I mentioned this is a thread in General Trek, but it seems best suited here. I did an bit for Whatculture titled "14 Dumbest Things in Star Trek—The Motion Picture", which is here (link). I already heard a few people suggest other candidates to take the total higher. Any further suggestions/amendments?
Just hit on the link more from Maurice. That was a fun read and perfect for 2:00 am. Yeah a lot of silly stuff. Only ship in interception range might still be my favorite but I got a chuckle out if the Probe Couture bit about Ilia's bathrobe and heels. They were all good observations and some probably speak to the rushed pace of production.
Well, Trek has already covered quite a few of those. Black holes do wander in and out of Sol (and so do things that potentially might have been "called" black holes back in the 1970s), say. Indeed, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" already featured a black traffic hazard right next to Earth. On the other hand, while Starfleet certainly has better things to do with its starships than keeping them idled at home port, the inability to intercept stuff coming from the direction of the Klingon Empire is extra distressing! The interesting bit in the list of 14 is the rumination on passage of time. Not all of it is on the mark: there is no contradiction between the ship at first being 20 hours away from V'Ger, and then after the repairs being right next to it, because we never learn how far the ship was from VGer before the repairs - that is, we don't know what the wormhole actually did to the ship. From the outcome, we can assume it actually helped out a lot! (Not so much as to fling the heroes past Vulcan, obviously, or Spock wouldn't have met them, but later on we learn the ship might take as long as four days to go from Earth to Vulcan, so nothing wrong with that one!) The valid complaint is the one about the 16 hours between "The cloud is 20 hours from Earth and we are right outside it" and "The cloud is four hours from Earth and we're stuck inside". Nothing much happens in the movie between those comments. Except, just perhaps, V'Ger accelerating...? Timo Saloniemi
It's the one about V'Ger not being smart enough to get the grim off it's name plate that gets me. TMP is supposed to be the Trek movie for intellectuals, when in fact it's just pretentious. Star Trek is very silly.
I loved the Probe Couture. The uniforms were so bad that I was glad Persis Khambatta got to wear attractive, sexy outfits...with heels. Ever notice how Bond movies from the 70s show women in bikinis by the pool area...with heels.
I’ve always rationalized that one out as the machines that created V’ger didn’t understand or care about aesthetics, so any grime on the probe would be irrelevant to them. Why would they think to clean up Voyager?
It's so smart though... but doesn't think there may be more letters on that nameplate than V###GER? It didn't take much for Decker to read the rest. Makes you wonder about the quality of all the data V'ger learned on it's mission to "learn all that is learnable"
In that case, I’d chalk it up to an issue with set design not matching what’s in the script. IIRC, the script says the letters between V and G have been “obliterated by some space hazard.” Obviously, the nameplate was not quite designed that way. It would’ve been less of a stretch if the nameplate actually had some holes or something that Kirk couldn’t just wipe off.
The incredible machine that adopted the little probe was certainly not going to do any learning on the probe; doing so would undermine its very reason of existence, which apparently was unquestioning obedience of this item of worship and its perceived reason of existence. Sure, the machine would aid, assist and boost the probe. But alter it? Remove some of that sacred grime? Why not simply digitize the whole thing with a bolt of lightning while the machine was at it? Timo Saloniemi
Grime on machinery isn't just an aesthetic issue, though. The more buildup, the more it can interfere with functionality. Kor
There is the point that "V'Ger" only very recently learned English in the past few days and, thus, found out how to read its name (or even that those markings were language and the three stylized maps of the Earth's continents at different points in history next to it weren't*). While it probably had images of the "seed" at the center of it, it wasn't going to go poking around washing the core of its own brain down after it had been sitting there for hundreds of years. I mean, if got an MRI or something, would your first reaction be to start poking at your own hypothalamus with a dental pick so you could get a better look in there? *I finally figured out what the deal was with those three ovals after I got a book with a reproduction of the sounds and images from the Voyager record. I have no idea why the set designers thought that image, among all images, should be on the nameplate.
I dunno, if I suddenly recognized markings as language I'd take another look at them and notice that grime/damage there and say, huh, I wonder if there's more to that. Again, all they had to do was obliterate bits of the nameplate and have Kirk figure out the name by the few bits of the text still remaining. If I see V_____GER and the top line of a 6, I can infer that the number must be a 6 because no other number has a top bit that looks like that, and I understand the context. But this gets back to the central problem with the film — I believe articulated by Harold Livingston —that was that they set up this godlike being of effectively infinite capability and for our heroes to have any sort of relationship to it undermines the premise and makes the premise inherently false. I think they are meant so that if anyone found the probes and visited its creator's planet millions of years from now they could see that the planet has active tectonic plates and thus shifting surface features. It's perhaps a silly idea.
Dunno about the "premise" being flawed: as our heroes put it, this particular God is incredibly childish, and that makes it accessible to our heroes just fine. It's just about the only relatable piece of writing in the thin plot in the movie, an intuitively acceptable rationalization for the whole thing. Plus, it's a fairly common human quality to be incapable of seeing inwards: there's little reason to credit a machine with better insight and self-reflection, when our heroes and their adversary agree that being machinelike is V'Ger's one great shortcoming and an obstacle it strives to overcome. Nobody designed it to be an artificial intelligence or anything. It's instead a fairly infantile fact-finding machine that has developed rudimentary intellect as a byproduct, and struggles to apply that to become more. It really should beyond its expected capacities to take a look in, let alone to ask the right existential questions such as "Who am I really?". Timo Saloniemi
That's why they were on the golden record, sure, but I was wondering why they were chosen as space-fillers on the "VOYAGER 6" nameplate in the movie. I suppose they might've picked it to explain how V'Ger recognizes Earth, and it'd have a better chance of reading on screen than the pulsar map or the diagram of the solar system planets, but I never would've guessed they were maps of Earth until I saw the full-size diagram in context.