EMH2: The secondary gyrodyne relays in the propulsion field intermatrix have depolarised.
EMH1: In English?
EMH2: I'm just reading what it says here.
EMH1: In English?
EMH2: I'm just reading what it says here.
The legacy of technobabble....
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
No, they didn't. It was total B.S. from the get-go.
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Today's shows are full of technobabble. House M.D., CSI, NCIS, Stargate, and it NEVER adds ANYTHING to the story, nor does it make any sense. Doctors will recognize House MD's babble makes no sense, forensic doctors will recognize CSI's babble is bullcrap, and physicists will recognize that Trek's and Stargate's babble makes no sense, but the general audience, to which I belong, doesn't care. So I will never understand the fan's gripe against technobabble in Star Trek.
I'm not a physicist, but do I happen to be fluent in English, so when words like "isoton" (meaning: identical or similar components to a ton but arranged differently or possessing different properties) or "gravimetric" (meaning: having the quality of measuring gravity) get thrown around, it's really annoying.
And that's before getting into things that don't exist or do things in Trek radically different than the plain meaning suggests. "Starship Mine's" "baryon sweep," for example--how hard is it to know what the word "baryon" means (a hadron with three bound quarks ordinarily found as those exotic particles, protons and neutrons
), and that using it as a high-energy sweep is a ridiculously bad idea?
TNG wasn't really that bad with technobabble, in that tended not to totally solve things with it. Like in "Starship Mine," the baryon sweep is a mcguffin, at least has consistent properties in-episode, and isn't the solution. Is it stupid? Hell yes, but it is just fiction...
The problem is when the technobabble substituted for resolution.
And that's before getting into things that don't exist or do things in Trek radically different than the plain meaning suggests. "Starship Mine's" "baryon sweep," for example--how hard is it to know what the word "baryon" means (a hadron with three bound quarks ordinarily found as those exotic particles, protons and neutrons
), and that using it as a high-energy sweep is a ridiculously bad idea?TNG wasn't really that bad with technobabble, in that tended not to totally solve things with it. Like in "Starship Mine," the baryon sweep is a mcguffin, at least has consistent properties in-episode, and isn't the solution. Is it stupid? Hell yes, but it is just fiction...
The problem is when the technobabble substituted for resolution.
There's nothing wrong with technobabble... in moderation. But when it's used as a means for characters to interact, as an excuse for your Harry Kims and Ensign Mayweathers to get a couple lines in the script, or worse -- as conflict resolution, then there's a gigantic problem.
I think the proof is in the pudding. I recall a distinct reduction of technobabble in TWOK, TUC, and FC. Compare that to, say, TMP, Generations and most especially Nemesis, and you can tell which movies were better received.
And that's before getting into things that don't exist or do things in Trek radically different than the plain meaning suggests. "Starship Mine's" "baryon sweep," for example--how hard is it to know what the word "baryon" means (a hadron with three bound quarks ordinarily found as those exotic particles, protons and neutrons
TNG wasn't really that bad with technobabble, in that tended not to totally solve things with it. Like in "Starship Mine," the baryon sweep is a mcguffin, at least has consistent properties in-episode, and isn't the solution. Is it stupid? Hell yes, but it is just fiction...
The problem is when the technobabble substituted for resolution.
Agreed. And I like Starship Mine, too. I suppose that subconciously, I took the baryon sweep to just be an episode-length version of the cliche'd evil crushing spiked wall trap. It wasn't the baryon sweep that needed to be resolved, it was how Picard would have to outwit the thieves that was crucial to the story. IIRC, Picard even uses his trusty Lecture Skills (tm) to hold off the main villainous until she's vaporized.
One of the clearest examples in my mind about misuse of technobabble is Voyager's "Flashback." Here we have Janeway exploring Tuvok's past with Sulu. If anything, this episode was perfect to explore that dynamic, the history of the Excelsior, and most importantly interesting-but-mysterious Tuvok. But how is it resolved? By the Doctor going into polysyllabic equivalents of using a mental defibrillator. Boo!!
I always thought that the baryon sweep would make the ultimate weapon. Use it against an enemy and you not onl;y kill them all, but the ship itself is intact!
I watched DS9 "Sword of Kahless" today. There's a scene where Dax is using some device to try and shut down a force field, but it's not working, so Worf suggests "try reversing the polarity". Clearly Worf knows nothing about any of this stuff, but he's genre savvy enough to know what works on Star Trek. And lo, it does work!
I never understood why "Flashback" just couldn't be a, you know... flashback. (And this is OT, but is it just me, or was Trek positively inimical toward flashback stories--it almost always had to have some framing device, to the good ("Matter of Perspective") to the confusing but okay ("Things Past") to the baffling and bad ("Flashback"). The only Trek ep I can think of off the top of my head that unabashedly used flashback storytelling is "In the Pale Moonlight."
)
You mean like House M.D.? They spend half the episode talking technobabble that makes no sense to the casual viewer. Entire dialogue sequences are only about technobabble, just so a few of the characters can interact, otherwise they wouldn't have any lines. And it's a conflict resolution, EVERY TIME.
And there's no difference to me between that medobabble that might be or not grounded in real medical terms, or Trek's babble, that is more grounded in fiction than science. Both makes no sense to the casual viewer.
Yeah, I just saw the same rerun and I groaned over the previous comment that the Vulcan's couldn't get through the forcefield because none of them thought of trying to reverse the polarity.Christ, that was a stupid scene.
There's a big difference between the technobabble in Trek and the medicalbabble in TV shows like House.
Because the medicalbabble is real and shows like House often have real-world doctors on staff to consult for accuracy. There's a website that "grades" House on its medicine and for the most part House stays "true" even if it fudges things a bit for the sake of TV.
So when House busts into the room and spouts off a bunch of medicalbabble about what they need to do, what needs to happen, or what the solution is that's a pretty big difference than -I'm going to go with Voyager here since they were the worst with technobabble, IMO- Belanna standing up and yaking about made-up technology nonsense in order to save the day.
This is, more or less, why I "liked" the technobabble in TNG because they tried to have it more or less make sense. There were times when they went too far, sure, and it didn't always make sense. But at the end of the day I don't think there's any similarity to medicalbabble saving the day in a show that's all about solving medical cases and made-up technology babble saving the day on a dramatic series.
House busting in to the room to describe some procedure to put the patient of the week through to solve the case is a lot different than Belanna saying they need to reconfigure Seven's nanoprobes to alter the wavelengths of the output on the deflector dish to save the day.
In one case something "real" is being called into play to save the day and it's mostly in-line with real life in another case a writer was either lazy or got himself stuck in the corner and couldn't come up with anything more creative than using made-up technology to save the day.
Agreed on all counts, and let me add that, by definition, a medical drama must have actual drama in it. If a medical show was nothing but medical babble, then it wouldn't be a dramatic show; when House can't come up with the solution, it turns out to be a metaphor about how his stubbornness prevents him from dealing with women, or something meta like that. His breakthroughs in his personal life tend to connect to the medical problem at hand, and sometimes the personal problems of the cast or the medical condition itself reflect real life social issues. The conflict isn't resolved with 500 CCs of tetrahedrazine, but by House swallowing his pride and asking a former lover for help that only she can provide.
"Darmok" is probably one of the best TNG examples I can think of about this... for the entire episode, Riker, Data, Worf, and LaForge pull off every technobabble trick in the book, from sensors to shields to phasers. But the solution isn't there, and it actually nearly gets them killed. Rather, the solution came when Picard was able to effectively able to break down the language barrier through cooperation and sacrifice. The episode almost seemed to be an indictment of technobabble.
Again, it's all about moderation and how technobabble is used. If people compare TOS to, say, Voyager, you'll see a virtual dearth of technobabble, but many classic Spock vs. McCoy moments. AND TOS managed to root it all back to modern day issues, too.
I don't think anyone would mind a reduction of technobabble if it meant more character development for Kim and Mayweather, too.
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I don't understand. Are you saying that they didn't do a good job of distinguishing Riker's fake technobabble from the "genuine" technobabble? Or are you saying that all the technobabble - genuine and fake - was bullshit?
yeah TNG got progressively worse with technobabble, especially once brannon braga came on the show. you could tell who wrote DS9 compared to who wrote Voyager. Voyager was horrible with technobabble, which was heavily written by braga. Ron Moore and Ira Behr handled DS9, which was much lighter on technology, and much stronger on story and characters. It makes me wonder how much different voyager would have been, had behr and moore had a hand in that show.
They would have all killed themselves, and found out that half of them have always been Borg.
Technobabble is actually fine as flavour material. It gives the sense these people are extremely competent professionals who know how this stuff works and are trying to come up with an expedient solution using technology and science theory sufficiently more advanced than our own to the point we don't get it, also it just sounds sort of cool and exotic.
Pages and pages of it, not so much. [TECH] should also never solve the story - and Voyager is more guilty than TNG of just using it as a narrative crutch in addition to spewing it all over the place. Not to say it wasn't a problem in TNG also, just not as much.
Pages and pages of it, not so much. [TECH] should also never solve the story - and Voyager is more guilty than TNG of just using it as a narrative crutch in addition to spewing it all over the place. Not to say it wasn't a problem in TNG also, just not as much.
Yeah, again, TNG didn't use it as a crutch to solve the story as much, or as badly, as TNG did and even when they did they at least did it a bit dramaticly.
Compare the times when TNG used the All Powerful All Magical Deflector Dish to when Voyager did. Voyager did it to solve the problem of their entire plot or they used Seven's nanoprobes to solve the problem of the plot, they used the transporter to solve the problem of the plot.
A mysterious infectious agent rampaging through the ship? Use Seven's nano-probes to cure them!
On the flipside, TNG may have used technobabble and the fictional technology to solve the problem of the week but often times that problem wasn't the driving plot.
They used the deflector to de-polute the atmospher of a planet (a Matter of Time, IIRC), now sure, a simple technobabble solution, but the problem(s) on the planet were just window dressing for the plot -Rasmussen the schister time-traveler was the core focus of the plot, the planet's problems was just sort of "there."
"Rascals" the transporter is used to turn Picard, Guinan, Ro and Keiko back to adults -after an earlier transporter accident removed D/RNA sequences that reverted them to pre-pubescent children- but them being children, and getting them back, wasn't the plot -as there was no question they'd make it back to adults- hell even the nonsense with the Ferengi wasn't the plot. The plot was how they (paticuarly Ro and Picard) delt with being children and how this compared to their earlier lives and childhoods.
Now, to go with a TNG episode here, the episode "Genesis" is more typical of how Voyager solved their plots (and it is no coincidence that Braga had a heavy hand in making Genesis) as in that episode techno-babble made the problem (everyone turning into animals) and to solve the problem. There was no "driving problem" or moral play to delve into like in my earlier examples. The entire story and plot was just to turn the crew into lesser life-forms and then get them back. And the technobabble in it doesn't even make sense (an absent-minded and distracted Beverly somehow gives Barclay a hypospray shot which activates dorman T-Cells turning him into a spider and spreading a "disease" around the ship turning everyone into some-kind of animal, seemingly at random.)
Gong back to Voyager, many times in that series the plot of the episode was solved by nanoprobes the deflector or a hypospray. Voyager's episode of "Tuvix" is a good example of them doing "technobabble" right. In that episode the Transporter caused the problem (mxing Tuvok and Neelix) and caused the solution (seperating them) but the drive of the plot was more with dealing with the co-mixed two and the emotion of seperating them.
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