Explanation for Worf's Tractor Beam Premonition? (from "Q Who")

[marsh8472]

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During the conference scene Worf chimes in and tells Picard that the Borg have locked a tractor beam on the Enterprise. We hear the chime noise a second before the camera switches away from the view screen where we have a good view of the entire borg ship and no tractor beam in sight. In addition to the second of view screen after Worf's chimes in, I would also expect there to be several seconds that would have elapsed between when the Borg lock a tractor beam, Worf to notice, and Worf to push the button to chime in to the conference room.

It would appear from this visual evidence that Worf may have had foreknowledge about the Borg's intentions to lock on a tractor beam. I'm trying to think of how he knew. Here's some ideas to start out:

1) The view screen is on a time delay of several seconds and is not showing a live feed of the Borg ship.
2) The view screen filters out the spectrum of light that the tractor beam admits
3) Enterprise sensors can detect a tractor beam lock several seconds before it's visible
4) Q was preventing the tractor beam from showing on the screen to delay their response a bit
5) Advanced foreknowledge from a temporal anomaly gave Worf precognition abilities like in episode "Cause and Effect"
6) A temporal distortion caused parts of the enterprise to exist in different time periods similar to Voyager episode "Relativity" where Neelix calls the doctor the mess hall about a sickness and the doctor receives the message and arrives at the mess hall before it occurs
7) Worf has a natural ESP ability, a known ability per TOS episode "Where No Man Has Gone Before"
8) Worf was secretly working with the Borg or Q and Worf gave himself away a bit by chiming in a little too early

Any ideas what's going on there?

 

[Carpathia86]

My idea is that it was merely an error with the VFX department.

 

[marsh8472]

My idea is that it was merely an error with the VFX department.

Probably but there needs to be an in-universe explanation too. Unless star trek is story within its own universe.

Either from "Ship in a Bottle" where PIcard said this:

PICARD: In a sense. But who knows? Our reality may be very much like theirs. All this might be just be an elaborate simulation running inside a little device sitting on someone's table.

Then there was a bug in the simulation that caused a momentary lag between audio and video in the simulation.

Or "Far Beyond the Stars" where Sisko said this:

SISKO: I suppose it did. But I have begun to wonder. What if it wasn't a dream? What if this life we're leading, all of this, you and me, everything. What if all this is the illusion?

and star trek is a story in its own universe, converted into a series later on which had an error in their VFX department

 

[CorporalCaptain]

My idea is that it was merely an error with the VFX department.

Mine too. [ed - To clarify, it's a problem in the VFX, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's the fault of the VFX department. The blame could lie with the director and/or the editor. In any case, almost certainly the problem could have been fixed during editing, simply by switching over to a different shot just before Worf calls the conference room.]

Probably but there needs to be an in-universe explanation too.

No, there doesn't. Plenty of great shows and films work just fine, despite having imperfections that are simply the consequence of their having been made by flawed humans.

 

[thribs]

I’m going with that they were watching a recording of the Cube. It wasn’t live.

 

[marsh8472]

I’m going with that they were watching a recording of the Cube. It wasn’t live.

Wonder why a recording would be preferred over a live shot

 

[thribs]

Wonder why a recording would be preferred over a live shot

Who knows how these 24th century people think.

 

[Butters]

It’s a natural phenomenon often captured on film, but there’s no explanation for it.

Usually it’s a car or building exploding twice or more, but from different angles. Other times, it affects onlookers reacting to the same event sequentially, rather than simultaneously, as we would expect.

 

[at Quark's]

Perhaps the first tractor beam only lasted for a few seconds, switched off, brief analysis of the effects and then a second tractor beam, much better tailored to the ENT-D is switched on. (Senior crew enters in the pause).

 

[Timo]

Or then it is like weapons lock: you lock first, and then fire. This the heroes can always sense before the actual shots fall.

Timo Saloniemi.

 

[Qonundrum]

Wonder why a recording would be preferred over a live shot

Because Memorex is more fun and dagnabbit, they're going to get as much use out of the new ship's recording instruments than to look out a boring window.

But, ultimately, production snafu or they ran out of time and money to out in the green beam. Or swapped scene f/x shots or something. As said above, human error.

Besides, look at all the scenes where Worf states there's a ship decloaking and then we see it, not before? Why can't Worf have his own little monitor on his panel to show it decloaking as opposed to the actor scene followed by f/x scene or, worse, f/x scene then actor scene because that just has Worf telling us all what we already knew.

 

[marsh8472]

I fixed it

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[CorporalCaptain]

I fixed it

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You essentially did, with a simple editing change and no new VFX. Good job.

The only issue, though, is that it's not from the ship's point of view. That's why I suggested just cutting away from the screen altogether, because that way you don't have to have a VFX shot at all, so you don't have to come up with a new one, though you do have to have other footage to go in its place of some or all of the crew still at the table, if you follow.

 

[thribs]

Nice but the angle is wrong. If that was live we should see it activating while Q is on screen.

 

[JesterFace]

The entire Borg cube was not on the screen when the report came in about the tractor beam.

Q was on the screen just before the tractor beam thingy, maybe it was due to that.

Or maybe it was just a paused image on the Borg ship on the screen.

 

[Makarov]

Worf was always betazoid. Any episodes referring to him as Klingon were typos in the scripts. By the time they realized this over 100 episodes had already been filmed so they couldn't correct it

 

[marsh8472]

Worf was always betazoid. Any episodes referring to him as Klingon were typos in the scripts. By the time they realized this over 100 episodes had already been filmed so they couldn't correct it

Could be a miracle. Kahless allegedly came to Worf in a vision in the caves of No'Mat where he told him that he would do something that no klingon had ever done before. Maybe this was it.

 

[cgervasi]

Any ideas what's going on there?

It's like how you can't see a laser beam unless it's hitting you directly or reflecting off something. Maybe a tractor beam can't be seen if it's hitting you directly. Maybe we only see the effects of it exciting trace gasses in space, but those photos are absorbed by the tractor beam. Maybe this affect is proportional to the cosine of the angle between the viewer an the tractor beam. So the magnitude of its brightness is proportional to the sine of the angle. At 0 degrees you see nothing; it's brightest at a 90 degree angle.

 

[Ar-Pharazon]

Wonder why a recording would be preferred over a live shot

Who knows how these 24th century people think.

The 24th century is a Utopia, right? They would use the time delay over live feed in case anyone on the other end drops an f-bomb. Can't have swearing in the 24th century.

Data swearing in FC was live, so you can see the problem there.

 

[PicardSpeedo]

The issue was that Data had accidentally recorded his weird porn over the first few seconds of the sensor feed, and so there was a delay while they cued up the recording to start a few seconds after the dirty part ended.