwell aboard the starship Enterprise, but that the alien does not even consider the humans and humanoids serving aboard the vessel to be true life forms, only an infestation of “carbon units.” As V’Ger turns out to be the product of a very advanced machine race from another part of the galaxy, it only sees the Enterprise and similar such artificial technologies as comparable life. All others are the equivalent of insects on our scale and are to be treated as such when the situation calls for it.

In its attempts to comprehend the carbon units aboard the Enterprise, V’Ger actually takes one of them (the Deltan Ilia) and replaces her with a mechanical probe, a proxy on a scale nearly matching the original person right down to her memories. One might make a case to a certain degree for the parallels with the Judeo-Christian God creating a human representative to go among our species, in part to better understand this particular creation for purposes than remain a mystery until the end.

Perspectives start to change once the Enterprise crew starts to interact with the Ilia probe and, in Spock’s case, part of the “mind” of V’Ger itself. For all its power and abilities, the alien shows that not only does it not see humans and other organic beings as another form of life, but it is actually searching for a “Creator” itself, which V’Ger is convinced is on the third planet from Sol.

As Spock later learns and relays to his comrades, V’Ger is going through an existential crisis. Its makeup and utterly logical machine mind do not allow it to cross certain boundaries both mental and physical. As a result, V’Ger remains both stuck in space and time and grows increasingly frustrated, to the point that it threatens to use its energy bolts to wipe out everyone on Earth. For all it has and can do, V’Ger needs something that most humans have and do every day, often without much deliberate thought. Until then, the alien cannot grasp the very things it has been seeking, the answers to who it is, why does it exist, and is there nothing more?

It is quite interesting to see how the crew of the starship Enterprise deals with their powerful captor. Kirk and most of the others are seeking direct information and answers about and from V’Ger as to why it has come to Earth and what it wants with that planet (and presumably its inhabitants). While they are willing (and otherwise forced) to tolerate and perform certain activities to placate V’Ger’s demands and avoid obliteration, Kirk et al become increasingly desperate in their own right to either satisfy the alien or prevent it from destroying Earth.

They attempt to use their technological tools of science, which they often find to be useless or even deactivated in the face of this alien superpower. They also consider using the weaponry of their technology as a means to either get answers or rebuff V’Ger: These too are also left wanting or turned outright useful in the face of this far more sophisticated entity.

Spock takes a somewhat different tack. From the start he has had a connection with V’Ger that the rest of the crew lack (and apparently every other sentient being in this part of the galaxy with telepathic abilities, or at least we never hear from them in the film). While the ability to “read” minds is a given in the Star Trek universe, particularly with species like the Vulcans, it still has a strong measure of mysticism and lack of rigorous credibility in our world. It is not hard to see Spock’s reading of V’Ger’s mind as akin to séances from our perspective, a form of reaching into the supernatural realm.

Nevertheless, Spock’s mind powers plus his feeling of kinship with V’Ger allow him to comprehend the alien in ways that the rest of the crew cannot. One might go so far as to say Spock is a disciple or even a “chosen one” of V’Ger, were the being an actual deity. This perspective is even more forced when we witness how Spock first became aware of V’Ger: During his Vulcan Kolinahr ritual, an ancient rite that removes all emotion from the participant’s mind, leaving only pure logical thought.

This event may be all about acquiring rational and logical thinking, but it is also hard not to perceive this ritual as a form of religious ceremony or rite of passage, given the surroundings of where it takes place and the priest-like elders who are performing it. Spock was even about to receive a talisman in the form of a large and rather clunky necklace as a symbol of his new powers.

Were our ancestors able to witness this scene and understand that Spock had sensed the powerful thoughts of an entity far up in the heavens, no one would blame them for interpreting all this as the Vulcan having had a spiritual/religious contact with a god.

The lines become even more blurred on a visual level in the way that V’Ger at last receives its answers. Even when we and Kirk et al learn that V’Ger is actually a robotic space probe made by humans centuries ago that got “tricked out” by some advanced alien machines and its Creator are the very beings it thinks are not true life forms let alone the kind that could make such a being as itself, it is hard not to see the “merging” of the Ilia probe and Decker as a mystical transformation.

The two participants – whom it should be noted were once lovers and are now again, with love being considered by many to be a transformative force unto itself rather than merely a biological method of ensuring reproduction and the continuation of the species – are first enveloped in a blue and white glow of light that swirls around them, ruffling Decker’s hair. Then they disappear altogether in the lig