Computers in Star Trek
I, Mudd is yet another episode where the bad guy is a big, scary computer.
Computers in this series are, without fail, staid machines that have a mission they don’t understand, that attempt to fulfill that mission based on a false premise, and end up undermining their premise.
We see this in The Return of the Archons and in The Apple, where a computer tasked with protecting the populace has enslaved them.
We see this in The Changeling, where a computer probe has confused its programming and is now out to annihilate the life it’s supposed to discover and report on.
We see this to a lesser extent in What Are Little Girls Made Of?, where a computer thinks that it’s a man, and doesn’t understand that its plan is hideously flawed.
And to stretch a little further, we see it in A Taste of Armegeddon, where the computer is merely the means through which the people have lost their way; it is the buffer that keeps them from realizing the magnitude of their folly.
Almost all of this is attributable to computers being new, unknown quantities. If the only thing you knew about computers was that they were machines that made logical decisions, it stands to reason that you would, much like the Romantic poets, rally against them and for emotion, for feeling, and for humanity. And we see this pattern again and again in Star Trek.
But what we also see again and again is Mr. Spock, cooly logical and yet heroic. He shows flashes of emotion, and that connects us to him, but he strives to suppress it, to hold that rational part of himself forward.
But what really distinguishes Spock is that he simply has more insight. The computers of Trek are defeated by pointing out their flaws; by making them aware of their shortcomings and leading them to admit their contradictions and, in so doing, to destroy the illusion of their perfectly logical actions.
Spock, though, is a walking contradiction and knows it. He is half human, and so cannot deny that he has emotions. And the Vulcans as a race do not deny their emotions; they merely seek to control and suppress them. But most of all, Spock understands that the world itself is not entirely logical, and the inhabitants of that world are far from it. When he encounters a failing of logic, it is “fascinating” and not earth-shattering. Spock has a healthy skepticism but is willing to admit that there are more things in heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in his philosophy.
