Heisenberg Compensator in "Ship in a Bottle"

[Jedman67]

Ship In a Bottle, if you need a quick refresher, has Barclay accidentally reactivating the Moriarty program in Holodeck 3, and Moriarty traps Picard, Data and Barclay in a holographic simulation while threatening the "real world" Enterprise in a dangerous situation.

Moriarty asks Picard to make himself and Lady Bartholomew "real" and is able to "leave" the holodeck by instructing the arch to simulate the Enterprise inside the holodeck (while - for the moment - fooling Picard & Co that it was the REAL ship).

As Moriarty desires to leave the holodeck for real, he forces Riker to come up with a solution or Picard is toast.

Data attempts to recreate moving items off the holodeck and bringing them to the real world via transporter, when he discovers that beaming can't work because the origin and destination are the same, and there is no matter for the transporter to lock onto.

Data hacks the holographic transporter to pretend that both 221B Baker Street and Simulated Transporter Room 3 are real, and then hacks the Arch so that Moriarty calls the Simulated Bridge and a holographic Riker.
Being that the transporter is just as "real" as Moriarty, the beam up works and Moriarty lives the rest of his days in a computer simulation.
Picard ends first the simulated Enterprise, then the Baker Street apartment, and returns to the real world.
---
In order to set Data's plan in motion, Picard instructs the Lady to tell "Riker" to remove the Heisenberg Compensator.
Was this merely a ploy to initiate Data's hack, or did removing the HC from the holographic transporter actually accomplish something?

 

[Mojochi]

From my understanding, there was never any viable plan for how to actually transport Moriarty into the real world, & Picard's Compensator talk was just to buy Data & Barclay time to rig some programming that would use the holodeck transporter to fake beam them to another simulated environment.

Picard instructs the Countess to tell Moriarty about the compensators. It was Moriarty's idea to relay it to Riker, thinking it had merit. Riker probably thought it was just gibberish & had to keep cluelessly panicking until Picard hatched his own plan from inside the holodeck.

One thing I think gets overlooked in this episode is just how much control Moriarty already had over his environment right at the start. At the end of the teaser, he's shown reactivating himself. In his previous appearance, he becomes quite adept at working with the ship's systems, & explains to Barclay that he'd had brief periods of disembodied consciousness.

I'm left to wonder if being stuck in protected memory kept him somewhat confined, & that maybe the wrong handedness glitch that they were experiencing in the Holmes program was actually a glitch he was able to manufacture himself, in order to get someone to do exactly what Barclay did, trace the glitch to his locked program & temporarily release him so he could regain his hold over their holodeck systems again, at which point he likely already knew how to quickly prep his ship in a bottle.

 

[Qonundrum]

I'm more amazed that the holodeck operating system didn't get sandboxed after "Elementary, Dear Data" to prevent the ultimate recursive feedback loop from happening again on ship. But then we wouldn't get the sequel, which is pretty great stuff. I recall there's one small plot hole that didn't take me out of the story, or I'm misremembering it, and I didn't like the fact that Moriarty forgot about Dr Pulaski, the newfound love of his life for which he wanted to feed her incessantly with via his tea and crumpets and all that. Now talk about empty calories...

 

[Mojochi]

I'm more amazed that the holodeck operating system didn't get sandboxed after "Elementary, Dear Data" to prevent the ultimate recursive feedback loop from happening again on ship. But then we wouldn't get the sequel, which is pretty great stuff. I recall there's one small plot hole that didn't take me out of the story, or I'm misremembering it, and I didn't like the fact that Moriarty forgot about Dr Pulaski, the newfound love of his life for which he wanted to feed her incessantly with via his tea and crumpets and all that. Now talk about empty calories...

He never expressed any love for her. He was just trying to be a gracious host, as abductors go, so long as there was no need yet to be uncivil.

So, when he comes back out, he's only concerned with Picard, who by his account left him to rot

 

[Jedman67]

From my understanding, there was never any viable plan for how to actually transport Moriarty into the real world, & Picard's Compensator talk was just to buy Data & Barclay time to rig some programming that would use the holodeck transporter to fake beam them to another simulated environment.

Picard instructs the Countess to tell Moriarty about the compensators. It was Moriarty's idea to relay it to Riker, thinking it had merit. Riker probably thought it was just gibberish & had to keep cluelessly panicking until Picard hatched his own plan from inside the holodeck.

Not quite: Picard, realizing that Moriarty had trapped them in a simulated enterprise, realized that he could fool Moriarty by "beaming" him off the Holodeck and into the simulation (which as we remember, was a second holographic program running inside the same holodeck).

I think it's pretty clear that when Moriarty calls Riker to prep the transporter at the end, he is actually speaking to a holographic Riker since Data hacked the arch to redirect calls to the bridge.

 

[Qonundrum]

He never expressed any love for her. He was just trying to be a gracious host, as abductors go, so long as there was no need yet to be uncivil.

So, when he comes back out, he's only concerned with Picard, who by his account left him to rot

Awww man! And I was hoping for a complex duality of our favorite villain! (Thanks for the clarification! )

 

[Mojochi]

Awww man! And I was hoping for a complex duality of our favorite villain! (Thanks for the clarification! )

Not that I would've been against him mentioning having had some amorous admiration for her. Lord knows she deserved a little love. Riker's dad is a sad epitaph. That lady was so hard up, she was drinking deadly poisonous wine, just to hear a little poetry from Worf

 

[PhotoBoy]

I really like this episode, but I do wonder if Moriarty should have twigged that Data's plan wouldn't work. How could a transporter beam up a collection of photons being animated by a computer and then materialise that into a working, living body with memories and personality implanted into the brain?

I know sometimes the holodeck could replicate organic matter (IIRC Data implies the holodeck trees in Farpoint are real) but even that doesn't solve the brain problem. Am I just overthinking it?

 

[CaptChris42]

I suppose it all depends how literally we take the old 'it converts matter to energy' line, from early TNG.

Most take that as a gross simplification, or at best that the 'pattern' is encoded into energy waveforms... somehow. But from the TNG Tech Manual onward, it was clear a 'matterstream' is also part of the procedure, and is reassembled.

Obviously, by the time of the EMH and the mobile emitter... newer options, were available.
But the Daystrom Archives instead ended up as, home away from home (with a deficit of 'away' usually)

For more fringe ideas, see Walter Schempp, wave encoding, and holonomics, etc.

 

[DonIago]

I really like this episode, but I do wonder if Moriarty should have twigged that Data's plan wouldn't work. How could a transporter beam up a collection of photons being animated by a computer and then materialise that into a working, living body with memories and personality implanted into the brain?

I know sometimes the holodeck could replicate organic matter (IIRC Data implies the holodeck trees in Farpoint are real) but even that doesn't solve the brain problem. Am I just overthinking it?

If Moriarty had twigged to it then it would have needed to be a two-part episode.