There's this really interesting moral dilemma, but we have a technobabble solution that will let us bypass the problem so no one has to make any ethically difficult decisions.
Ignoring this trope is the reason why Tuvix is still discussed so heavily.
> Ignoring this trope is the reason why Tuvix is still discussed so heavily.
Or Damage where Archer had to steal that part in order to save humanity. Although some say they'd have been satisfied if they'd later made some mention of going back for them.
I think an even better resolution to that storyline would have been if Archer decided to go to their home planet (maybe after discovering that the crew had died after they left them) and face the consequences of his actions. Basically confess to his crime and throw himself at their mercy to relieve his guilt.
If ENT had lasted long enough, that would have made a really good episode for the 5th or 6th season. A great courtroom drama, some real character development for Archer as he struggles with the consequences of his actions, a good exploration of the moral dimensions of war, and a surprising last-minute twist where he is saved from lifelong imprisonment or death by an act of mercy. That would have been some juicy Star Trek.
> An actual ethical dilemma with no good resolution.
It's better than that. An ethical dilemma where our hero characters throw ethics out the window in the name of self preservation.
I think the only other time I recall seeing that was the Voyager Equinox episodes.
Fun fact, (if you didn't already know because it's actually pretty obvious), her "Well screw that!" is a dub-over of "Well *fuck* that!" so the film could get a PG rating.
Just went to look for a video of the flamethrowers and SGE gave me this based on an r/StarTrek thread
> The bridge of the Star Trek: Discovery ship, the USS Enterprise, has a feature that causes flames. The bridge has exploding consoles and flamethrowers due to reversing the polarity of the canteen's ice cream machine.
The disco bridge flamethrowers draw you out of the suspension of disbelief - they’re so predictable and so clearly a set prop. Give me the crew going side to side in their seats any day.
Why should that matter? If I connect my laptop to an aircraft carrier, is it suddenly in danger of exploding? There's no reason the consoles should have that much power running through them; they're just computers for communicating with the rest of the ship. The *Enterprise*'s weapons aren't in the tactical console, and the engines aren't in the helm console.
Ooooh I have one!
A crewmember is Kidnapped/goes AWOL and is gone for hours until someone can't find them.
**Picard:** Computer, where is Beverly Crusher?
**Computer:** Beverly Crusher is not aboard the ship.
Like, hey Computer, just speculating, but *maybe* an unauthorized, unplanned, random transport of vital personnel off the ship could be like, a push notification or something at least???
And then there's the related "humans are so uniquely awesome among the galaxy's sentient species" trope. And come to think of it, they always seem to mean sapient when they say sentient.
> And come to think of it, they always seem to mean sapient when they say sentient.
That thought occured to me too just now, and it's now going to irritate me everytime they say it
Add some face paint and a wrinkle on the nose, and you have a completely new species that also magically has the exact same evolutionary path, set of emotions, range of political dysfunctions, and can miraculously even interbreed!
They have 2 centuries of technological advancements, a whole team dedicated to security, and it seems like a majority of the time they'd be better off with our modern mall cops with modern gear and a few grainy security cameras. I know it makes it easier for them narratively but it seems crazy to me how often someone can bust out of prison, steal a shuttle, or just take full control over the ship with ridiculous ease.
One of the things that annoys me the most watching Star Trek is the holding cells. Why the hell are you confining possibly dangerous people behind an electronic forcefield? A door would be better.
"See? We are so good because we follow the Prime Directive to the letter and apply it consistently. No matter what happens to the indigenous people of this world, our hands are clean."
"The Prime Directive demands that we let this intelligent species go extinct. We will stand by as witnesses as a preventable natural disaster wipes them all out, because interfering with them might be much worse for their society than total annihilation."
I just finished watching Homeward, where Picard is very cross at Worf's brother Nikolai for breaking the Prime Directive to save some humanoids.
This aspect of the PD as presented is kind of a dumb, blunt instrument. I think at least two captains were explicitly called out by being asked how many times they'd broken it. The PD prohibition of interference in internal affairs is generally better, but still far from ideal. Can't argue against prohibition of first contact ~~until the subject species develops warp travel~~ *with pre-warp civilisations* though.
Yes, strip it down to internal affairs and no contact with pre warp civilizations. Natural disasters can be averted only if the local population remains unaware. This is rational and has easy to understand limits.
But even though we have advanced sensor technology let’s drop a cloaked duck blind that always seems to get fucked up somehow like a couple hundred feet from a village.
It always seems that way because it wouldn't be interesting otherwise. "Group of anthropologists completes standard survey with no issues" isn't a fun hour of TV.
Even natural disasters can be iffy. At what scale is interference warranted, and is there a point where you leave a population to deal with the externalities of your interference? Do you stop Pompeii if you are able? What do you do when stopping one geological event accelerates another? What if the population will know SOMETHING interfered even if they don’t know what? If a plague is spreading, are we ok to beam a life saving airborne vaccine to inoculate a population without their knowledge or consent?
I mean we save Sarjenka’s planet by destroying the Dilithium Crystals causing the geological shifts. Great. How is Sarjenka’s civilization doing? Are they about to descend in to post-apocalyptic barbarism because their existing infrastructure and supply lines have been totally wrecked in the last 8 weeks? Are the scientists of the planet left baffled why the calamity stopped? Did anyone build survival bunkers beforehand and are now left looking like they wasted their resources? Is the planet wide shattering of dilithium crystals going to change the ecosystem in unforeseen ways?
Obviously, we have to wrap things up in 48 minutes and exit with a feel good ending, but life doesn’t revolve around making one decision and never having to deal with anything that isn’t an immediate consequence.
I feel like the TNG/Voyager era especially (DS9 didn’t deal with the PD much) turned it from a good idea, into a borderline religious idea. It was treated as almost sacrosanct and the situations where it was applied got way too absurd imo
By contrast, TOS (and later on SNW) took a more reasonable approach to the PD imo.
The Boralans are an interesting case in as much as the catastrophe that kills their planet is unavoidable. In regards to preserving the village, it opens a wider question as to whether Starfleet should start acting like the preservers and start yanking people off their planets and depositing them somewhere else for whatever reason you come up with.
The events of the episode are an absolute travesty on half a dozen points, but if you start framing interference as justified in the name of preservation, there’s a whole can of worms to be addressed in regards to responsibility for the life you choose to preserve and how you go about doing it.
I’m not saying the decision to save the Boralan village was wrong, but the way they went about handling it was just absolutely stupid and way more harmful than it should have been.
i’ve thought of this episode from time-to-time in regards to their remaining society once they are settled on the new planet. their population is so small that it’s unlikely they will survive, but if they do, they will eventually figure out the truth as they evolve.
in the short term, they will have big setbacks in their scientific advancement as a society. their position on the new planet is different, as are the stars and constellations. any math they’ve developed that depends on the constants of their original planet (mass, gravity, etc) will need to be reworked. they will also have a very difficult time explaining their own evolution and missing links with their new planet’s plant and animal life.
i would love a throwaway line in Discovery that updates us on their journey over the past 1,000 years.
I agree with the Prime Directive in principle, but, like most Star Trek crews, I also agree that there are logical limits and exceptions, such as when the natural development of a society, and indeed, a whole planet, is about to cease through no fault of their own.
They usually decide that the reason they have captains empowered with a lot of leeway on long range missions is to make those kind of judgement calls, when the otherwise good rule will lead to a result that is bad.
The captain will have to defend the choice to go against it. And usually they have been able to.
But it's a good thing in general that they look upon the internal development of alien societies as sacrosanct.
I feel like the prime directive has been shown not to apply if they can avoid cultural contamination - I recall the Enterprise-D diverting an asteroid impact from a populated world at least once and Pikes Enterprise also attempted it in SNW with no moral dilemma.
Intervention in the development of a species is much different than just diverting an asteroid.
That said, now I'm wondering if alien species would create protected areas around developing life (much like we create marine protected areas in fragile areas of the ocean) and if Earth is currently within one of them.
I just watched the next generation episode where Picard won’t intervene with one planet keeping another planet addicted to a plague cure. I did kind of appreciate how Picard tweaked the regulations to ensure that the planet would one day break their addiction but still. That was some cold shit.
To, hopefully, quote SF Debris accurately: "A person whose only response to the plight of millions dying is pointing at a piece of paper is not the hero in your story."
Generally it doesn't end well when a high tech civilization interferes with a less technological civilization.
Remember that the prime directive was a critique of cold war proxy wars like Vietnam. And it still applies, are Iraq and Afghanistan better of now? All those African countries France is still meddling in. Major companies extraction resources in the global south, but it's the companies that profit from all the rare earth minerals, while the people remain poor.
Even charity organisations are sketchy. That's a real deep rabbithole, the stuff most of them do in the global south. From pocketing most of the money themselves to messed up things like using people their as guinea pigs for new medication.
Not to mention these high tech civilization interfering in the global south generally keep corrupt leaders in powers so they can continue what they're doing.
And yes, Star Trek gives a few examples were interfering is the 'righ thing to do' but as a general rule, it's actually good.
Remember it's not just the federation, we've seen klingons do it as well.
The point of my comment wasn't that Prime Directive itself is bad; it was that the way PD is applied in Trek is maddeningly inconsistent and depends on whatever point the lazy writer is trying to hammer home.
It’s this. The Picardist interpretation of the Prime Directive is anti-scientific (that’s not how evolution works), promotes a belief in superstitious predestination, is needlessly cruel, and is almost impossible to enforce uniformly amongst conscientious COs.
Like, if Captains violating your most important rule is a running joke, either your organization is hopelessly corrupt or the rule sucks.
holodeck safety software engineers share an office in a tiny damp basement room in Starfleet HQ together with the security guys who designed the key phrases to their starships
"So we're going to put in a self destruct system. Obviously it will need to be very secure, so we'll make sure to put in the strictest safety protocols."
"Great, what will the password be?"
"1-1-A"
It was better than the ridiculously contrived scenarios to create the "cowboy planet" or the "nazi planet" in TOS. The studio needs a good excuse to use the costumes and sets from the lot next door to save money, and the holodeck is less bizarre
This made much more sense in early TNG. We see the crew marveling at the holodeck, just like the viewers. It is heavily implied that this is new technology to keep the crew from going crazy on long missions.
By VOY, holodecks are apparently standard issue on Starfleet ships. Should have had the bugs worked out by the time the tech was deployed to the fleet.
Out of universe, it was a good opportunity to do bottle episodes with existing wardrobe and sets, saving some cash.
I know they have replicators but the holodeck is like today's printers, these things break all the time and in the last 20 years that I've worked IT I can safely say that they have not improved one bit; they break all the time.
The equivalent issue isn't that the printer breaks a lot, it's that almost every time it does, Ghengis Khan gets released in the office. Something that can get so wildly dangerous almost every time it frequently breaks down shouldn't be on a spacecraft.
I forgot what episode it was but it had an amazing Meta opening.
It was Voyager, Tom Paris detects an anomaly and puts it on screen. Then Janeway says something like:"Is it a spacial anomaly, an entity?, a worm hole?, a space disturbance?" (Like she mentions 4-5 different things) and Tom responds "No mam, it's something that we've never encountered before!".
That scene made me chuckle and I could never find again.
I hesitate to even post this because when you read this you won’t be able to unsee it. 99% of the time when someone contacts another person with their communicators, they don’t actually tell the person anything. Very few full, meaningful conversations happen over the comm system. Instead, they ask the person to come see them in person so they can talk face to face.
“LaForge to Captain Picard.”
“Picard here. Go ahead Commander.”
“We’ve got a problem in Engineering, Captain. I think you better get down here.”
“On my way.”
Like just tell him the problem! This happens ALL. THE. TIME.
> “We’ve got a problem in Engineering, Captain. I think you better get down here.”
"What is it?"
"I think you better come see this."
"It's 32 decks away, Mr. LaForge. What is it?"
"... I think you better-"
Yeah I don't think the Captain of an air craft carrier would go down to engineering to talk to them personally. Most of the time the captain wouldn't even get a full report on what was wrong. Just something like "engine one is down. Repairs are ongoing. Estimated time is xx:xx." Once the crisis is over they would file a full report.
So if it's non critical, being like
"Data made a lady"
"What?"
"Data made a lady, he built a woman and it's his daughter"
"Can you repeat that"
"Captain, just come down here."
"Captain, Wesley Crusher created yet another new form of life and it's eating the bits of the ship that keep us alive."
"You have no idea how little that narrows it down, Commander."
Not in a military context.
You tell someone that’s a Lt Commander+ that they’d “better get down there” or “you need to see this”, you’d get your ass torn open for lack of specificity and wasting time
I feel it could be to prevent critical information being overheard by people listening in to comms eg enemy spies or security officers during confidential missions.
"We're the only ship in range." - not too bad, but sometimes it feels like Starfleet only has 5 ships
Forgetting technology exists - "Transporters are down!" What about using a shuttle? or the transporters on the shuttles? "We invented a shield so strong you could sit in the corona of a star." never used again
> "We're the only ship in range." - not too bad, but sometimes it feels like Starfleet only has 5 ships
TMP was the worst offender in this category by far.
"This massive, seemingly hostile entity is approaching Earth. *Enterprise* is currently in spacedock finalizing her refit, but she's the only ship in the sector, so she has to intercept it."
"...I'm sorry, back up. The only ship in the sector? The sector that includes *the capital planet of the Federation*?"
KIM: "We are done for, we'd need the power output of 500 warp cores to get out before the anomaly crushes the ship!"
SEVEN: *Taptaptaptap*
KIM: "Hey, what are you inputting there?"
SEVEN: "Borg algorithm."
PARIS: "The deflector dish is emitting a galvanized tachyon beam that has successfully changed the gravitational constant of local space! Anomaly left, captain. Resuming course for Earth."
JANEWAY: "Great work, Seven!"
SEVEN: "..."
*Roll credits.* *
*Next week, Voyager will look like fresh out of spacedock again, even though half her hull was melted off. Also, the shuttle that was torn to shreds after Chakotay steered it into the anomaly will be standing in the hangar bay with a fresh paintjob.
Honestly the lack of continuity and proper utilization of the concept are why I’ve never seen all of Voyager, and it’s always been hard for me to watch in general. That might seem dumb, but I just genuinely find it all so frustrating.
"And I say
Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish
That's the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up"
i think TNG is worse than VOY. i used to joke, during the original run, that if geordie had been on board, he'd have 'em home by the end of the episode using the deflector, his visor, and inversing the polarity of something.
Spend an entire episode dealing with something like an alien virus only to get a brief voiceover at the end "the doctor found a cure and everything is back to normal".
I mean... TNG and Voyager directly address this frequently. Obviously they break the rules on occasion, but for the most part Picard and Janeway stayed on the ship.
Sparks. Too many sparks. Boom. Sparks. Bang. Sparks. You have shields, a warp drive. 20th century circuit breakers? Nah. Sparks sparks sparks sparks sparks sparks.
Get to some random place and just immediately send an away team without armour shields or any kind of Intel into whatever hell scape they stumbled into this week.
How starship crew members could figure out things at the finest minds in Star Fleet couldn't figure out. Every ships doctor/chief engineer perform miracles in 45 mins that the best federation doctors/engineers couldn't solve solve. "Forget it Bashir, this illness is incurable..." (1 hour later) "It was actually quite simple really.. come on Miles, let's get a beer" 🤣
TNG-era trek is competence porn. Everyone is brilliant, focused, cool under pressure, and emotionally resilient. Except Barclay, which is why he's such a great character.
The other I hate is time traveling to modern day Earth. It worked exactly once in The Voyage Home. Otherwise it just feels lazy and a way to save on budget. I can't believe Picard season 2 did it for half a season
I think every Star Trek series can get away with it exactly once, but the mileage will vary.
Picard spending half a season on it was just about unforgiveable.
On the other hand, travelling in time to *not* the modern day is one of my favourite tropes! The Bell Riots episodes of DS9 are great, for example, and I love First Contact.
City on the Edge of Forever is widely considered on the best Trek episodes ever.
So is Far Beyond The Stars
(okay, technically it's the 1930s and 1950s, but still)
Personally I also like the episode where the Ferengi are the "Rosswell Aliens". It's a fun episode.
Those episodes you listed I like! I mean when the go back to actual modern day, plus or minus a decade. The 30s, 50s, and even the episode where they go back to the 1800s all work for me because it's still different than today.
Sorry, we'll have to disagree on this one. I love the voyager two-parter with Sarah Silverman. Also the TOS episode where they go back to the 60's was also pretty good, iirc.
Which really surprised me since I was pretty lukewarm on those characters but it really helped flesh them both out, even if it wasn't our Kirk.
But it does highlight the growing problem with the time travel episodes, since we're pushing up against historical events in the Trek world and basically delaying them in order to justify going to modern day. Which isn't the end of the world, I think telling a good story is most important, but still.
The nice part about when they go back to the present day in TOS, is that the “present day” is actually like 20 years before I was born. So it really is like a new world
I don’t mind it so much if it’s one episode like I liked the one with Kirk and La’an in modern day Toronto. But yeah most of Picard season 2 was in modern Los Angeles and that was just SO annoying.
Most possession stories.
Sometimes they're okay like that weird bioluminescent alien episode that focused on Geordi and the science outpost. Changelings are fine. I don't mind body doubles. Its specifically when an alien entity takes over another and uses them as a puppet, not a bad premise I just don't like 99% of the episodes that do it.
I was going to go with exploding consoles killing people but I absolutely back to the misuse of the PD. SNW seems to be doing it better, the few times it's come up, but the TNG-era was pretty bad with it. Hell, it didn't even exist in Enterprise and they still made an episode about it to try and justify genocide.
...which reminds me, I also hate the constant misuse of evolution and supernovas.
Oh no, following the Prime Directive would have tragic consequences! Let's act like this is a real moral dilemma for 45 minutes instead of just admitting that the Prime Directive is stupid.
I admit that the Prime Directive has good intentions and is right for a few good points. But it has massive flaws, like being unable to safe a species from a preventable natural desaster like a vulcano or something.
Otherwise keeping your asses out of internal affairs and not interfering with the technological and societal development of a species... I can get onboard with that.
It's just so weird to me that it's written as an absolute rule that they would need to violate to do anything. Rather than Starfleet at some point writing it with guidelines for when it is and isn't appropriate to interfere. Instead they leave it as an absolute rule that gets regularly ignored. Which probably means for the cases where it is important to not interfere everyone knows violating it is a non issue.
Every time something explodes inside the ship rocks come out of no where. Are star trek shipyards just filling void spaces in the enterprise with fucking rocks? 💀
Classic Trek:
- Not just the ridges, but a species looking like cookie-cutter clones of each other. In a military? Fine. But civilians? Vary up the skin tones and the clothing. (I realize a lot of this comes down to time constraints and budget, so it's forgivable on that level.)
- Not putting the collar/undershirt on a 'monster maroon' TOS movie era uniform. It looks terrible. Drops the design from a 10 to a 6 automatically.
Modern Trek:
- A new uniform or ship design every time someone sneezes. It used to be a big deal when a new uniform or ship was revealed, but now it's just a Tuesday.
- Endless references to classic Trek. They may be fun, but it's starting to pile up. Where's YOUR new thing? ^\* A lot of long-running franchises are stuck in this rut, so it's not a Trek-specific thing. See also: Ghostbusters.
- Intense color grading. Either too blue/cool (Discovery does this a lot), or (less common) too warm. It feels like there's no subtlety sometimes. Current season is doing a bit better, I've noticed.
(^\* Yes, yes, spore drive, 32nd-century stuff, etc, etc, I'm exaggerating for effect.)
At this point? Time travel. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic Trek time travel episodes, but I’m done with it at this point. Go forwards, not backwards.
Shields. They can withstand intense stellar radiation, hold up Dyson Sphere doors, and even hold off the Borg for a few minutes but also take one disruptor hit...'Shields down to 40%!!!!"
Also, there's a "particle" for every phenomenon in the universe. Wait, I'm just feeling the effects of a gimmeabreakatron particle fountain.
To be fair, cosmic radiation can't compete with the sheer force of the WMD-level weaponry they throw around.
According to lore a standard photon torpedo has a 1 kg antimatter warhead... that is enough to level a city. A phaser can cut tectonic plates in half or just stun THAT DUDE standing at the next street crossing from orbit.
Most people just forget, how mighty Star Trek weaponry is according to maths, while Star Trek itself sometimes treats it as Q-Tips as off-brand firecrackers that are thrown at tanks.
Yeah in some ways I think the original series actually did this much better, because the Enterprise is always threatening to level planets and they can stun people from space. It was inconsistently used, but there was an awareness of the awesome power of a starship that the later series just tended to forget, presumably because that would lead to power creep when they keep on having bigger and badder enemies and the point is to have some realistic obstacles for the characters to overcome.
Fun fact: a 1 kg antimatter/matter explosion would generate a 43 megaton explosion, or just slightly less than the largest nuclear device ever built. And yet, somehow, they throw those things around like Pez dispensers.
The misconception that evolution is a tech tree to fill out. There's talk of "more evolved" or "less evolved" like there's some sort of ladder to climb. Evolution doesn't work that way, species adapt to their environment.
It's pretty common throughout the franchise but having just rewatched Voyager and Enterprise it seems like the writers were particularly bad at this one.
I looked it up and it actually has a name on TV Tropes, "Evolutionary Levels". But to save everyone from spending their afternoons there I won't add the link. 😊
Unpopular opinion but; The Mirror Universe!
You're telling me that despite ALL the vast differences of the universes that everyone's parents still ended up boinking in the same ways so that everyone still showed up in the same place at the same time?
Engineering has a problem that they'll stress is impossible to rectify and/or will take too long.
The Captain says to do it anyways. And no matter what, Engineering does it.
Lack of informed consent in transporter usage and how often they transport people against their will or without telling them there is a non-zero chance they come out the other side wrong.
Prime directive. The idea is good but not helping people who are going to die because your high horse morality doesnt make any sense to me. If you have the power to help and you just let whole civilization(s) die because doing so would "contaminate" their natural evolution just makes federation a grade A+ A-holes.
Other thing is the time travel stuff especially going back to our current time never been a fan of that.
Third thing is the section 31 or more of the modern version of it where section 31 has fleets of ships soldiers starbases and stuff. To me section 31 was at its best when it was just Sloan.
Star Trek's lazy alien design all of the series have just way too many forehead of the week low budget corner cutting aliens. Its been my pet peeve since very beginning when i first started to watch the show almost 40 years ago.
Rock insulation on starships and exploding computers.
The trope of aliens or humans with "mental powers" that let them control everyone/everything or put the entire galaxy at risk. Kevin Uxbridge, I'm looking at you. I'm looking at you, Keplian child. I'm looking at you, Charlie X.
I'll give TNG-era Q a pass because they at least used him sparingly.
Alternately, Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development and Mirror Earths. I don't even consider this as a trope so much as just bad writing.
The Mirror Universe. It doesn’t make any sense, even in the confines of a wacky space adventure, and a lot of the Mirror Characters just come off as annoying.
Humans win because they're smart, skilled, driven, empathetic, resilient, caring, emotional, explorers with superior morality.
Alien species are further along evolutionarily *and* technologically, but humans are still better, somehow.
Revolutionary, groundbreaking thing that gets forgotten/buried by the next episode.
Welsey, through poking around with the Traveller and Kosinski's equations, discovers that the Federation's fundamental understanding of the universe is flawed, and that there is an extra foundational element that is overlooked with Federation physics, like how subspace is for our basic assumptions of the universe, compared to theirs.
The Traveller reasurres Wesley that the Federation isn't ready, and it is brushed away, to be forgotten.
That the Federation's basic physics are incorrect is the kind of thing that they ought to know about, before they build further on flawed science, and a lot more of everything comes apart at the seams later.
Barclay, with his intelligence boosted by the Cytherian probe, discovers a way to achieve extreme-speed warp travel that puts Discovery's spore drive to shame, achievable using the basic hardware on a starship. At the end of the episode, the Enterprise has a *full cultural and technological exchange* with the Cytherians, after which them, and all their tech, is forgotten.
It's the kind of thing that would have let Voyager get home in time for tea, rather than wandering about the delta quadrant for 70 years. At worst, they just make a few hops, and route through Cytherian space. It's doubtful that they would mind for an emergency case.
------
Also aliens that are just humanoid, with only minor surface-level differences. We see a lot of weird biologies under the surface, but they usually have human parts, rearranged, or with a few extras, and it doesn't actually matter much at all.
It making a difference would make Trek that much more interesting.
EDIT: An example might be a Klingon like Worf. They have redundancies, so he might have greater physical strength/durability, but with an equal trade-off of being more sensitive to hypoxia, because those redundancies represent greater oxygen demand, or not being as likely to notice a serious injury because his redundancies mask it until they can't compensate any more.
"Shields at 60%!!"
The way in which the writers let the audience know that the battle is going poorly for the heroes, but not so badly that it can't be recovered and, more importantly, won't have to do anything like show battle damage or have long-lasting consequences.
Insurrection had this twice for cryin out loud.
i don't know if this is so much of a trope, but i really hated the way Voyager would just flat out forget that they were lost in the Delta Quadrant for 70 light years. sometimes you'd think they were on a pleasure cruise
Space rape of the women. Mind raped, impregnated without consent, weird ghost-like alien bangin' Crusher with her magic candle, kidnapped and forced to marry or battle to the death, kidnapped to serve another alien species...
I love Star Trek, it's by far my favorite sci-fi, and I'm happy they made a point of showing women, but our damn vaginas get us into a lot of trouble. The only scifis I've found that get women closest to right are Stargate and Babylon 5.
For me, it's the "technology X would make the solution to this problem simple, so let's invent a type of radiation that makes technology X inoperable" trope.
It's got to be the sentient nebula/life form episodes. It happened so often in Voyager. A weird breeze would come in through life support and poof, it was sentient space breeze and it now has control of the ship.
Main characters falling in love within days of meeting someone new, willing to drop everything to be with that person. That was my biggest gripe with PIC S2 and Rios, but I was rewatching DS9 and Jadzia did the same thing (albeit unsuccessfully).
alternate universes. mainly mirror worlds.
I can see how it could be fun for the actors, and its fun to see alternate versions.
I dont HATE it, but it's the most skippable eps I have
I don’t think it’s my absolute least favorite, but the frequency of “too much interference” as a reason for transporters, sensors, or anything else not working is so beyond-overused that it cracks me up. I’d love to see Ryan’s Edits or some similar YouTube channel do a supercut of all the times a character uses the phrase “too much interference.”
The captain always getting into action-movie type scenarios. That's just not their job.
Also...the number of times they'll beam down to a planet with no protective gear or survival kits or anything in case someone goes wrong. And they should know by now that things always go wrong!
I cannot stand the mirror universe episodes. No matter what show or timeframe all the characters are there even though the events that take place in the other universe would have been completely different and there is no way these people would all end up together by sheer chance AND everyone is a dick.
"We need you to join this extremely dangerous mission deep in enemy territory."
"But I'm the ship doctor."
"Yes, that is why you are needed. You are an expert in biological stuff, and the other members of the team are just idiots who couldn't possibly complete the mission without you."
There's this really interesting moral dilemma, but we have a technobabble solution that will let us bypass the problem so no one has to make any ethically difficult decisions. Ignoring this trope is the reason why Tuvix is still discussed so heavily.
> Ignoring this trope is the reason why Tuvix is still discussed so heavily. Or Damage where Archer had to steal that part in order to save humanity. Although some say they'd have been satisfied if they'd later made some mention of going back for them.
my head cannon is those guys died
I think an even better resolution to that storyline would have been if Archer decided to go to their home planet (maybe after discovering that the crew had died after they left them) and face the consequences of his actions. Basically confess to his crime and throw himself at their mercy to relieve his guilt. If ENT had lasted long enough, that would have made a really good episode for the 5th or 6th season. A great courtroom drama, some real character development for Archer as he struggles with the consequences of his actions, a good exploration of the moral dimensions of war, and a surprising last-minute twist where he is saved from lifelong imprisonment or death by an act of mercy. That would have been some juicy Star Trek.
That’s a great episode, for that reason. An actual ethical dilemma with no good resolution.
> An actual ethical dilemma with no good resolution. It's better than that. An ethical dilemma where our hero characters throw ethics out the window in the name of self preservation. I think the only other time I recall seeing that was the Voyager Equinox episodes.
Exploding consoles. Your laptop explode and kill you lately? Mine neither.
Adding to this. For some reason Discovery's bridge has built in flamethowers in the back.
Every time I see a spurt of flames from those, I'm reminded of [The Chompers from Galaxy Quest.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv04e7q-DzU)
Sigourney Weaver's reaction in that scene cracks me up every time.
Fun fact, (if you didn't already know because it's actually pretty obvious), her "Well screw that!" is a dub-over of "Well *fuck* that!" so the film could get a PG rating.
"Well fscrewk THAT!"
Just went to look for a video of the flamethrowers and SGE gave me this based on an r/StarTrek thread > The bridge of the Star Trek: Discovery ship, the USS Enterprise, has a feature that causes flames. The bridge has exploding consoles and flamethrowers due to reversing the polarity of the canteen's ice cream machine.
All Starfleet consoles come pre-packed with ROCKS
The disco bridge flamethrowers draw you out of the suspension of disbelief - they’re so predictable and so clearly a set prop. Give me the crew going side to side in their seats any day.
That and no seatbelts
Internal dampeners are sufficient for most usage. However they should have combat seat-belts.
Inertial dampeners
Into darkness does have seat belts
ROCKS!
Well, is your laptop powered by EPS?
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Dilithium will really upgrade your graphics.
Right, I use relays to manipulate power distribution on my truck so I don't have a shitload of amps running through a toggle switch on the dash.
This happens to me once a week! I have died so many times.
It has not, but I also have not been using it while connected to a starship while in battle
Why should that matter? If I connect my laptop to an aircraft carrier, is it suddenly in danger of exploding? There's no reason the consoles should have that much power running through them; they're just computers for communicating with the rest of the ship. The *Enterprise*'s weapons aren't in the tactical console, and the engines aren't in the helm console.
Survivor bias! /s
Caves with perfectly level floors
The Lower Decks cave episode
TV caves show up in any adventure show. The floors are flat and the walls are weirdly wrinkled (from the spray-on concrete).
Ooooh I have one! A crewmember is Kidnapped/goes AWOL and is gone for hours until someone can't find them. **Picard:** Computer, where is Beverly Crusher? **Computer:** Beverly Crusher is not aboard the ship. Like, hey Computer, just speculating, but *maybe* an unauthorized, unplanned, random transport of vital personnel off the ship could be like, a push notification or something at least???
'Planet of Hats' - namely a planet whose inhabitants all share a single defining characteristic. Arguably the franchise's most overused trope.
And then there's the related "humans are so uniquely awesome among the galaxy's sentient species" trope. And come to think of it, they always seem to mean sapient when they say sentient.
> And come to think of it, they always seem to mean sapient when they say sentient. That thought occured to me too just now, and it's now going to irritate me everytime they say it
I don't think those words meant those things back then. Even today in common parlance, "sentient" usually still means "intelligent".
Klingons, Romulans, Ferengi and many others: "you called?"
Add some face paint and a wrinkle on the nose, and you have a completely new species that also magically has the exact same evolutionary path, set of emotions, range of political dysfunctions, and can miraculously even interbreed!
Hey! Didn’t you see “the chase”?!
DS9 did a good job of subverting this trope as much as possible with the Klingons and Ferengi.
They have 2 centuries of technological advancements, a whole team dedicated to security, and it seems like a majority of the time they'd be better off with our modern mall cops with modern gear and a few grainy security cameras. I know it makes it easier for them narratively but it seems crazy to me how often someone can bust out of prison, steal a shuttle, or just take full control over the ship with ridiculous ease.
I loved when Worf was complaining that security was tighter on a starship and Odo starts listing off all of the fails from the Enterprise.
Lmao that was a great scene! And Odo was just so ready for that lol.
One of the things that annoys me the most watching Star Trek is the holding cells. Why the hell are you confining possibly dangerous people behind an electronic forcefield? A door would be better.
"See? We are so good because we follow the Prime Directive to the letter and apply it consistently. No matter what happens to the indigenous people of this world, our hands are clean."
"The Prime Directive demands that we let this intelligent species go extinct. We will stand by as witnesses as a preventable natural disaster wipes them all out, because interfering with them might be much worse for their society than total annihilation."
I just finished watching Homeward, where Picard is very cross at Worf's brother Nikolai for breaking the Prime Directive to save some humanoids. This aspect of the PD as presented is kind of a dumb, blunt instrument. I think at least two captains were explicitly called out by being asked how many times they'd broken it. The PD prohibition of interference in internal affairs is generally better, but still far from ideal. Can't argue against prohibition of first contact ~~until the subject species develops warp travel~~ *with pre-warp civilisations* though.
Yes, strip it down to internal affairs and no contact with pre warp civilizations. Natural disasters can be averted only if the local population remains unaware. This is rational and has easy to understand limits.
Pre warp, that's the phrase I was looking for, thanks. It's late, I'm going to sleep.
But even though we have advanced sensor technology let’s drop a cloaked duck blind that always seems to get fucked up somehow like a couple hundred feet from a village.
It always seems that way because it wouldn't be interesting otherwise. "Group of anthropologists completes standard survey with no issues" isn't a fun hour of TV.
It would be fun for some super nerds but it wouldnt sell well
Even natural disasters can be iffy. At what scale is interference warranted, and is there a point where you leave a population to deal with the externalities of your interference? Do you stop Pompeii if you are able? What do you do when stopping one geological event accelerates another? What if the population will know SOMETHING interfered even if they don’t know what? If a plague is spreading, are we ok to beam a life saving airborne vaccine to inoculate a population without their knowledge or consent? I mean we save Sarjenka’s planet by destroying the Dilithium Crystals causing the geological shifts. Great. How is Sarjenka’s civilization doing? Are they about to descend in to post-apocalyptic barbarism because their existing infrastructure and supply lines have been totally wrecked in the last 8 weeks? Are the scientists of the planet left baffled why the calamity stopped? Did anyone build survival bunkers beforehand and are now left looking like they wasted their resources? Is the planet wide shattering of dilithium crystals going to change the ecosystem in unforeseen ways? Obviously, we have to wrap things up in 48 minutes and exit with a feel good ending, but life doesn’t revolve around making one decision and never having to deal with anything that isn’t an immediate consequence.
I feel like the TNG/Voyager era especially (DS9 didn’t deal with the PD much) turned it from a good idea, into a borderline religious idea. It was treated as almost sacrosanct and the situations where it was applied got way too absurd imo By contrast, TOS (and later on SNW) took a more reasonable approach to the PD imo.
The Boralans are an interesting case in as much as the catastrophe that kills their planet is unavoidable. In regards to preserving the village, it opens a wider question as to whether Starfleet should start acting like the preservers and start yanking people off their planets and depositing them somewhere else for whatever reason you come up with. The events of the episode are an absolute travesty on half a dozen points, but if you start framing interference as justified in the name of preservation, there’s a whole can of worms to be addressed in regards to responsibility for the life you choose to preserve and how you go about doing it. I’m not saying the decision to save the Boralan village was wrong, but the way they went about handling it was just absolutely stupid and way more harmful than it should have been.
i’ve thought of this episode from time-to-time in regards to their remaining society once they are settled on the new planet. their population is so small that it’s unlikely they will survive, but if they do, they will eventually figure out the truth as they evolve. in the short term, they will have big setbacks in their scientific advancement as a society. their position on the new planet is different, as are the stars and constellations. any math they’ve developed that depends on the constants of their original planet (mass, gravity, etc) will need to be reworked. they will also have a very difficult time explaining their own evolution and missing links with their new planet’s plant and animal life. i would love a throwaway line in Discovery that updates us on their journey over the past 1,000 years.
I agree with the Prime Directive in principle, but, like most Star Trek crews, I also agree that there are logical limits and exceptions, such as when the natural development of a society, and indeed, a whole planet, is about to cease through no fault of their own. They usually decide that the reason they have captains empowered with a lot of leeway on long range missions is to make those kind of judgement calls, when the otherwise good rule will lead to a result that is bad. The captain will have to defend the choice to go against it. And usually they have been able to. But it's a good thing in general that they look upon the internal development of alien societies as sacrosanct.
Unless they have warp capability then yes of course we help save their species.
I feel like the prime directive has been shown not to apply if they can avoid cultural contamination - I recall the Enterprise-D diverting an asteroid impact from a populated world at least once and Pikes Enterprise also attempted it in SNW with no moral dilemma. Intervention in the development of a species is much different than just diverting an asteroid. That said, now I'm wondering if alien species would create protected areas around developing life (much like we create marine protected areas in fragile areas of the ocean) and if Earth is currently within one of them.
As much as he was wrong on so much else, Beltran kinda had a point about the Prime Directive.
I just watched the next generation episode where Picard won’t intervene with one planet keeping another planet addicted to a plague cure. I did kind of appreciate how Picard tweaked the regulations to ensure that the planet would one day break their addiction but still. That was some cold shit.
To, hopefully, quote SF Debris accurately: "A person whose only response to the plight of millions dying is pointing at a piece of paper is not the hero in your story."
Generally it doesn't end well when a high tech civilization interferes with a less technological civilization. Remember that the prime directive was a critique of cold war proxy wars like Vietnam. And it still applies, are Iraq and Afghanistan better of now? All those African countries France is still meddling in. Major companies extraction resources in the global south, but it's the companies that profit from all the rare earth minerals, while the people remain poor. Even charity organisations are sketchy. That's a real deep rabbithole, the stuff most of them do in the global south. From pocketing most of the money themselves to messed up things like using people their as guinea pigs for new medication. Not to mention these high tech civilization interfering in the global south generally keep corrupt leaders in powers so they can continue what they're doing. And yes, Star Trek gives a few examples were interfering is the 'righ thing to do' but as a general rule, it's actually good. Remember it's not just the federation, we've seen klingons do it as well.
The point of my comment wasn't that Prime Directive itself is bad; it was that the way PD is applied in Trek is maddeningly inconsistent and depends on whatever point the lazy writer is trying to hammer home.
It’s this. The Picardist interpretation of the Prime Directive is anti-scientific (that’s not how evolution works), promotes a belief in superstitious predestination, is needlessly cruel, and is almost impossible to enforce uniformly amongst conscientious COs. Like, if Captains violating your most important rule is a running joke, either your organization is hopelessly corrupt or the rule sucks.
The holodeck malfunction trope, happens way too often, if it would be this unsafe it shouldn’t be used in the first place
holodeck safety software engineers share an office in a tiny damp basement room in Starfleet HQ together with the security guys who designed the key phrases to their starships
“Computer, initiate self destruct. Authorisation code P-A-S-S-W-O-R-D”
Written on a sticky note by the console.
"So we're going to put in a self destruct system. Obviously it will need to be very secure, so we'll make sure to put in the strictest safety protocols." "Great, what will the password be?" "1-1-A"
They also do the psychological profiling of their Admirals down there.
I believe the passphrases are supposed to simply be something to say for voiceprint ID, but the writers seem to change their minds on it fairly often
Computer, transfer all command codes to me. Authorisation? *Uses Talkboy to play back Picard Alpha 4-7 in his voice*
It was better than the ridiculously contrived scenarios to create the "cowboy planet" or the "nazi planet" in TOS. The studio needs a good excuse to use the costumes and sets from the lot next door to save money, and the holodeck is less bizarre
How about extremely Irish planet?
**DELETE THE WIFE**
This made much more sense in early TNG. We see the crew marveling at the holodeck, just like the viewers. It is heavily implied that this is new technology to keep the crew from going crazy on long missions. By VOY, holodecks are apparently standard issue on Starfleet ships. Should have had the bugs worked out by the time the tech was deployed to the fleet. Out of universe, it was a good opportunity to do bottle episodes with existing wardrobe and sets, saving some cash.
Made sense for DS9 too. If a flow regulator needs fixing, Rom's gotta get the spare parts from somewhere, so why not the holosuite?
The holodeck rarely malfunctions on the Voyager. Other forces take control of it.
I know they have replicators but the holodeck is like today's printers, these things break all the time and in the last 20 years that I've worked IT I can safely say that they have not improved one bit; they break all the time.
The equivalent issue isn't that the printer breaks a lot, it's that almost every time it does, Ghengis Khan gets released in the office. Something that can get so wildly dangerous almost every time it frequently breaks down shouldn't be on a spacecraft.
If holodecks existed in real life but there was a 1% chance of dying every time, people would still be lining up to use them
i really hate holodeck episodes honestly lol
Same, they are so overused. I kinda liked how opposed to them Kira was early in ds9.
i just hate it that they discover a new phenomenon or new tech and forget it the next episode. or it's never brought up ever again
A Dyson Sphere. They found a fucking Dyson Sphere *and never went back!*
That's why I love Lower Decks. They go in for second contacts etc. So that would be a good ep where they visit that sphere.
They probably sent a ship equipped specifically to study it.
In ST Online it's an important feature. Beta canon only, I know.
That could be a series on its own.
I forgot what episode it was but it had an amazing Meta opening. It was Voyager, Tom Paris detects an anomaly and puts it on screen. Then Janeway says something like:"Is it a spacial anomaly, an entity?, a worm hole?, a space disturbance?" (Like she mentions 4-5 different things) and Tom responds "No mam, it's something that we've never encountered before!". That scene made me chuckle and I could never find again.
Also that one time the turbolift opens and she's leaning all casual and just asks "Wormhole?" like it's just another Wednesday.
Another boring Wormhole Wednesday at the office.
Like a way to travel anywhere instantly with only a slight case of evolved lizarditis to resolve afterwards.
I hesitate to even post this because when you read this you won’t be able to unsee it. 99% of the time when someone contacts another person with their communicators, they don’t actually tell the person anything. Very few full, meaningful conversations happen over the comm system. Instead, they ask the person to come see them in person so they can talk face to face. “LaForge to Captain Picard.” “Picard here. Go ahead Commander.” “We’ve got a problem in Engineering, Captain. I think you better get down here.” “On my way.” Like just tell him the problem! This happens ALL. THE. TIME.
> “We’ve got a problem in Engineering, Captain. I think you better get down here.” "What is it?" "I think you better come see this." "It's 32 decks away, Mr. LaForge. What is it?" "... I think you better-"
Yeah I don't think the Captain of an air craft carrier would go down to engineering to talk to them personally. Most of the time the captain wouldn't even get a full report on what was wrong. Just something like "engine one is down. Repairs are ongoing. Estimated time is xx:xx." Once the crisis is over they would file a full report.
So if it's non critical, being like "Data made a lady" "What?" "Data made a lady, he built a woman and it's his daughter" "Can you repeat that" "Captain, just come down here."
"Captain, Wesley Crusher created yet another new form of life and it's eating the bits of the ship that keep us alive." "You have no idea how little that narrows it down, Commander."
Honestly realistic though.
This meeting could've been an email!
This email could have been a text.
Not in a military context. You tell someone that’s a Lt Commander+ that they’d “better get down there” or “you need to see this”, you’d get your ass torn open for lack of specificity and wasting time
I just assumed they were all like my mom, testing 'CALL ME NOW' just so they can talk to me about the sandwich they ate.
I feel it could be to prevent critical information being overheard by people listening in to comms eg enemy spies or security officers during confidential missions.
I’d imagine the level of spam and unwanted calls between thousands of personnel all dealing with different problems would be an issue.
"We're the only ship in range." - not too bad, but sometimes it feels like Starfleet only has 5 ships Forgetting technology exists - "Transporters are down!" What about using a shuttle? or the transporters on the shuttles? "We invented a shield so strong you could sit in the corona of a star." never used again
> "We're the only ship in range." - not too bad, but sometimes it feels like Starfleet only has 5 ships TMP was the worst offender in this category by far. "This massive, seemingly hostile entity is approaching Earth. *Enterprise* is currently in spacedock finalizing her refit, but she's the only ship in the sector, so she has to intercept it." "...I'm sorry, back up. The only ship in the sector? The sector that includes *the capital planet of the Federation*?"
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Deus ex technobabble in the last five minutes of an episode. TNG and VOY are the worst offenders.
KIM: "We are done for, we'd need the power output of 500 warp cores to get out before the anomaly crushes the ship!" SEVEN: *Taptaptaptap* KIM: "Hey, what are you inputting there?" SEVEN: "Borg algorithm." PARIS: "The deflector dish is emitting a galvanized tachyon beam that has successfully changed the gravitational constant of local space! Anomaly left, captain. Resuming course for Earth." JANEWAY: "Great work, Seven!" SEVEN: "..." *Roll credits.* * *Next week, Voyager will look like fresh out of spacedock again, even though half her hull was melted off. Also, the shuttle that was torn to shreds after Chakotay steered it into the anomaly will be standing in the hangar bay with a fresh paintjob.
borg.use = true; *ship safely reaches Warp 10*
Salamander.form = false;
Honestly the lack of continuity and proper utilization of the concept are why I’ve never seen all of Voyager, and it’s always been hard for me to watch in general. That might seem dumb, but I just genuinely find it all so frustrating.
"And I say Bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish That's the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us 'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up"
i think TNG is worse than VOY. i used to joke, during the original run, that if geordie had been on board, he'd have 'em home by the end of the episode using the deflector, his visor, and inversing the polarity of something.
Spend an entire episode dealing with something like an alien virus only to get a brief voiceover at the end "the doctor found a cure and everything is back to normal".
"I reprogrammed Seven's nanites..."
The captain going on all the missions, no matter how dangerous.
I mean... TNG and Voyager directly address this frequently. Obviously they break the rules on occasion, but for the most part Picard and Janeway stayed on the ship.
Time travel, and I can't for the life of me care about any mirror universe episode.
I hate mirror universe. Once in TOS was fine.
Sparks. Too many sparks. Boom. Sparks. Bang. Sparks. You have shields, a warp drive. 20th century circuit breakers? Nah. Sparks sparks sparks sparks sparks sparks.
The Enterprise being the only ship in range while at Earth. There should be thousands of ships at Earth at any given time.
When they punch with their hands balled together
I enjoy in Lower Decks they often literally narrate the blow as, "Kirk punch!"
Get to some random place and just immediately send an away team without armour shields or any kind of Intel into whatever hell scape they stumbled into this week.
No food, water, EV suits, or shelter. Huge sandstorm that kills all life coming up. But the air is breathable? Eh, uniforms are good enough.
Nearly everyone promoted above Captain apparently has to be either evil or at least a douchebag.
At this point, the Mirror Universe. It was a fascinating idea in TOS and has felt tired ever since.
How starship crew members could figure out things at the finest minds in Star Fleet couldn't figure out. Every ships doctor/chief engineer perform miracles in 45 mins that the best federation doctors/engineers couldn't solve solve. "Forget it Bashir, this illness is incurable..." (1 hour later) "It was actually quite simple really.. come on Miles, let's get a beer" 🤣
TNG-era trek is competence porn. Everyone is brilliant, focused, cool under pressure, and emotionally resilient. Except Barclay, which is why he's such a great character.
The other I hate is time traveling to modern day Earth. It worked exactly once in The Voyage Home. Otherwise it just feels lazy and a way to save on budget. I can't believe Picard season 2 did it for half a season
I think every Star Trek series can get away with it exactly once, but the mileage will vary. Picard spending half a season on it was just about unforgiveable.
On the other hand, travelling in time to *not* the modern day is one of my favourite tropes! The Bell Riots episodes of DS9 are great, for example, and I love First Contact.
City on the Edge of Forever is widely considered on the best Trek episodes ever. So is Far Beyond The Stars (okay, technically it's the 1930s and 1950s, but still) Personally I also like the episode where the Ferengi are the "Rosswell Aliens". It's a fun episode.
Those episodes you listed I like! I mean when the go back to actual modern day, plus or minus a decade. The 30s, 50s, and even the episode where they go back to the 1800s all work for me because it's still different than today.
Sorry, we'll have to disagree on this one. I love the voyager two-parter with Sarah Silverman. Also the TOS episode where they go back to the 60's was also pretty good, iirc.
The Strange New Worlds episode with Kirk and La’an was really good too!
Which really surprised me since I was pretty lukewarm on those characters but it really helped flesh them both out, even if it wasn't our Kirk. But it does highlight the growing problem with the time travel episodes, since we're pushing up against historical events in the Trek world and basically delaying them in order to justify going to modern day. Which isn't the end of the world, I think telling a good story is most important, but still.
The nice part about when they go back to the present day in TOS, is that the “present day” is actually like 20 years before I was born. So it really is like a new world
That was Gary Seven, right? It was supposed to set up a spinoff series. Maybe not a spinoff per-se, but definitely a new CBS show.
With young Teri Garr! Her character reminded me of Phoebe from Friends, and Garr later played Phoebe’s mom.
I don’t mind it so much if it’s one episode like I liked the one with Kirk and La’an in modern day Toronto. But yeah most of Picard season 2 was in modern Los Angeles and that was just SO annoying.
Most possession stories. Sometimes they're okay like that weird bioluminescent alien episode that focused on Geordi and the science outpost. Changelings are fine. I don't mind body doubles. Its specifically when an alien entity takes over another and uses them as a puppet, not a bad premise I just don't like 99% of the episodes that do it.
Gotta save on the actor budget somehow
"Inertial dampers are offline!" *proceeds to shake violently in their seat rather than transform into red mist on the bulkhead*
I was going to go with exploding consoles killing people but I absolutely back to the misuse of the PD. SNW seems to be doing it better, the few times it's come up, but the TNG-era was pretty bad with it. Hell, it didn't even exist in Enterprise and they still made an episode about it to try and justify genocide. ...which reminds me, I also hate the constant misuse of evolution and supernovas.
well the fourth directive is on privacy, like in Europe. no cameras./s
Oh no, following the Prime Directive would have tragic consequences! Let's act like this is a real moral dilemma for 45 minutes instead of just admitting that the Prime Directive is stupid.
I admit that the Prime Directive has good intentions and is right for a few good points. But it has massive flaws, like being unable to safe a species from a preventable natural desaster like a vulcano or something. Otherwise keeping your asses out of internal affairs and not interfering with the technological and societal development of a species... I can get onboard with that.
It's just so weird to me that it's written as an absolute rule that they would need to violate to do anything. Rather than Starfleet at some point writing it with guidelines for when it is and isn't appropriate to interfere. Instead they leave it as an absolute rule that gets regularly ignored. Which probably means for the cases where it is important to not interfere everyone knows violating it is a non issue.
It’s really only written as an absolute rule in 90’s Trek. TOS treated it more as a useful guideline. SNW as well.
The PD has generally good guidelines. But it's practically worshipped as sacrosanct in the TNG-era. Interference is always better than extinction.
The surprise kid. Just stop it already.
The reset button. Which would erase any interesting character development. Voyager was really really bad with this.
Phaser fire being dodged. They also supposedly have 16 power settings and could level a building but all we ever see when they hit is a puff of smoke.
Every time something explodes inside the ship rocks come out of no where. Are star trek shipyards just filling void spaces in the enterprise with fucking rocks? 💀
The crazy Admiral trope. I mean how can Starfleet even do anything if the top brass is always insane.
Classic Trek: - Not just the ridges, but a species looking like cookie-cutter clones of each other. In a military? Fine. But civilians? Vary up the skin tones and the clothing. (I realize a lot of this comes down to time constraints and budget, so it's forgivable on that level.) - Not putting the collar/undershirt on a 'monster maroon' TOS movie era uniform. It looks terrible. Drops the design from a 10 to a 6 automatically. Modern Trek: - A new uniform or ship design every time someone sneezes. It used to be a big deal when a new uniform or ship was revealed, but now it's just a Tuesday. - Endless references to classic Trek. They may be fun, but it's starting to pile up. Where's YOUR new thing? ^\* A lot of long-running franchises are stuck in this rut, so it's not a Trek-specific thing. See also: Ghostbusters. - Intense color grading. Either too blue/cool (Discovery does this a lot), or (less common) too warm. It feels like there's no subtlety sometimes. Current season is doing a bit better, I've noticed. (^\* Yes, yes, spore drive, 32nd-century stuff, etc, etc, I'm exaggerating for effect.)
OSHA would like to have a conversation with Cpt. Picard concerning safety protocols on the Holodeck. Now.
At this point? Time travel. Don’t get me wrong, there are some fantastic Trek time travel episodes, but I’m done with it at this point. Go forwards, not backwards.
Shields. They can withstand intense stellar radiation, hold up Dyson Sphere doors, and even hold off the Borg for a few minutes but also take one disruptor hit...'Shields down to 40%!!!!" Also, there's a "particle" for every phenomenon in the universe. Wait, I'm just feeling the effects of a gimmeabreakatron particle fountain.
Do remember the TOS enterprise can wipe out all life on a planet easily.
To be fair, cosmic radiation can't compete with the sheer force of the WMD-level weaponry they throw around. According to lore a standard photon torpedo has a 1 kg antimatter warhead... that is enough to level a city. A phaser can cut tectonic plates in half or just stun THAT DUDE standing at the next street crossing from orbit. Most people just forget, how mighty Star Trek weaponry is according to maths, while Star Trek itself sometimes treats it as Q-Tips as off-brand firecrackers that are thrown at tanks.
Yeah in some ways I think the original series actually did this much better, because the Enterprise is always threatening to level planets and they can stun people from space. It was inconsistently used, but there was an awareness of the awesome power of a starship that the later series just tended to forget, presumably because that would lead to power creep when they keep on having bigger and badder enemies and the point is to have some realistic obstacles for the characters to overcome.
Fun fact: a 1 kg antimatter/matter explosion would generate a 43 megaton explosion, or just slightly less than the largest nuclear device ever built. And yet, somehow, they throw those things around like Pez dispensers.
The misconception that evolution is a tech tree to fill out. There's talk of "more evolved" or "less evolved" like there's some sort of ladder to climb. Evolution doesn't work that way, species adapt to their environment. It's pretty common throughout the franchise but having just rewatched Voyager and Enterprise it seems like the writers were particularly bad at this one.
I looked it up and it actually has a name on TV Tropes, "Evolutionary Levels". But to save everyone from spending their afternoons there I won't add the link. 😊
Unpopular opinion but; The Mirror Universe! You're telling me that despite ALL the vast differences of the universes that everyone's parents still ended up boinking in the same ways so that everyone still showed up in the same place at the same time?
Star Trek has no idea how to consistently write its technology.
Landing a shuttle about four miles from the intended destination and then walking
Engineering has a problem that they'll stress is impossible to rectify and/or will take too long. The Captain says to do it anyways. And no matter what, Engineering does it.
Shields protect against everything, except when they don't
Lack of informed consent in transporter usage and how often they transport people against their will or without telling them there is a non-zero chance they come out the other side wrong.
Prime directive. The idea is good but not helping people who are going to die because your high horse morality doesnt make any sense to me. If you have the power to help and you just let whole civilization(s) die because doing so would "contaminate" their natural evolution just makes federation a grade A+ A-holes. Other thing is the time travel stuff especially going back to our current time never been a fan of that. Third thing is the section 31 or more of the modern version of it where section 31 has fleets of ships soldiers starbases and stuff. To me section 31 was at its best when it was just Sloan. Star Trek's lazy alien design all of the series have just way too many forehead of the week low budget corner cutting aliens. Its been my pet peeve since very beginning when i first started to watch the show almost 40 years ago. Rock insulation on starships and exploding computers.
The "struggle with humanity and emotions" is getting overdone: Spock, Data, Lal, The Doctor, Seven, Hugh...
>For me it's seeing aliens who just have a nose ridge. My child...
The trope of aliens or humans with "mental powers" that let them control everyone/everything or put the entire galaxy at risk. Kevin Uxbridge, I'm looking at you. I'm looking at you, Keplian child. I'm looking at you, Charlie X. I'll give TNG-era Q a pass because they at least used him sparingly. Alternately, Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development and Mirror Earths. I don't even consider this as a trope so much as just bad writing.
Every single space faring race is unified rather than being different nation states
The Mirror Universe. It doesn’t make any sense, even in the confines of a wacky space adventure, and a lot of the Mirror Characters just come off as annoying.
The running joke of captains needing warp speed catchphrase. Just say "engage" which is a command to engage the warp drive
Time travel.
Humans win because they're smart, skilled, driven, empathetic, resilient, caring, emotional, explorers with superior morality. Alien species are further along evolutionarily *and* technologically, but humans are still better, somehow.
Revolutionary, groundbreaking thing that gets forgotten/buried by the next episode. Welsey, through poking around with the Traveller and Kosinski's equations, discovers that the Federation's fundamental understanding of the universe is flawed, and that there is an extra foundational element that is overlooked with Federation physics, like how subspace is for our basic assumptions of the universe, compared to theirs. The Traveller reasurres Wesley that the Federation isn't ready, and it is brushed away, to be forgotten. That the Federation's basic physics are incorrect is the kind of thing that they ought to know about, before they build further on flawed science, and a lot more of everything comes apart at the seams later. Barclay, with his intelligence boosted by the Cytherian probe, discovers a way to achieve extreme-speed warp travel that puts Discovery's spore drive to shame, achievable using the basic hardware on a starship. At the end of the episode, the Enterprise has a *full cultural and technological exchange* with the Cytherians, after which them, and all their tech, is forgotten. It's the kind of thing that would have let Voyager get home in time for tea, rather than wandering about the delta quadrant for 70 years. At worst, they just make a few hops, and route through Cytherian space. It's doubtful that they would mind for an emergency case. ------ Also aliens that are just humanoid, with only minor surface-level differences. We see a lot of weird biologies under the surface, but they usually have human parts, rearranged, or with a few extras, and it doesn't actually matter much at all. It making a difference would make Trek that much more interesting. EDIT: An example might be a Klingon like Worf. They have redundancies, so he might have greater physical strength/durability, but with an equal trade-off of being more sensitive to hypoxia, because those redundancies represent greater oxygen demand, or not being as likely to notice a serious injury because his redundancies mask it until they can't compensate any more.
"Shields at 60%!!" The way in which the writers let the audience know that the battle is going poorly for the heroes, but not so badly that it can't be recovered and, more importantly, won't have to do anything like show battle damage or have long-lasting consequences. Insurrection had this twice for cryin out loud.
i don't know if this is so much of a trope, but i really hated the way Voyager would just flat out forget that they were lost in the Delta Quadrant for 70 light years. sometimes you'd think they were on a pleasure cruise
That'd be kind of a funny Star Trek What If? type episode. Just Voyager avoiding absolutely everything and only flying in a direct path home.
Space rape of the women. Mind raped, impregnated without consent, weird ghost-like alien bangin' Crusher with her magic candle, kidnapped and forced to marry or battle to the death, kidnapped to serve another alien species... I love Star Trek, it's by far my favorite sci-fi, and I'm happy they made a point of showing women, but our damn vaginas get us into a lot of trouble. The only scifis I've found that get women closest to right are Stargate and Babylon 5.
Stargate had its "Code of Honor" episode though... but this time with Asian people instead of black.
For me, it's the "technology X would make the solution to this problem simple, so let's invent a type of radiation that makes technology X inoperable" trope.
The Enterprise is always the only ship in range
It's got to be the sentient nebula/life form episodes. It happened so often in Voyager. A weird breeze would come in through life support and poof, it was sentient space breeze and it now has control of the ship.
Main characters falling in love within days of meeting someone new, willing to drop everything to be with that person. That was my biggest gripe with PIC S2 and Rios, but I was rewatching DS9 and Jadzia did the same thing (albeit unsuccessfully).
Malfunction in the holodeck. They should’ve got rid of it after the first couple malfunctions because it’s nonessential anyhow.
alternate universes. mainly mirror worlds. I can see how it could be fun for the actors, and its fun to see alternate versions. I dont HATE it, but it's the most skippable eps I have
I don’t think it’s my absolute least favorite, but the frequency of “too much interference” as a reason for transporters, sensors, or anything else not working is so beyond-overused that it cracks me up. I’d love to see Ryan’s Edits or some similar YouTube channel do a supercut of all the times a character uses the phrase “too much interference.”
The captain always getting into action-movie type scenarios. That's just not their job. Also...the number of times they'll beam down to a planet with no protective gear or survival kits or anything in case someone goes wrong. And they should know by now that things always go wrong!
I cannot stand the mirror universe episodes. No matter what show or timeframe all the characters are there even though the events that take place in the other universe would have been completely different and there is no way these people would all end up together by sheer chance AND everyone is a dick.
"We need you to join this extremely dangerous mission deep in enemy territory." "But I'm the ship doctor." "Yes, that is why you are needed. You are an expert in biological stuff, and the other members of the team are just idiots who couldn't possibly complete the mission without you."