Its crap - and takes up 45 mins of programming that could be used to screen some more Simpsons to us under-privaledged, sky-less Brits.
…being “series television.”
In order for the show to be successfully syndicated after its initial run, the episodes must be stand-alone. You shouldn’t need to know what happened before to watch any particular installment. There’s a general premise, with a set of characters holding predictable roles, and then we’re off into the story.
Shows that depend heavily on continuity, like Buffy and NYPD Blue, drive syndicators and programmers crazy. In order to introduce the show to someone who’s never seen it before, you are required to have thirty to sixty seconds recapping recent important plot points in order to contextualize what follows. This recap (1) reduces the amount of time that can be devoted to the episode (say, from 42 minutes to 41 minutes), and (2) cannot be cut down because they’re already made as tight as possible by the original producers due to point 1. (Syndicators are notorious for trimming out a few seconds here and a few seconds there so they can cram in another commercial).
By contrast, something like Law and Order is easy to syndicate, because, aside from the rotating cast, you can watch any episode from any season at any time and not worry about missing some important piece of the story. They’re all self-contained. An audience member can tune into the season at any point and get “hooked,” because they won’t be confused. An audience member trying to start watching Buffy in the middle of, say, season six would no doubt give up in frustration: who are these people and what the hell is going on?
That makes the various incarnations of Star Trek annoying to watch if you’re used to coherent, long-form storytelling, but they’re designed that way with a specific eye toward long-term profitability.
Re the issue raised in the OP, about important crew members always going on missions, there was an episode of Enterprise recently where Hoshi brought lunch to Doctor Phlox. This is a bridge officer being assigned to take-out delivery duty, merely to give the character some face time in an episode where she would otherwise be ignored.
I think that’s a necessary consequence of trying to build a show around the commanding officers of a starship, though. In the future, when I am named Emperor of Earth, I’ll create a Star Trek spinoff called Xeno Team, which is basically exactly the same as Star Trek except the captain, engineer, etc., are incidental bit characters. These command officers are rarely or never seen, being responsible only for keeping the ship running and taking it from place to place, at which point Our Heroes, who are specialists in alien physiology and diplomacy and language and law and so on, spring into action. I mean, would it make sense to have The Mayor be a cast member on CSI: Crime Scene Investigation? Nope, it’s a team of specialists, doing their jobs, and Star Trek would be a lot easier to write for if they took this approach.
John Mace wrote:
… to which psychonaut replied:
… to which I now say:
Bullpucky! The 4-billion-year-old genetic program discovered in “The Chase” only directed evolution on the planets it was seeded on so that their boispheres would eventually produce bipeds that superficially resembled the alien species that “wrote” the program.
As we know from various episodes of TOS and TNG, despite these superficial similarities, the internal structures and chemical makeup of different humanoid species can be dramatically different – e.g., Vulcans have copper-based blood, those three-fingered guys in the ST:TNG episode “First Contact” (not to be confused with the movie of the same name) had their kidneys in the wrong place, etc…
And as we know from that ST:TNG episode where the crew “devolved,” not all humanoid species followed the same evolutionary path to arrive at their current appearance. Counselor Troi, a half-Betazoid, evolved from some kind of a fish, and Worf, a pure Klingon, evolved from some monstrous being that didn’t resemble anything that’s ever existed on the Earth.
Given this evidence, the “amazing genetic engineering” of the original genetic programmers in “The Chase” was obviously not sufficient, by itself, to have made the various humanoid species capable of interbreeding.
To take it a step further, what about Voyager’s Doctor? He was a friggin’ computer projection. He was in* the computer! Yet instead of retrieving information from the computer directly into his own memory banks (or whatever), he would sit down and read the information off a monitor. The computer can’t export text files from one program to another? Even Microsoft has a handle on that.
Things that bug you about Star Trek
*Time Travel. ST does not know how to handle the theories of time travel and merely use it as a plot solution.
*bridge security and Self destruct. Too lax and too simple to overcome. Practically nothing in the whole ship is completely secure. It seems no matter what their precautions are (live voice encoded passwords) some alien can easily get around it. And any bridge officer can blow up a starship whenever the situation arises.
*Federation engineers can make subspace beacons (or anything else) out of toasters and fried burnt out leftover circuitry no matter which race it came from. Its like they know who to make a star trek gadget out of rocks and that if they dont use some sort of technology that is so way beyond the understanding of normal people, it wouldnt be worth solving the situation involved.
Things that DONT bug me about Star Trek
*No seatbelts. Do seats in Navy carriers and destroyers have seatbelts? How can you design safety apparatus on a starship for an eventuality that only happens rarely (plotwise) if at all. Most of the time, inertia dampeners and gravity plates take care of the tossing around.
I also really like it when the Enterprise (or other ship) banks as it turns-- thru empty space. Or how one ship will list to one side after it is disabled by a phaser blast. Or how they’ll hail another ship and say “No answer” after waiting for about 1/2 second.
In one of the recent “Enterprise” episodes (Cogenitor), they meet entirely new aliens with whom they are able to converse immediately-- no priming the universal translater first. This, after making such a BIG deal about how necesary that was in earlier episodes.
Slayer: Do they use the “inertial dampeners” to keep things moist? Trek got it right earlier (dampers), but then it seems they let it slip after awhile.
That was always my bitch about Voyager. They’re on the other side of the galaxy, interacting with aliens no one’s seen before and the damn aliens all speak perfect english first try. The translator is so good that it can do new languages that presumably have no base in anything already in the database?
John Mace, dampen in this usage appears to be accepted. Indeed, it’s the primary definition according to Merriam Webster.
Thanks emarkp you even used the same online dictionary as I would have. Silly me, I was about to cut and paste the thing.
dampers sound so much like diapers…
Keptin, We lost Inershal Diapers!!
Dammit, Chekov! I needed those Diapers!
Oh another thing I never liked was that Worf got his ass kicked practically in every scenario that forced him to do battle. Only the nerdiest of trekkers knew that Worf was supposed to be the epitome of Klingon warrior skill but there was never any actual scene that depicted or supported that. Just once i wanted him to go into a bar full of belligerent aliens, wipe the floor with everyone and come out like he hadnt warmed up yet. Klingons were psycho wimps ever since Gene died.
Emarkp: Well I guess I could be wrong, but I don’t think you’d ever hear a Mechanical Engineer talk about “dampeners”. Anyway, the dictionary seems to think it’s OK. I stand corrected, but my spirt remains undamped.
Goldfish: Other Trek franchises were pretty lose about the whole translation thing. But Enterprise went thru elaborate lengths to emphasize how the UT was supposed to work, then just trashed to the whole thing in one episode. Kind of makes Hoshi irrelivent (we could only hope). Of course the idea that they could get a whole language down after hearing about 6 words was a bit of a stretch, no?
I can never understand how a starship can have an enemy ship in visual range, fire a weapon and completely miss it! You would think some sort of tracking technology for a phaser or photon torpedo will always allow for a deviation and make the hit anyway.
The pre-ST:TNG ships must have carried TONS of food. Or did they? Without replicators, it would have been like a WWII German sub with all the food.
Das NCC1701…
I want to see what a starship toilet looks like.
I want to see what this so-called Earth society looks like that doesn’t use money. Do countries exist? Is baseball really gone? Does the U.S. have 87 states?
I would’ve liked it if anyone had…ST:TNG–not enough good actual hand-to-hand combat in general, much less bar fights. C’mon, doesn’t anybody actually fight anymore? An-bo-jitsu my a$$.
Emergency transporters available to get someone to sickbay immediately, but still in crises people spend a lot of time running through the halls.
Any episode involving holodeck inanity: Freud, Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood, San Francisco.
Any episode involving contamination or computer failure via some unusual form of energy, always includes the line, “Captain, we’re detecting unusual fluctuations in the technobabble blahdeblah”…BO-RING…
Does anyone have a copy of the ST:TNG drinking game that was floating around the Internet about 10 years ago? The only bits I recall are, “For each foot [over two] Riker’s feet are apart, take one drink” and “Wesley Crusher is threatened with death, down whole beverage.”
I’m curbing my apologist tendencies and just trying to answer questions people have. 
Yes, I believe you are right. Apparently decks 9, 16, 17, and 18 held cargo, which I presume is largely food.
The SherWood Forest ep had nothing to do with Holodecks, Salieri.
The particle-of-the-week is pretty high on my list of pet peeves, but it really annoyed me as to how Next Generation turned the ship’s engineers into all-knowing geniuses. Geordi was easily as intelligent as Data. How does a guy who doesn’t look much older than I am (late 20’s) have in-depth experience in mechanics, electronics, particle physics, high-energy physics, chemistry, and every other field pf expertise that the crew might need. The guy is the Dr. Quest of the future.
I found the techno-babble amusing. Quick quiz: You are the captain of a ship (ocean-going; not a starship). You ask the ship’s engineer to fix a broken piece of equipment. Which of the following two statements are you more likely to hear?
- “Sure thing. I’ll rotate the gear interlinkages, re-align the belt systems, and re-calibrate the gauges, and it should work. It’ll take approximately 67 minutes.”
or
- “OK, I’ll fool around with the stupid thing and see if I can’t get it to work. Check back in an hour or so.”
And finally, in the “useless technology” category, nothing beats the warp core ejection system. Good Lord, is there a more failure-prone system to be found anywhere? It seems like the damn thing will go offline as soon as the enemy charges their weapons. You could throw a giant rubber band over the warp core and have a more reliable ejection device than whatever they use now. Actually, that would be pretty cool:
Geordi: Captain! We have a warp core breach!
Picard: Eject the core!
Geordi: Computer, corfirm tension in ejection band.
(Pan over to the warp core. There is a a meter-wide elastic band bolted to the floor on either side of the core and stretched over the top of it.)
Computer: Tension confirmed.
Geordi: Eject!
BOING!!!
(The core is sling-shot out of the room. A moment later, the band snaps back in. It hits some anonymous engineering guy and crushes him against the ceiling.)
Geordi: Core ejected, Captain.
Picard: All hands, brace for explosion.
BOOOOM!!!
(ship lurches violently)
Picard: Any casualties?
Geordi: Yeah. Lieutenant Brown. Poor guy got caught by the backlash.
Picard: Sorry to hear it. Whose turn is it to replicate the sympathy card?
I still don’t understand why they don’t carry a spare warp core. Since those things are pretty fragile, you’d think that they’d like to have extras on hand, in case they had to eject one, and no other ships were in the quadrant to tow them to the nearest starbase.
In other words:
[Xena] A wizard did it! [/xena] 
NoClueBoy:
Thanks for reminding me of what could possably be the #1 thing that bugs me about Star Trek: Q. If I wanted to see magic, I’d watch Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.
More than anything, the fans.
It actually kept me from wanting to get into the shows.