What's the worst non-canon decision in the history of Trek?

2 AU... 82AU... it'd all fit neatly into the Discovery Turbolift Funhouse!

 

I mean, Enterprise established that the 28th century or so, they had the ability to make things larger on the inside.

I’m assuming the tech was salvaged from this strange blue box they discovered in the midst of everything.

 

Except:

1) The impossibly big turboshaft interiors were introduced at the start of season 2 while the ship was still in the 23rd century.
2) Why bother? It's a bloomin' elevator. It doesn't need elaborate transdimensional engineering, it just needs to go up, down, and sideways. Heck, if you have that kind of dimensional engineering, just have programmable doors that spacewarp you directly to your destination, so you can get from the bridge to sickbay or engineering instantly just by stepping through the door frame. And they can do that anyway with the built-in transporters in their badges. So the giant hyperspace funhouse is absolutely pointless.

The only "explanation" is that Discovery's VFX team consistently ignores what the script and common sense say and does their own bizarre thing, like putting an image of Earth behind a space station stated in dialogue to be 100 AU from Earth.

 

That was the Backup Earth.

 

The only mode we ever saw was destructive digitization, and we saw it at three scales. And the climactic threat was that it was about to happen to the surface of the Earth at a fourth, larger scale, in order to remove the carbon unit infestation but presumably preserve the rest of the Creator's planet. It was never discussed, implied, hinted at that there was any other mode. So, to assume otherwise, we'd have to posit something that we have no evidence of.

Yeah, I agree with @Charles Phipps. It had eaten everything Spock saw on the spacewalk. We'd only ever seen the digitizer operate in that one mode. Why assume there was another mode?

Oh, yeah, and that justifies the 82 AU size. It's insignificant next to its abilities. You don't reach the limits of this universe for nothing.

 

"I call it... Chia Earth!"

 

The story from an insider is that the turbolift funhouse came directly from Kurtzman himself despite protests from the art department who had already come up with their own internal layout for Disco which did not leave room for such a contraption.

Supposedly, Kurtzman's reasoning was to address why the ship is twice the size of a Constitution class but only has a fraction of the crew. But then they completely ignored that in the Q&A Short Trek by showing the Enterprise also had a turbolift funhouse of its own.

 

It was a cool visual and sadly it makes no sense, sort of like Cetacean Ops.

 

Why in the world would Cetacean Ops not make sense? Dolphins and whales are now considered by most scientists to have intelligence comparable to humans. Surely the idea of Starfleet including the nonhuman sapient species that actually exist in real life is no less plausible than the idea of Starfleet including imaginary humanoid aliens.

 

More in the Blackfish sense that a ship not specifically designed to allow them freedom of movement would be a hellish existence rather than Starfleet wouldn't have aquatic members. There's a reason that poor dolphin in Johnny Mnemonic is a drug addict. He's all cooped up in an aquarium.

 

Who knows, Cetacean Ops could take up a whole deck...

 

Conversely, the only things we know it digitized received special emphasis in the presentation. Epsilon IX wasn't floating around with all the planets and moons and things, it was a grainy image inside the big mouth thing. Ilia was a massive statue.

 

Yeah, that's a good point. But Spock said the Epsilon IX space station was stored there "with every detail," no reference to any graininess. Spock theorized that he was in a gigantic imaging system, and, lo and behold, images were projected. I'm not sure what, if anything, can be concluded from the manner of projection, especially when the dialog asserts no lack of detail.

I've always thought that the TMP screenplay could have benefited from at least one more draft. Just what it is that V'ger had done, did, and was capable of doing was always less than clear, and that's not the only problem.

 

To be fair, part of the movie's appeal is the 2001-esque, "This is stuff largely beyond human comprehension."

 

Now I wonder what happened to the residents of Cetacean Ops when the Enterprise-D's saucer crashed in Generations. And how many dolphins were lost in the Battle of Wolf 359, the Battle of Sector 001, and the various engagements of the Dominion War.

 

The Enterprise-D was so absurdly huge that it would've had plenty of room for them. It had only a thousand people in a volume considerably larger than a real-world aircraft carrier with a crew of 5-6000. I'm not so sure about the Cerritos, though.

They were probably better cushioned in the midst of all that water than the rest of the crew getting flung around through the air. I'm sure they were evacuated along with the rest of the crew at the end.

The TNG Technical Manual says the cetaceans on the E-D were a "consultation crew" of researchers in theoretical navigation. The E-D was meant as a science ship first and foremost, and the Cerritos is a "second contact" ship meant for routine duties rather than combat. So there may not have been any cetacean crew on the combat vessels in the war, or on the frontline ships called in to battle the Borg.

 

Funny how things can grow on you. When I first saw "Encounter at Farpoint" way back in 1987 (as a nubie fan of only about a year at that point) I thought the ship was big, ugly behemoth.

But along the way it started to grow on me. I don't know how, maybe later as they refined the special effects it just looked better. But it got to the point that when it was destroyed in Generation I was a bit bummed out. I was like damn, that sucks.

In fact, when Picard and Kirk came out of the Nexus I actually kind of hoped they were going to find a way to prevent it from being destroyed.

 

Although, prior to Lower Decks, the only time Cetacean Ops was actually referenced onscreen was in Yesterday's Enterprise, where the Enterprise is depicted as a warship

 

Geordi did mention dolphins on board in The Perfect Mate, which at least implied the existence of a Cetacean Ops in the Prime timeline.

And, it's not canon of course, but there was always Hwii, the dolphin-like alien researcher from Diane Duane's Dark Mirror.