A to Z Challenge: Zors

The last entry ironically involves the beginning for the whole Robotech saga.  To bind the series together Carl Macek came up with the idea of Protoculture, which needed someone to be behind its discover.  Enter, Zor.  Through some of the other entries I've already talked about Zor, the genius who isn't really shown in his original form and yet who drives the whole saga.

Zor & Flower of Life

He was a scientist on Tirol who was somewhat of a rebel genius.  He went to Optera and met the Invid and discovered that the seeds of the Flower of Life could be turned into a powerful energy called Protoculture.

To learn more about the Flowers of Life and their power, he seduced the Invid queen or Regess.  She even adopted a human-like form to please him.  And he repaid her by taking the Protoculture back to Tirol, where the leaders there became the Robotech Masters and tried to destroy the Invid with their army of Zentraedi warriors.

With what happened, Zor started to realize the mistake he'd made.  And so he made a plan.  He coerced the Robotech Masters to let him build the SDF-1.  Then he went around to nearby planets to seed them with the Flower of Life.  But the Invid were always a step behind him to pay him back for what he'd done.

They finally caught up to him and killed him, though not before he sent the SDF-1 to Earth.  I think in the books it's mentioned that Zor, like Khyron the Backstabber, abused the dried Flowers of Life to get high.  That's part of what gave him the vision to send the SDF-1 to Earth.

After Zor died, his remains were taken back to Tirol.  Not to be buried or cremated.  Instead the Robotech Masters tried numerous times to clone him so they might regain the knowledge sent away on the SDF-1.  But none of their experiments came to fruition--to their knowledge.

Before the Masters left Tirol, they began growing another clone that they would allow to grow more naturally.  This eventually became Zor Prime.  While he looked like the original, he didn't really have the memories and so the Robotech Masters basically put him on the line as a soldier in a red Bioroid.  They finally decided to let him be captured with an implant in his brain so they could see and hear what he saw and heard.  Besides being a spy the hope was he would figure out where the Protoculture Matrix was, but by the time he did, the matrix was breaking down and creating Flowers of Life that would bring the Invid.

Zor Prime

Zor Prime is captured by Dana Sterling's Hovertank squadron, though for a little while he's debriefed by Nova Satori and the Global Military Police.  Eventually they decide to put Zor into the 15th, where Dana Sterling develops a crush on him that isn't reciprocated for a while.

When the 15th infiltrates the Robotech Master flagship, the Masters switch Zor's programming back on and he briefly turns traitor before his emotional connection with Dana allows him to break the Masters' control.

Though Zor and the 15th escape the Masters, they return later and this time Zor kills the Masters.  He stuffs Dana into an escape pod before he crashes the Masters' ship into the remains of the SDF-1.  In the show it says that this is what releases the spores of the Flower of Life to bring the Invid to Earth while in the books it says mystical "Protoculture Wraiths" put up a shield to keep the spores from being obliterated.  Since Zor is supposed to be a genius the book option would make more sense.  The show option is like Oppenheimer forgetting to carry a 1 so the atomic bombs dropped on Japan don't do anything.

Interestingly, the Zor Prime story is similar to what John Scalzi uses in the second Old Man's War book where they clone some scientist hoping he'll retain some of the scientific genius of the dead guy but when he doesn't show a sign of it they put him in the army and then he starts remembering stuff later on.  I'm not saying it's plagiarism but just something similar.  Maybe Scalzi read the Robotech books or watched the show.

Rem, not R.E.M.

Meanwhile in The Sentinels there's another Zor clone in Rem.  He grows up under the tutelage of the old scientist named Cabell but he doesn't have any idea that he's Zor's clone.  Cabell basically stole some of Zor's DNA to make the clone and raised it pretty much as his son.  Rem goes with the Sentinels and is captured on the planet Garuda by the Invid.  Exposure to the atmosphere of the planet gets him to start tripping and starts to unlike Zor's memories.  When he's finally rescued he starts to realize that he's a clone.  He and the android Janice Em become sort of a couple until she dies to stop TR Edwards.

After the defeat of the Invid Regent and Edwards, Rem goes around studying the Flowers of Life and trying to reseed the Invid homeworld of Optera.  He's on the SDF-3 when it's stranded in another dimension.  He winds up stranded with Lynn-Minmei in that dimension along with the SDF-3's fold engines.  Maybe not really the ending he deserved but symbolically I think it was sort of showing that Zor's time was over and the universe was moving on from him.  And with Minmei giving birth to original Zor it's kind of the circle of time or something.  It's definitely a Freudian thing that Rem is in a way his own father.