Technobabble actually becomes less of a problem in Trek once Michael Pillar left.
- Thread starter Jayson1
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One of SG-1's best lines is when they do make a direct crack at Star Trek and its technobabble. Like in The Other Guys:Ah, but what SG-1 did, and I loved it, was that Carter would start up with a technobabble explanation, and O'Neill would cut her off with "CARTER! In English!"I'm 100% sure that was a direct poke at Trek.
Another favorite moment was when the captain of the Prometheus (I think) said something like "Prepare to engage the enemy!" And O'Neill said "Why do you say things like that? Teal'c, are you prepared to engage the enemy?"
"I am prepared, O'Neill."
He shrugs at the captain and gives him a look, like "just do it."
"If we were home right now, you'd be at a Star Trek convention dressed like a Klingon."
"Vulcan! And how can anyone call themselves a scientist without worshipping at the Altar of Roddenberry?"
"'Oh Captain, how do we solve this one?' 'I don't know, something to do with the tachyon emitters, perhaps?'"
A classic MacGuffin isn't any meaningless thing, rather it has to be important to the characters. The titular Maltese Falcon is a MacGuffin because WHAT it is in not important to the story, but that everyone WANTS IT (no matter what it actually is) is.
Joss Whedon described the Hellmouth as a topological McGuffin, a shortcut to move the story along. That's more what I'm going by. Warp drive is a McGuffin to get Kirk to the end of the galaxy in "Where No Man Has Gone Before" and the the center of it in The Final Frontier. It's a means for the sake of the story.
The Maltese Falcon is a thing that everyone wants because it's worth a lot of money, which, to me, makes it less necessary to create a new term for -- it's just an obvious "motivation," ka-ching.
The chroniton tech in FC stood out* to me at the time too, but, like most people, I was happy for the movie to wrap things up. Their being forever stuck in the past wasn't something that concerned them at any time the movie.
(*) FC is the best of the TNG movies, but if you look at it too closely you wonder. If the Borg plan was to assimilate the past all along, why not travel back in time from the Delta Quadrant, then travel to Earth? No one would know. That's how it came across in the movie. If the idea is they'd give the Single Cube Approach one more try, then were forced to try Plan B, then why didn't the Borg in the Delta Quadrant, seeing Plan B's failure at Earth in FC, then try Plan B from the Delta Quadrant? ...To me, Time Travel is a McGuffin. It's a device (instead of a motivator) used to be able to tell a particular story.
But he is a expert on nerds. He knows what we like and gives it to us on a consistent basis.
Jason
Fifty demerits.
I think all the shows abused technobabble to a degree, it's just by the time we got to Voyager, it became too standard. It was like they were saying these things on automatic pilot or something. But I think the worse offender might be TNG. It was in their everyday talk almost.
I pointed out in another thread somewhere that TOS kind of got it right. It had a way of mixing Twillight Zone with Sci Fi. In Spectre of The Gun, Spock was explaining why Chekov was "dead" only because he thought he was dead, and was actually alive. The way it was done was interesting. It had that weird sci fi aspect to it.
I pointed out in another thread somewhere that TOS kind of got it right. It had a way of mixing Twillight Zone with Sci Fi. In Spectre of The Gun, Spock was explaining why Chekov was "dead" only because he thought he was dead, and was actually alive. The way it was done was interesting. It had that weird sci fi aspect to it.
Techno-babble is good, in moderation. I think it's necessary to give a "scientifically convincing" feel. Trying to imagine these 24th century people in real life... we'd like to see what they'd truly say to each other regarding technical things. Simplistic banter wouldn't be convincing. But then... TOO realistic might not be enjoyable. You do have to take some artistic license and balance it out. Yeah, some seasons of these series went too far and were saturated with technobabble. Was Michael Pillar a culprit? Perhaps... but I don't think he was the only one.
See, I'm not sure about that. The technobabble at least worked within itself, but (and I haven't seen the episode in years) if you think you're dead, you don't die. That's the thing about reality -- it stays the same, regardless what you think. Someone in an asylum may legit think they're Napoleon, and the whole world around them tells them they are, because that's how they process it, but they are not Napoleon Bonaparte and the world around them isn't telling them so.
It makes for an interesting episode, but it may be more fake than the technobabble.
Joss Whedon has a deep understanding of the genre and knows how to tell a good story within the genre while making fun of it at the same time.
I like your math.
Another classic example of a McGuffin would the top-secret microfilm in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. Hitchcock never tells us what kind of classified info is actually on the microfilm or why it's so valuable because, story-wise, it doesn't really matter. It's just an excuse for plenty of spy-versus-spy plots and counter-plots with poor Cary Grant stuck in the middle.
Ditto for the assassination plot in THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH. Why are the sinister bad guys out to assassinate that foreign diplomat? Who knows, who cares? Again, Hitchcock does't waste time explaining that; all that matters is that Jimmy Stewart and Doris Day have accidentally stumbled into a mess of foreign intrigue that's getting more dangerous by the second.
And given that Hitchcock actually coined the term "McGuffin," I'll defer to his usage.
And yet he stumbled over what a MacGuffin is. Greg Cox groks it.
10 points to Slytherin.
It isn't one or the other? Whedon or Hitchcock. Only one man will pass the Gates of Heaven...FIGHT!
But for the sake of discussion, one could make the argument that words change with usage. And usage denotes necessity. Until someone comes up with another abstract catch-all for another "don't think about it too much" plot device, I think McGuffin works and you'll see people using it.
But for the sake of discussion, one could make the argument that words change with usage. And usage denotes necessity. Until someone comes up with another abstract catch-all for another "don't think about it too much" plot device, I think McGuffin works and you'll see people using it.
True, it may be more psychological than technobabble, but its the way it mixed Twilight Zone psychology with science to create this pseudo-technobabble that made it interesting. So hearing Spock explaining all this in a twilight zone style all the while keeping it within science made the scene stand out for me.
The point Trek really missed--no one (the fans) knew what the hell these people were talking about, and it got boring. Who cares or understand what an "inverse" tachyon bean" is or does? Why not just tachyon beam?
When I eat inverse tachyon beans, I get gas the day before.
I don't always eat tachyon beans, but when I do, they're inverse. Stay hungry, my friends.
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