# Most annoying sci-fi TV/movie tropes **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 5, 2016, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257 "2016-01-05T19:35:27Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/61 "2016-01-06T23:19:07Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > This gives me a great idea for a show, which I’ll make especially for you: a spaceship that week after week flies around the galaxy and nothing happens. > > Seinfeld in Space. What, besides literally every other thing, could be better? You remember Quark by any chance? Not the guy on DS9, the one with Richard Benjamin. ---
**Author:** ![Penfeather](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/penfeather/32/384_2.png) [@Penfeather](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Penfeather)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 11:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/62 "2016-01-06T23:37:19Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > This gives me a great idea for a show, which I’ll make especially for you: a spaceship that week after week flies around the galaxy and nothing happens. > > Seinfeld in Space. What, besides literally every other thing, could be better? Hey, \*Red Dwarf \* was awesome. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2016, 11:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/63 "2016-01-06T23:43:51Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > You remember Quark by any chance? Not the guy on DS9, the one with Richard Benjamin. I do. I watched it in first run it is remembered by some with greater affection than it deserves. Other than the sci-fi veneer, it was just another cheezy comedy. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2016, 12:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/64 "2016-01-07T00:14:23Z")
> [@Chihuahua](#): > > Ground combat. I’ve never understood it. > > 1. Shows like TNG and especially DS9 have extremely hokey weapons and do things that are very unrealistic. They wear brightly colored uniforms and dance around in ways that would get them killed in a real firefight. Usually their weapons don’t even have sights. They shoot these conspicuous glowing beams of energy with an extremely low rate of fire… Practically any real-world firearm would be more effective than a phaser. I cannot conceive of why nobody turns an MG42 on Luke Skywalker. Makes no sense. I especially hate the episode of DS9 where they have the gun that teleports bullets from one end of the space station to the other. They have literally created the perfect weapon and yet nobody bothers to use this on the battlefield, even when they are in the middle of a war. This. I am still amazed that both the weapons-and tactics!-are stuck squarely in the mid 19th century. How about a small AI drone with multiple phaser hardpoints (perhaps one that can camoflague itself too) that can zip around and zap everything not wearing a Starfleet badge? This is well within the given technology in the universe in question but nobody nowhere has ever bothered to invent one for some bizarre reason. Holographic decoys? Nope, none of that, just shoot them the old fashioned way. ---
**Author:** ![cmyk](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cmyk/32/3353_2.png) [@cmyk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/cmyk)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 6:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/65 "2016-01-08T06:09:51Z")
Always remember that alien deserts always come equipped with some form of native, giant sandworm. ---
**Author:** ![magnusblitz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b4bc9f/32.png) [@magnusblitz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/magnusblitz)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 7:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/66 "2016-01-08T07:10:57Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > It really does annoy me that there’s never any consistent sense of how long it takes to travel from one planet to another. Take “Star Wars”. It sometimes seems like it only takes a few hours or minutes to travel to another planet. I know that they want to keep the action going, and the sense of time passing is controlled by the narrative rather than some show bible that says Endor is 34 quatloos from Bespin and so it takes 12 days for a “fast ship” to travel between them. > > You don’t have to explicitly state how long it takes, but if it takes days to travel between planets it should seem like days to the audience, even if you just show characters sleeping or eating or walking around or having conversations or training. I agree. For example, A New Hope would’ve been a lot better if we got to see Obi-Wan training Luke in how to use a lightsaber, or maybe see Chewbacca play space chess with a droid or something in his spare time. > [@Richard\_John\_Marcej](#): > > What I find annoying is when the writers try to “solve” the long distance travel in space with suspended animation or hyper sleep. They used this a lot in the _ **Alien** _ franchise and while watching these films I’d be taken out of the story, by wondering: > > • How are they ablate survive years like this with no food, no nourishment? > • Whether the body is lying down or propped up the blood will flow and settle and worse, the muscles will atrophy after al that time of non use. > • and after all of that, once the body “awakens” the instability would take a long time to overcome. It would be hard enough trying to orient oneself on a spacecraft, but once they land and set foot on a gravitational planet, they’d collapse, I don’t understand these complaints. It’s “suspended animation” - by the definition of the term alone, it means the body (and all of its individual cells) are suspended. That means they aren’t moving, or aging, or atrophying, or anything. They’re just completely frozen. – Anyways, one thing that sometimes bothers me is when planets are just entirely “the desert planet” or “the ice planet” or whatnot. Less so in stuff like Star Wars (which is really just fantasy with sci-fi window dressing, where the planets are stand-ins for different lands) but I’d expect a bit more from a “harder” sci-fi fiction like Star Trek or Mass Effect. I actually really liked how in the last Riddick movie, he starts out in a crappy wasteland but makes it over the hills to an area that’s still rocky but has plenty of plants growing. Actually feels realistic. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/67 "2016-01-08T16:46:39Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#): > > This. I am still amazed that both the weapons-and tactics!-are stuck squarely in the mid 19th century. How about a small AI drone with multiple phaser hardpoints (perhaps one that can camoflague itself too) that can zip around and zap everything not wearing a Starfleet badge? This is well within the given technology in the universe in question but nobody nowhere has ever bothered to invent one for some bizarre reason. Holographic decoys? Nope, none of that, just shoot them the old fashioned way. Pre-19th Century. Where the hell is the artillery? Everything’s direct fire. The closest I recall seeing is Kirk using something like a mortar to drive off an (unseen, other than incoming fire) Gorn attack in “Arena”. One shot, if I recall. If a pack mortar is sufficiently badass to drive off attackers in the wires with one round, why isn’t photon artillery de rigueur in any surface combat action larger than an away team recce? ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/68 "2016-01-08T17:21:16Z")
> [@iljitsch](#): > > Reaching planets at sub-light speeds. There’s always conveniently a planet or moon around when someone needs to crash land. It took the fastest space probe we made 10 years to reach Pluto! Sorry but even Pluto’s only a matter of light-hours from Earth. And Earth is only 8 light-minutes from the Sun. So travelling at a decent sub-light speed - say 0.5 c - makes things nice and quick. ---
**Author:** ![Bill\_Door](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/50afbb/32.png) [@Bill\_Door](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bill_Door)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/69 "2016-01-08T17:27:53Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > Quote: > Originally Posted by iljitsch View Post > I guess you could have technology-based telepathy, but that never happens. > It happened in a TNG episode, where Picard and Beverly were equipped with some sort of device which enabled her to read his mind and discover he loved her… > > Yeah, not one of the best. > Reply With Quote > Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle used tech-based telepathy in their novel _oath of Fealty_, but that’s the only case I’m personally aware of. I didn’t see the ST:TNG episode that **Brother Cadfael** refers to. I know we’re mainly interested in TV and movies, but is the Lens from the Doc Smith novels technology based or is it biological? I remember them conferring at least limited telepathy, but it’s been a long time since I read the stories. ---
**Author:** ![scr4](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/59ef9b/32.png) [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/70 "2016-01-08T17:51:55Z")
> [@magnusblitz](#): > > Anyways, one thing that sometimes bothers me is when planets are just entirely “the desert planet” or “the ice planet” or whatnot. But Mars is entirely a “desert planet,” Europa is entirely an “ice moon,” Venus is all hot, etc. Most planets are, by human standards, entirely at an extreme climate. The unrealistic part is that those planets all have breathable atmospheres, as they seem to in Star Trek. ---
**Author:** ![Yllaria](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/yllaria/32/3452_2.png) [@Yllaria](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Yllaria)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 6:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/71 "2016-01-08T18:26:39Z")
Have I been out of the loop, or are there fewer plots being resolved by “reversing the polarity”? That was the trope that annoyed me the most. ---
**Author:** ![Scumpup](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ce73a5/32.png) [@Scumpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Scumpup)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 6:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/72 "2016-01-08T18:32:59Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > But Mars is entirely a “desert planet,” Europa is entirely an “ice moon,” Venus is all hot, etc. Most planets are, by human standards, entirely at an extreme climate. > > The unrealistic part is that those planets all have breathable atmospheres, as they seem to in Star Trek. It would be kind of limiting if every story ended with “…and then they crashed and died.” ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/73 "2016-01-08T18:44:46Z")
Every alien species: Physically, they are humans with assorted skin conditions. Mentally, they are humans with anger issues. The exceptions to these are few and far between. And their behavior is ALWAYs easily comprehended. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 7:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/74 "2016-01-08T19:48:31Z")
> [@Boyo\_Jim](#): > > Every alien species: > > Physically, they are humans with assorted skin conditions. > > Mentally, they are humans with anger issues. > > The exceptions to these are few and far between. And their behavior is ALWAYs easily comprehended. I’m sorry but the two or three episodes of Star Trek TNG that dealt with non humanoid life forms seemed kind of pointless to me. ---
**Author:** ![furryman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/furryman/32/99_2.png) [@furryman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/furryman)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/75 "2016-01-08T19:50:51Z")
> [@Chihuahua](#): > > Not my point. I get that conflict is a necessary ingredient for storytelling. My point is about perspective: If the Enterprise’s experience is typical, Starfleet must be the most dangerous and terrifying job of all time. If not, why does this one ship keep bumbling into the craziest stuff? Almost as bad as all the things that went on in that fictional land of “Afghanistan”. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/76 "2016-01-08T19:59:33Z")
> [@furryman](#): > > I’m sorry but the two or three episodes of Star Trek TNG that dealt with non humanoid life forms seemed kind of pointless to me. Well, I can’t defend shows that break the tropes but are done badly. I’m sure it’s very difficult to write aliens that are truly _alien_, whose(?) thoughts and motivations are incomprehensible to humans, yet still manage to engage us in the narrative. It’s not all that common even in SF literature. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/77 "2016-01-08T20:04:49Z")
> [@scr4](#): > > But Mars is entirely a “desert planet,” Europa is entirely an “ice moon,” Venus is all hot, etc. Most planets are, by human standards, entirely at an extreme climate. > > The unrealistic part is that those planets all have breathable atmospheres, as they seem to in Star Trek. It’s not that all planets have breathable atmospheres. It’s that starships only sends away parties to planets that have such atmospheres. Planets without such atmospheres get dedicated terraforming teams, and their stories, while perhaps interesting from a technical point of view, are not generally adventures. Admittedly I am bothered when a planet that did NOT go through the sorting process – that is, a planet ta ship crash-landed on – is so earthlike. But if the atmosphere were so toxic that there’d be no way to survive without life support, the story wouldn’t be about crash survivors. It would be about the funeral directors and grief counselors and bartenders back at the starbase. ---
**Author:** ![msmith537](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d9b06d/32.png) [@msmith537](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/msmith537)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 8:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/78 "2016-01-08T20:17:55Z")
“Planet” becomes the smallest unit of geographical, environmental, social and geopolitical reference. Ergo: Desert planet Snow planet Grain planet Garbage planet Recreation planet Planet with a single culture of warriors/poets/businessmen Planets are BIG and DIVERSE. So are cultures. Why in the future does each planet become a single monolithic entity. “I’m going to take my R&R on Risa” “OMG! Aren’t they in the middle of a bloody civil war!” “No…That’s West Risa on the other side of the planet.” Space combat as the Battle of Midway in space. Yes, the Battle of Endor was pretty cool visually. But there is absolutely no reason why small fighters should be able to approach within 10,000 miles of a warship in space armed with energy weapons. What the heck is the purpose of those tiny fighters anyway? The ships are miles long. It would be like two boxers attacking each other with swarms of gnats. Deus ex machina hacks that suddenly allows some mundane system of the ship to save the day at the last minute. If reversing the polarity lets you turn the deflector array into a capital-ship destroying superweapon, why are polarized deflector arrays not standard armament on all Federation ships? It’s like finding out your Tomahawk missiles can ALSO be used as cruise missiles. Hovering your alien warship over the city you are attacking. ID4, Transformers, Man of Steel, etc, etc. What is the point of hovering a couple thousand feet over the city you are attacking? Can’t you just nuke/death ray the city from orbit? Swords. I get it. A lightsaber is a cool looking elegant weapon from a more civilized age. But it still has the range of a sword. As does the Kligon Bat’leth, a composite high-tech Katana or any other melee weapon that hasn’t had a place in combat for the past 100 years. ---
**Author:** ![Trinopus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/2bfe46/32.png) [@Trinopus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Trinopus)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/79 "2016-01-08T21:10:29Z")
> [@magnusblitz](#): > > . . . It’s “suspended animation” - by the definition of the term alone, it means the body (and all of its individual cells) are suspended. That means they aren’t moving, or aging, or atrophying, or anything. They’re just completely frozen. . . . Depends on the story. Han Solo was totally frozen in carbonite: he was absolutely static, no heartbeat. But the suspension in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or in Alien, works by slowing metabolism way, way down, yet not causing it to cease. In 2001, you can see the heartbeats on the monitor: really slow, but visible. And so the accusation is correct: if the suspension was for too long a time, there would be muscle atrophy and other bad effects. A really good hibernaculum can compensate for some of this, but it isn’t the same as total time-stop stasis. ---
**Author:** ![iljitsch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/77aa72/32.png) [@iljitsch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/iljitsch)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2016, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257/80 "2016-01-08T23:31:27Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > Sorry but even Pluto’s only a matter of light-hours from Earth. And Earth is only 8 light-minutes from the Sun. So travelling at a decent sub-light speed - say 0.5 c - makes things nice and quick. Right… Except that even if we ignore relativity it takes 6 months at 1 g to accelerate to 0.5 c. And should you randomly drop out of hyperspace then the nearest star would be at least a lightyear or so away on average, so it’s not feasibly reachable using slower than light propulsion. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-annoying-sci-fi-tv-movie-tropes/742257.md?page=5)