The math on the evacuation should be doable. Twenty transporters in use, one is seen beaming a batch of people in about 15 seconds, let's give the saucer ten of the transporters (as the computer sends people from Deck 17 on to transporters from #11 on), have a look at the dimensions and see that people could rather leisurely walk from anywhere in the saucer to queue up on those transporters when the first batches were being processed (and definitely within the four minutes allocated). Everybody is disciplined enough not to bring any luggage of any sort (although apparently one brings his or her invisible friend). So basically we could divide a thousand people with 10 and get a total processing time of twenty-five minutes.
We can then start reducing the number - some people in the secondary hull in the other 8 transporters, some walking out through the gangway (at a witnessed rate of one per second, this single route should cover 250 people already), some already offboard (I mean, three of our seven main heroes were). Some 500 people to evacuate using all the transporters evenly (plus a couple of hundred to evacuate using the gangway) would still give an evac time of six or seven minutes.
So, do we have to believe in just 300 people (plus the gangway-using 200-300) being aboard to get it down to four minutes? Well, we can assume that it takes less than 15 seconds to beam out a batch of people if they aren't slowly moving children (or from one of the very first batches, which are less time-critical as most of the queues are yet to form). We also know the top decks will evacuate via cargo transporters, which may be assumed to handle a larger number of people at a time. So we don't have to assume quite as low numbers as that.
Then there's also site-to-site, plus the use of the starbase transporters, although both would require some aiming, and the PA does not tell anybody to prepare for this sort of processing.
In the end, though, the math does support getting more than half the ship's complement offboard in less than four minutes.
besides Quinteros' line about nothing can be done being edited badly
Umm, what line? He's just saying there's no time to beam back since the ship is going to blow (which is true as far as he knows), then finding out the explosion appears to have been mysteriously delayed (which baffles him, but doesn't justify him sounding an "all clear"). Sure, there's a lot of things that could be done - but as far as he can tell, none are safe, and he doesn't even need to say "nothing can be done". Which may explain why he never says such a thing...
They really should just have had a line in there somewhere about the Enterprise putting up the shields preventing beaming.
But the core breach already prevented beaming anybody aboard. And the ambiguous information about the breach perhaps not going to happen was not something they could act upon.
The "shields are up" line would only prevent the beaming out of Picard and Riker. But they couldn't do that anyway, because they didn't know where Picard and Riker were, as the Bynars had hidden them from the computers somehow. And they were far from certain that Picard and Riker were even onboard.
I think the beginning when Quinteros and company board the ship was cut backwards.
True enough. I guess there was no way to construct a convincing forced-perspective set of the entire long gangway arm, so they wanted a door at both ends of a shorter section of it in order to get two angles on the arriving team. They did one door with NCC-1701-D signage, and another with starbase signage (using much the same elements). And that was fine and well: the shape of the gangway arm certainly caters for that starbase-side doorway, which would lie between the angular and circular parts of the arm. Indeed, the gangway exterior was no doubt modeled in synch with the creation of the set.
But they cut the coming-towards-camera angle in the wrong place, after the receding-from-camera angle - which I guess makes dramatic sense as it "gradually" reveals the identity of the arrivals. Alas, it completely ruins the illusion of the set itself, because the face angle shows them going through a door they must already have cleared before the neck angle. Understandable but lamentable.
I guess we could argue they reached the E-D doorbell and then Quinteros went all "Dang, I forgot to check my hair - let's go back to the previous junction where there's a mirror!" so that they had to do it all over again.
Timo Saloniemi
