If the 5 year mission actually entailed being a great distance from Earth then maybe I could see it. However, it looks like Earth is just a short trip from wherever the Enterprise happens to be. No need to have families on board as you can just rotate crew every 6 months or so.
IIRC, the original idea given in the pilot episode was even stupider: to try to rein in overly-adventurous captains and crews by having their loved ones there in the line of fire(!!)
Nope. I’ve often thought about how many kids died when the Borg wiped out most of the fleet.
However it fits in with the attitude of smug superiority so prevalent in the early years of TNG, at least. Look how absolutely furious Picard got when a being millions of year more advanced than he is dares to judge humans.
Eh, no starship captain or crew is immune to that. Kirk had some of that “arrogance” as well. IMO, it’s just part of being human. We none of us are willing to “welcome our new overlords” with grace and humility.
In Generations, my least favorite scene is the one where they all must abandon ship and some kid is crying because her teddy bear is dropped and left behind. :rolleyes: Sure it’s realistic, but it’s 1. as schmaltzy as a Hallmark card and 2. manipulative and 3. so unnecessary because families don’t belong on life or death missions.
Spock was always First Officer in TOS (Only a lieutenant commander in the first season, rather than full a commander, but either way…) and I don’t doubt for a minute that he outranked Stiles.
Yes, Kirk could not have been more clear in ordering Stiles to drop the bigotry. But that’s just it. Why wouldn’t the First Officer “gently” remind Stiles that he was violating top orders, as well as clearly disrespecting a commanding officer? As I have said, the scene never made much sense to me. (Although, again, it’s fun to work out possible explanations.)
You know, I think I can at least understand why the dubious writing was what it was. The emphasis was on Spock-the-Unflappable. The failure to make this scene well-written was that Spock-the-First-Officer was skipped over.
In “The Corbonite Maneuver” (season one of TOS) Kirk compares bluffing the alien threatening to destroy the Enterprise to playing poker. Spock says that poker sounds like an interesting game, and McCoy replies that he’ll have to teach him.
In TNG I am always bothered by Data’s “passionate” wish to experience emotions. Simply, if I doesn’t have any, how can he be said to have any kind of desire?
Okay, you could argue that he doesn’t actually have the desire and this is just his programming mimicking human “desire behaviour”. However, when he is forced to switch off his emotion chip, we are clearly meant to empathise with his “disappointment” afterwards, and I think that’s inconsistent. If he doesn’t have emotions, why should he, or we, care?
In actual fact, I think Data is a good argument for the branch of Philosophy of Mind known as Functionalism, which would, in essence, argue that having certain appropriate responses is in fact all there is to having emotions, with no underlying mystery “state” (or emotion chip) being required.
Data has been programmed with a “desire” to learn and improve on his basic programming. I presume he can learn hard science stuff relatively fast.
It would become apparent to him that there is a bunch of subjective stuff that emotional beings can learn that he struggles with. (How to choose between chocolate and strawberry?) It is also apparent that some folks (like Riker) can utilise their intuition and emotions in their (command level) jobs pretty successfully.
Watching some episodes in the final season of Voyager I became hungry…because I saw Tom Paris easting fried chicken. It would have had to have been replicated fried chicken but it did make me a bit hungry…and reminded me of some cheesy BS line from Riker in an early TNG episode of how humans no longer eat meat, they just replicate food that looks and tastes like meat.
But if Paris grew up in a society that doesn’t eat meat how the hell would he even know what fried chicken looks like? Pictures? Why bother? You can just replicate a glass of fried chicken nutrient and drink it a fraction of the time it would take to eat it. Same with steaks and pork. Hell, even milk. So what happens to the animals? Do humans just have farms woth animals that serve no useful purpose. Janeway grew up on a farm in Indiana from her bio. For what? We don’t need to grow corn or whatever, we can replicate it! (Isn’t killing a plant just a bad, though? Veggies have to die for us to eat them…oh, but they ain’t sentient…even though people say they have feelings…)
I won’t even go into the whole no money thing and we work to better ourselves stuff in the 24th century. To me, its a big friggin’ nit and I tend to ignore it for my own enjoyment of the show. Gene Roddenberry had a utopian vision but some of his ideas were kinda out there…at least to me. YMMV.
One of the Maquis guys-the one who tricked Cisco into rescuing his comrades in the Sand Pebbles episode-subjected him to a tirade about how much better “real” food was than replicated stuff. Come to think of it, Cisco imported some peppers from Earth that Mrs. Cisco burned trying to fry them for him. I doubt that Cisco’s Daddy had replicated food at his restaurant.
Because fried chicken is awesome.
And that’s actually a serious answer. What pleasure is there to be had in a fried chicken drink? Star Trek isn’t some dystopian efficiency-above-enjoyment future where everyone derives their sustenance from pills. It’s a place where, if you enjoy it, you can do it, the only limitations being your time and motivation. Eating fried chicken can certainly be an enjoyable thing, and I see no reason why families wouldn’t keep it as tradition. The only reason most people would be eating replicated food versus real would be the simple lack of availability.
I’m sure a fried chicken drink is available to those who want it, just as protein shakes are available to people today, but the choice is there.
He discovered it in a Captain Proton holodeck adventure.
By the same idea that Bosstone identified above, some people prefer non-replicated food. There are quite a few mentions throughout TNG and DS9, and especially VOY, how they used to have their aunt’s actually cooked homemade whatever, et cetera. There are plenty of people in Federation society who maintain that replicated food just isn’t as good as the real thing.
I asked my dad, a CPA, once, about a moneyless reciprocation economy. He said it would work, but implementing it would be damn near impossible. So I’m willing to give them that one.
What Picard said in “First Contact” and elesewhere is flatly contradicted elsewhwere, even if we skip over TOS and Enterprise and only look at the three “advanced” series. We could, of course, figure that Picard wasn’t including the Ferrengi, etc., in his statement. But the opening of the Voyager series has Chatokay intently questioning Tom’s involvement in his capture, and he specifically mentions simple love of Latinum as the most likely motivator for the odd alliance with Star Fleet against him. It turned out that there was much more to Paris than that, of course, but the glimpse of his personal life we saw earlier showed that Chatokay knew him well enough.
I’m okay with part of Roddenberry’s slant toward Utopianism, including the idea of global unity. But so much of it seems so pie-in-the-sky that it’s beyond silly. Not only is humanity perfectible, it’s inevitable that we achieve it, and in an eye-wink of future historical time, no less. Right.
Of course, Star Fleet as non-military :rolleyes: takes the cake.
I liked the movies’ red uniforms, but wish they hadn’t used them for the time of Picard’s early career without the “turtlenecks” underneath. Compare Jim Kirk, http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/en/images/f/fd/James_T_Kirk%2C_2293.jpg, with Jack Crusher, http://images3.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/en/images/c/c2/Jack_Crusher.jpg, and Cory Zweller, http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/en/images/e/e8/Cortin_zweller.jpg. Just doesn’t look as good without the turtleneck.
Other nitpicks: Why have a supposedly-French captain speaking with an upper-crust English accent? For that matter, so do his brother and his nephew!
Starfleet medicos shouldn’t be able to reverse body-changing alien maladies with a single drug.
One of my favorite eps of TNG was Conspiracy. I was always disapointed that they never followed up on it.
Perhaps he learned English from a British person. Maybe his universal translator is bent.
He’s actually speaking French; we hear it in English because of the universal translator. He had the accent programmed in because the chicks dig it.
Do the French respect Shakespeare as much as P. Stewart does?
During season 2, Riker cooks some eggs for Worf, Pulaski, and Troi. Worf, IIRC, was the only one who liked them.
I got the feeling the food replicator was a convenience more than anything else, and most families on Earth ate the old-fashioned way. Sisko’s father (DS9) even owned a New Orleans restaurant and Sisko peeled potatoes.