Things that bug you about Star Trek

Cafe Society
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Inspired by this thread.

My first thoughts are of ST:TOS, but other series have problems too, so I’ll leave it open.

One thing that comes immediately to mind is this:

Inkwells? Really? People stopped using inkwells decades before I was born. Being from the Left Coast, Iowa seems a little behind the times to me. But 300 years behind the times? :dubious: Stealing apples? Surely, children were occupied by other endeavours besides stealing apples. And tormenting animals seems so 1930s.

Another thing about TOS that bugs me upon re-watching, is that it’s so preachy. I don’t mean PC-preachy, but Christian preachy. There seems to be too many references to the Christian god.

Too many tapes. Yes, it’s unfair to mock the technology of half a century ago, but surely someone could have dreamed up something more advanced than tapes.

Stephen Hawking likes his computer-generated voice because it is so identified with him. But computer-generated voices are very close to human voices now. The TOS computer’s voice is very primitive. There was one episode where the computer has a sultry voice, and Kirk explains that someone thought the computer needed a ‘personality’. So the technology existed to make a voice human. Why keep the clunky robot voice, other than to hammer home that it’s not a human talking. (The computer voice was improved in later series.)
Those are some off off the top of my head. So how about later series?

Too much technobabble, especially when seconds count. ‘I’m going to reroute the oscillation overthruster through the flux capacitor, and then send the output to the warp core. Once I cross-circuit to B, that will stop the explosion that is imminent in the next few seconds.’ JUST DO IT, ALREADY!

Similarly, when the ship or shuttle is under attack, the characters have to describe exactly what they are going to do to out-maneuver the opposition. By the time they finish talking about it, they should already be blown to bits. And what about the pilots and helmsmen? ‘Lay in defensive pattern Gamma!’ They’re supposed to be pilots, but they just punch in pre-programmed maneuvers. ‘Damn! defensive pattern Gamma didn’t take into account that the enemy are hand-flying their attack ships, and can simply adjust their fire!’

Adjust fire? When you have an opponent 20 metres away from you, why is it so hard to hit them with a speed-of-light weapon? Try shining a flashlight on a raccoon you can see. It’s not that hard.

Don’t get me wrong. I like the shows. But there are still things that bug me about them.

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“Vulcans cannot lie”, a concept introduced in an episode where the Vulcan character lies repeatedly. Oddly, the irony of that last part is often forgotten and the first part was accepted as a rule, unbroken until the first episode of Star Trek: Enterprise.

3

Why do people with beam weapons (phasers and the like) treat them like pistols and not swords?

4

As far as TOS goes, the only thing that bothers me is how Roddenberry allowed his Utopian beliefs to influence the show. “We’re so advanced in the future that we don’t need to use violence to settle disputes” etc.

Some of the movies, especially the first one, had some the most horrifically-bad uniforms ever devised. They looked more like thermal underwear than anything else.

The first few seasons of DS9 were pretty pathetic. I would love to know just who exactly thought it would be a good idea to take a show dedicated to exploration and turn it into a static, garrison-based show.

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They never really got the holosuite right from a usability angle. They got the general usage right, adventure, games, and sex, but preparing to use a holo-program always was a bit of nuisance. Take Picard’s 1920’s gangster adventures. He always wore era appropriate cosplay, which is fine if that’s your thing, but the program shouldn’t react negatively if he didn’t. When anyone entered the suite in uniform the holographic NPCs would always make comments such as wondering why they’re wearing pajamas. The program should ignore 23rd-century tech, manners, clothes, and vocabulary for user expediency. Call of Duty doesn’t chide me for being out of uniform if I play it in my underwear. You could fanwank it away by saying that maybe Picard plays his games in ultra realism mode but these issues seem to plague all holo-programs.

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With a static lead actor. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Picard must have, because Quark’s holodeck on DS9 didn’t do that, as I recall. There was a recurring program with a 60s-era lounge singer, and he and the other holo-characters did not respond to the “real” people, including Klingons and Ferengi, as a 1960s person would respond to meeting a Ferengi or a Klingon, even in a Vegas lounge. :slight_smile:

Flyer: For a “garrison-based show” DS9 sure seemed to leave that garrison a lot. :slight_smile: Mainly because it was next to a wormhole.

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We come in peace
Shoot to kill!
Shoot to kill!

9

To keep viewers from realizing that the creator’s girlfriend-and-later-wife was getting a double paycheck: Computer voice and Nurse Chapel.

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I think that would be because the beam of the weapon has an effectively infinite range. If you were swinging it around like a sword, you’re as apt to take out your own ship that is flying around overhead, or possibly your ally who is on the catwalk above and to the left of your foe.

11

How so many of the AQ species that are encountered are at rough technological parity with the Federation. Realistically, you’d expect that any aliens encountered would be far ahead or far behind.

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The encapsulated-episode model, in which the galaxy could be blown off its axis by the first commercial break but was completely restored by the final credits. I am binging through DS9 right now (the only ST series I had never watched) and there are a couple of completely abysmal examples of it in the first seasons. Even small personal changes are erased “Call me Julian” “Okay, don’t call me Julian any more.” I understand it does grow into a more progressive-storyline model lately, but TOS and TNG could be run in any random order without disturbing a line, and Enterprise is only a little different. Voyager was both best and worst at this.

The whole “universe of super-shiny ships sharing the same static tech” thing gets old, too.

The “crew discovers a village of happy people Who Are Not What They Seem To Be” trope got pretty well shredded over the collated run, and far too many ended up “Teaching Our Heroes A Valuable Lesson.”

13

Other than the “Son worshipers” in “Bread and Circuses,” what references to the Christian God were there?

14

The Prime Directive – especially in TNG.

The entire idea was used as a writing crutch to prevent the obvious solution (why the hell doesn’t The Enterprise just nuke the bad guys from orbit? Oh, the Prime Directive). But it became a straitjacket. Picard ignored it many a time, and never faced any consequences.

Note that this doesn’t actually bug me. It just amuses me and it fun to see how often it gets ignored.

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I really associate that more with the earliest days of TNG (after Roddenberry had started to believe his own press), rather than TOS. While TOS did make the occasional reference to Earth putting aside its more warlike ways and learning to work together, it was mostly background and didn’t really influence the plot that much.

If TOS was supposed to represent a society that didn’t need to use violence to settle disputes, it failed spectacularly, considering how many fight scenes it had! :slight_smile:

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I can’t think of them off the top of my head, other than ‘Who Mourns for Adonais’ where Kirk says ‘Mankind has no need of gods…we find the one quite adequate.’ In ‘Bread and Circuses’ it was a plot point. In other episodes they were just bits of dialogue.

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If you’d said this 20 years ago I probably would have disagreed, but having recently re-watched the full run of DS9 I’m going to have to reluctantly agree with you. Technobabble wasn’t so bad on TOS, but by the time TNG rolled around it assumed a prominent role (e.g. alien entity is threatening the Enterprise. Wunderkid Wesley figures out if you reroute the primary couplers through the induction manifold relays and into the phase emitter blahblahblah…then the alien gets a big shock and leaves the ship alone (or other suitable happy ending).

On the one hand I guess I appreciate that the writers made some attempt to provide semi-consistent/plausible-sounding technological solutions to many of the problems facing the Trek crew, but on the other hand, there are a LOT of episodes that revolve around technological problems & solutions. After a while the technobabble gets pretty tiresome and one finds themselves wishing Chief O’Brien gets to the end of the sentence sooner instead of later.

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Another thing about technobabble: ‘We need to do [something].’ O’Brien/Data/Torres/Whoever says, ‘It’s hypothetically possible, but I’ll have to babblebabblebabble the Spacebabble, and then babblebabblebabble.’ OK, it’s something that’s never been done before. But the engineer comes up with a workable solution off the top of his/her/its head, and explains the procedure to the Captain.

H&I (Heroes & Icons channel) actually has a comedic spot featuring technobabble.

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For a future interplanetary federation, a lot of things seem to be centered around [del]Earth[/del] [del]Western[/del] [del]American[/del] 20th Century American culture.

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These United Federation of Planets flags bug me.