No seat belts. Exploding consoles. Shouldnt crew members wear some kind of face-guard in battle? Or at least be blue toothed into their console at a safe distance and give verbal commands rather than quaint button pushing?
Then there’s the time where Picard was turned into a kid, and an hour later a handful of Ferengi captures a ****ing Galaxy Class starship.
Or Picard beams down and Riker crashes the GD thing after a POS antiquated Klingon ship opens fire.
Man, Riker squeezed that whole ‘saved the Earth from the Borg’ for all it was worth. I should also point out that except for Sisko, post-Kirk, every damn incarnation right up to the latest movies has featured our ‘heroes’ constantly being out-classed and getting the holy shit kicked out of their ships.
Only GODS and God-like aliens could ever curb-stomp Kirk like that.
Nobody pees. Have you ever seen anyone pee on any of the Enterprises? No. Nobody pees.
Including cats.
. . . Starships have inertia dampeners.
Except on the bridge where the crew doesn’t even have seat belts in case the inertia dampeners fail, though the ship might as well be anchored in space dock because it’s immovable when warping the space around it. And everyone flies in different directions when a jolt hits.
The irony is that the ship, as compared to the truth of interstellar travel, is a miraculous marvel. I mean we’ve had yet another thread in GQ where there appears to be no viable, nay even conceivable, means of interstellar travel-and here we are, the human race zipping around the galaxy a mere 2 centuries from now. It isn’t astonishing that it occ. has bugs and whatnot perturb it, but that it can go anywhere at all.
Neelix: You’ve got the most amazing ship in the quadrant, and every day, you try to blow it up!
Ashley Judd.
The Dauphin.
The Entire Planet of Scantily-Clad Jogging Aerobics Instructors.
The kids that were stuck in the turbolift with Picard when the power went out.
It’s got its own warp drive, capable of doing, like, warp 1.0001. Kind of like the little one-lung gas engine in a Volt.
Nothing like a quarantine field around the teleporter. Or even the docking bay. Oh, I know the teleporter is supposed to screen stuff out. (It was mentioned in one of the episodes). That, frankly, is bullshit. It can only screen out known stuff, after all.
I also don’t like…
damnit! A phone call came in the middle of this and I totally forgot what I didn’t like. Dammit dammit dammit!
It’s hard to come up with 20-22 scripts every year without falling back on some technobabble “The positronic flux wookkieemajig is broken because of the space time flubbertrons emitted by a whatchamacallit.”
On top of that, the show - all versions of it - was expensive, but the ship sets are a fixed cost, so there’s pressure to always weite a script that can take place on the sets you’ve already built, which means much of the drama needs to happen onboard the Enterprise, which means that the easiest route to drama is to put the Enterprise in danger, and
The show’s initial decisions about the rules of the Star Trek universe have to remain in play even when they’re stupid.
The worst of those decisions was the existence of transporters, the use of which is insanely inconsistent. The show would have been way better off had that idea never been floated.
My quote: Look at poor Wesley Crusher. Teenage boys are usually horny as a stoat. But I have never seen a young girl anywhere near his age on the ship.
Ethilrist replied:
Ashley Judd.
The Dauphin.
The Entire Planet of Scantily-Clad Jogging Aerobics Instructors.
Okay Ethilrist, I sit corrected. Wesley did have a few young ladies around. But now that I recall, on the Planet of Scantily-Clad Jogging Aerobics Instructors, (the Planet Getcherrocksoff I believe) I found Wesley’s behaviour opened up a lot of questions in my mind.
Here he is, a teenage boy who lives in a small apartment with his mother and doesn’t even have a door that closes on his bedroom. He gets beamed down to play unsupervised with a bunch of the hottest young bods this side of the Crab Louse nebula. A beautiful young girl his age proposes a “game”. So what does Wesley do? Does he react like any red-blooded teenager? When in Rome does he do as horny Romans do? No he is pathetic. He starts stammering and finding polite ways to decline. Then it turns out that the young lady had a ball game in mind (get **your **mind out of the gutter, I mean like baseball) and Wesley is immediately relieved.
So what is with this kid? Is he gay? Are there any gay-straight alliances on Starships to help him accept himself? Is he a member of those dorky “virginity clubs” that right-wing fundie groups run in high schools?
Mommy issues.
On the topic of seat belts, ISTM, if the inertial dampers fail during warp maneuvers, seat belts will not prevent you from disintegrating.
This is not really about the Enterprise per se* but one of the things I CAN’T STAND about Riker is the way he is so full of himself and the way he arrogantly barks at crew members who are obviously doing their best.
The exchange is usually like this:
Laforge: I think I can get the plasma condenser rerouted to the disitron calibration units, and that might give us enough power to shut down the reactor core before it explodes. But I only have one minute before the circuits melt down.
Riker: All right, do it. And HURRY!
Now at this point, if I were Laforge, I would not care if the whole friggin’ ship blows up. I would turn to that arrogant, bossy piece of shit and say, in my most sarcastic voice: "OOOOHHHHH, you recommend I hurry? Really? :rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: No shit, Sherlock! I just TOLD you I had a minute to keep us all from being blasted into space dust, but stupid me was going to lie down and take a 2-hour nap. I guess it took an upper ranks officer like you who pulls down a few hundred thousand bananas a year to figure out that I need to HURRY! Well DUH!!!:rolleyes::rolleyes::rolleyes: I guess I won’t take the time to read this comic book first, then.
Another thing wrong with the ship. It is constantly running out of power.
All it takes is one or two hits from an enemy starship, or maybe just a very large spitball or a paper clip shot on an elastic, and they start screaming about how the shields are down to 10% and they will have to deflect power from the rest of the ship to keep the shields up.
There have even been cases where they have to evacuate parts of the ship and shut down life support systems on those decks (can they be sure they got everybody out on time?) in order to save power.
Who the hell designed this ship? Did they not think this military Starship might get fired on once or twice?
Why are they constantly running out of power? Could they not stop at a garage and buy a few old car batteries, just to top up their energy supply?
LOL, LOL, LOL, ROFL. . . . . . I am not talking to you because those “Confessions of a Holodeck Janitor” were sooo funny I pissed my pants,
No wait, at my age I do that everyday anyhow.
No seriously, that column and others in the series reminded me of the golden age of National Lampoon in the 70s when they were fantastically funny, before they went into their long, slow decline. Many thanks.
LOL, LOL, LOL, ROFL. . . . . . I am not talking to you because those “Confessions of a Holodeck Janitor” were sooo funny I pissed my pants,