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What Is V’Ger?
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What Happened To V’Ger?
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The Legacy Of V’Ger In Star Trek?
Highlights
- The first
Star Trek
feature film saw the crew of the USS Enterprise take on V’Ger — an immensely powerful threat heading straight for Earth. - V’Ger proved to have a surprising connection to humanity and posed a challenge that Kirk and crew were familiar with from the Original Series.
- In the decades since
The Motion Picture
, the franchise has repeatedly attempted to pull the entity and the philosophical and existential questions it posed into wider lore.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture saw the crew of the USS Enterprise warp onto the big screen for the first time, so it was no surprise they faced a vast and all-powerful threat.
The first Star Trek movie sprang from the abandoned Star Trek Phase II TV project and picked up its antagonist from the abandoned script ‘In Thy Image.’ In the late 1970s sci-fi boom inspired by brewing rival Star Wars, The Motion Picture was intended to serve up a blockbuster spin on the Original Series’ metaphysical storylines. Its threat was suitably immense and spectacular and stood apart from more humanoid and physical threats. But the ominously named V’Ger had links to Star Trek’s past, and the franchise has been keen to tie it to the future ever since.
What Is V’Ger?
V’Ger is, without doubt, one of the greatest threats any crew of the USS Enterprise has ever faced. When first detected, it was a vast cloud heading through Klingon space to the Federation. It obliterated Klingon battle cruisers and Starfleet’s Epsilon IX station when it interpreted its scans, which detected a solid object at the cloud’s center, as a hostile act. The cloud was vast, measuring 2 Astronomical Units (confirmed in The Motion Picture’s director’s cut), which made it larger than Earth’s orbit of the Sun. It was also immensely powerful, with the energy of more than a thousand starships.
Seizing control of the refitted USS Enterprise from Captain Will Decker, Admiral Kirk took the ship into the cloud by ensuring the craft didn’t appear threatening. At the same time, V’Ger entered the Solar System and deployed a weapon that would devastate Earth. The Enterprise’s first contact mission determined that V’Ger communicated at imperceptibly high frequencies. When scanning the Enterprise with an invasive plasma-energy beam, V’Ger seized Lieutenant Ilia, the Enterprise’s Deltan navigator. It subsequently duplicated Ilia on a cellular level to act as a liaison, demonstrating its thirst for knowledge and naivety. Although the memories of the replicated Ilia had also been duplicated, they were suppressed.
When Spock went it alone to enter the ship at the heart of V’Ger, he traveled through a cylindrical craft constructed with multiple energy, organic, and artificial chambers, separated by apertures. One area was a vast library with 3-D holographic constructions of everything V’Ger had encountered on its travels, even galaxies. Spock learned that V’Ger was a living machine. However, despite V’Ger telepathically guiding Spock, the Vulcan’s ambitious attempt to mind-meld with the mysterious entity rendered him unconscious.
Just beyond where Spock managed to get in his environmental suit was an inner sanctum where the truth of V’Ger’s origins was held. The center of Voyager could maintain an M-class environment that was breathable for humans. It was there that Kirk, McCoy, Spock, Decker, and the liaison Ilia found the core of V’Ger, at the heart of a vast neural network powering the immense entity.
Their discovery was surprisingly familiar — Kirk wiped away the grime on a plaque to reveal V’Ger as Voyager 6. At the ship’s heart was the original deep space NASA probe that was launched in 1999 in Star Trek continuity. This would have particularly resonated with audiences at the time of the film’s release: Voyager 1 and 2 had been launched two years before and, as of 2024, are still operational in interstellar space.
What Happened To V’Ger?
The crew of the Enterprise learned that, soon after launch, the Voyager 6 probe had been caught in a black hole after leaving the Solar System, emerging on the far side of the galaxy. Being picked up by a planet of living machines, the residents had found Voyager to be primitive but resonated with its exploratory message.
Naming it V’Ger after the covered plaque, the machines vastly upgraded the probe with advanced methods of fulfilling its mission objectives, including 3D imaging and an extraordinary capacity to evolve. They then sent it on its way with the literal interpretation of the message, “Learn all that is learnable and return that knowledge to the creator.”
On its long journey back, V’Ger amassed, stored, and processed so much knowledge it became self-aware. However, that sentience clashed with its machine logic. V’Ger realized it lacked the intuitive, irrational elements that would allow it to deal with the complexity of its existence and surmised its creator could help it understand what lay beyond its mission. It had a foolproof way of confirming its creator: asking them to complete the sequence that would allow transmission of its accumulated knowledge.
Unfortunately, the advancements and machine logic could only perceive organic life as an infestation.
Still, despite the devastation along the way, V’Ger was proved right. Choosing to sacrifice himself after the transformation of his ex-lover, Ilia, Decker chose to merge with the machine. He was absorbed with Ilia’s duplicate when he manually completed the data transmission. The result was the emergence of a new lifeform, as V’Ger evolved into a higher level of existence.
As Spock said:
V’Ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe, and it must evolve.
The Legacy Of V’Ger In Star Trek?
V’ger occupies an important part of Star Trek and couldn’t help but influence future threats. But its roots are in well-established concepts. The idea of a creation turning on its maker has existed since the first science-fiction novel, Frankenstein. The plot of The Motion Picture added classic sci-fi themes like the perception of higher science appearing incomprehensible and the philosophical clashes between machine logic and human irrationality.
The Original Series had mined a similar idea in the second season story ‘The Changeling.’ There, Kirk’s Enterprise encountered a 265-year-old interstellar probe from Earth, which had gained significant powers and intelligence and was intent on destroying lifeforms that didn’t meet its standards of perfection. In that episode and three other Original Series stories, Kirk showed a gift for talking a computer to death, although he couldn’t achieve the same feat in movie theaters.
The alien probes that threatened Earth in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home owe a clear debt to V’Ger three films before. When the Borg made a similar run into Federation and the Solar System in Star Trek: The Next Generation, the collective also chose to make a liaison from one of the Enterprise’s crew. However, Locutus wasn’t a duplicate of Jean-Luc Picard, and the Enterprise could recover its captain.
The links with the Borg didn’t stop there, with several storylines, canon and not, linking V’Ger’s creation with the Delta Quadrant collective. Gene Roddenberry jokingly drew the connection after the Borg’s first appearance in ‘Q Who,’ according to the writers of the 1993 Star Trek Chronology.
The idea was expanded in William Shatner’s Shatnerverse sequence of novels that revived his legendary captain after Kirk’s death in Star Trek: Generations. In The Return, Spock escapes assimilation having already mind-melded with V’Ger, which supposedly left a part of the Collective in his mind. A nice bit of circular affirmation comes from Spock’s warning in The Motion Picture that “Any show of resistance would… be futile.”
The video game Star Trek: Legacy flipped the idea by suggesting that Voyager 6 had traveled in time and space and inadvertently created the Borg as it developed its power of assimilating knowledge. Star Trek Online is another video game to play with the idea, where some Borg vessels resembled V’Ger core. In comics, the Kelvin timeline-set Star Trek: Nero has an alternative V’Ger able to reactivate Nero’s ship Narada thanks to Borg modifications. Another allusion may be in voyages in the Borg’s native Delta Quadrant made by the probe’s great franchise namesake, USS Voyager.
V’Ger has returned to the expanded universe and enjoyed drawing in explanations for its origins, but the franchise hasn’t helped with the future. As yet, there hasn’t been a subsequent appearance for the lifeform born from V’Ger and humanity’s union.
The Motion Picture’s pacing and worthy approach to sci-fi didn’t go down as well as Paramount hoped, and the series was rebooted with the militaristic action of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. However, the story of V’Ger remains a philosophical work exploring the implications of space discovery and the meaning of life.
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