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Why didnt they just beam up Reeds communicator?

WraithDukat

Captain
Captain
In the episode "communicator" - why didn't they just beam it back up to the ship? We know they can beam the equipment. Plus they can track the exact location of comms but in this episode they could only track it to "three city blocks" (we saw them do it in the episode the caves).

Would have made a lot more sense if he lost a tricorder or phase pistol.
 
What episode is this again?

Oh, "The Communicator".

Don't think I saw it, can't comment.

we saw them do it in the episode the caves
Not sure what this is referring to either. No such title is listed.

Dawn?
Strange New World?
Terra Nova?
The Breach?

Something else entirely?
 
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What episode is this again?

Oh, "The Communicator".

Don't think I saw it, can't comment.

we saw them do it in the episode the caves
Not sure what this is referring to either. No such title is listed.

Dawn?
Strange New World?
Terra Nova?
The Breach?

Something else entirely?

Sorry was supposed to say "episode WITH the caves". I'm referring to "strange new worlds"
 
They couldn't take the risk that somebody might SEE the communicator disappear in a flash of a transporter effect.
 
They couldn't take the risk that somebody might SEE the communicator disappear in a flash of a transporter effect.

Good point, but the chances that it was found when they first realised it was missing were slim surely?

Plus even if they did who would believe them? It would become urban myth.
 
Yeah, I wondered that too. A phase pistol probably would have been a better choice; while one would think they'd place trackers on those also, it'd be a bit more believable anyway.

Didn't much care for this one. Like much of ENT, it seemed to go out of its way to skip past interesting and obvious conversations to get to fighting and laser shootouts.
 
It's a shame though because it was a decent episode apart from that and made an interesting point about the dangers of cultural contamination and how easy it can happen.
 
Well, beaming up communicators was never really an option in TOS. The villains always removed those from the heroes, after which Scotty was powerless to remove them from the villains by transporting - unless somebody flipped open the device and activated it. Basically, locating or beaming up a non-activated communicator in Trek is not easier or more difficult than doing the same to a similarly sized object of some other sort, say, a pack of cigarettes. One might assume that pinpointing small things like that is much harder than pinpointing bigger things such as Vulcans or shuttlecraft.

Communicators in TOS were already said to contain advanced future technology. Perhaps a transtator would show up brightly in scanners amidst more primitive components? Then again, a transtator might be built out of perfectly ordinary materials and its sensor trace would not differ much from the transistors in a primitive radio set.

As for the episode, it's one of those "escalating plot" things where things start out innocently enough, and everything our heroes do is slightly too little, slightly too late. The audience can exclaim afterwards that everything could have been solved by doing a bit more a bit earlier, but that's not really fair, because the heroes were in no position to know that things would escalate. Suggesting overkill as the preferred approach from everything from the very start is not only detrimental to drama, it is also unrealistic...

Timo Saloniemi
 
In line with what Timo says, we have to remember that at this point in the series, Earth is still pretty much the babe in the woods regarding space exploration. There are possibly dozens of standard operating procedures they haven't yet considered, even with the Vulcans' "fatherly" advice, which they might just as likely ignore.
 
They couldn't take the risk that somebody might SEE the communicator disappear in a flash of a transporter effect.

Right.

Because sending people armed with phase pistols was a much better plan. Not to mention claiming to be enemy super soldiers and using an invisible spaceship to rescue Archer and Reed.
 
Because beaming up a communicator would make the episode ten minutes long. That's why.

Really, give a guy from the 19th century an iphone. He's not going to be able to do much with it, especially given it has a limited battery life. Beaming it up wouldn't be a big deal either considering he'd just be written off as crazy. Sending down away teams for a single item and risking... basically what happened, getting caught, is just dumb.
 
Because beaming up a communicator would make the episode ten minutes long. That's why.
... Thus making time for my "Archer's little sis is getting married, and he can't stand the groom!" episode!
snark_zps33abebc0.jpg
 
Almost all episodes of a show can be solved in a matter of minutes if they just do that one thing they did in another episode in the nick to time to fix that other problem. Good episode though.
 
Perhaps that doofus Malcolm turned off his communicator's location beacon - kinda like how we can turn on/off our exact locations on phones. I imagine they would have such an option, in case they were on a stealth mission against opponents of a similar level of technology.
 
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