You know who should write for the next Star Trek series?

[Der_Trihs]

@Voyager

One other odd thing - Spock had never heard of poker until the Corbomite Maneuver. I can imagine poker not being played on Pike’s ship, but how could he have gone to the Academy and never heard of it?

Perhaps no one invited him to a game, and he was too focused on his studies to be interested in anything as “illogical” as human games.

[SenorBeef]

@RealityChuck

There’s really no need for the technobabble, but for some reason, the later versions of Star Trek considered it indispensable.

It was just lazy, bottom of the barrel, cheap writing.

Scripts were actually written with “[technobabble]” to be filled out later by some technobabble generating crew.

So the script might be like:

Picard: What can we do about it?

Geordi: Well, we may be able to [technobabble] but I don’t know, it will be difficult because of [technobabble]

Picard: I have a cool accent, so it will sound convincing when I agree to your plan. Make it so.

I mean - it’s bottom of the barrel, horrible writing - it’s not even worthy of being called hack writing. And the reason they kept doing it is that no one punished them for doing it - trek nerds will watch any horrible crap with the star trek name even if they don’t actually ever tell interesting stories. If you can get away without paying for a script writer, I guess, why bother doing it?

[rjung]

@JThunder

Maybe they should have John Byrne write the next Trek series. That way, he can casually ignore all of Voyager and Enterprise.

Nah, it’s gotta be Peter David, if only to puncture Byrne and his oversized ego.

Hell, Paramount could get David to simply adapt his New Frontier series of Trek novels, and give us some good ol’-fashioned original-style action, adventure, and steamy sex…

[Raguleader]

@RealityChuck

Contrast with B5: in the episode with the alien plague, they gave little snippets, but not full explanations. “It may have something to do with the yellow blood cells.” You don’t needc to know what yellow blood cells are, and what they do, and how they affect the alien’s matabolism: the only important points are that they exist and were what the infection targeted.

Heh, that example from B5 is especially noteworthy because…

Dr. Franklin does eventually develop the magic cure for the problem, but too late for it to be of any use, as the entire Markab race had just died off. I think this was the start of the Franklin stim-abuse story arc, but it’s been too long since I saw the show.

To be honest, I kinda like sci-fi where the hero DOESN’T know how the various technological doohickies work, only that they sometimes do. His engineer doesn’t try to tell him what they’re doing to fix it, except in the most general terms. Scotty never explained to Kirk that there was a problem with the quantum flux heisenberg remodulators on the warp core’s five-speed transmission, he simply told Kirk that ithe problem would be dealt with promptly, and then did it, usually in the ta-DAH nick of time.

On Babylon 5, outside of things directly involved in tactics and ship handling, Sheridan’s technical expertise seems to begin and end with the procedure for arming and detonating a nuclear warhead, a sledgehammer solution to a problem if ever there were one (fortunately for Sheridan, he encounters a whole lot of nails in his military career).

[Bryan_Ekers]

@Raguleader

To be honest, I kinda like sci-fi where the hero DOESN’T know how the various technological doohickies work, only that they sometimes do. His engineer doesn’t try to tell him what they’re doing to fix it, except in the most general terms. Scotty never explained to Kirk that there was a problem with the quantum flux heisenberg remodulators on the warp core’s five-speed transmission, he simply told Kirk that ithe problem would be dealt with promptly, and then did it, usually in the ta-DAH nick of time.

I remember an episode when they were trying to beam Kirk up during some kind of nail-biting escape (“Obsession”, I think, after Kirk and some redshirt had just detonated a megabomb to kill the cloud creature) and the technobabble consisted of Spock’s “Cross Circuit to B!” and such, suggesting an emergency procedure that didn’t need to be explained in terms of thermion particles and pattern enhancers and Heisenberg compensators and other scientific-seeming terminology mangled beyond comprehension.

Actually, I found when the Trek guys of any series used actual scientific terminology, they were always wrong, and usually way wrong.

[Mangetout]

@Sam Stone

Quentan Tarantino.

In the end, Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Scottie kill each other in a blazing phaser battle.

Actually, wouldn’t they kill each other at the beginning, with the rest of the show’s action as a flashback to previous events.