Episodes where the entire plot fundamentally doesn't work

They melvined him.

 

The courtroom drama part also makes no sense. Samuel T. Cogley is supposedly an eccentric but brilliant defense lawyer -- but he never offers a defense! He just stalls for time until he can verify his hunch that Finney is alive. Oh, and he makes an impassioned but completely irrelevant speech about "rights" -- specifically the right of the accused to confront his accuser. The Enterprise computer isn't Kirk's accuser; the computer log is the prosecution's main piece of evidence, which would have been made available to Cogley in pretrial discovery.

And I never got that "ion pod" thing either.

 

The 'Ion Pod' throws me too.
As the story goes, they needed to have something like it for the plot but as technology it just does not make sense to me. Why, with all the sophisticated computerz and technological abilities we have seen on screen, does it require a human operator to be inside it? Anything the operator would have to do could be done from an adjoining control room, just add an extra meter of control cabling ...

 

I find myself wondering whether the ion pod really makes any more or less sense than the phaser control room shown in 'Balance of Terror', though. As you said, why is there a dedicated team of people needed to fire phasers, creating an obvious delay factor on one of the potentially most critical systems? The fact that it's never shown again (though possibly alluded to?) doesn't really help matters.

 

I actually find phaser control room more believable than the ion pod because it's a potentially vital system.

There is a lot of power running through those relays. In that era, some components probably needed to be manned to prevent overloads and such.

 

It would make more sense on the JJprise or Discoprise due to the phaser turret style used as you can't expect tactical to control all the phasers.

I see it like whoever is manning the tactical station on the bridge feeding down data to the phaser control room and whilst in theory it is delayed it should also produce more accurate and therefore economical firing solutions.

 

The ion pod seemed pretty vital once a ship gets stuck in an ion storm...

 

Seemed like it was more for getting readings than for actually saving the ship.

 

Maybe for maintenance purposes, but the idea that the captain of the ship can order phasers to be fired but it then needs to be relayed to a completely different part of the ship and then is incumbent on someone else to push the button doesn't seem to make much sense. What if intraship comms go down?

 

I imagine the consoles alert the phaser control room people when the captain says 'fire', just virtue of Sulu or anyone else on tactical pushing the button, not an intercom.

I suppose the principle is not much different than a captain calling to fire cannonballs on wooden sailing ships.

 

How could they know for sure the Kazon wouldn't remove them?
Ultimately if the Kazon got a hand of the Array it could change the balance of power throughout the Galaxy, Voyager had to insure it's destruction

 

If you can't just leave a bomb unattended, then you leave it with a volunteer or a small team. They stay behind and ensure that the bomb goes boom, even if it means going down with the array.

 

Just time the explosives to go off 10 seconds after the ship is sent home.

 

Omet'iklan would be proud of you.

 

As would Janeway. "Time's... UP!"

 

Well, you just described how it was done in WWII battleship or cruiser. A guy down in the gun turret had the trigger, waiting for the order from the bridge (or fire control). Worked okay then. I'm sure that's what the writers were thinking of when they created the phaser control room.

 

Could it be said, on some level, that a plot doesn't work if for some unexplained reason main cast character has to use a shuttle that is slower than a starship to reach some location and then there's some troulble because of it?

Examples,
TNG and 'Final Mission', Wesley and Picard just had to use a shuttle to reach a negotiation?
TNG and 'The Mind's Eye', LaForge had to use a shuttle to go visit Risa, there was no way the Enterprise could just drop him off? Besides, it looked like he was not using warp speed so they must've been pretty close anyway. But the Romulans had to capture him and brainwash and all that.... fortunately eventually it's a good episode even if the beginning raises that question.

 

Why would a starship of the 23rd century intentionally emulate this kind of inefficient operation of the 20th?

It didn't even work okay in the one episode in which we saw it.

 

I just watched DS9: Melora, and although I admit that I enjoyed the way she learned to accept the consequences of living in a higher gravity environment and learned to rely on others when necessary, and also the way she realized that getting medical treatment that would allow her to function in a higher gravity environment would deprive her of much of her identity, I found my ability to suspend my disbelief to be seriously lacking. Even presuming that anything resembling a humanoid would evolve in a low-gravity environment, the proportions would absolutely be different, and they wouldn't be breathing a nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere either, the lighter elements would all escape into space. Or else the planet would need to have some sort of natural forcefield that's stronger than a normal magnetic field to keep the atmosphere locked down. And I can't imagine how that would work.

 

It is possible that the planet was terraformed by an advanced society sometime in thepast,and that the fhypothetical force field keeping the atmosphere from escaping was artificial.

I also note that what gives peiple a feeling of weight and what their bodies are adapted to cope with is the surface gravity of a world, while what keeps the atmosphere from escaping is the escape velocity. So by changing the mass, radius, volume, & density of a world, you find that hte surface gravity and the escape velocity do not change to the same degree.

Thus a planet could have a relatively low surface gravity and a relatively high escape velocity. Since I forget whether the Elaysian homeworld's surface gravity was ever mentioned, I have no way of knowing whether a planet with such a low surface gravity could have a high enough escape velocity to retain a dense oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere. I note that it is considered to be improbable that any humans would want to live permanently on a planet with a surface gravity higher than 1.25 to 1.5 Earth's surface gravity.

If Earth's surface gravity is 1.25 to 1.5 times that of the Elaysian homeworld, the surface gravity of the Elaysian homeworld would be about about 0.666 to 0.8 that of Earth. If Earth's surface gravity is twice that of he Elaysian homeworld, the Elaysian homeworld would have a surface gravity of 0.5 Earth's surface gravity. I do not think that it is necessary to make the surface gravity of the Elaysian homeworld less than 0.5 that of Earth to make Earth's surface gravity very uncomfortable and unhealthy for Elaysians. Though of course dialog in the episode "Melora" may indicate the difference in surface gravity is greater than that.

The Moon has a surface gravity of 1.622 meters per second per second (0.1665 that of Earth) and an escape velocity of 2.38 kilometers per second (0.2127 that of Earth) and just about no atmosphere, while Titan has a surface gravity of 1.352 meters per second per second (0.138 that of Earth) and an escape velocity of 2.639 kilometers per second (0.236 that of Earth) and an atmosphere even denser than Earth's.

In the case of Titan its much greater distance from the Sun gives it much lower average temperatures and particle velocities in its exosphere where atmospheric gases escape, thus enabling it to retain them much longer, and also a much lower surface temperature than Earth. If the Elaysian homeworld could somehow have a surface temperature as warm as Earth's with an exosphere temperature as low as Titan's it should be able be warm enough on teh surface for humans and also be able to retain a breathable atmopshere for geological erasof time.

I also note the most intelligent prmate species to evolve on Earth had widely differing body forms. So Neanderthals and gorillas, for example, were and are much more robust in build than humans. Perhaaps the human equivilents on the Elasians homeworld wold have been much more slender than humans, but the Elaysians are descended from Neaderthal or Gorilla equivalents and are as stronge on their homeworld as Neaderthals or gorillas on Earth.

And maybe Melora is an especially stocky and strongly built Elaysian and so appears simiar to a typical human woman.

 

David Weber, who writes somewhat harder sci-fi than Trek, explores the effect of gravity levels on humans. A person reared in 0.78g will likely be able to adapt to Earth normal, but they'll be somewhat frail, physically. And, a person raised in 1.3 or 1.4g will be built like a brick outhouse.

In an Allen Steele book, "Apollo's Outcasts", the young protagonist of that book was conceived and born on the moon and as a result is confined to a wheelchair on Earth. They simply couldn't return him to the moon because he wouldn't survive the 3g of takeoff. Once they figure out a way to get him through that... let's just say a lot changes for him.