I disagree that the transporter is creating matter. Didn’t Gene himself go to the trouble to say that transporters and replicators are not the same tech (even if they share a lot of the same principles of operation)?

If a transporter was creating people, it would have to also be an industrial replicator, tech that didn’t exist during Kirk or Archer’s day. It would also mean that replicators can create (complex) life, which is repeatedly said to be impossible. The episode Ship In a Bottle had to trick Moriarty into thinking it was possible to beam him and his partner off the holodeck and into the real world, because it wasn’t possible by any stretch of the imagination.

Thomas Riker is a miracle. The rogue transporter confinement beam and the accidentally duplicated pattern signal should have failed every step of the way but somehow didn’t. AND it miraculously acquired the necessary matter to resolve the signal into a living person. The matter belonging to William Riker proper made it back to the Potemkin. Who knows, maybe neither of them are pure. Maybe William is 1% planetary dust and Thomas is 1% William.

I’m sure Starfleet R&D ogled over Picard’s report to Starfleet Command for a long time. But I think the fact that the Moriarty program was still just a hologram in a lab at the turn of the 25th century suggests they couldn’t find a way to replicate that accident.

‘Riker’ is officially a unit of measurement now.

Yes, but not for that reason.

It probably all came from the distortion field around the planet that caused the issues in the first place. It was strong enough to disrupt a transporter beam, so it might have been made up of physical matter swirling around in the upper atmosphere.

Having the beam reflected back to the surface took with it enough junk for the transporter signal to repurpose into a new Riker. :P

We’ll say that’s the reason Thomas acted a little cockeyed compared to William.

Inb4 Star Trek / Delicious in Dungeon crossover.

Isn’t that essentially what Neelix’s cooking was?

Yes, the current theory on how transporters would work in the real world is duplication and digitization, but in Star Trek it is a literal matter transference. Transporter signals and confinement beams act like radio waves, they can only go so far and through so much before they fall off, and whatever matter got disassembled at point A is what gets sent out and reassembled at point B.

…At least until the transporter chief does something unorthodox like making a second confinement beam around the first to prevent matter leakage, only to have that second beam be unnecessary AND get mirrored back to point A where it used ambient particles to build an effectively complete duplicate of the person being transported without the knowledge of that person or the ship doing the transporting in the first place.

Thomas Riker was given the same memories of William Riker, but he didn’t exist before that incident.

Whatever star date he was generated on.

Which is… sometime in 2361, approximately 26 years after William Riker was born.

Just like how Jonathan Frakes shares a birthday with William T. Riker.

(Coincidentally, it’s the same birthday as Gene Roddenberry.)

Troy Story 4: Oh god, they’re just going to keep making these aren’t they?

“Keeeeeern!”

“What ARE you doing with that dog?”

“For some reason, that corner is where the spotlight was aimed at.

I decided to become an atheist that day.”

She found out an entire alien race elevated her to the status of godhood as a feminist icon. How could she refuse? :P

To this day, male and female Moclans brawling in the street to the tune of 9 to 5 is one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever gotten out of science fiction.

Don’t date the boss, don’t copy Star Trek THAT closely!

Gordon still feels like a weak link to me, he is on the show because he’s MacFarlane’s friend, after all.

But Gordon certainly has some good content. The whole leg gag is still amazing to me. And “This family is stronger than time.” still hurts even though they went back to the 21st century girl well two times too many.

Hey now, Voyager has a lot of good stuff and important progressiveness. And a lot of Voyager people have worked on The Orville, including Robert Picardo and Tim Russ.

Don’t disparage those girls by comparing them to Discovery.

Is that Marlon Brando?

Oklahoma Klingons… I HATE Oklahoma Klingons.

“I deserve to relax for the rest of the day.”