Star Trek is famous for its transporter technology. In the real world, the idea of “beaming up” was actually a way of dealing with a limited budget; the show couldn’t afford expensive shots of shuttles flying to every planet, so Gene Roddenberry came up with the transporter instead. In most cases, crew transport themselves straight to a planet’s surface without needing to worry about shuttles and the like.
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The transporter symbolizes Star Trek as a whole. “Beam me up, Scotty” is easily one of the most famous lines of sci-fi dialogue, and transporter accidents have become a dime a dozen. We’ve seen characters split in two, transported to different locations, and even merged (a hilarious Voyager idea in which Tuvok and Neelix were combined into a single being). But now, shockingly, we’ve learned the transporter can be used as a terrifying weapon.
The Transporter Can Be Used to Torture
Star Trek went full horror in Strange New Worlds Season 4, episode 2 (“The Griffin Incident”). Something of a ghost story, this sees three members of the Enterprise crew – Spock, La’an, and Kirk – transport to an abandoned ship, the Griffin, where they are manipulated by a malevolent entity that may or may not be a ghost of some kind. It’s a “Division 12” mission, something the heroes cannot explain and eventually pass over to a specialist unit who investigate inexplicable phenomena. But, strikingly, the psychological torture also shines a light on the transporter.
In one hallucination, La’an believes she’s helping to transport fellow crew members back to the Enterprise one and a time. Something goes horrifically wrong with Ortegas, though, who screams in pain as her body remains stood there, shimmering. A horrified Uhura checks the transporter, and discovers La’an has supposedly transported Ortegas into herself. It’s clearly not the normal function of a transporter, but it’s shocking to see how easy it is to apparently circumvent any safety protocols. Of course, the whole thing turns out to be an illusion, but it’s based on “real” Star Trek technology so it can consume La’an.
We’re used to the transporter. The technology is familiar to us, popular and much loved, but Strange New Worlds revealed its dark side. Imagine, for example, a warlike race lacking in morality who figured out how to use a transporter; it’s so easy to imagine them creating torture devices with it, where they transported a person into themselves for a while before moving them into the pattern buffer and removing them from the device. If the experience of “pseudo-Ortegas” is anything to go by, such torture would be absolutely agonizing.
This is certainly another justification for the Prime Directive, which governs Starfleet’s willingness to share tech with other races. Even warp-capable races could potentially abuse basic technology like the transporter, using it in horrific ways. Little wonder the Federation is often accused of hoarding technology; they know how easily it could be abused.
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