Favorite technobabble scenes in TNG?

[Jayson1]

Tech talk I know could sometimes be use badly, though I feel like I understand why they used it. What are some scenes with this kind of talk that you like. I got a few right here.

Data's super long code in "brothers" while on the bridge while trying to get off the ship.
Geordi playing that kind of quiz game were he has to name all those elements in role in the opening scene of "Mind's Eye."
the fake technobabble riker is using to trick the ferengi in the ep "Rascals"
Alot of the problem solving stuff between Geordi and the hologram of Doctor Brams in the ep "Booby trap."

Jason

 

[Sakonna]

The fake technobabble from Riker in "Rascals" is the first thing that popped into my head when I saw your thread title. That was a very finely tuned level of ridiculousness they were trying to hit.

I also love Troi's technobabble in "Timescape" about how Romulan ships work, after "Face Of The Enemy" suddenly made her the resident expert on Romulan technology.

 

[Mojochi]

Watching poor James Doohan stumble through the Jenolan incident tech talk, that he was clearly reading off of cue cards, as he walked down the corridor with Geordi, overloads in the plasma transfer conduits, gravimetric interference, aft power coil explosions. I doubt he'd had that much condensed tech talk in any of his other Trek appearances. He must've thought it was insanity, & I'd never considered how truly different their two shows were until I saw him doing it.

I never saw the technobabble quite the same after that, & I can completely understand how the 1st lady to test for Janeway on Voyager could think it was utterly infantile. They went even farther overboard on that show. It was just so easy to overlook it on TNG, because Spiner, & Burton routinely made it so conversational. It really impresses me when I see them do it now. There may be no better actor readings of that stuff than those two

 

[Armus]

I don't know. "A Matter of Perspective" is a guilty pleasure so maybe that Krieger Wave nonsense.

 

[Paradise City]

There's an equilibrium there that TNG on never got right. Because watching some first and second seasons, the explanations of the various stuff are often conspicuously child-like. Then later on they troweled layer upon layer of obtuse technobabble.

I thought Data giving his commands in Brothers was well done -- aside from not aligning what the screen said with the dialogue.

 

[RAMA]

Post STNG shows had more technobabble, but STNG got the ball rolling for sure. I'm guessing that like the Kelvin era movies, DSC will wisely eschew technobabble for driving the plot forward.

 

[Mojochi]

Post STNG shows had more technobabble, but STNG got the ball rolling for sure. I'm guessing that like the Kelvin era movies, DSC will wisely eschew technobabble for driving the plot forward.

Agreed. Unless it was for comedic effect (Rascals) or to highlight Data's capabilities (Brothers) I never felt (At the time) that TNG's technobabble was excessive or distracting. Whether it was the writers keeping it reigned in, or the ease with which the actors delivered it, it never pulled me out of the story in the way that sometimes would happen on later spinoffs, but seeing poor Scotty, of all people, struggle with it, made it glaringly obvious that this wasn't your dad's Star Trek anymore

 

[Vandervecken]

Data: The asteroids contain large quantities of meklonite, which is interfering with our scanners. I am also detecting traces of kephneum, a compound found in the outer shell of the parent being. It is likely the asteroids provide sustenance for this lifeform, sir. ---Galaxy's Child


Too right. I should have thought of that.

 

[Jayson1]

I disagree with the notion that the other shows had more technobabble. They overall had less simply because they had fewer years with Michael Pillar in charge. He basically invented the stuff. When you look at DS9 that talk is at it's biggest use in season 1 and 2 and the same with Voyager. The reason why it was invented I feel was to have make the technology of Trek feel more realistic while also helping make the character fee like they were very capable and smart people.

Jason

 

[Kirks_Flying_Wig]

Watching poor James Doohan stumble through the Jenolan incident tech talk, that he was clearly reading off of cue cards, as he walked down the corridor with Geordi, overloads in the plasma transfer conduits, gravimetric interference, aft power coil explosions. I doubt he'd had that much condensed tech talk in any of his other Trek appearances. He must've thought it was insanity, & I'd never considered how truly different their two shows were until I saw him doing it.

He seemed to be having the same trouble in Generations.

 

[RAMA]

Doohan considered himself a "techie" and often read science and technology books. So the dialogue shouldn't have been too hard for him to get used to.

RAMA

Watching poor James Doohan stumble through the Jenolan incident tech talk, that he was clearly reading off of cue cards, as he walked down the corridor with Geordi, overloads in the plasma transfer conduits, gravimetric interference, aft power coil explosions. I doubt he'd had that much condensed tech talk in any of his other Trek appearances. He must've thought it was insanity, & I'd never considered how truly different their two shows were until I saw him doing it.

I never saw the technobabble quite the same after that, & I can completely understand how the 1st lady to test for Janeway on Voyager could think it was utterly infantile. They went even farther overboard on that show. It was just so easy to overlook it on TNG, because Spiner, & Burton routinely made it so conversational. It really impresses me when I see them do it now. There may be no better actor readings of that stuff than those two

 

[Mojochi]

Doohan considered himself a "techie" and often read science and technology books. So the dialogue shouldn't have been too hard for him to get used to.

RAMA

It's not a science or intelligence thing. It's an acting thing, & I'm by no means saying anything negative about Doohan. That type of dialog can be very overwhelming if you don't do it regularly, and it looked pretty obvious to me that they had him reading it from cue cards. The issue was that not only was Doohan getting old, but he hadn't done much acting apart from Scotty, in a long time, and even when he did, that kind of writing was not in fashion at such extremes.

Plus, he may not have gotten sufficient time to digest the lines properly enough to do it from memory. One of the easiest ways to memorize lines is to relate to them, digest the meaning, but with all that technobabble, it's almost impossible to do it that way. It's all so abstract to common language, that you can't relate. I've seen lots of actors struggle through lines & that's exactly how it looks, but even with those hurdles, he still managed to carry the scene over well enough IMHO. I just can't help noticing

 

[ALF]

Data's super long code in "brothers" while on the bridge while trying to get off the ship.

Jason

If you liked that scene, you may enjoy this, then:

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O'Brien always seemed to sell me on the technobabble the best. Here's a nice one from The Nth Degree but it's Barclay:

BARCLAY :It... it just occurred to me that I could set up a frequency harmonic between the deflector and the shield grid... using the warp field generator as a power flow anti-attenuator and that of course naturally created an amplification of the inherent energy output.

RIKER: Uh huh............................Nice job.​

 

[Mojochi]

O'Brien always seemed to sell me on the technobabble the best.

Agreed. Him & Laforge make it the most conversational

BARCLAY :It... it just occurred to me that I could set up a frequency harmonic between the deflector and the shield grid... using the warp field generator as a power flow anti-attenuator and that of course naturally created an amplification of the inherent energy output.

Oooooo Good one lol​

 

[Sakonna]

O'Brien always seemed to sell me on the technobabble the best.

Agreed. Him & Laforge make it the most conversational

It's not TNG, but it is O'Brien -- I love his explanation in "Past Tense" of the time travel. A micro-singularity traveling through the sector exploded and caused the chroniton particles in the hull to enter a high state of temporal polarization, thus redirecting the transporter beam, not in space but in time... it's complete gibberish, and it comes out totally plausible. And Nana Visitor has these priceless reactions through the whole thing.

The conference room explanations for what's going on in "Cause & Effect" and "Parallels" are also fun.

 

[Mojochi]

It's not TNG, but it is O'Brien -- I love his explanation in "Past Tense" of the time travel. A micro-singularity traveling through the sector exploded and caused the chroniton particles in the hull to enter a high state of temporal polarization, thus redirecting the transporter beam, not in space but in time... it's complete gibberish, and it comes out totally plausible. And Nana Visitor has these priceless reactions through the whole thing.

The conference room explanations for what's going on in "Cause & Effect" and "Parallels" are also fun.

Actually, that's when I started getting annoyed by it. lol I do get that in this case it's kind of done for humor, but chroniton this & chroniton. That made time travel on Star Trek so .....ick,

Like it took the wind right out of the time travel concept's sails, & turned it into this run of the mill thing, like changing your wiper blades. "Pull over at the next space station. We gotta sort out our chornitons before we have another temporal anomaly"

 

[Armus]

Actually, that's when I started getting annoyed by it. lol I do get that in this case it's kind of done for humor, but chroniton this & chroniton. That made time travel on Star Trek so .....ick,

Like it took the wind right out of the time travel concept's sails, & turned it into this run of the mill thing, like changing your wiper blades. "Pull over at the next space station. We gotta sort out our chornitons before we have another temporal anomaly"

I just watched "Parallels". It's a decent show but the technobabble explanations of those late TNG episodes are rediculous. Somehow or another it's Geordi's visor that created the problem. "When Worf's shuttlecraft came into the fissure, its warp engines caused a small break between the quantum realities. Worf was thrown into quantum flux. He started shifting into other realities." - Data
After the counterpart Dr. Crusher's question about La Forge's VISOR, Data says that the VISOR uses a subspace differential pulse which intensified the quantum flux.

 

[Farscape One]

Brannon Braga penned episodes in particular loved technobabble.

 

[Mojochi]

I just watched "Parallels". It's a decent show but the technobabble explanations of those late TNG episodes are rediculous. Somehow or another it's Geordi's visor that created the problem. "When Worf's shuttlecraft came into the fissure, its warp engines caused a small break between the quantum realities. Worf was thrown into quantum flux. He started shifting into other realities." - Data
After the counterpart Dr. Crusher's question about La Forge's VISOR, Data says that the VISOR uses a subspace differential pulse which intensified the quantum flux.

Yeah... That one's pushing it. TNG's old standby mystery particle the Tachyon" got a buttload of mileage too

 

[velour]

It's not a science or intelligence thing. It's an acting thing, & I'm by no means saying anything negative about Doohan. That type of dialog can be very overwhelming if you don't do it regularly, and it looked pretty obvious to me that they had him reading it from cue cards. The issue was that not only was Doohan getting old, but he hadn't done much acting apart from Scotty, in a long time, and even when he did, that kind of writing was not in fashion at such extremes.

Plus, he may not have gotten sufficient time to digest the lines properly enough to do it from memory. One of the easiest ways to memorize lines is to relate to them, digest the meaning, but with all that technobabble, it's almost impossible to do it that way. It's all so abstract to common language, that you can't relate. I've seen lots of actors struggle through lines & that's exactly how it looks, but even with those hurdles, he still managed to carry the scene over well enough IMHO. I just can't help noticing

The technobabble on TNG was light years ahead of that on TOS.

The phrases and words that Scotty used on TOS sounded quaint and primitive compared to the dialogue of the TNG crew.

For example, in TOS "The Return of the Archons", these are some of the lines spoken by the chief engineer:

"Captain, we're under attack. There are heat beams of some kind coming up from the planet surface."

"Those heat beams are still on us. You've got to cut them off Mr. Spock, or we'll cook."

"The heat rays are gone, Captain, and Mr. Sulu's back to normal."

And from "The Apple":
"Something from the surface. It's like a pail of water on a fire. A beam, maybe or a transmission. And it's still on. I'm having it analyzed, but it's like nothing I've seen before."

"We might be able to pull out with warp drive, but without it ... we're like a fly on fly paper."

"We're putting everything but the kitchen sink into impulse, sir."

Heat beams, heat rays, fly paper, kitchen sink, etc. That was the language Scotty used. It is actually kind of funny.

Scotty/Doohan sounded out of his league when he was talking with Geordi. But I would still take Scotty any day over Geordi.