Journey to Babel has another one that drives me crazy. McCoy’s performing open heart surgery on two Vulcans during turbulance, and, in all seriousness, utters the line, “His blood pressure is 220 over 80, I just wish I knew if that’s good or bad.”
:eek: He did surgery on them without even knowing the normal range of their species’ vital signs? How long had he been Spock’s doctor at that point anyway, without being able to read the most basic measurements of his health? No wonder Spock hated him.
I think that was just McCoy’s dry wit.
A true nitpick is that heis smoking a cigarette. You can see the smoke rising from behind some medical equipment.
He didn’t sound like he was joking, IIRC. I’ll have to watch it again.
I’ve seen the smoke one - I think it’s supposed to be the machine overheating, though they no doubt created the effect with a cigarette (which Deforest Kelley was no doubt smoking inbetween takes).
I always figured that to be McCoy’s curmudgeon role. He knew everything there was to know about aliens, but his schtick was to grumble about it. Like House’s great-great-great grandson, or how Scotty always claimed ‘she canna take it anymore’.
May I hijack into TNG? The episode that bothers me (up the long ladder) is the one about the two colonies (one high-tech clones, the other apparently low-tech Irish peasants) that were lost. The Clone people had five survivors, three men and two women. Why the fuck didn’t they *at least *have each woman bear two children from each man? Another 12 people, and another few generations of careful breeding could have created a society with at least a hundred different people to clone instead of five.
I think it was Bones just being Bones. What bothers me more is that this surgery (apparently) takes so much damned blood. Vulcan anatomy my ass. :rolleyes: No open heart takes that much blood. They should have said liver or major bowel surgery or an aneurysm removal or some such…
And (I just watched) they DID use an alert level 3 in The Lights of Zetar. Hmmm. Methinks they need to simplify their alert manual.
Don’t know the name of the episode, but there’s the time they come across Abe Lincoln, who asked them if they still measure time in minutes. Kirk says they can convert to it, but don’t they use minutes all through the series?
Momentary hijack for a question – In the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren,” Alexander is playing a song on the harp when Kirk comes walking in. He stops, and says in a deep, croaky voice, “Retetatex, Colex,” and steps aside. What the hell is “Retetatex, colex?" Or is it simply nonsense?
I think they explained it as that was an insufficient stock to achieve safe diversity. Or maybe there were just a couple of guys absolutely no one wanted to sleep with
It’s from Aristophanes’ play The Frogs; this translation has the line as “Brekekekex, ko-ax, ko-ax”, which is supposed to represent the croaking of frogs.
Yes, I’m a Star Trek fan with a BFA in Theater, and I recognized it from my old classes in Greek theater.
The thing that always confounded me was how fast Warp speed and subspace radio was.
For example:
In the 2nd pilot and the episode with the Kelvin’s turning most of the crew into styrofoam cubes, they travelled to the edge of the galaxy, Ok fine Earth is on one of the outer arms of the galaxy. But then in Star Trek V they travel to the centre of the galaxy (yes I know you don’t think it exists but I have a copy… it certainly exists. It’s awful but it exists)
For subspace radio it takes a day or so for a transmission to reach Starfleet from Vulcan, yet in “The Alternative factor” The Enterprise receives a call from a commadore claiming that reports from **Every Sector of the galaxy **describe the “winking out of existance” after Kirk and crew suffer from. In fact the Enterprise is orbiting the centre point of the disturbance.
Hmmm… come o think of it why did they keep changing the look of dilithium crystals and the location in engineering in which they are located? Sound’s like Scotty had quite a bit of free time.
Scotty: Ya know I dinna think the drawer in the upper room is a good place for the crystals… better we build a chamber in the centre of the main Engineering. While we’re at it lets reconfigure the shape of the wee things just in case."
Engineer: Again?!? This is the fifth configuration we’ve done this month!!!
Scotty: Ya know Laddy, a red shirt like you can find plenty o’ oppurtunities in Security.
Engineer: So do you want them round or pointy Sir?
If 2/5 of the survivors were that repellant, they could have used the cloning technology to make “test-tube babies”.
My point is, they could have had a planet populated by a race of about a hundred clones instead of five. If each of the surviving women had two children (1m, 1f) from each man, that’s another 12 people. If each of those kids had 2 children with those not their siblings, that’s another 12 people without even getting fancy about it. Start cloning *after *you’ve run out of viable options.
If you had all that technology, wouldn’t you carefully breed as many different people as you could to populate your planet?
I was watching my DVDs of TNG (half watching really, but anyway…) in the the episode “Remember Me” Dr. Crusher meets her mentor from medical school, Dr. Quaice who is retiring. He was the doctor of a Star base for many years and he’s pretty old. How old? Hard to say…he looks about 70 so I guess he’s 100 or so in 24th century terms.
This guy has the rank insignia of a commander. So how long has he held this rank? Seriously, couldn’t they have made the guy a rear admiral at least? Because in our archiac times if an oficer fails to make promotions in certain time limits that officer is retired. The same goes for enlisted, too. If not you’d have people remaining as as privates for 15 years or so. (Yes, I know private is an army term, but it goes for all branches). Assuming that Quaice had to at least be a Luitenant to mentor Crusher (doesn’t make sense either. That means he was a (equivalent to 24th century age brackets) a 55 year old Lt.
This bugs me because it would have been easy just to make the guy am admiral. (Commodores do not exist in our navy now, so they went out like Dodos in the trekverse when TNG came along I guess.) It bugs me because, Mr. Scott aside, you don’t see anyone with the rank of captain unless they are starships captains. Its a minor sticking point with me. O’ Brien is a Chief Petty Officer but only WAY late into DS9 did they bother giving him any rank insignia to denote that. Well, its no biggie. I suppose its not a nit, its just something that bugs me.
