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Stupid Stuff in TNG

Plus she has a very big gun.

Speaking of stupid things...

A big powerful weapon you can just randomly fire into the ceiling. Man, I hope it's not powerful enough to go threw it into the next quarters. I know, futurist alloys and what not, but could there be a soft spot?

And where is security? No checks to make sure people who aren't Starfleet officers, are not carrying big weapons around as they see fit?

And that big weapon ... doesn't have a stun feature? Why not stun the everybody, including any personnel that happen to be nearby and call security? How about erecting a force field around them? How about having a key personnel erect a force field that can't just be de-activated? So forth and so on. Granted I don't recall (thankfully) much about the scene and don't know what could and could not be done, but just grabbing a big phaser weapon and firing it into the ceiling seems incredibly stupid to me.
 
The holodeck emergency episodes always sucked.
The fact that you can program it to kill you is about as stupid as anything.
And the "something is wrong with the program and if we end the program it will destroy any living beings inside the holodeck" plot was absolutely awful and thoughtless.
 
How anytime there is a "rogue" on board the ship, the sensors can never detect them because they throw away their com badge, but the sensors can pick up life forms millions of kilometers away on other planets or ships.
 
Half the time, Worf states "Enemy decloaking ahead" before the f/x shot of the Romulans or whoever decloaking. Okay, it's impossible to show the other way around unless they had the camera behind Worf looking at the big viewscreen...

And what happened to the neat f/x shots of a crewmember being really close to the viewscreen that was used a lot in season 1 but not much afterward? Seemed stupid to nix it, unless it was more difficult to do (e.g. hiding the possibility of the blue glow outline around characters used to key in the background in post production...

Data didn't get court-martialed in "The Quality of Life"...

Data did get court-ed in "In Theory"...

"The Inner Light" reveals this big mystery probe, which seeks out an alien thing, rewrites its brain to tell the story of a civilization in 20 minutes but it's not an episode of "The Brady Bunch", then deactivates and doles out a flute after one of the implanted memory people states they're seeking out just one person. If they're wanting to tell the universe about themselves, why deactivate after contacting just one alien critter? On the plus side, unlike the Pioneer Probe, these flute-happy aliens didn't show anatomical features like what Kirk let Khan view while in sickbay... ("Hey aliens, come conquer us, here's what makes us tick, and if you like what you see let us know! Safe word is 'banana'!")

No consistency in the holodeck and how it creates virtual matter... that's easier to roll with, especially if the episode is otherwise strong (e.g. "Elementary, Dear Data").

Data being "Class of '78" doesn't fit based on implied age, coupled with the show taking place ostensibly in the 2360s. At least TNG got its own legitimate "So when are we taking place in?" like how TOS hadn't made up its mind between 200 and 300 years depending on season 1 episode, only TNG kept the incongruity down to a decade or two instead of a whole honkin' hundred years...

Data having to tell everyone he's an android...

McCoy stating "How do you know that so precisely?" when all Data did was say "137 years precisely" - now, maybe it was McCoy's birthday that day but even then, no mention of precise hours, minutes, seconds, nanoseconds, unless McCoy remembered what mommy or daddy told him in terms of when he was born.

Data and Yar, sitting on what used to be a tree (Tasha's bed, there's just no better way to explain the worst scene in one of the worst-ever episodes, which then needed callbacks - which were a gamble at the time - to retroactively give some dramatic weight what was a truly cringe-worthy moment)...

Any episode where Troi states what everyone in the audience already sees, though the few episodes where her empathic traits are put to good dramatic use (e.g. "Encounter at Farpoint" where she's the only one who'd be able to provide a key plot point believably, "Home Soil" (if I recall rightly), "The Survivors", "The Loss" as a trope inversion, etc) just couldn't be done every week either. So on the plus side, the times when it's used to good dramatic effect makes us long for more than "She's saying the obvious, captain!"

Wesley - in terms of writing the adults as utter nincompoops for the sake of making Wesley look more intelligent. That's a whole new level of teh stupid, but on the plus side anyone age 8 or under wouldn't notice. (Season 2 onward fixes the narrative failures, makes Wesley more rounded and more believable while retaining the higher-IQ and socially awkward qualities, and not at the expense of the adults.)

Dr Crusher bogs off to head up Starfleet Medical... then returns to the ship and not because it gives Q a chance to throw more shade than usual. After the antics in "Ethics", one wonders how she made it to Starfleet Medical to begin with...

...which reminds, season 5 onward ramp up teh stupid with one-dimensional, glib plots that do far more to preach than to tell a genuinely cerebral story. (DS9 onward thankfully didn't continue the trend.)

Even in 1988, the revelation of the critters in "Conspiracy" being pink crawdads that Granny would smoke up after getting a little pot* was laughably bad and not the slightest in terms of being scary, the episode had a good buildup but pretty much shattered at that moment. A follow-up story was to add more to this, but to be fair they changed it so the new big bad would be the cybernetic Borg - so out of an initially stupid inkling came something far more refined and genuinely ominous.


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Speaking of stupid things...

A big powerful weapon you can just randomly fire into the ceiling. Man, I hope it's not powerful enough to go threw it into the next quarters. I know, futurist alloys and what not, but could there be a soft spot?

And where is security? No checks to make sure people who aren't Starfleet officers, are not carrying big weapons around as they see fit?

And that big weapon ... doesn't have a stun feature? Why not stun the everybody, including any personnel that happen to be nearby and call security? How about erecting a force field around them? How about having a key personnel erect a force field that can't just be de-activated? So forth and so on. Granted I don't recall (thankfully) much about the scene and don't know what could and could not be done, but just grabbing a big phaser weapon and firing it into the ceiling seems incredibly stupid to me.

The same applies to shooting a gun in a house. Unless it's for self-defense and you're intent on wounding/killing someone, shooting a gun (for intimidation for example) is just stupid. The bullet can easily ricochet and kill someone in the next room or if you're very unlucky, get back to you, like a boomerang of sorts.
 
The stupidest thing in TNG for me is Wesley Crusher
How many times, when all was lost, did the manchild pop up with a solution that neither Picard, Riker, La Forge or Data seemed capable of implementing ?
Ludicrous.

Or any of the other hundreds of trained and experienced Starfleet personnel aboard the ship, for that matter.
 
Half the time, Worf states "Enemy decloaking ahead" before the f/x shot of the Romulans or whoever decloaking. Okay, it's impossible to show the other way around unless they had the camera behind Worf looking at the big viewscreen...

Possible fix: when a cloaking device disengages there is a specific and measurable discharge of energy which can be picked-up by sensors before the vessel in question becomes fully visible.
 
In Genesis: Data tells Picard that he'll turn into a Pygmy Marmoset... But these animals adult weigh about a tenth of a kilogram!! What will happen of Picard body mass? How would he get it back (after he'd lost it to go back to his initial form)? I just find that episode incredibly stupid! The ship is populated by animals, some are predators and others I guess preys. The death rate should be enormous after several days. "Worf" alone, should have killed half a dozen people!!!
 
In Genesis: Data tells Picard that he'll turn into a Pygmy Marmoset... But these animals adult weigh about a tenth of a kilogram!! What will happen of Picard body mass? How would he get it back (after he'd lost it to go back to his initial form)? I just find that episode incredibly stupid! The ship is populated by animals, some are predators and others I guess preys. The death rate should be enormous after several days. "Worf" alone, should have killed half a dozen people!!!

Not to mention Barclay as spider. A very big spider at that. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! :eek:
 
To be fair, Picard swears in French ("merde") in the episode Elementary, My Dear Data

But if the universal translator is working like I think it works, then why do the Klingon's speech suddenly switch from being translated to English to Klingonese just because they are using a vulgar word?
 
Or...there is a time when an alien says speak in their language when another character was speaking in the alien tongue. So all these other alien races all learn to speak English because it is that important of a language throughout the universe?
In Sins of the Father, the Klingons are speaking English in the high council chamber when Picard enters. The Klingon nurse speaks English even when Picard is in disguise.
I know it's a tv show and the aliens speak English for the tv viewers, but it's dumb how certain times when aliens switch to their own language
 
Or...there is a time when an alien says speak in their language when another character was speaking in the alien tongue. So all these other alien races all learn to speak English because it is that important of a language throughout the universe?
In Sins of the Father, the Klingons are speaking English in the high council chamber when Picard enters. The Klingon nurse speaks English even when Picard is in disguise.
I know it's a tv show and the aliens speak English for the tv viewers, but it's dumb how certain times when aliens switch to their own language

Startrek, in general, is very vague about this. For example in "The Way Of The Warrior", Martok's son says something that though insulting is in no way vulgar yet his words are heard in Klingon. But then in what language is Martok's son speaking when we hear him in English when he's addressing two people one Bajoran and the other Cardassian!!! If it's in some galactic common tongue... then we have yet to hear about it! if it's another language then what is it?

When it comes to languages in general and StarTrek, the less said about it the better!!! It's total confusion.
 
But if the universal translator is working like I think it works, then why do the Klingon's speech suddenly switch from being translated to English to Klingonese just because they are using a vulgar word?

I suppose that it may be that these particular terms in klingonaase do not have any direct translation.
 
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