During the second season of Strange New Worlds, Christine Chapel spends a big chunk of her time advancing her career with studies and opportunities. One of which gets her away from the Enterprise to spend time working with one of the Federations greatest minds. In season three, we come face to face with that mentor – Roger Korby. And with all their charm and the beginnings of a new story, the original series has already told us how this will end…
Roger Korby coming home to the Enterprise was a surprise to Spock. It wasn’t a surprise to anyone else. Not just for the first episode of seasons three emphasising that Chapel was pretty much done with the drama and ready to move on, but those who’ve seen the original series would know the legacy characters have a bit of history.
Making their first and only appearance in the original series, Roger Korby was an archaeologist and exobiologist who had gone missing for a few years before being found by the Enterprise. A heralded scientist, known as a genius within the world of archaeological medicine, Korby had went missing on an expedition to Exo III leaving behind his fiancée, Christine Chapel, who yearned to find him again one day.
That day eventually came, three years after his disappearance. Korby’s expedition was presumed lost after an ecological transformation on the planet that should have killed everyone. Korby survived. Kind of. Having already discovered that the planet was once inhabited by sophisticated androids, he’d survived the crisis by going underground. In a mix of desperation and good old fashioned scientific curiosity, after finding technology that could duplicate him in android form, he rebuild himself as a machine, letting his body die.
Fascinated by what he could achieve, Korby began to wonder if this was the key to eliminating the flaws of humanity. As a human turned machine there would be no hunger or disease. He had all the upsides of himself with none of the down sides. Or so he thought. Time and isolation weren’t kind to him. When the Enterprise found him on Exo III, Chapel was eager to go to the surface and rekindle her love. But she found someone who was merely a shallow part of himself.
In the time he’d been alone with the thoughts and the technology, Korby had began to envision a future where the hybrid of human and machine could usher in a new era where they could lead the species as a whole to perfection. His visions has a nobility about them. But without realising, he had lost the line between man and machine, and under his own egotistical view and need to spread his findings to the greater world almost forced James Kirk himself to be replicated as an android to infiltrate the Federation and create a whole new hybrid species to wipe out humanity.
Once he realised that humanity comes from struggle, learning and independent thought, he sacrificed himself in a moment of clarity. A once infamous scientist becoming a cautionary tale about unchecked ambition and the visionary who list his way.
In Strange New Worlds we meet the man who carried the ideals and humanity that he’d lost and gave his life for. Considering the complex relationships Christine Chapel has already has in the prequel series, meeting the man she’ll eventually want to marry in the years where his idealism is still something to behold may make some intriguing viewing going forward knowing there’s nothing but tragedy in their future.
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