Film Theory: 3 DEADLY Truths About the Star Trek Transporter

Who wins in a fight: Federation, Klingons, Romulans, or the Cardassians? Check out Star Trek Infinite ► play.paradoxinteractive.com/StarTrekFilmTheory

Not ONCE did an episode that heavily featured the transporters go by without my dad turning to me and ranting about how he would never trust using a transporter and he HEAVILY encouraged me not to either. And I just sit there nodding along because he’s totally right and I totally agree, but also don’t think that’s something I gotta worry about for a bit.

Fun fact: Not once is the phrase, “Beam me up, Scotty” exclaimed in the original series. It’s one of the most famous Mandela effects in fiction.

I'm surprised you didn't mention how much Dr. McKoy fought against using the transporter in the ST:TOS movie. it even had an example of a very, very bad transporter accident!

There is an episode where Barclay finds creatures inside the transporter beam. There's another where Troi days "for a moment I thought we were inside that wall" and somebody answers "for a moment you were." This goes to show that conscious thought is kept inside the transport beam, which means you are still you when you arrive where you are. There is no death and then reassemble, but instead you are aware the whole time.

One thing that Matt left out was you could also be teleported to a different universe. There was one episode in the original series and several episodes in Deep Space Nine where one or more people were transported to a mirror version of their universe.

I like the video, and I'm not the kind of fan who gatekeeps, so two things, 1. Scotty wasn't trapped mid-transport. He was stored in the shuttles pattern buffer, which stores the transport pattern before rematerialising. 2. Dr. M'benga also stored his sick daughter in a transport buffer until a cure was found.

I remember having a debate with my cousin once about using transporter technology as a means of humane execution - I'm actually kind of surprised the shows' writers never tackled an idea like this (at least, not as far as I can remember - does anyone here recall an episode about this?). Anyway, my cousin was using the TNG episode with Barclay in his argument that being in the transporter doesn't necessarily mean you lose consciousness. One thing MatPat neglected to mention about that episode was that the bizarre, giant wormlike lifeforms Barclay sees during transport are revealed to actually be humans that had somehow been STUCK in transport for god knows how long... which is an extremely disturbing concept in itself, frankly - one that I'm disappointed wasn't touched on a little more! It's a reveal made at the end of the episode and is just handwaved away! But yeah, if you're still conscious during transport and aware of your pattern degrading, that could be a truly horrific way to die.

I'm surprised that Mat didn't mention the Next Generation episode 'Rascals', where the transporter was used to age or de-age people. They essentially unlocked immortality via the transporter, but it was never addressed again.

There is a reason that the NX-01 crew only used the transporters for emergencies and supplies. Then Season 4 happened, and they got used to it.

Surprised he never pointed out that "Beam me up, Scotty" was never actually said in that exact way on the show, much like "Elementary, my dear Watson". If there's a tradition time honored by both MatPat and Trekkies, it's being pedantic

I loved star trek next gen as a kid in the 90s! The temporary accident episodes were some of the scariest things I had ever experienced. Used to think about what would happen if it went wrong and I'm struggling to rematerialize, also fantasized about saving people from transporter failures, just seemed so captivating.

I'd like to see a study about how dangerous transporters are versus shuttlecraft, because I remember there being a lot of shuttlecraft crashes in all of the shows :P

One thing to note about being stuck in the pattern buffer - it's entirely possible that you CAN'T get stressed or experience normal psychological degradation from it, and can only experience them when you're out (which is why someone can develop a phobia about it, but someone else can get stuck there without overstressing about it) because in that state, they can perceive, but have no hardware on which to produce the chemical stress responses - the information is encoded as part of the transfer process, but they only experience the negative effects post-transport. Thus, if they don't have a problem with being transported (like Scotty), then they unlikely to come out stressed because they literally can't feel bored or stressed or angry or anything else at all. There's no physiological component to it because there's no physiology to happen in.

I also noticed in one episode that they retain the data from each teleportation in an archive, which they used to fix some medical problem WITHOUT resetting the person's memories. So whenever a person dies, they could just load up that person's last teleportation data to revive them with just a bit of memory loss. When people get old, injured, or sick they could just merge the memories of their old body into a young body to reset their youth and health. People could duplicate armies of scientists, soldiers, etc. to accelerate technological progression or win wars. It was frustrating that the writers were too dumb to utilize obvious implications from the technology they presented in previous episodes.

i LOVE star trek, and i think mat did an amazing job on this video, i just wish that the great folks down at film therie did more trek episodes

The series Star Trek Enterprise also had some transporter problems as well, especially considering it was probably more unstable than what we had back during the age of Kirk

There is one thing about the trasnporters that i have never seen being fully utilized. Its amazing medical possibilities. You could store a backup of someones patern in a long term storage instead of just a buffer and if ANYTHING, from injury to death to desease, affects the crewmember just pass him through the teleporter, comparing archived to current data, and fixing what must be fixed.

Matpat didn't even have to theorize much, the show explored almost every possibility lol

I’m surprised you didn’t include that transporter scene from The Motion Picture. Especially after bringing up that people are apparently aware that they’re inside the buffer. That scene to this day has one of the most unsettling, horrific movie screams I’ve ever heard.