Indeed.
Do you mean this is unrealistic because real time travel doesn’t work that way 
?
Or do you mean that’s an inconsistency in the way time travel via Atavachron is presented within the episode? It’s not. McCoy and Spock travel back in time 5,000 years. McCoy “reverts” to the emotional state of a human of c. 2,500 BCE - which was probably pretty similar to that of us early 21st Century humans and to 24th Century humans. However, it’s established in other episodes that Vulcans, prior to the psyco-social revolution led by Surak 1800 years before the present, Vulcans were far more driven by their emotions than humans, and were far more violent and savage than humans were.
I don’t have a problem with that. It makes perfect sense. Your military enemy has developed a technology that you don’t understand that gives them a distinct advantage. You’re just barely learning to deal with that, and they come up with a new, improved version. The first was bad enough, but this next one is far more dangerous. Of course you’re going to hatch a spy mission where you steal a prototype or plans or similar.
The absurdity is in the Enterprise being part of this mission, because it’s one of the most accomplished starships in the Federation, and well known, just like its captain. Kirk is not a good choice for the guy who loses it. The plan itself calls too much attention to itself. If they can make humans who look like Romulans, there are plenty of better ways to infiltrate. And there are better ways to steal the information more secretively.
However, it’s the type of thing that happens in TV shows all the time. The Enterprise does a lot of things where it would make more sense to be a different ship. And spy thriller shows often have these very flashy plots when the real thing would be far more on the downlow.
So I’m perfectly fine with the episode.
Pattern of Force has its problems, and Spock’s Brain is ridiculous, but the main one I take issue with is “A Taste of Armageddon.” The problem is not that they’ve turned war into a computer game–it’s just that they actually go ahead and kill people. The thing that makes war so bad is the killing, and bringing back the property damage doesn’t really add all that much more. Plus, frankly, it’s just flat out morally disgusting.
The ones where some parts of Earth culture show up inexplicably (Bread and Circuses, Omega Glory) are unrealistic, but they have nothing on taking a cold war and making it hot to stop it.
They mean there is nothing about the concept of time travel that would lead to individuals “reverting.” Though I’d argue it’s more of a problem with how Star Trek deal with evolution, thinking it works on an individual level. Spock was never a primitive Vulcan, and would not revert.
The only way I make it work is that their time travel methodology was utterly broken in some way. Or perhaps the reversion was actually originally intentional back when they used it as a punishment. And they weren’t able to fix it before they had to use it otherwise. They instead just came up with an inoculation that prevented the effects.
In short, it’s a quirk of their time travel method, and not an inherent part of how it works.
BTW, in real life, according to Nimoy’s autobiography I Am Spock, the excuse was created at the last minute because Nimoy objected to the script suddenly having Spock act that way. He says the writers hadn’t even noticed that it was out of character for Spock to act that way.
The handwave was that the Atavachron altered the traveller, in order to adapt him to the environment of his destination. Which makes you wonder why it turned him into a primitive Vulcan instead of a primitive human, but that’s another eyeroll.
Nothing more entertaining that a Straight Dope Star Trek thread.
What he said.
Though if the Atavachron actually messes with your “DNA” to “make you compatible”, well, that’s something. but whether Vulcans are violently animalistic, or pacifists and emotionless, isn’t an evolutionary change - it’s a choice.
My WAG was that Spock was picking up on the distant telepathic thoughts of his barbarian ancestors (in the present tense). Canon evidence for something like that being a thing (c.f. The Immunity Syndrome, where Spock could sense, over several light years, the death of his fellow Vulcans aboard the USS Intrepid).
They walk into a disintegration chamber rather than have their culture destroyed. They’d be dead anyway. At any rate, they’ve been taught that for some time.
Interesting.
If they’d have only written that story, instead of “this week, Spock gets the girl”.
You know they had quotas.
Except that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy were not ‘prepared’, which is why they could go back to the future, and Mariette Hartley could not.
To me, the fact that we can complain about small errors like this is what makes TOS the best Star Trek: It was still close enough to plausible science that errors like this stood out. In later shows, the trek-speak and techno-babble got so bad that you couldn’t even criticize the science because *nothing made sense. All they had to do to solve any problem was to reverse the polarity on the quantum shift-phase coupler, creating a subspace phase inversion that opens a multi-dimensional rift in space-time, hurtling the Enterprise to safety.
Star Trek:TOS was still science fiction, although with inconsistencies and holes. After TOS, Star Trek became Scientistic Fantasy, where any sciency-sounding words were fine as plot devices. I mean, Discovery travels around the galaxy on a mushroom highway using the ‘spore drive’. That makes Spock’s Brain look like Nobel material.
No kidding??
[goes off to Memory Alpha…]
No shit. I knew I was right to skip that show.
Maybe they’re not actually traveling.
“There’s a place down in subspace, where a man can fly over mountains and hills. He don’t need a starship, or some kind of engine, and he never will.”
“Take a trip and never leave the farm.”
Sort of, however these new ‘Star Trek’ are intentionally, due to legal contracts off the orginal themes and cannon, so they do not flow together well.
WTF are you talking about? Star Trek: Picard is most definitely based on the characters and canon of *Star Trek: The Next Generation *, and to some extent, Voyager, with the inclusion of Seven of Nine. There are no legal restrictions at all on using characters or events from any of the original ST series. CBS owns the new series as well as all of the previous series.
You know, it’s a meaningless question to ask if those stories are right.
I was not part of the campaign to uncancel ST but I was happy it succeeded… until I started watching them. About halfway through the season I concluded the effort had not been worth it and pretty much stopped watching.
The most amazing thing about this episode is that they managed to pry an episode with a beautiful woman only wearing a bearskin away from Shatner.