Weird or "no shit" moments in Star Trek

It also boggles the mind that a civilization so advanced would go to so much trouble to commemorate sun and moon gods. That's a type of worship much more associated with primitive societies.

 

MCU Thor agrees with you.

 

Well, I don't see Fed citizens using the Christian calendar all that much, not for everyday life. In star travel, they need to emphasize star dates because of relativity, which is not nearly the problem it would be without warp travel that deals with it, but still somewhat of a problem nonetheless. For other reasons too, AD or CE may only be one of multiple ways people choose to measure time, so a person might need to have it pointed out what AD year it is now.

As for Masks, and their religion, a great thing about science fiction is mixing up of elements like this... what if a society had such a religion well into their technological era? And I challenge you to come up with any reason they wouldn't. We can label modern Earth religions as more "advanced", but that's just how we happen to feel about them. It's subjective.

Japan still has Shinto, which comes from much earlier than the Judeo Christian religions.

What I dislike about Masks is that it seems to be throwing magic at us. Not tech that sort of looks like magic to us.

 

They had to establish that 20-year difference somehow, so (going back to the original poster) so whatever system they had used, they still would have had a reference in it to our earth years for the viewers. I think the problem with this scene is not that Chakotay blurts out it is 2371, but the Romulan who happens to refer to the Earth's calendar of his own, instead of stardates. Or better yet, why not have the dialog go something like this?

TELEK: The date is lemshak x
Chakotay : Computer, what's that in stardates?
Computer: Federation stardate y
Chakotay (astonished): but that's almost 20 years ago!

but then I would think the UT would have been smart enough to translate it in stardates right away.

 

I always assume that the UT translates the measures into standard Federation Units, same thing for dates of course. It would be impossible to talk to aliens otherwise. Some of them might not even use the decimal system. An alien species with four fingers on their hand instead of five is likely to use the octal system and if they have more than two (upper) limbs then all bets are off.

 

I guess

Telek R'Mor: "By your calendar, it's Stardate 23742.1."

Chakotay: "But... this is Stardate 43742.1!"

doesn't have the same emotional wallop to it

 

Future Imperfect: The computer had trouble compute because it was too busy with the simulation!
Yeah right, like it couldn't spare among those billions of billions of calculations necessary to run a three-D simulation of that quality, a minuscule proportion for voice recognition or Riker's very simple questions to Data... Once again the writer's complete scientific idiocy is showing!

 

How about when McCoy first comes aboard the Enterprise in TMP, and everyone acts like it's horribly amusing that he doesn't want to get on the transporter pad? They're practically going, "Oh, that wacky Bones, with his totally unfounded hatred towards technology!", conveniently forgetting that we literally saw the transporter turn two people inside out not five minutes ago. Bones was damn right not to want to use the transporter after that.

 

Or how about how everybody plays the pronoun game so it's a surprise to the audience who is refusing to beam up?

"OH... I'll see to it that he beams up!"

"Starfleet. Kirk. Beam that officer up now."

Not to mention that Uhura plainly said "the last six crew members are ready to beam up" minus one. Kirk should have been aware his CMO was not among the five that beamed up. "Familiar ring to it" indeed

 

"DISPLACED" - the makeshift phaser Paris and Torres had ran out of power and was useless. So when those two Nyrians fell, why didn't they grab their weapons?

 

First of all, I despise Masks. I was cringing the whole time when I first saw it on the night it first aired.

But to play Devil's advocate...

1. We don't actually know the nature or purpose of the thing.
2. The space temple likely was not functioning properly, at least not with Enterprise's systems (and Data's)
3. What we saw may be just some kind of program that clashed with the Enterprise's computer systems.
4. We don't actually know that the builders worshiped the sun and moon like the episode depicted. It may be part of a program that reacted with the Enterprise's computers..

If they had a Vulcan cast member, he or she most likely would have said at least some of those.... Tuvok and Spock would have...

 

Well, I suppose anything is possible. As the (Voyager) Doctor once says: "The universe is such a strange place."

I'd say that there is a slight chance that the library has been damaged by the passage of time (millions of years if I remember correctly) and it's now doing things, it was not initially meant to do (e.g. turning ships into rock, snakes and random vegetation).

 

Or how, in First Contact, all crew stubbornly refuse to name the Vulcans -even Picard in his own log near the very end still says "the alien ship has detected the warp signature..."-before they actually showed up on-screen in the last five minutes of the movie

 

Good point! I was thinking maybe it was Riker and company trying not to contaminate the timeline any more than they already have, but they already name dropped the Borg and described in great detail about the future and the Federation at that point. Except for the Vulcans. Tell them all you want about the future, but name drop the Vulcans and the timeline implodes

 

Insurrection: If they asked the immortal aristocrats if they were willing to share the benefits of the whatever particles with billions of people from the federation and they said: "No!" then they would look like egotistic assholes and it would be hard for Picard to defend them... If they answered "Yes" then there wouldn't be any conflict and the movie would be pointless. So the "brilliant' solution found by the writers is that no one ever asks them the question... Sure! That's plausible! Also, no one among the immortals ever says anything about the problem of either keeping everything to themselves or sharing with others... They just act like that question doesn't exist, even though it's central to the movie!
Congratulations: You've just concocted the most implausible plot point EVER!!!

 

Strangely, the BBC cut it from 'Conspiracy' but left it intact in 'Shades of Grey'.

 

The censor fell asleep when reviewing Shades of Grey.

 

Reminds me of political boards where polemics led some posters to say offensive things. These things sometimes happened when I was away from the board and when I would get in the delinquent posts had all been erased but you could still see often fragments of what had been said in quotes... here and there ...

 

"It's only a clip show, no one's going to watch it."

 

In "Profit And Lace": Bashir agrees to perform unnecessary surgery on Quark in order to commit a deception that would influence DECISIVELY who was going to be the next head of state of an entire planet. I don't know but I think that there must be some Starfleet regulation against that kind of thing...