By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Last year, the film Oppenheimer took the assault world, sweeping the Oscars and leaving a lasting cultural impact on all those who saw it. In terms of tone and subject, this film was the polar opposite of Star Trek, a franchise which consists in exploring new strange worlds rather than building bombs. However, decades before Oppenheimer came out, Star trek: travel Delivered an surprisingly complex episode (“Jettel”) built around an extraterrestrial representation of J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer in Star Trek
The influence of Oppenheimer on this subject Star Trek The episode was relatively well known among fans at the time because it was not exactly subtle. In this story, Neelix is traumatized by the meeting of traveling with Jetrel, a scientist who built a weapon named Metison Cascade who killed more than 300,000 Talaxians, including the own family of Neelix. In the traditional fashion of franchise, the scientist has a crazy plan to try to undo the damage he has caused, but he flows against time because he dies of a deadly blood disease caused by the very super- weapon he helped to develop.
“Jettel” was written by three writers, including Kenneth Biller, a man who said later: “I did a lot of research on Oppenheimer And became fascinated by what I learned “by writing this episode. According to the writer,” there were Jettel lines said that real things said that Papier said. “As an example, He mentioned that Jetrel asked him if he felt guilty of what he had done in the Talaxians, just as “Oppenheimer was asked if he felt guilty of Hiroshima and he said: “ Yes, I feel guilty, but I do not regret regretting he. ‘”
Another little real Oppenheimer’s dialogue that made Star trek: travel The episode concerned Jettel’s description of the appearance of the Metron waterfall: “brighter than a thousand suns”. It was referring to the time when Oppenheimer quoted the famous Bhagavad GitaBy saying: “If the brilliance of a thousand suns was to immediately explode in the sky, it would be like the splendor of the powerful. I became death, the shast of worlds. »»
If that is not enough, Biller once summarized “Jettel” by saying that this episode was essentially “Neelix meets Robert Oppenheimer”. In this way, the episode was a little more on the nose compared to the usual metaphorical narration of Trek, but Biller was just fascinated by the creation of a science fiction Answer to the question “What if Oppenheimer was faced with a survivor?” In this case, the survivor is Neelix, and transforming the episode into an unexpected character study of Talaxian is one of what won the showrunner Michael Piller and other producers.
“Basically, we use the character of Oppenheimer as an inspiration to say something about one of our guys,” said plunder about this episode of Star Trek. The fact that the guy in question was the character of Comic Relief Neelix helped win the producer Jeri Taylor, who praised “Jettel” because it “gave us the opportunity to show a completely different side of Neelix”. The colleague producer Brannon Braga accepted, saying that the episode “withdrew Neelix to be just comic relief”, a necessary step because “you do not want him to become the joke of the ship.”
In case you ask yourself the question, Oppenheimer and his inheritance are found fairly well in this episode of Star Trek. Jettel ends up failing in his noble attempt to cancel the damage he caused and ended up being forgiven on his death bed by Neelix. This stand-in of Oppenheimer, like so many characters from Mémorable Star Trek camée, is presented as a tragic figure that has decided to do the right thing, which does not look like what we see in the ‘Episode of DS9 thematically similar “Duet”.
Once again, Oppenheimer is normally the last person you associate with Star Trek, but “Jettel” proves that the fascinating life of this real character can be a springboard to learn more about our favorite fictional characters. And if you don’t like the episode, you don’t have to become the destructive of the worlds to make it disappear. Instead of pulling a meteron cascade, just press the power button on your remote control and, like Jettel himself, do your best to forget what happened.
