Could Martia from Star Trek VI have been a changeling?

[parrot999]

So, I recently rewatched Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, and think it is a really good, and criminally underrated film, which thematically and structurewise matches up with Deep Space Nine, a similarly criminally underrated series.
From the tone and political focus, to the much more character focused story telling, and the heavy themes of internal conflict, the final original series movie has a lot in common with DS9.

But anyways, it also set up a bit of lore that has relevence to DS9. The idea that shapeshifters are believed to be a myth by most civilizations. Something Kirk remarks to the shapeshifter, Martia.

So my question is, could Martia have been a changeling? Possibly one of the hundred? She claimed to be a chameloid when confronted by Kirk, but if she was one of the hundred she wouldn't know about her true species and would likely come up with her own species name like Laas did. Also, she appeared to have a slightly viscous fluid-like appearance when changing form, though far more simplistic than the 3D rendered effect on DS9...

What are you guys' thoughts?

 

[Karzak]

No. Colonel West however...

 

[Timo]

Well, there are discrepancies in how a young Changeling like Odo behaves, and how Martia does. But Changelings are specifically known for their ability to look like something else, so there is no telling!

Say, the ability not to glow like the DS9 Changelings do while changing form would be a necessary skill for any adult Changeling trying to impersonate a top officer in the paranoid Romulan intelligence service, for months at an end... True, we have never seen a DS9 Changeling swap form without the glowing thing - but then again, a Changeling swapping form in front of the cameras is usually one already exposed, and in no further need of pretending (the form-swap is to facilitate escape into the air, through an air vent, or the like).

But where is this inborn "sense of justice" (that is, need to dominate) that Odo and Laas had even without knowing who they were? Does Martia run the prison camp through manipulating the warden (that is, does he call her "Constable")? Does she sort out the alien scum into those who live and those who die? Or does she just drink a lot due to her disdain of solid food?

And does she really need to cooperate with the Klingons in order to regain her freedom, what with being a more skilled shapeshifter than Odo ever became?

Timo Saloniemi

 

[SpocksOddSocks]

No. Colonel West however...

Yeah... he does have a bit of that look about him...



As for the OP, I'd go with no. I think a more likely contender would be an allasomorph like in TNG The Dauphin. But as that makes at least 3 shape shifting species I can think of (the salt vampire) I think it's just are likely there are more and Martia is just another.

 

[Greg Cox]

One oddity of ST VI is that Kirk and McCoy act as though they've never encountered a shape-shifter before, and have only heard rumors of such things, despite, say, Captain Garth, who supposedly learned the secret of molecular transformation for some exotic alien race known to the Federation.

There was also the Salt Vampire, although that was more about projecting a telepathic illusion than actual shape-shifting since it appeared different to different people at the same time ....

 

[JWPlatt]

Remember, all the movies are reboots.

 

[Timo]

It can be argued whether Garth could really change his shape, or just create the impression of this happening like the Salt Vampire and several other illusionists did - but such hair-splitting shouldn't affect Kirk's perception on whether Martia was an all-new phenomenon or not! Martia had not demonstrated any "true" shapeshifting (such as the trick of becoming physically smaller and thus slipping out of that shackle) yet when Kirk colored himself impressed...

But Kirk would know that a) Martia was not a Salt Vampire (he had Crater's expert opinion that those were extinct), and that b) Garth was not a species. And Kirk is in the business of running into exotic alien things that are mostly the same from week to week, so he would have learned to be discerning.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Greg Cox]

It can be argued whether Garth could really change his shape, or just create the impression of this happening like the Salt Vampire and several other illusionists did - but such hair-splitting shouldn't affect Kirk's perception on whether Martia was an all-new phenomenon or not! Martia had not demonstrated any "true" shapeshifting (such as the trick of becoming physically smaller and thus slipping out of that shackle) yet when Kirk colored himself impressed...

But Kirk would know that a) Martia was not a Salt Vampire (he had Crater's expert opinion that those were extinct), and that b) Garth was not a species. And Kirk is in the business of running into exotic alien things that are mostly the same from week to week, so he would have learned to be discerning.

Timo Saloniemi

But Garth was said to have learned the art of "cellular metamorphosis" from the Antosians, who presumably knew it as well. And "cellular metamophosis" sounds like shape-changing to me.

Maybe Martia was related to the Antosians? Or maybe she could have learned the trick the same way Garth did?

(The real answer, of course, is that they certainly weren't going to slow down the movie to run through Kirk's entire history with shape-changers, but, even still, Kirk and McCoy's wide-eyed disbelief seemed a little overdone.)

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Martia said that it takes a lot of effort to change shape. Most Founders find it easy to do. (Odo has a hard time mimicking one specific shape - the human face - but otherwise he doesn't look like he's struggling.)

And I'm sure Martia really is changing shape, otherwise she wouldn't have needed to turn into a little girl just to get out of the chains like we see her do. And as they're climbing up out of the tunnels, she changes shape a couple of times there too. So I think it's not just mental.

As for Odo's sense of justice, there's an interesting tidbit put forth in the recent novel Disavowed...

Spoiler: novel

It suggests that the mirror universe Founders are like Odo - they have their own Dominion but they run it much more fairly, are not worshipped as gods, and are even subject to Dominion law. Some wonder whether the Mirror Odo is actually from the regular universe, and the reverse...our Odo might be from the MU.

 

[2takesfrakes]

Martia was very cool and I wouldn't have minded seeing her come back to STAR TREK as a distant relation, or just another shape-shifter who happens to look like her. I'd say "yes," she's a changeling and a missed opportunity. They should've brought her "back" in true STAR TREK fashion, some way, to further her adventures. And her love for cigars was very cute. I would not be at all surprised if she, herself, only lit up for "the look." I doubt it was supposed to have an effect on her ...

 

[Christopher]

One oddity of ST VI is that Kirk and McCoy act as though they've never encountered a shape-shifter before, and have only heard rumors of such things, despite, say, Captain Garth, who supposedly learned the secret of molecular transformation for some exotic alien race known to the Federation.

Not to mention the Vendorians from TAS: "The Survivor" -- and the Rigellian hypnoid from "Mudd's Passion," though that was an illusion-caster like the salt vampire. And there were aliens that could change their shape with technological assistance, like Sylvia and Korob (via the transmuter) or the Kelvans (who probably changed their shape using a variation of the same technology they used to turn the crew into small blocks -- although the novel The Valiant portrays them as Changeling-like shapeshifters). And incorporeal aliens that assumed human form, like Trelane and the Organians. Shapeshifters should've been old hat to Kirk and McCoy.

There's an old TOS novel called Enemy Unseen that has the same problem. There's this big mystery with members of the crew seeming to act out of character and do things they later don't remember doing, pretty much like in "The Survivor," and it's quickly obvious to the reader that there's a shapeshifter aboard, but the characters act as though they've never even contemplated the idea of a shapeshifter before, and it takes them forever to figure it out.

 

[Timo]

But Garth was said to have learned the art of "cellular metamorphosis" from the Antosians, who presumably knew it as well.

True enough - but the fact that it was something that could be taught rather suggests it was a technology or a technique, not a biological trait of the Antosian species. And Garth didn't just use it as prescribed, he invented a new use for it all "by himself", again suggesting this use in shapeshifting was not an Antosian thing.

The timeline of the events is vague, but it seems Garth was injured; Antosians cured him with the technique; this healed him (restored lost body parts!) but apparently also drove him nuts; he tried to destroy the Antosians, but his crew stopped him; he got put through the various steps of the criminal-curing system until ending up at Elba II as a hopeless case; and there he learned to shapeshift, with nobody suspecting such a possibility until it was too late.

It is possible to see Antosians as shapeshifters. But in light of these events, it's a bit unlikely...

As for the nature of Garth's shapeshifting, Phil Farrand in his Nitpicker's Guide makes the observation that at one point, Garth's ring rather visibly loses an opulent gemstone. Later on, after a round of shapeshifting, it's back in place. Evidence of Garth being physical, like Changelings (and shedding body parts unnoticed)? Or of him being an illusionist with rather mad ideas about how his royal attire ought to behave? The one option that seems ruled out is that Garth's clothing (or jewelry, at any rate) is real and physical...

Timo Saloniemi

 

[Greg Cox]

In general, this was a pretty common trope on TOS: Everything they ran into was "like nothing we've ever encountered before!"

Just once, I wanted Spock to report "peculiar energy readings, not unlike the ones we recorded at Beta Alpha VI. Possible some manner of non-corporeal life-form . . . of the sort we've encountered several times before?"

Kirk: "Again?"

 

[Christopher]

What always got me was TNG's "Where Silence Has Lease," where they came upon a zone of darkness in space that was uncannily similar to the zone of darkness from "The Immunity Syndrome" (albeit a bit cloudier and bluer), and Data explicitly stated that no Starfleet vessel had ever encountered anything even remotely similar. Although, knowing what I know now about Roddenberry's intentions to divorce TNG from TOS as much as possible and make it something of a soft reboot, I wonder if that was a deliberate repudiation of the past rather than just forgetfulness. Maybe GR thought the idea of a giant space amoeba was too silly, so he wanted to write it out of history.

Then again, TOS did occasionally have moments of continuity that were unusual for the '60s -- like in "By Any Other Name," where D.C. Fontana not only brought back the energy barrier at the galactic edge, but had Kirk remind Spock of the mind-touch trick he used to escape a cell on Eminiar VII.

 

[Karzak]

I think it is also a fair thing to assume that the writers on the various Star Trek shows probably don't keep track of the obscure details about previous episodes quite as religiously as we, the fans, do.

 

[JWPlatt]

...Roddenberry's intentions to divorce TNG from TOS as much as possible and make it something of a soft reboot...

A source would be helpful here. The claim is in conflict with "The Naked Now."

 

[Christopher]

...Roddenberry's intentions to divorce TNG from TOS as much as possible and make it something of a soft reboot...

A source would be helpful here. The claim is in conflict with "The Naked Now."

No, it's not in conflict, because I said soft reboot. Continuity isn't the absolute all-or-nothing matter that some fans assume. Countless works of fiction play fast and loose with earlier installments, keeping some elements while ignoring others. (For instance, the series of The Six Million Dollar Man, which Harve Bennett produced, ignored or retconned a number of details of the pilot movie, while still keeping the basics of its story intact.)

Roddenberry took a rather Doylist approach to Trek continuity, treating the series as a dramatization of "actual" events rather than a direct depiction, and thus not necessarily accurate. When ST:TMP came out and changed the look of the Klingons, Starfleet technology, etc., Roddenberry's explanation to the fans was that it had always looked that way, but he hadn't been able to show it accurately with TOS's production limitations. In his TMP novelization, he advanced the conceit that TOS had been a fictionalized account of the "real" adventures of the Enterprise, produced after the 5-year mission ended, and "inaccurately larger-than-life" in its depiction. Whereas the chronicle of the V'Ger mission was made with Admiral Kirk's approval and would thus be closer to the truth. So he was laying the foundations for the idea that later incarnations of Trek were closer approximations of the underlying "reality" than earlier ones.

By the time TNG came along, there was a lot about prior Trek that Roddenberry wasn't happy with -- the budgetary and creative compromises he had to make, the less successful ideas he'd come to regret, and the episodes and films made by other people without his supervision, interpreting ST in a way he didn't agree with. So he saw TNG as a way of revising the universe -- keeping the parts that he still liked and paring away the rest. In his view, some of the original episodes still happened -- though maybe with some of the details being wrong -- while other episodes and films were apocryphal.

 

[Greg Cox]

I think it is also a fair thing to assume that the writers on the various Star Trek shows probably don't keep track of the obscure details about previous episodes quite as religiously as we, the fans, do.

And back in 1966 or so, I'm sure they had no clue that people would still be dissecting the episodes nearly fifty years later!

 

[MacLeod]

I think it is also a fair thing to assume that the writers on the various Star Trek shows probably don't keep track of the obscure details about previous episodes quite as religiously as we, the fans, do.

And back in 1966 or so, I'm sure they had no clue that people would still be dissecting the episodes nearly fifty years later!

Quite true, however times change, so is today's audiance less willing to forgive continuity errors between episodes?

Or has a change occured at one point you had to wait for a re-run to rewatch an episode. Today you can buy it on DVD/BR or as a digital download or stream it. Viewing habits have changed with DVR's meaning you could record weeks of episodes and watch them all one lazy afternoon. For example on my DVR I'm sat on something like 10 episodes of Gotham to watch and I'll likely watch 5 of those at a time straight after each other.

 

[Christopher]

Quite true, however times change, so is today's audiance less willing to forgive continuity errors between episodes?

Or has a change occured at one point you had to wait for a re-run to rewatch an episode. Today you can buy it on DVD/BR or as a digital download or stream it. Viewing habits have changed with DVR's meaning you could record weeks of episodes and watch them all one lazy afternoon.

Indeed. Back in the '60s, even syndicated reruns weren't that common. I've read that it was TOS itself, and its unprecedented popularity in syndicated reruns even though it had significantly fewer episodes than the minimum 100 that were believed necessary for viable syndication, proved that there was more of an audience for reruns than anyone in the TV business had realized -- and that this led to shorter seasons and more reruns in the schedule overall, which wasn't necessarily such a good thing.

So back then, the odds were that you'd see an episode once or twice and then never see it again -- and if you missed it, you'd have no way to record it for later, so you might never see it at all. That's why the emphasis was on standalone stories rather than continuity. Each episode needed to work as a complete tale in its own right, with no dependence on anything outside of it.