That was an amusing dig at it.
Does it get better?
- Thread starter StarLord
- Start date
What about TOS?
And Season 3 of TNG, which most of us like, didn't have much much use for repetative technobabble scenes...
I see how you can see it that way (though I personally don't). But I don't even think it matters how you look at it. Parody or not, it still helps the story forward by telling us something (which I would call 'good' use of technobabble) rather than trying to disguise that the writers don't have a solution either (which I would call 'bad' use of technobabble).
It's a great moment that shows Barclay out of his mind and Riker out of his depths!
The way I think I've described it in the past is, that TOS was about the missions where the Enterprise explores strange new worlds and encounters danger at every turn, whereas TNG veers a lot more often towards showing us realistic, functional storylines, but which feel curiously like seeing what happens on the Enterprise between all of the 'exciting' stuff. The TNG crew always seem to have loads of time for sitting around at violin concerts or art classes or hanging out at the gym or chilling in Ten Forward or cosplaying on the holodeck, where it always felt like on TOS everything was one roller coaster running into another
It's a difference in story focus. One is action-oriented, the other is character-oriented (not to say one can't dip into the other too, but it's about where the drive of the stories lies). This helps to emphasize TNG's general feeling that they spent a lot of time doing 'milk runs', because when the story isn't about the mission but about the people, then the missions themselves have to be a little less... exciting. 
Honestly, I don't remember if TOS had technotalk or not, maybe I should revisit the series after a while.
Someone, help, did TOS have technobabble?
TOS was generally just along the lines of Spock saying "captain, a photon distortion has disabled our shields" and Scotty making stuff up about "the warp core depolarising" and such.
It's definitely a great example of how to keep technobabble at the optimum level - just enough gibberish to make things sound cool and offer the show a veneer of being scientific without wasting the viewer's time or distracting from the story. Although I've never really had a problem with technobabble in any Star Trek series, LeVar Burton and Jeri Ryan could fire it off so fast that it never dragged the episode down for more than like 10 seconds.
It's definitely a great example of how to keep technobabble at the optimum level - just enough gibberish to make things sound cool and offer the show a veneer of being scientific without wasting the viewer's time or distracting from the story. Although I've never really had a problem with technobabble in any Star Trek series, LeVar Burton and Jeri Ryan could fire it off so fast that it never dragged the episode down for more than like 10 seconds.
Technobabble should be simple and based on actual scientific concepts that people can comprehend. As I said it wasn't really a huge problem until the last 2 seasons of TNG where some Brannon Braga episodes hinged on some overcomplicated, convoluted fake emission or particle or pulse which created the situation in the first place. Phantasms comes to mind, which is a good show except for the incomprehensible nonsense about interphasic pulses and organisms.
There's a certain amount of "they don't talk like real people" syndrome as well. Characters having formalized professional speech is one thing, but in reality even engineers aren't going to waste time saying things like "recalibrate the quantum subspace threshold by seventeen percent, that should reallign the dilithium manifolds".
How do you do that when some of the technology is purely science fiction and will, in many cases, never be realized/invented?
Tenchnobabble has a place. It helps create the imagery of a fantastical future but should never be overdone as it often has been at times in Star Trek.
Wasn't it Maurice Hurley who really took the reins for season 2's more dangerous, haunting, exploring true unknowns alone style? Michael Pillar's style for season 3 onward is also rich and steeped but season 2's format really is underrated, only because of residual slack from season 1. 2's top-50% episodes really nail a format that I wish had stayed a bit longer as well.
Utterly agreed! Season 6 (if not starting at 5) went overboard with excessive attempts to make the setup feel real - when season 3 did just enough to feel satisfied with a balance between real science and fake TV show creative liberty that makes it feel more plausible than waving any old magic wand or whipping out a laser sword. Sci-fi is still fantasy but it takes and makes more of an effort to feel plausible while having some spectacle. Fantasy is more just about the spectacle (often for the sake of un-exciting plot advancement), but I'm preaching to the choir...
The 2nd clip, I too felt, was more integral and reasonable to the plot (and technically accurate with the real life terms used without going into la-la land) but that first clip-- such a compilation of cringe at times. For one thing, processors don't fluctuate as such. Energy to them might... even taking into account "positronics" as a theoretical replacement for electronics, there are still some real life constants. Never mind if there's a primary speech processor, this rather implies secondary, tertiary, or how many other more processors of which proper error checking protocols given Data's stated processing speed from previous episodes ("Datalore", "The Measure of a Man", et al) combined with basic common sense means an error check and reroute to a working processor would occur before the melodramatic crowd-pleasing moment kicks in... if Data has multiple processors for a dedicated task for contingency purposes, then algorithms to preemptively check would surely be commonplace as there's no 640KB limitation, never mind some algorithms can be a single block of code that can be ran from any other functions (e.g. OOP, the mid-20th century vernacular but even mid/late 20th century home computers (e.g. 1977, when real disco reigned) had BASIC and other beginner languages containing commands like GOSUB that did a simular same thing but more clumsily). Especially as Data has a backup archive of the operating system ("Contagion") and a convenient off switch ("The Measure of a Man"), etc, for something self-repairing and autonomous there's no reason for any lack of error checking protocols. Speech synthesis is still an important enough function...
And EM bursts (or EMPs) would do more than temporarily knock out communication signals, depending on intensity and relative position to various devices...
Perhaps actual science is a stretch..It's true that we may never see Deflectors, but the actual concept of a deflector beam that protects the ship from objects in its path is something quite simple and it doesn't require a mouthload of incomprehensible jargon.
I haven’t thought about the early writers/producers much. It was a revolving door of them I know, but even if I looked them up, I couldn’t tell you their “style.” It’s interesting to me to read your impression of Hurley as it gives me a sense of his influence to put to just the name.
And it’s interesting to break down the series by overarching styles.
If Piller was season 3 on, and Hurley 2, who was season 1, and how would you describe his style? How would you describe Piller’s over his seasons?
^Maurice Hurley and Michael Piller were both successful TV writers in the 80s and I believe they were friends. Hurley wrote for Miami Vice, and he was a cop and action writer. Hurley wrote Q Who, which was inventive, spooky, and high concept. Piller wrote The Best Of Both Worlds, which was dramatic and epic. Both men were strong writers. I think Piller was better at rewriting than he was at creating new stories from scratch. Piller was more character oriented in his approach and not as adept at action or sci fi. He seemed to have an easier time with Roddenberry than Hurley did. Hurley either quit or was fired while Piller was coaxed to stay by Roddenberry himself.
I hope Time Squared gets another chance - it's a standard time loop story, but it's the best one any Star Trek has done IMO. Easily beats Cause and Effect for me because it's basically the same plot but with that season 2 haunting/spooky quality, a real feeling of creeping dread.
I love the episode. It’s just not on the list because it’s so perfectly episodic.
Still, the shot of Picard next to the shuttlepod with the shuttlebay doors open and the maw of the anomaly behind them remains with me to this day. It was really striking at the time, even if it’s weekly thing on DSC today lol And, yeah, it’s another of Hurley’s “space is scary” episodes. They should really do more with that these days. Pre-DSC, it was too much overpopulated humanoid aliens of the week, when in reality space is just that — really freaking large and empty and maybe scary as hell when you do find something. There’s enough alien life in Trek where space will never be lifeless, but it could use more attention to some of those other things it can also be.
Nothing dates TNG and TNG-era Star Trek more than this.
I hate nothing more than when they are in the middle of a battle and they're still talking like radio narrators.
Worst example in Star Trek history: the shuttle craft chase scene in Insurrection when they are trying to capture Data...with Picard and Worf sounding like they're reading from a clunky script instead of like how real people would be interacting during a crisis.
In fairness, VOY was really guilty of this as well.
^ at the same time, real people would not talk like what we think of as like real people today. It’s the distant future. I like some of the formality they use — it’s a placeholder for the future-speak they’d likely use. When they do talk like real people circa today, I’m usually taken out of the narrative knowing they’re doing this to make the alien-ness of the future more “relatable.” Uh-huh. Okay
