"Enterprise" too advanced for 22nd Century

[Tenacity]

Trek is supposed to be modeled after real life progression of science more or less.

I never gotten that impression. Star Trek is modern people with a few isolated technological advances, set in the future.

I for one would probably enjoy the show more with less tech as a up front part of the story, keep it in the background, rarely mention as much as possible. The show should primarily be focused on people and their problems and solutions.

Where did you get the idea that it's supposedly "modeled after real life progression of science?"

 

[Christopher]

Where did you get the idea that it's supposedly "modeled after real life progression of science?"

From everything that is known about the original series. It was one of the first SFTV series that ever attempted to consult with real scientists and engineers and extrapolate plausibly into the future rather than just making up random nonsense. This is very well-documented in The Making of Star Trek and elsewhere.

I for one would probably enjoy the show more with less tech as a up front part of the story, keep it in the background, rarely mention as much as possible. The show should primarily be focused on people and their problems and solutions.

That's not incompatible with having plausible science. Again, you need to read The Making of Star Trek, where Roddenberry explains his philosophy that if a cop doesn't stop to explain the workings of his gun and his cruiser, there's no reason for SF characters to give detailed exposition about their technology. But the writers can still figure out a plausible understanding of how it works even if it isn't spelled out explicitly onscreen. For instance, Roddenberry's science advisors explained to him the need for a starship to have a deflector field or beam of some sort to repel interstellar dust and debris that could damage or destroy a ship at high velocities, and that's why the Enterprise was given a dish on the front. It was there because of the producers' scientific knowledge. But it was never explained as a deflector dish at any point in TOS or TAS -- never until TNG. Because there's a big difference between what you figure out as a writer when building your world and what you actually need to put on the page. The latter is only a subset of the former.

 

[Tenacity]

rather than just making up random nonsense

But isn't that what the writers did with "technobabble?"

Large chunks of the science in Star Trek is complete made up, and that's okay because Star Trek is set in a fantasy future, not a scientific realistic one.

Where the ships travels as fast as the writers wants them to this week in order to tell a story. Sure they could have chart on the wall reminding the writers what the speeds are, but they don't because it isn't important to the show.

Oh, and evolution is whatever Dr. Phlox say it is.

 

[Christopher]

But isn't that what the writers did with "technobabble?"

That term wasn't coined until the TNG era. I'm talking about TOS, back when all this started over half a century ago. Star Trek is not one monolithic thing, but multiple separate works created by different people in different eras. TOS started out with the goal of being scientifically credible, allowing for dramatic license and budgetary compromises. As I said, other than a couple of 1950s kids' shows, it was the first SFTV series that did make even the slightest effort at researching credible science, and pretty much the last one for quite a while. Later Trek productions have been inconsistent in their commitment to that goal, with some trying to live up to the same standard and others just not bothering.

Early TNG actually had pretty solid science by SFTV standards, thanks to Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda working as technical consultants as well as art staffers. There's some pretty good stuff here and there. The portrayal of a periodic nova star in "Evolution" was so good you could use it in a science class to illustrate the principle. And "Yesterday's Enterprise"'s explanation of the time warp as due to "a Kerr loop of superstring material" is actually quite a plausible one grounded in real general-relativistic concepts and advanced astrophysics, aside from the misuse of "superstring" to mean "cosmic string." But as TNG and its successors went on, the standards of science declined, and the good science gave way more and more to actual technobabble, made-up stuff like tetryons and veterons and "anti-time."

Large chunks of the science in Star Trek is complete made up, and that's okay because Star Trek is set in a fantasy future, not a scientific realistic one.

Again, that was absolutely not Gene Roddenberry's original intention. That's the result of later producers not bothering to maintain the same effort at credibility that Roddenberry aspired to. His explicit goal in the creation of Star Trek was to make a show unlike everything else in SFTV at the time -- more adult, more sophisticated, more realistic both from a character standpoint and a scientific standpoint. And for pretty much the first 20-25 years of Trek's existence, it succeeded in that goal, remaining head and shoulders above the ludicrous, cheesy SFTV that followed, things like Space: 1999 and Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers.

It wasn't until the late '80s and the '90s that other smart SFTV shows followed in TNG's footsteps, though they were usually relatively fanciful themselves. And Trek's own commitment to credibility grew increasingly inconsistent over time. So audiences today don't see Trek as any different from the rest of SFTV. It's just another show for you. That's sad, because for a generation it was the best thing SFTV had to offer by a considerable margin. Well, it's not really sad -- it's good that there's so much more quality SFTV now, that it's not just one good, smart show and a bunch of cheese. But as someone who grew up in the era when Trek was the undisputed standout in SFTV, it's kind of sad that audiences today don't realize how extraordinary it was in its day, and for some time thereafter.

 

[Prax]

Andre Bormanis was the scientific consultant for TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Whatever the original ideas or intent may have been, I can't see past intelligent design ("The Chase"), evolved transwarp salamanders ("Threshold"), angels ("Transfigurations"), ghosts ("Sub Rosa"), gods ("Who Mourns...", Q and others), brain-stealing and whatnot when I watch the show.

That said, I do enjoy it for what it is and don't expect more from it than the above.

 

[Tenacity]

I'm talking about TOS

I'm talking about Star Trek as a whole.

That said, I do enjoy it for what it is and don't expect more from it than the above.

You can expect more, and that's fine. but you aren't necessarily going to get it.

 

[Christopher]

Andre Bormanis was the scientific consultant for TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise.

No, Bormanis didn't begin until DS9 premiered, and was only the science advisor on season 7 of TNG; Naren Shankar preceded him in the role in season 6 of TNG. And both Sternbach and Okuda were credited from the start of TNG as technical consultants.

I'm talking about Star Trek as a whole.

And my point is that it's not a monolithic whole. As I said, different creators over the decades have approached Trek very differently from each other. It is a titanic mistake of logic and fact to assume they've all done things the exact same way. The fact that Gene Roddenberry intended TOS to be more plausible and grounded than any other SFTV show before it has been extremely well-documented over the decades. Just read The Making of Star Trek, the definitive behind-the-scenes book about the original show. But his successors have rarely attempted to live up to the same standards.

 

[Prax]

No, Bormanis didn't begin until DS9 premiered, and was only the science advisor on season 7 of TNG; Naren Shankar preceded him in the role in season 6 of TNG. And both Sternbach and Okuda were credited from the start of TNG as technical consultants.

Edit: Andre Bormanis was the scientific consultant for part of TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise.


They were all there for the various series. It's not like Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda contributed to the plausibility in early TNG, then left; or that they cared, then stopped caring.

 

[Christopher]

They were all there for the various series. It's not like Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda contributed to the plausibility in early TNG, then left; or that they cared, then stopped caring.

Of course not, but consultants and advisors are low on the totem pole. The reason they're called that is that nobody is required to do what they say. So whether their advice gets used depends on how willing the producers are to listen to it. And early TNG's producers were more inclined to listen than a lot of the later showrunners, let alone the filmmakers. That's why the science degenerated from the smart, literate stuff in early TNG to the made-up nonsense words in the later shows. I've always suspected that part of it was Rick Berman not wanting the shows to repeat themselves and demanding fresh new technobabble terms and particles-of-the-week, so once they exhausted the believable terminology, they were forced to resort to gibberish.

 

[picard_2305]

It's an old argument, but yes, it was still too TNG-like and therefore didn't delivery enough retro appeal.

I think it did a better job at doing a pre TOS prequel vibe than DSC has done so far. The visual nods to TOS, like T'Pol having a Spock scanner and the nacelles being cylindrical. If DSC took the TOS look and gave it a modern facelift, not a completete redesign then there be a win win.

 

[Rick Sternbach]

Of course not, but consultants and advisors are low on the totem pole. The reason they're called that is that nobody is required to do what they say. So whether their advice gets used depends on how willing the producers are to listen to it. And early TNG's producers were more inclined to listen than a lot of the later showrunners, let alone the filmmakers. That's why the science degenerated from the smart, literate stuff in early TNG to the made-up nonsense words in the later shows. I've always suspected that part of it was Rick Berman not wanting the shows to repeat themselves and demanding fresh new technobabble terms and particles-of-the-week, so once they exhausted the believable terminology, they were forced to resort to gibberish.

Mike Okuda and I actually had a pretty decent batting average (writer/producer approvals) when it came to fleshing out most all of the 24th century tech hardware and operations, and offering up some basic science pointers and astronomical data. TPTB could use it or not, sure, but pretty early on they began to trust what we put into the memos. Yeah, some of the terminology came off as super-science handwaving, but I think those were occasions when the script called for something weird and new, and we tried to make it at least sound plausible. Verteron, for example, came from me; I used the Latin root for "to turn" to indicate a strange subatomic something that could twist/bend space. We really did try. However, when it came to terms like isogenic or metaphasic, that really, really wasn't us. - Rick

 

[Christopher]

Verteron, for example, came from me; I used the Latin root for "to turn" to indicate a strange subatomic something that could twist/bend space. We really did try. However, when it came to terms like isogenic or metaphasic, that really, really wasn't us. - Rick

Hi, Rick, thanks for the input. Yeah, I figured that later stuff wasn't coming from you guys. It seemed to start once Andre Bormanis came on board as science advisor, though of course correlation doesn't prove causation. We got an astonishing number of technobabble terms containing either "iso-" or "-lytic," often in contexts where the meaning of those roots had no apparent connection to what was being described. And yes, there was even "isolytic" used at least once.

What I found really weird was how TNG: "Emergence" introduced the term "vertions." We already had verterons, so where was the sense in coining something so similar-sounding?

 

[Lance]

My take is that ENT (and DSC to some extent) are misblamed for this. The TMP aesthetic was, I believe, a good natured attempt to offer up what TOS 'really' looked like with a bit more budget, likewise I don't believe the use of the movie Enterprise to represent the 1701 in "The Naked Now" to be a mistake. The idea of that being a retcon of the design aesthetic, or simply a more detailed version of it, is perfectly okay to me.

The problem doesn't lie with the prequels for getting it 'wrong', but with first TNG, then DS9, for thinking it would be cute to have current day characters interacting with 1960s era sets. Those are the shows that quantified the 60s era retro look as authentic in-universe, so yes while I think that meant ENT and DSC had an obligation to follow suit as it had by then been established how this particular era 'looked' (moreso in DSC's case as its supposed to be near contemporaneous to TOS), it was in fact TNG and DS9 that created the problem. Without "Relics" and "Trials and Tribbleations" confirming that aesthetic as being the real historical look, I honestly don't believe that ENT would've come under fire for this.

 

[Christopher]

My take is that ENT (and DSC to some extent) are misblamed for this. The TMP aesthetic was, I believe, a good natured attempt to offer up what TOS 'really' looked like with a bit more budget, likewise I don't believe the use of the movie Enterprise to represent the 1701 in "The Naked Now" to be a mistake. The idea of that being a retcon of the design aesthetic, or simply a more detailed version of it, is perfectly okay to me.

I've heard indirectly that, according to someone in the know, Roddenberry saw TNG as a soft reboot, his chance to revise the Trek universe in a way that discarded the parts he wasn't happy with. It's well-known that he wanted the animated series left out, but apparently he felt the same about the Harve Bennett movies and some portions of TOS as well. Some of that was that he didn't like the parts that he wasn't directly in charge of, but part was probably his own dissatisfaction with the compromises and mistakes and limitations he'd been unable to avoid on TOS.

The problem doesn't lie with the prequels for getting it 'wrong', but with first TNG, then DS9, for thinking it would be cute to have current day characters interacting with 1960s era sets. Those are the shows that quantified the 60s era retro look as authentic in-universe, so yes while I think that meant ENT and DSC had an obligation to follow suit as it had by then been established how this particular era 'looked' (moreso in DSC's case as its supposed to be near contemporaneous to TOS), it was in fact TNG and DS9 that created the problem. Without "Relics" and "Trials and Tribbleations" confirming that aesthetic as being the real historical look, I honestly don't believe that ENT would've come under fire for this.

That wasn't being "cute" so much as a logistical necessity. "Relics" didn't have the budget to rebuild the entire bridge, so they had to use a stock shot of the empty bridge from "Tomorrow is Yesterday" and rent some fan replicas of the command chair and helm console, then shoot everything against the backdrop of the lift alcove and single console that they could afford to build. (They just moved it around to the other side for the reverse shots.) They had to match the look of the original footage and replicas, because that was all they could afford. And "Trials and Tribble-ations" was built around the idea of a Forrest Gump-style integration of DS9 actors into stock footage from TOS, so again, they had to match the original look for the sake of visual continuity with the reused materials. As for "In a Mirror, Darkly," I think that it reused the set pieces built for "Trials" as portions of the fuller set recreations -- that they'd been building the whole thing up in stages since "Relics" and now were able to finish it. (I think Mike Okuda actually found some original "gumdrop" console buttons left over from TOS and incorporated those into the reconstruction.) So again, they were somewhat obligated to recreate the original look because of their budgetary need to reuse what they had. It was never strictly an aesthetic choice.

 

[Tuskin38]

They also borrowed the forward consoles targeting scope (?) from Star Trek New Voyages fan series for IAMD.

 

[Christopher]

So it's basically the same reason TNG kept so much of the movie-era design sensibilities -- because cost-cutting required them to recycle pre-existing sets, miniatures, and costumes. Designs get kept when actual production assets are directly recycled in one way or another. But when a Star Trek production starts out from scratch, without reusing anything from the past -- as with TMP, Kelvin, and Discovery -- you get a clean break design-wise. Which suggests that's the default one would expect if the decisions were based purely on aesthetic concerns rather than budgetary and logistical ones.

After all, fans may like things to stay the same, but production designers are, well, designers. It makes sense that they'd want to create their own original versions of things rather than just copying their predecessors' work. They are getting paid to be creative, after all.

 

[Lance]

Strictly speaking I agree that the DS9 example is dictated to by the concept of integrating TOS footage with DS9 actors -- hence, as I stated, confirming the TOS look as 'accurate' by proxy -- but I have heard reports that in Relics case the first notion was to rebuild the movie era bridge until someone came up with a cost effective way to partially rebuild the original set. My belief is that TMP is a soft reboot of what all of TOS's aesthetics 'really' looked like and that was fine right up to the point where Relics opened a can of worms by having Scotty interact with the 60s era set. It's like the so-called Klingon problem too: I think it's perfectly acceptable that the TMP era onwards Klingons were simply what TOS Klingons looked like with a better make up budget, which seems to have been the general idea (eg. DS9's Blood Oath etc), until T&T had to present DS9 era people interacting with TOS Klingons and had to address the visual discrepency onscreen.

Ultimately IMO none of it really *matters*, but while some might criticise ENT and DSC for failing to recognize TOS's 60s aesthetic, the reality as far as I see it is that it was TNG and DS9 who confirmed that aesthetic was indeed historically true in the Trek universe, so the expectation was there within fandom that anything before that period needed to somehow reflect it. Without those two Next Trek episodes, I doubt anybody would've seriously expected a TOS Trek prequel to actually look like a retro future, but it had become canonized as the way things really looked and that the massive changes in design that TMP brought in were not simply retcons but actual in universe changes.

Once something is established as being or looking a certain way within the historical construct of a work, it becomes incumbent to maintain that no matter how ridiculous. Consider how the Star Wars prequels and interquels (Rogue One etc) still make some vague attempt to retain a 1970s aesthetic in hairstyles and set designs etc despite the ridiculousness of doing so The 'original sin' of making 60s Trek aesthetic the actual in universe look was commited by TNG and DS9. ENT is unfairly criticised for beating it's own drum, but if those earlier series hadn't done that and made the 60s aesthetic the way TOS actually looked in universe, then it hardly would've been so important for ENT to maintain it. Like the Blood Oath Klingons, we'd probably all have simply have suspended our disbelief and run with it.

 

[Christopher]

but while some might criticise ENT and DSC for failing to recognize TOS's 60s aesthetic

Anyone who does so isn't paying attention -- or is confusing recognition with slavish copying. ENT's designs were loaded with homages to TOS designs. They were a very well-thought-out effort to strike a balance between TOS aesthetics, 21st-century technology, and modern TV production standards. As for DSC, they've departed more radically, but they clearly do recognize TOS's aesthetics, as seen in details like the phaser and communicator designs, the return of a TOS-style look to the Andorians (with a few tweaks), and so forth.

the reality as far as I see it is that it was TNG and DS9 who confirmed that aesthetic was indeed historically true in the Trek universe, so the expectation was there within fandom that anything before that period needed to somehow reflect it.

Except none of this is "history," and it's pretentious twaddle to pretend that it is. It's just a bunch of stuff people made up for fun. And different people make it up differently, which is only to be expected when dealing with creativity.

Once something is established as being or looking a certain way within the historical construct of a work, it becomes incumbent to maintain that no matter how ridiculous.

No, it absolutely does not. It is absolutely wrong to insist that every creator of fiction should somehow be required to do things the same way. As a creator myself, I find that mindset hideously oppressive and threatening. The whole point of creativity is that everyone gets to do it differently. Fiction and art are supposed to challenge and surprise us, to show us unexpected things and expand our minds, not just conform to our pre-existing prejudices and expectations.

And comparing Star Trek to Star Wars is invalid. The two works are profoundly different. Star Wars has always been an exercise in nostalgia from the start. It was created as an homage to '30s adventure serials and sci-fi comic strips, to '40s war movies and '50s samurai movies and sportscars. It's always been about paying tribute to the past. And it's set "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away," so there's no pretense that its designs represent anything in our own future; thus they can be forever retro. But Star Trek was meant to look to the future, to extrapolate forward from its present. That demands a totally different approach to its design, an approach that constantly updates to reflect real-world progress and new ideas of the future.

 

[Mutai Sho-Rin]

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Standing Ovation. Slavish adherence to some imagined "canon" is equal to fundamentalist religion, just not quite as likely to harm real people.