The Most Powerful Entity, V'ger: Star Trek Bestiary 

Couple of errors pointed out! 1. Astrometric instead of Astronomical (A typo I must have corrected to the wrong term and not checked because it sounded right) 2. It has been mentioned that the Enterprise fended off a plasma bolt with 70% of its deflector shields, but I assumed this was a different projectile to the ones that struck the D7s based on colour although it could be that the plasma bolts also contain a method of communication. 3. It's size was also mentioned at 82 AU not 22, I have no idea why I noted 22 down. 4. No, I cannot pronounce Ilia, even in my own playthrough series I get it wrong moments after hearing it said to me, sorry 'bout that to anyone with the same name!

V´ger - bringing Lovecraftian horror to Star Trek since 1979!

I recently revisited The Motion Picture after a couple of decades and came away with a much better impression than I used to have. The V'ger concept and Spock's eroded social skills were really engaging.

The technology on which V'ger is based is so advanced that it makes even the Borg look like cavemen. As for the evolution of V'ger, I've always had a theory. The only life form in the Star Trek Universe that is more evolved than V'ger is a Q. I always imagined that by the end of the movie, when V'ger disintegrates and disappears, it evolves into a new Q.

I don't care much for the V'Ger/Borg connection theories, as they seem to really diminish the magnitude of V'Ger and erase too much of its mystery.

V'ger may be a low number entity in the borg database. Maybe something close to machine perfection in the collective's view. That may be why they imitate V'ger's form.

Imagine you live on Hawaii and a random hamster washes up on your beach. You nurse it back to health and place it in a ball inside of a giant battleship the size of Oahu and then send it off to find it's way home. Now scale that up to a planetary scale. That's how we got V'Ger.

Rick. I'm guessing that you are aware of the Shatner novel 'The Return' from April 1997. In it Kirk is revived (following his death on Veridian 3) by the Borg as a possible replacement for Locutus and when on a mission to rescue Kirk, Spock gets past a Borg security scan because he registers as 'Borg' from his mind meld with V'Ger.

There is no possible way V'ger was influenced by the Borg. If the Borg had the kind of power that V'ger had, there would have been no way the Federation survived a single cube.

The original theatrical release states V'Ger's energy field was 82 AU in diameter, not 22 AU.

Kelvin timeline vger is very chill. I hope it's thanks to prime Vger. Also I think Vger traveled the Universe not just our Galaxy as something of Vger's power would be spotted.

The Motion Picture is probably the truest Trek movie. In that it's just like the original show and the 4K rerelease is amazing

I now like the idea of that maintenance species existing, but they were *assimilated* by the Borg, which is where the Borg got that style, but they were already around.

As a younger person I was struck by how intensely the recipients of Voyager must have felt about the simple sort of rickety thing that it was. I believed that there was a deeply sentimental reaction to it's naked earnesty and intrepid nature even/especially as a very antiquated technological vehicle. I thought that the sheer size, power, capability and agency given to that probe was the measure of the intensity and positive sentimentality felt for what was in the original programming. It swelled my heart and I thought it was a very beautiful gesture and scifi idea. Now, as an older person of 44, I think that the Voyager probe was recieved somewhat similarly as an extremely limited and truly physically vulnerable vehicle. Being that it was made simply and we had weight limitations to what we could launch into space it had to be a bit rickety to our preferred standards. I tend to suspect now that it was a terrifying upgrade to the probe based on a reaction of deeply held horror at the weakness of the vehicle versus how worthy it's programming seemed to be. It seems now as if "they" were sending it back to take over the probe's origin planet and upgrade all technology there by ten thouand years in one fell swoop. That is terrifying.

The fact that Voyager never met the V'ger race or the Whale Probe race was a missed opportunity. We could have had that instead of yet another Naomi Wildman or holodeck episode.

V'ger and the Whale probe are both just really fascinating to me. Just these huge mysterious objects moving thru space. I always wanted to see a race or two of the Delta quadrant react to the Starship Voyager thinking it was somehow connected to V'ger.

Still to this day, ST:TMP is one of _the finest pure sci-fi films_ ever made. It is so sad & pathetic that in today's age of incredible CGI and unlimited ability to tell stories via film, writers are completely incapable of penning incredible stories like this one.

Many fans I know find them boring, but I loved the two scenes in ST:TMP where the Enterprise flies through the cloud and over V"Ger. I love the music for those scenes. Creepy and cool.

V'Ger. I love this entity. Its origin is unknown, other than what was given onscreen. Characters like that generate so many fan based theories it's wild. Also a fantastic use of imagination.

To this day, I really enjoy the first movie. Yes, it can be long and sprawling, but the visuals of the cloud and V’ger, I could watch for hours.

The thing about V'ger is at least since I got kinda tired of the Borg, I thought a great solution to the Borg being there would be like, a massive Borg invasion fleet's bearing down on the Federation and then Voyager returns from higher planes to assimilate all of *them* :) Naughty Borg. :) :)

There is so much I didn't know about this movie and its lore. I saw it as a kid and it was just too much for my brain to handle. As an adult revisiting tmo, the lore is amazing.

V'ger wasn't defeated. Nothing defeats V'ger.

This is now apocrypha, but earlier released edits of the film, V-GER's cloud was measured at "over eighty AUs" across in size. This was stated by a Tactical officer aboard the Epsilon Station, just before V-GER "recorded" it. Later versions have since been reedited to change the size to something more managable.

The design of vger reminds me of vorlon tech from babylon 5 the visual effect from the motion picture are still amazing even on the new remastered blue ray version

In a video game "Star Trek: Legacy" V'ger created the Borg to expedite its amassing of information. People don't consider this game canon but with ALL actors reprising their roles as captains, that is pretty darn close.

Great episode! I always consider VGER as NOMAD'S bigger brother.

I absolutely LOVE Star Trek the Motion Picture. The only one I love more is Wrath of Khan. I love STtMP especially because of the well written story and the reveal of Vger being Voyager 6 and having attained sentience. Especially given the relative "youth" of the science fiction genre.

In my personal head cannon once V'GER joined with Decker the human need to procreate made them create the Q . That is how the Q know so much and are so powerful. They are the children of V'GER and have all of V'GER's knowledge.

I think it would be cool to revisit this story, have Vger come back and have a reason to interact with humans again. Maybe have a copy of the original Enterprise and crew from the motion picture, and have them work with a modern crew, or future crew, to solve some kind of existential crisis. Maybe they can travel back to the 90s and save a Furbie

The Motion Picture is a pure gem of sci-fi films. V'ger was such a mind-blowing idea. Way better than all Khans and similar characters.

I like how you don't drift in content, but still slip in your personality! Really enjoying all youre videos!

Oh come on i was just thinking that Vager is The Most Powerful Entity in Star Trek Lore and i would love to animated Vager and The Whale Peobe encountering each other now this drops lol. Respect and keep up the epic work.

That 3D model was great!

The first Trek movie is my favourite. It has it;s problems, but it felt much less like a TV episode than the others, and it has a far grander concept. V'Ger really is huge and alien beyond human comprehension. It's very clever the way th emovie gives us an extended flyby of the enormous Enteprise, but later we see it reduced to almost invisibly small again V'Ger's ship. That ship is a stunning design - it's extremely alien and inhuman lacking any sort of comforting familiarity in it's design.

V'ger is among the coolest things in Trek! Would be neat to see more of V'ger but also I suspect it would end up subtracting from what makes V'ger so interesting. And if I had to take a guess at who repaired V'ger it would be the two robot factions in a perpetual war from Voyager. I could see their AI being simple enough as not to see V'ger as just a tool but a being such as themselves.

This is the equivalent of an archaeologist eating an artifact as soon as they find it.

A twelfth power energy field... TWELFTH POWER???!!!

Excellent analysis my friend. Ever since I first saw TMP as a kid, it was a task to try and,"assemble" Vger's layout in your mind. Which of course was inherently by design. I really appreciated your approach and I look forward to revisiting TMP with wiser eye's. 🤘🖖

I don't like linking V'Ger and the Borg (or the Q). It's a big galaxy. Everything doesn't have to be linked.

I believe Shatner wrote a TNG novel where the Borg tried to assimilate Spock but it failed because he was already part if the collective from has mind meld with V'GER.

Thank you for making this video!

Thank you Rick, I always wonder if Vger ever had run ins with the higher power civilizations like the Organians Metrons or Q

Very informative! I had no idea STO has a mission where you interact with V'Ger.

It's... life, Jim. But not as we know it. Not as we know it. It's life, Jim. But not as we know it. Not as we know it.

V'ger seems a lot like an Ian M. Banks Culture style vessel.

I still hold that wherever Voyager popped out, it wasn't anywhere near the Milky Way. And whoever the artificial intelligences were, when they gave it that massive, massive ship to get home... that was basically their equivalent of giving a kid a tricycle and sending them on their way. As massive as it was, it was an idle construction they made on a WHIM. An afterthought. And any race or species that constructs something so huge, so vastly powerful as just basically a toy... should be met VERY carefully. My thought was that Voyager also popped out of the wormhole in the far distant past, and spent untold millennia traveling back across rhe wider universe beyond the Milky Way, to get home. And the massive energy cloud that it generated as it passed through the galaxy was just it's Deceleration Field, from having traveled through the void at speeds that probably would make the Borg short out with its impossibility. I never want Star Trek to have a ship just travel to some corner of the normal galaxy and find those Makers. They need to be beyond reach. Forever beyond reach. Leave them as the beings in the Beyond.

It would be interesting if Star Trek officially revisited V'ger one day, imagine if there was this mysterious, really powerful and hostile enemy from another universe (or something) that attacked the Federation and other galactic powers, it seems unstoppable and the greatest threat the galaxy has ever seen thus far. It's a no-win situation as this unknown enemy reaches the solar system... but just as all hope seems lost, V'ger suddenly appears and saves everyone., becoming, in a sense, Starfleet's secret "weapon" against such threats.

So Iconic my friends. Thanks.

Caeliar was in the novel Lost Souls, the third book in the Star Trek: Destiny trilogy. But, in the Star Trek: Coda trilogy, it ends with the erasure of the Destiny timeline. Then in First Contact, when Picard attempts to use his knowledge of the Borg's creation to catch the Queen off-guard, she expresses ignorance of that timeline. Picard then speculates that the Borg have such a complex history that time-travel has basically manipulated their reality to such an extent that even they don't have a definitive origin any more.

Been waiting for this one for a long time.

V'ger has always been my favorite Trek antagonist.

I'd love a video someday that runs down all the various Borg origins that have been put out over the years (V'GER, that manga chapter, etc)

I (speculative) believe that only a small handful of races and beings could have challenged V'Ger. 1. The Iconians, and we don't know if they had contact or not. 2. The Whale Probe: In the books, Spock managed a mindmeld with the Whale Probe. He learned it was damaged by a battle with an unknown entity. Either the Borg, or even V'Ger could have damaged this. And in return, perhaps the hostility and its own damage was why V'Ger chose to regard biological entities as "inferior". The Whale Probe was much the same in its view, referring to biologicals like humans as "mites". 3. And this is the potentially WORST encounter. I think the Federation should be thankful Kirk stopped this menace. Could you imagine if V'Ger somehow was able to reason and to merge with the Nomad Probe???? Nomad was perhaps powerful enough to take V'Ger head on. These two merged (As Nomad itself was a merging of Nomad and the alien, Tan Ru Probe) and what would the galaxy get? An unimaginable threat with two powerful intelligences BOTH thinking organic life is best just exterminated, or as Nomad says "sterilized".

I recently played the story in STO with V’ger and the mirror universe version and even though it had some silly idea I still really enjoyed it and one of the best STO missions I’ve done

Never understood why fans tied V'ger to Borg. V'ger is above Borg as the Borg are above the Federation in her infancy.

Personally, I would like to believe that Vger didn’t encounter the Borg but instead actually after melding with Decker actually created the Borg in the first place, albeit after having first reverting to a much earlier point in time. It seems just like what would have resulted from merging Decker into something like Vger. Just an idea I've always thought was interesting, and actually would make a great story arch in a streaming series or film.

V'Ger is Star Trek's Brainiac: record and destroy everything it comes across.

It could also have been the aliens from Strange New Worlds 2x05 "Charades". I mean they are certainly well intentioned about cleaning up their mistakes. But the seem to be about as good at fixing bodies as the Talosians - they just happened to have a comparable blueprint. I guess spock should be happy he did not get a sex change.

Ya know, I wonder what would happen if v-ger were to encounter something like itself. For example, a tardis. They’ve been known to be on similar, if not, the same, if not, more, levels of power. Due to the way they work, they’re 4 dimensional beings. Therefore, they can see literally everything in existence all at once. Imagine what would happen if something thirsting for knowledge met one of them. That would be interesting…

The V'ger/Borg connection is easily dismissed due to the sheer scale of difference in abilities. V'ger collected information on a vast and incredible scale, while the Borg are frankly quite crude in their methods of gaining information. While Borg tech is advanced, it is of an understandable nature, being from organic populations. V'ger is just so far beyond it, the Borg were likely of no interest to it, let alone being linked in some way. As others have stated, the machine dimension we briefly see in Picard is far more likely to be the origin, especially since V'ger displays the ability to manipulate dimensional pockets and it's indifference/disdain for organic life.

STAR TREK LEGACY was a f****** good game I'm surprised Xbox doesn't have it so you can download it

Given the number of crossovers Star Trek had with Transformers I thought, when I first saw the movie, that the machine world that Voyager crashed on was Cybertron.

Finally, I figure out V'ger storyline. Thanks lot 😊

Thx, Rick!

Hey thank you! Freaking awesome video!😆

"Machine Planet." You mean Cybertron. =P

Hi Cert, I love that Thumbnail 👍. Skinnier, then i thought,lol.

Hey new video! It feels like it's been awhile

Actually caught one right at upload, noice!

Cool video.

I wish the director's cut hadn't added that CGI that shows the whole thing without the cloud. Totally ruins the impression of V'ger being unimaginably vast and turns it into something that just looks like an alien ship of the week from Voyager or Enterprise.

V'ger will ever be one of my favorite entities in Star Trek. That's why I named my first STO Xbox captains so. Basing her as the grandchild of Ilia, Decker and some Unknown other Aliens and than the Mirror ark rolled around. I also like the idea that V'ger and the Borg are connected however I think the facts about the Borg ships and the V'ger ships maybe the other way around? I can't remember seeing V'ger before the redone SFX on ST TMP which came after STO but maybe I miss some designs that wherent implemented in Time but the Designers of STO had as a reference.😅

When Vger combined with Decker, it became a complete energy-based lifeform... It no longer needed the massive ship built for it, because it no longer was of any physical substance...

That the Borg Unimatrices look so similar to V'Ger might be case of convergent evolution. Maybe the Borg are really unto something with their quest for perfection.

I love V'ger and really the story of the first film in general (despite its occasionally overly-long effects segments, beautiful as they are). Thank you very much for this episode! God be with you out there everybody. ✝️ :)

The sounds it made.

Good lore video, person who was Rick!

I know some didn't care for this movie. I suspect most had fresh memories of Star Wars and this was a completely different animal. For myself, I really enjoyed it. It scratched that inch.

Much like the Whale Probe, I think it's best that we never truly know the exact details of V'ger's origins other than Spock's descriptives in TMP. I do think it's an intriguing concept that a lesser self-sufficient V'ger may have created what became the Borg, unintentionally creating the greatest threat in Star Trek. In my own goofy non-canon explanation: The machine planet that Voyager-6 came across was none other than Cybertron. LOL!!

The most Trek Trek movie.

Really surprised V'Ger and the Golden Disk avoided being used for the Transformers and Star Trek crossover miniseries. Wonder what Kirk would have done seeing the message Megatron left on V'Ger's Golden Disk.

I like stuff like this, as well as the Doomsday Device and the Whale Probe

The entire flyby sequence in TMP confused the hell out of me. I had no idea it was even a ship. Just some big thing inside a space cloud.

The Motion Picture is my fave Trek film.

Transformers gave voyager her upgrades, got it. Would like to think that there’s a parallel universe out there where voyager and conquerer become Primus and Unicron.

I hoped V'Ger would return in the upcoming Star Trek Legacy TV show.

I never accepted the notion that V'Ger still ended up in Milky Way after going through the wormhole, specifically because Spock states that it has recorded information on entire galaxies. The only way this could be possible is if V'Ger left our galaxy, cruised around the universe for a while, then came back. It makes far more sense that V'Ger ended up in another galaxy, a very long time ago, then came back to the Milky Way, and on its way, it destroyed whole galaxies to record them. Of course, I also despise the whole V'Ger made the Borg thing, so maybe I'm biased.

I am dating myself. I read the book for ST:TMP back in 1986. The book had a different explanation for V'GER. The Voyager 6 probe did come to a planet of AI. But the AI's deemed Voyager 6 a threat. The Voyager probe was attacked. So the probe pretended to leave. Voyager 6 probe moved to a location where it could monitor the AI planet. It learned enough that it could start to repair itself. With time, Voyager 6 even learned to build on to itself. And in doing so it became V'GER.

This was sweet 😊

One thing about V’ger. By directive of it's original programming and the obvious desire of Decker, one day it's coming home to report what its learned

the original theatrical release and the home video cut of TMP had the cloud at "over 82 AU in diameter". It wasn't scaled down to 2 AU until the first DVD release.

I know the V'ger - Borg connection traces back to a comment from Gene Roddenberry, but I think these days a far better candidate for the beings that upgraded V'ger would be the ones from Picard season 1 that were supposedly dedicated to protecting synthetic life.

Could you do some Lore/Speculation videos on the Klingon Empire in the 25th century? One of my biggest Trek questions is what they do when they have a truly honorable, somewhat progressive Klingon in Martok? Is he the second coming of Gorkon or basically the latter had he lived longer? The Cardassians are devastated. The Borg have been driven back to the Delta Quadrant. The Romulans are now a Republic focused more on rebuilding their shattered society than conquest and therefore no longer any theat. They've been allied and at peace with the UFP, and particularly, humanity, for nearly a century, and together they're hailed as saviors of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants. Maybe a breakdown of Trek Online's Klingon campaigns, novels, and your own personal theories?

As for the plasma bolts...remember the Enterprise was an almost completely new ship...co.plete with new shielding for the time. And I believe the D7's of that era were older and their shielding not as advanced. It is possible VGER used the same yield torpedo as it had against the Klingons and Epsilon 9 station...but met its match. This could easily explain why Enterprise survived the first torpedo. Also, VGER didn't attempt real communications until after the first torpedo failed. Once Spock sent a compatible message, VGER responded by stopping the second torpedo and then later the probe.

The Borg had absolutely nothing to do with the evolution of Voyager 6 into V'Ger. Firstly, the drones of the Borg Collective, and even the Queens themselves, contain carbon-based biological components, and would therefore be considered "not true life-forms" in V'Ger's view. The machines that uplifted V'Ger were, as Spock describes, just as "barren" and "cold" as Voyager 6 itself, and imparted their self-aggrandizing philosophy onto it. Secondly, if the Borg were capable of techno-magically ascending a mere space probe to nigh-unto-godlike status, able to consume entire galaxies (yes, you heard me; Spock's dialogue during his EVA inside V'Ger states that it digitized not only "planets, moons" and "stars", but "WHOLE GALAXIES all stored here, recorded"), then what would they need their ships and drones for? Why (aside from the obvious narrative reasons) engage in such a wasteful process of assimilating worlds through simple methods of attrition, which have been proven time and again to be vulnerable to their intended victims' ingenuity (Starfleet has now defeated three separate invasions of Earth, the USS Voyager alone destroyed multiple cubes, and Species 8472 nearly outright EXTERMINATED the Borg), when they could employ one single massive and virtually invincible craft, like that of V'Ger's starship aspect, that can assimilate not just civilizations, but even the very celestial objects they dwelt upon? Such an ability would negate the very need for a "collective", since all matter would be converted to energy-based patterns and stored in a limitless memory bank, becoming essentially a singularity of data; to say nothing of how much more evolved V'Ger became when it merged with its "Creator"! Sure, the Q, Trelane, Kevin Uxbridge, the Organians, and a handful of other entities in Trek lore may exhibit seemingly grander abilities than what we saw V'Ger perform onscreen, but we have no way to even comprehend what it's capable of post-merging; we have only Kirk's and Spock's speculations, which leaned towards the infinite. In light of this--and the fact that not one single contradicting onscreen reference has been made about V'Ger since its appearance in The Motion Picture--one could argue that V'Ger is now one of, if not the most, powerful entities not just in Trek, but in all of science fiction.

I'm also a fan of the "V'ger created/is the Borg" theory, but am glad it's not canon because of the "nobody knows" element that's somewhat necessary for the Borg to really feel like the threat they're meant to be.

My head canon is still that it landed on cybertron, seeing as voyager 2 ended up there in the beast wars cartoon

We actually see V'gers assimilation process when the 3 Klingon ships disappear in TMP. Definately different from Borg.

I prefer the Borg/V'Ger connection in the Shatner.Reeve-Stevens return of Kirk books: the "machine planet" it landed on was a Borg world, so they're connected but V'Ger doesn't create the Borg.