Star Trek: The Motion Picture Part I

I thought for a long time that Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Star Trek I) was the second worst Star Trek movie after number five, but the more I think about it, the richness in its symbolism is pushing it higher and higher on my list (at least past number three).

I love Star Trek because of the gadgets, gismos, and science that are incorporated or forced into the show. I'm not as interested in the characters, save for Spock, especially the actors who play them. (This is why Sheldon of The Big Bang Theory TV show logically makes no sense to me in this regard. Why should he be interested in the actors who play the characters since they are just speaking and bringing alive the words that the writers make up? Though I digress.) The Heisenberg compensator (for beaming to work) alone has given me hours of pondering as to how it could work.

I wonder, in their final analysis, whether the writers realized the theological profoundness of their project. This post will mention a single overarching one.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church paragraph 27 (CCC 27) reveals that, "The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself."

V'ger represents man and Decker represents God (Creator). V'ger, although knowing the accidents (or the stuff/workings) of the universe, nevertheless desires with a great passion to know the Creator from within its innermost core, the old stuff of ancient TI calculator circuitry. (Just because the heartfelt longing is old doesn't mean it is not there as from the beginning. / Sidebar: It has been said that all the electronics of the Apollo hardware could now fit in a single TI calculator.)

Although growth in knowledge of the universe seems to be completed at infinity, it is not enough for V'ger. It's programming is not complete. Hence the search climaxes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture with the interaction between Decker and V'ger via the probe (more on this in a later post).