I have to wonder, why not just use the trasporter to beam intruders into the pattern buffer (or into a holding cell) instead of sending crappy security teams to deal with them? The Shields don’t get in the way at all.
I think even the Voyager writers decided to entirely ignore the ridiculous “Threshold.” There was a 4th-season episode called “Day of Honor” in which, with the help of Seven, the crew experiments with opening a “transwarp conduit” using Borg technology. At the beginning, Torres says somthing like “We don’t know anything and transwarp technology!” 
Later, Paris asks Seven for some tips on piloting the ship, saying, “I’ve never travelled through transwarp before.”
Of course, if “Threshold” had really happened, it should have gotten them home quickly. All they needed to do was figure out how to steer, then fit the ship with a transwarp drive. After they got back home, the Doctor (who himself would presumably not have been affected) could have cured everyone at his leisure.
The last post in this thread before this unintended bump was from September 10, 2001.
Interesting, what?
I was thinking the same thing. I was flipping through the thread to see if it continued onto the 11th.
There’s a MAJOR contradiction in the last episode of The Next Generation. To recap: They’re looking for the anomaly in the future time period because they’ve found it in the other two. But in the future it’s not there, so everyone thinks Picard is senile. Later, in ten forward, he realizes that it wasn’t there because it didn’t exist until they created it by scanning for it. Then it grows bigger the further back you go into the past, because it’s made of anti-time. That’s why they could find it in the other two time periods. Picard tells them they have to go back and look for it again, because it will be there now.
But here’s the thing: it shouldn’t be there when they go back and look for it. In order to see it, they would have to go back and look for it before they created it, because it grows backwards into the past, not forwards into the future. Q later identifies that moment in ten forward where Picard realizes the paradox as the point where he showed humanity’s true potential. But in fact, the paradox still had him totally confused! The whole point was that his actions in the future timeline created something in the past, but he still expects it to be there after he created it. I guess humanity isn’t that great after all.
Another thing that bothers me is how all the species seem to be able to mate with each other and produce children, despite their supposedly numerous internal physical differences. In fact, Humans, Klingons, and Romulans are all the same species. If two animals can mate and produce viable offspring (i.e. offspring that are capable of having children of their own), then those two animals are by definition members of the same species. Belanna Torres, a half-Klingon/half-human, had a child. So humans and Klingons are the same species. Also, there was a crewman on the Enterprise-D who had a Romulan grandfather (in the episode with that McCarthy-esque admiral, I think it was called “Drumhead”). So clearly one of his parents was a half-Romulan/half-human, meaning Romulans and Humans are the same species. And the fact that they thought his grandfather was Vulcan means there’s probably some record of half-Vulcans having kids (I can’t remember Spock ever doing so), so perhaps Vulcans and humans are the same species too.
By the way, is it just me or do an awful lot of Starfleet admirals seem to be evil, or at least to have their own sinister adgenda? I haven’t tried to count them, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that half the admirals we’ve seen on Next Gen. and DS9 (particularly Next Gen.) were villains to some degree.
Regarding the whole Klingon head-ridge thing, I think the only explanation that really makes sense was that all Klingons always had ridges, but the make-up wasn’t good enough to show them on the original series. If we’re pretending that Star Trek is actually real, then we might as well pretend that all the aliens in the original series actually look alien, rather than looking like humans with bad make-up. The only thing that truly contradicts the “always had ridges” theory is the moment when the DS9 crew notices how weird the Klingons look, and Worf says “We don’t like to talk about it.” I for one am willing to write this off as a joke on the part of the writers, and pretend it never happened.
Another episode that always drove me nuts is the one where Voyager gets stuck in a black hole and escapes through “a crack in its event horizon.” Physically, this just makes no sense at all. It’s not just a matter of science fiction bending the laws of physics – the phrase “a crack in its event horizon” is actually nonsensical. The event horizon isn’t a physical barrier – it’s just the distance at which the not even light can escape. It’s a little like saying someone discovered a “gap in the earth’s equator.” It makes no sense, since the equator is a line drawn on a map, not a physical object.
I’m pretty sure the show’s science advisors knew this was ridiculous, which is why they tried to gloss over it by making the script say “Type 4 Quantum Singularity” (or something like that) instead of “Black Hole.” But unless you totally change the meaning of “event horizon”, it still makes no sense. Really it was just an attempt to do an episode about a submarine stuck under a sheet of ice, but they should have picked something better than an “event horizon” to be the ice.
Or, both parents could have been quarter-Romulans (Quadroms).
When I first heard about the “Trials and Tribble-ations” episode, I wondered how they would handle the different Klingon looks. Part of me was hoping that while they were in the past, Worf would look just like the 1960’s Klingons - it would’ve been brilliant. I have to admit, I like the way they handled it, because it really does boil down to what they were able to make look good back in the '60s with the budget they had. It’s time to let the Klingon thing go. They’ve always had ridges. We just didn’t notice them until Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Good gad man, how many times must I explain this?
All Klingons have two heads, one smooth and one Alligator-Snapping-Turtle.
(When not being worn, they are kept in a jar and periodically polished.)
At some point it became popular to wear the turtle heads exclusively.
Not wishing to be thought of as fashion hounds, they tried to keep it secret.
We know better thanks to TOS.
Same here.
My top three annoyances that haven’t been mentioned yet (since we’ve long gone beyond “contradictions” to pure nitpicking):
1. "You’d better get up here and see this."
This happened on every incarnation of the show, not so much TOS, but lots on TNG and DS9 (I gave up on VOY) and sometimes on ENT (which I’ve given up on now officially). You’d have an officer in his/her quarters or in a cargo bay or whatever, the intercom would signal the officer, and somebody on the bridge would say, “You need to come see something.” The officer responds, “What is it?” And the caller says something like, “It’ll be easier if you just come look.” Like that would be acceptable procedure in any organization of that nature. After you become sensitive to it, it’ll start driving you nuts.
2. Speed in general.
There are some specific comments about aspects of this in the preceding posts, but I think, in general, speed has always been poorly handled by show. Consider: They usually have a ship, upon arriving at a new system, drop out of warp beyond the outermost planet, and then fly in toward the sun at subwarp (note the occasional shots of Enterprise or whatever passing Jupiter), a trip that could take days. Or consider ship A chasing ship B in warp; ship B drops out of warp, and ship A follows suit a few seconds later, at which point it should be several light-years past ship B, without any mention of having to turn around and go back. Or consider two ships meeting each other head on and passing; based on the two-shot showing their relative velocities, and based on how fast ships need to travel through the vastness of space to get anywhere, it’s clear that one ship is actually traveling backwards only a bit more slowly than the ship facing forward.
And it’s not like these issues couldn’t be easily handled with a bit of dialogue. For the first, they could casually mention that they’re coming in above the plane of the system, dropping out of warp, and then moving straight “down” onto the desired planet. For the second, instead of the captain saying “take us out of warp,” he/she could say, “stay with them.” (Actually, it almost never makes sense for the captain to say “take us out of warp,” since at those speeds a fraction of a second can represent millions or trillions of kilometers. It’d be better for the captain to order the helm to “leave warp on your mark,” or something else indicating that it’s the responsibility of the helm officer to execute the flight plan appropriately.) And so on.
(Along the same lines, since I’ve been DS9 in its Spike reruns, is how when the ships dock at the station, they come barrelling in at ridiculous velocities and slow down only at the last second. Those giant vessels with their many many tons of mass should be crept in for the last few hundred meters lest a catastrophic thruster failure cause them to take a giant bite out of the docking ring. Either that or they should shut down engines and let the tractor beam do the last bit, and even so that would be a lot slower than it is. But I know that would be boring television, so I grit my teeth and give it a pass.)
But here’s my most significant item of confusion:
3. Where the hell are the media?
It’s always seemed a significant oversight to me that we never see any journalists or anything like that anywhere in the Trek universe. None of the characters watches or reads the “news”; everybody just seems to know everything. This is an especially egregious gap in DS9 (which otherwise I love), as the political machinations pursued by Kai Winn, the various Vedeks, councilmembers, etc., would seem to be tailor-made for journalistic exposé. But— nada.
I’m not suggesting that Trek should be turned into Murphy Brown or whatever. I’m not even suggesting that a journalist should be a regular or even an incidental character. But to have no mention at all of anything like a free press and the attendant reportage, not even in passing, just strikes me as being awfully, awfully weird.
Very good.
That’s poetic license. It would take too much time to “really” do it.
^:)^
Ironic you should mention the early seasons of DS9, becuase the later seasons feature Jake Sisko in exactly that role, as some kind of war correspondant on the station during it’s occupation by Dominion forces.
One of the “Best of Trek” books (a collection of fan-written essays) discussed this at length, including speculation on the endless media analysis that would follow such galaxy-shaking matters as the Genesis Device and whatnot.
Wow. Here’s an old thread for ya.
The references to the Federation having credits go beyond TOS. In DS9, there’s a reference to Jake Sisko (who was at Starfleet Academy) having used up his “transporter credits,” and in the first episode of Voyager, Quark tried to sell Harry Kim a souvenir of some kind, and he quoted a price in credits.
The most likely explanation is that the Federation uses credits to pay for goods and services. They work to earn a living just like we do. They don’t have physical money, but the idea that they don’t use money at all is just a bit of Federation self-aggrandizement, probably with more than a bit of wishful thinking involved. (Just like the idea that Starfleet is not a military force. They may wish that they could be nothing more than peaceful explorers, but the reality is otherwise.)
Additionally, the Jake Sisko reference suggests that, for civilians at least, the use of transporters might be rationed.
Star Trek is a funny thing: the Federation looks like a really great place at first glance, but the more I think about it, the more it starts to look like a futuristic Soviet Union. First of all, they openly scorn the ideas of capitalism and free market. In TNG, the Ferengi were bad guys, and even in DS9, Quark was barely tolerated at first. Then there’s the seemingly all-powerful military. Apparently, Starfleet captains can go anywhere and do damn-near anything they want, as long as they can think up a halfway-plausible excuse. Is that alien culture doing something you don’t like? Then just go ahead and make them stop. Prime Directive forbids interference? Don’t worry about it. Nobody ever gets busted for breaking the PD.
Even humans aren’t immune from this kind of treatment. In DS9, when the Starfleet admirals are concerned about Changeling spies, they declare martial law on Earth (!!!). In another episode, we see Ben Sisko poison a Federation colony, forcing them to relocate against their will, simply because it is politically expedient to do so. Apparently, the concept of Due Process has died out.
My Federation-is-a-totalitarian-regime theory might also explain the conspicuous absence of the media. We don’t want people talking about how we abandoned the Maquis to be slaughtered by the Cardassians, do we?
As for the Klingons and those ridges, I’ve never heard an explanation that doesn’t sound really lame, but at present I’m going with the theory that the smooth-heads are a subspecies of Klingons (or perhaps Klingon-alien hybrids) who siezed power for a while. Many bumpy-heads had their bumps removed to copy the smooth-heads and gain access to important positions. Eventually, the smooth-heads were overthrown, and bumpies who had their bumps removed had prosthetic bumps installed to return to their old appearance. The smooth-heads are presumably still out there somewhere, but they’re out of power and keeping a low profile for now. The bumpies are embarassed that they let themselves be subverted like that, so they don’t like to talk about the subject.
Neither the Ferenghi nor the Bajorans belong to the Federation.
DS9 was very dark. I liked it very much.
There isn’t one. Kor, Kang and another guy were in TOS wearing smooth heads and DS9 wearing the turtle style.
I prefer Julia Houston’s theory that I explained above.
Get over it. Worry about something important, like what the hell happened to Kirk’s hair?
^:)^
In contrast, the media were quite visible on Babylon 5. Their presence ranged from news reports on the President’s assassination to even a whole episode that was presented as a sort of “60 Minutes”-style expose on the station.
That was Captain Sisko reminiscing about his Academy days and his trips home to New Orleans; Jake didn’t join Starfleet. And a restriction on transporter use may not have been an economic one; Starfleet may have simply wanted to limit cadets’ time off-campus. When I was in Naval OCS there were similar restrictions on how often we could leave the base.
Well, when Jake Sisko reached adulthood in DS9 he became a reporter. But he was a stringer for the “Federation News Service,” so your point about a lack of civilian institutions is well-taken.
The whole culture of Star Trek seems way too homogeneous and centralized. Almost every proper noun had the adjective “Starfleet” or “Federation” in front of it. The universe would ring much more true if we heard the names of some cola brands or websites or large conglomerate corporations, like, oh, just to make up an example, the “Blue Sun” company.
Actually, in Generations, you see a couple reporters on the E-B, and they seem to be annoying Kirk very much.
But the “enlightened” people of the future don’t have Corporations(because they are bad, M’kay) and they don’t drink cola, just that Synthol(?) crap(which is just like real alcohol, except that it doesn’t give you a buzz. It’s like Non-alcoholic beer, completely missing the point). I think that diceman is right. It’s either a futuristic totaliratarian state with extremely good PR(because there is no Independent media), or it’s totally fantasy in a futuristic setting.
Quark serves root beer in his bar on DS9; his brother, Rom, is quite fond of it. In addition, the Ferengi have at least one brand of their own – Sluggo Cola.
Hit enter too soon.
You’re also incorrect about synthehol… it has alcoholic effects but ones that are under the control of the people imbibing. If need be, the person drinking can shrug off the effects through a conscious effort.
If the Federation doesn’t use credits, why would Quark (no dummy when it comes to financial matters) try to scam a Federation citizen out of credits?