I was watching the TNG episode “Up the Long Ladder” last night - the one where they encounter a planet full of clones and another full of Irish stereotypes.
Anyway, at one point Riker and Pulaski are stunned and cells from their stomachs are removed. Geordi walks into the main chamber and the Prime Minister says he hasn’t seen them. Back on the ship, they don’t remember anything about this incident until Geordi asks them what happened. It’s here where Geordi says (I’m paraphrasing):
“I know he was lying. My visor picks up all sorts of things when a person is lying - stress levels, heart rate, small imperceptions. With other species it’s not as clear but humans - I’ve got them down cold.”
So - since he can easily tell when a human is lying, why don’t they always bring that up? I’m sure there have been episodes where the plot involved Geordi being tricked by a sneaky human, which I would now consider a plot hole - can anyone think of an example?
And come to think of it, why would they let him or Troi into their poker games? I sure as hell wouldn’t be playing Texas Hold 'Em with a Betazoid and a guy wearing a lie detecting visor.
And on a side note - did anyone else think that Irish chick was hot?
Trek was always doing that – Scotty comes up with a brilliant improvisation one week, which would have come in real handy the next week, but for some reason, everyone had forgotten about it by then.
One thing I never could quite figure out about this episode: Why did Riker, Pulaski, and Geordi kick up such a fuss about being cloned? It’s not like they are ever going back to this planet. And if they were squeamish, why not ask for volunteers? In a ship the size of the Enterprise, you’d find a whole bunch of folks who couldn’t care any less if they leave a few clones behind.
Besides… Ricker probably left quite a bit of his DNA on various planets.
Perish forfend that the people of the Trek universe find some gimmick one week, and continue to use it in the future, like, say, becoming psychic, or boosting the ship’s speed, or shields, or weapons, or being able to run people through the teleporter and make them years younger (two different ways, one of which should actually be reproducible in a lab…).
The Bible for the series have always run something like this: They’ve got gadgets. What happens when we take them away? Oooh, they have to use their brains! Neat!
I know that Trek always forgets about technologies introduced in previous episodes, but I always thought that when it came to character traits / developments, they stayed the course. Troi loving chocolate, Riker playing the trombone, etc. I can’t recall a character trait screw up like this.
That bothered me as well. They never explained why they were so oogy about the clone thing. They also didn’t explain why the hot chick’s dad acted drunk after drinking the Klingon synthahol.
It’s worse than that. He can see right through most playing cards. Who needs to read your opponent’s face, when you can just take a look at what he’s holding? Then again, they’re not the only ones with unfair advantages… Data can instantly compute conditional probabilities, based on the cards he’s seen come up, and he has a perfect poker face. Perhaps the Trek poker game would be worth another thread?
And all Irish women are hot. When I was in Ireland for two weeks a couple of years ago, the ladies ranged from “kinda cute” to “I’ve-got-to-be-dreaming-but-please-don’t-wake-me-up”. I don’t understand how this is possible, but there are some things that one need not understand, merely enjoy.
Another huge plot hole involving the VISOR involves androids. In the ep where they hook up the main viewer to the VISOR, someone comments about an aura around Data. Geordi indicates he can identify androids by the aura. Yet he fails to detect Julia Soong’s androidy goodness.
Of course, Soong was very careful to make it pretty much indetectable that Julia was anything but human. He could have included something to foil her “aura,” whatever that is.
Back to the OP, Troi can supposedly detect lies a lot more easily than La Forge can, but she’s fooled tons of times. When it’s convenient to the plot for her to detect the lie she says “he’s lying.” When it’s not convenient she says something vague like “he’s hiding something,” even if everything he says is a lie (such as was the case with Rasmussen, the guy from the “future” in “A Matter of Time”).
Enola Straight, how did you know that the Klingon drink was real alcohol? From what I remember about that scene, he just says something in Klingon to the replicator, then the Irish guy makes a bunch of silly crosseyed faces and hams it up so much that they should have reshot the scene.
Re the OP, I was going to write a long spoof of the “I have a dream” speech in which I call for a Trek series that doesn’t get distracted by meaningless technical minutiae and that pays attention to its own stories from week to week and that gives us full-bodied characters we can identify with and whose fates we care about instead of spending endless downtime between interesting events worrying about ridiculous trivia like whether the turbolift doors have the correct deck designation for wherever they’re going to or coming from, a big part of the which nitpicking is the show’s stubborn insistence on inventing ostensibly cool notions and then rubbishing them at the end of every hour, but I’m too tired.
He stated something along the lines of balancing an equal moment of pain for each moment of pleasure, this after disdaining the ‘no hangover’ and 'dismiss intoxication by just thinking of it" aspects of synthehol.
So when he (first) asked for and got whisky, and was unimpressed, Worf THEN synthesized the Klingon hootch that knocked the old guy for a loop.
OK, I thought he just thought their replicated whiskey wasn’t strong enough so he wanted something with more kick, I must’ve missed their earlier discussion of synthehol.