Hi! After reading opinions for a long time, I’ve realized that some episodes are quite controversial nowadays. For example, Star Trek: Voyager Season 4, Episode 17, “Retrospect,” has been compared to the #MeToo movement, with some people criticizing how it “handles rape culture unevenly” (as one IMDb review puts it).
This got me thinking: What other things do you feel Star Trek make wrong?
The lack of racial diversity for the empires outside of the Federation makes it feel like somehow only the Federation ever figured out how to work with others. Even problematic caste style situations do not come up enough, let alone just simple variations of races.
The most “diverse” other empire is somehow the Dominion. We know the other empires have other races in them as well. It’s such a Federation centric view of the universe and I feel that it reinforced my America centric mindset because the parallels seem so direct to me. We are diverse, everyone else is easily groupable into divided others. Only we are Free. Only we are willing to work together.
Seven of Nine was generally poorly handled. From the problems of the “Born Sexy Yesterday” trope, to the male crew members hitting on her. To her costume, and the various bad mothering choices of Janway. To the face that she was so beautified.
I would have preferred her to remain grotesquely Borg for a couple of seasons and slowly be rehabilitated.
Life support. It’s always hilarious to me when power going out to life support is treated as an instantly fatal threat. IIRC, if you actually do the calculation it’s ridiculous. If you combine the interior volume of the Enterprise D with its crew count, you would find that the life support system could be offline for MONTHS before the oxygen levels started to substantially drop.
It’s unclear in my viewing EXACTLY what life support is doing.
It’s clear that it has very refined monitoring of compounds present, filtering mechanics, and essentially arbitrary disbursement of reagents.
LaForge: “Computer: flood cargo bay 2 with [the most exotic deep-cut compound that ever was]”
Barret: “Consider it done, I’ve got tons of that shit fucking ready to go and dumping it exactly in the one room is no fucking problem whatsoever”
It was my head cannon that starship operation leaked a ton of not great stuff into the air constantly, and that ongoing room-by-room analysis was always happening and carefully measured filtering and counter-disbursements was just constant. “Make oxygen” was part of it, but wasn’t by a large margin the whole of it.
This is based on nothing other than my feeling that the atmospheric management systems were way too extra.
That’s true. If you assume it’s a lot more than just the O2 supply, it makes more sense. Ok. I have a new fun headcanon.
So, here’s the thing. We know the Federation has multiple species in it. Those species likely have different atmospheric requirements. Sure, we sometimes see crew members wearing breathing apparatus, like the Benzites. But I wonder if every species actually needs its own atmospheric mix? Maybe every species has its own ideal mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc.
That is a problem if everyone has to share the same atmosphere. But what if they didn’t have to? Imagine if the life support system is generating little individual micro atmospheric pockets for every person onboard. Every crew member basically gets to breathe the atmospheric mix of their home planet. Using transporters, force fields, replicators, and good-old-fashioned fans, the ship generates little atmospheric bubbles around each crew member. And those bubbles move with them through the ship.
So would anyone need a breathing apparatus? It’s possible those species just have very unique air requirements that go beyond the capabilities of the life support system to handle. For example, maybe the Benzites require a gas that is poisonous to some other species? You don’t want to make big pockets of that floating around. You minimize the amount of it introduced to the ship by using personal breathing devices.
This would also explain why the system is capable of dispersing arbitrary compounds.
But the need for constant filtration is an interesting point as well. Though that seems like less of an immediately lethal threat than a long-term exposure thing.
I never think about that.
I know the show often shows life support issues as lack of oxygen, but wouldn’t temperature be a issue much sooner? Maybe not hours, but days?
Honestly, the whole thermodynamics of the Starship Enterprise are an open question. Real spaceships need to be festooned with radiator panels. The Federation ships just deal with waste heat by venting it…somewhere? So it has to have some thermal management system that is beyond our understanding. How that would affect how long a passively cooling starship would take to cool down, I cannot say.
Booker.
Why have Starfleet rules when you just have a dude on your ship that you can call on that just shits on the rules.
And it’s not Mariner-style twisting or bending the rules it’s just complete skirting of them
Also how they can’t arrest him for jeopardizing trillions of people, because his right to pursue happiness.
Khan Noonien Singh has never been portrayed by an actor of the character’s ethnicity, nor have any of his descendants.
You just wrinkled my brain…
Code of Honor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)) had some issues and wasn’t consistent with Roddenberry’s concept of the Star Trek universe.
When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.
Observe:
In the episode, Siege of AR-558, the Feds are defending a subspace relay behind cover, in an entrenched position with only one approach through a choke point and are getting the absolute SHIT kicked out of them. THIS IS A SOLVED PROBLEM. We solved it in the 19th century. The solution is a machine gun. Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?
Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?
Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?
Why is this not standard issue?
The number of creative solutions that are devised and then forgotten are too numerous to count. Occasionally there will be a call back to the solution for the diehard fans but I feel like its rare.
I eventually remember that it is what it is. It’s not a hard SciFi setting. The solution is often a bunch of science-sounding words and the deflector dish.
put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
I may be a little fuzzy on the official version of how replicators work. Do they not need feedstock?
I’ve always kind of assumed that they were basically transporters, pulling raw materials out of storage to be materialized as the requested thing. And the similarity in the special effects for the two seems to support that.
Either way, I can’t help but think that an emplaced continuous-fire beam weapon would be more energy efficient and less prone to failure than a replicator-fed slugthrower.
Replicators use a base of neutral material that the system finds easy to use for turning into other stuff. For this kind of specialized application you might use materials close to the end result lowering the energy usage to extend the life of the unit. In DS9 they had self replicating mines that were networked so that the surrounding mines would replicate a detonated mine using the material of the detonated mine.
The real problem is shields. A slugthrower would be completely negated by a personal shield. Against a beam weapon it depends on how much energy it can absorb per second vs. what the beam can shoot.
On AR-558 they’d been run down and were running out. Any heavy weapons they brought had been damaged or expired.
They’re not standard due to the lack of people firing bullets.
Because it’s not easily targeted, I don’t recall anyone deliberately targeting a bridge? Also there’s much more tempting targets and the non-military advantages outweigh the military disadvantages. All the same arguments about why humans have their brains and eyes all up on display rather than burried behind a case of bones!
No idea about the pockets thing. Probably because they’re not motivated by the acquisition of things they don’t think about places to put their things?
This is the one that immediately comes to mind for me.
I definitely appreciated that they used that dress across gender boundaries. The dress itself isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that they didn’t give them the choice.
when worn with leggings it looked quite smart. they should have done that from the beginning.
Bro rocked that uniform.
Ah, the skant… you were taken away far too soon.
“That you could see what I had for breakfsat” wow…
Bro, ep 2 (or 3 I forget) is far worse than that skirt. Some racist ass wakanda forever shit going on in that ep.
I really do hate “Retrospect”.
But I think my answer to the question is “evolution.”
not sure if this has been discussed by the actresses or anyone familiar with the behind scenes situation, but what was with casting a chinese-american and korean-american as japanese women? given the how the imperial aspirations of japan had such a brutalizing affect on those nations, i still find this culturally tone deaf. why did the characters have to be japanese?
referring, of course to keiko o’brien and hoshi sato.
I get it, but also Patrick Stewart was not a french man.
sure, i get that a person from place a can have a role as someone from place b. it’s the magic of acting. i’m not talking about france and britain who have been allies for over a century. the japanese fascists were exceptionally brutal to those they attempted to colonize. there’s a very long and troubled history of “comfort women”. this happened within the last 80 years, so within 50 years of tng. maybe it’s just me, but this always felt really weird to me.
English is kinda like French, in the bigger scheme of things
Not really, is like saying “korean is kinda like japanese”, they are different.
Letting Rick Burman run rampant for years
I came here to say, “attractive women existing.”
… What?
It would ruin the concept, so I get why they don’t tackle the topic, but:
The federation, particularly humanity inside of the federation, is run by essentially a military government. There are elections, probably, we never really get to see them, and the decision making process of the admirals is not shown to the viewer, for world building and story telling reasons. The admirals are the problem posers, the calls to adventure, the exposition. “Go there, do this, top secret, very important, blah blah”.
They don’t do misuse them in lore, that much, but even the lesser capable space ships are enormously dangerous. If I recall correctly, there are even some mentions of not being regularly allowed to warp inside solar system boundaries. The risk of misuse or accidents is unimaginable. I’m pretty sure humanity has resigned itself to being ruled by some admiralty board that could order to vaporize the planet. They’re not going to do that, but the implication is certainly… looming.
I also really don’t like how they changed styles after the 80s/90s series. The perceived need to reinvent themselves has yielded mostly bad results. Only “Strange New Worlds” is tolerable, because it’s well done, but it’s still “too much” in my opinion. The special effects are nice, but there was no need to design corridors like that.
Same for uniforms. Look at how much “the suit” has changed since the 1870s. Barely at all.
Neither humanity nor the Federation are run by a military government. I’m not even sure what gave you that impression. The federation, as its name suggests, is a federal system like the US, or the EU. Each planet retains its political structure while participating in the federation. Earth is the exception where it’s essentially the DC of the federation and is run directly by the federation council. Earth is also unique in being communistic rather than having a currency based economy like most other planets and the federation itself. Starfleet is a human organization that predates the creation of the federation and at that time was absorbed as its military arm. The president of the federation is the commander in chief of Starfleet. There is even a two parter in DS9 where an admiral tries to overthrow the president and fails and it is referred to as a “military coup”.
Neither humanity nor the Federation are run by a military government.
While I agree with you that it’s almost certainly not the intent, we unfortunately have seen that a shocking number of uniformed Starfleet officers sit on the Federation Council.
That was a review board for disciplinary action within Starfleet. The federation council members were there because it was an intragalactic incident.
If Starfleet disciplinary hearings are directly conducted by the UFP president, that raises even more questions, and certainly doesn’t dispel the notion of a “military government”…
Eh, any spaceship capable of even approaching warp speed is a potential star-killer. Like in a very physical sense those ships each have the ability to kill all life within a solar system.
Justifying the no money situation. Which DS9’s ‘In the Cards’ highlights as not making any sense.
Money always is a problem, Boimler wins a lot of money playing on DS9 and he doesn’t care at all. It’s not realistic having some characters had a strong motivation with money and other don’t care.
1st seasons
I personally like first season of TNG, people usually overhate the two first season of TNG.
the outfits were spicy and so were the missions
edit I misread, these are minor things. My actual answer is Star Trek has never put enough women in decision making positions in the creation of Star Trek and all of Star Trek’s success is despite that.
spoiler
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Bicycles, where the fuck are all the bicycles? The last transportation anyone would choose to use when we could teleport everywhere would be bicycles because they are pleasant af, they are also super useful for exploring planets. I get filming people on bicycles “doesn’t look cool” but it annoys me. Also put all the power density of spaceships into an electric bicycle? It would go for years and years and years on a charge…
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Where are all the dogs? For the humans but also space dogs should probably be far more common, do you really think humans are alone in domesticating dogs to get an edge?
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Spaceships would have lots of board games on them and people would be obsessed with them, far more than the holodecks necessarily. Star Trek sort of does this with the poker table meetups that happen in TNG.
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Spaceships, especially long haul ones, would ALL unless they were purely military ships have a garden/park section in them where real native plants were grown from the aliens homeplanet. This would be necessary for mental health as a place crew could go.
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Teleporting is too easy without enough costs, so storytelling always has to justify itself around not being able to use teleporting to solve the issue.
- Well, we got the TNG crew in a dune buggy at least, but you’re right, mountain bikes would be way better exploring rando planets.
- Klingons have targs, right?
- How many eps across all the shows did they show Kaltoh, 3D Chess, etc?
- Didn’t Keiko maintain one in the Enterprise and then eventually converted space on DS9 into one?
4 - garden areas were shown in a few places, and any tech Trekkie can tell you that even schematics of early ships had such places.
Page seven showing the botany level
1701-D blueprints had a lot more, being a bigger ship.
For 3 they sort of did, but the entire show is stuck in a boomer mentality that video games are a kind of a meaningless drug or distraction unless it is chess or heavily chess coded and a symbol for masculine intelligence.
Whatever it is just games are magic because all you need is another human and time to discover new things and unfold a rich experience and both are in abundance on a starship journeying through space.
edit I appreciate the thorough response but if I were to write scifi the garden/small park space would be a part of virtually ever spacefaring civilizations spacecraft, for health (for humans even just seeing pictures of plants improves our health), for cultural and spiritual reasons, for a sense of home and rhythm… There would be a thousand names for these spaces, maybe we humans would use “heart” or something like it to refer to that part of a spaceship but it would not be our idea, it would be highly unusual not to find analogs in other alien spacefaring species within their ships for the same reasons.
Additionally I would include as a scifi author the nuance and ethics around how pirates might board your ship and steal all your valuables but arbitrarily destroying the “heart” or garden even for pirates would be considered especially heinous as no matter who you are in space the thought of not being around plants, even if you are doomed to die or especially if you are, is kind of scarier than almost anything else if you are unfathomably far from home.
I don’t know, call me weird or just a nature lover but I firmly believe having a “heart” to a deep space spaceship is just as important as having a faster than light drive… which leads thematically into a natural justification for why shuttlecraft are capable of FTL travel but people still rely on big ships unlike say Star Wars where smaller ships are used for long distance tansportation just as much as big ones are.
It all ties back into the basic thematic fantasy of scifi that we can “leave earth and expand” is a twisted lie, we can only bring earth with us to new places, if we extract ourselves from earth truly, we die, we are not islands biologically.
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