5: Computer, End Program!

Primitive Culture: A Star Trek History and Culture Podcast

Westworld and the Holodeck. A state-of-the-art entertainment complex where you can live out your wildest dreams, surrounded by people who look, sound, and even feel like flesh-and-blood. The sixth-season TNG episode “A Fistful of Datas” tips its (cowboy) hat to the 1973 film Westworld, in which a robot gunslinger runs amok in a Wild West fantasyland, terrorizing the hapless players whose fun day out has just turned into a nightmare.

In this episode of Primitive Culture, hosts Tony Black and Duncan Barrett discuss the connections between Westworld’s amoral theme park and Star Trek’s holodeck. We consider the risks human beings will take for excitement, the moral cost of creating artificial beings for exploitation in games of sex and violence, and whether such complex systems can ever truly be kept under control.

Chapters Intro (00:00:00) Holographic Rights in Voyager (00:15:23) Prostitution and Holographic Sex (00:23:34) Vic Fontaine (00:30:14) Safety Protocols and Corporate Responsibility (00:33:50) Hubris Versus Sabotage (00:48:00) Post-finale Voyager Novels and the Holo-revolution (00:52:00) Final Thoughts and Recommended Viewing (01:01:00) Hosts Tony Black and Duncan Barrett Production Tony Black (Editor and Producer) C Bryan Jones (Executive Producer) Matthew Rushing (Executive Producer) Ken Tripp (Executive Producer) Amy Nelson (Associate Producer) Richard Marquez (Production Manager) Brandon-Shea Mutala (Patreon Manager)