Five Minute Hell

[RobertScorpio]

Trek's, all of them, rely on the five minute quick fix..which ones were done real good? And which were not good at all?? I think TNG made it an artform, but even they tripped it up at times..

Rob
Scorpio

 

[blaXXer]

lolwut?

 

[Marie1]

You mean like last minute changes? Cuz I liked "To the Death" DS9 tho there were apparently last minute changes.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

^^
I believe the OP means when the main characters in Trek find a suden soultion to their problems 5 minutes before the show ends.

 

[Marie1]

Ooohhh... k, tnx.

Ummm, hmmm... Maybe DS9 Babel, and what one with the missile heading for Cardassian Territory? Oh, and that one where Dax and Worf are almost executed by the Dominion.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

While I generally hate quick fixes, I don't hate the ending of BOBW. While not the greatest thing in the world, I understood that they couldn't defeat it traditionally.

 

[sbk1234]

I remember really wondering about how they'd come to a solution in Contagion, on TNG. I think that was really well done. I was surprised, but I didn't feel cheated.

 

[Outpost4]

Welcome to the world of episodic television, RobertScorpio.

Trek is no worse than the detective who reveals the killer five minutes before the end of the show, relying on leaps of imagination masked as logic to connect clues that have little in common. A good lawyer would get most of Columbo's opponents off, at least those who didn't confess thirty seconds before the final fade to black.

 

[JiNX-01]

While I generally hate quick fixes, I don't hate the ending of BOBW. While not the greatest thing in the world, I understood that they couldn't defeat it traditionally.

Actually, what I like about the ending is the simplicity of the solution. No technobabble yanked out of somebody's colon.

Picard is a Borg, even tho' he doesn't have the level of access that would let him shut down the cube himself. But he does have full access to the knowledge of the collective, including what would be accessible to Data and what it would take to destroy the cube.

 

[spoonunseptium]

Welcome to the world of episodic television, RobertScorpio.

Trek is no worse than the detective who reveals the killer five minutes before the end of the show, relying on leaps of imagination masked as logic to connect clues that have little in common. A good lawyer would get most of Columbo's opponents off, at least those who didn't confess thirty seconds before the final fade to black.

lol, exactly! Ever watched the show House? Every single episode, without fail- they wouldn't revel the cause of the medical meltdown until exactly 3 minutes before it ended. Whenever I'd get anxious about the mystery being solved, I'd look at the clock and be like "oh, it's not 8:57 yet."

Anyway, my favorite has got to be an episode in Voyager, when B'elanna actually says, "I just thought of this!" She tweaks something, and the entire problem is solved.

that was one of my few wtf moments.

 

[Outpost4]

My WTF moment was Spock's inner eyelid. If I had been McCoy at the end of Operation: Annihilate!, I would have said, "What inner eyelid? I'm a physician trained in Vulcan anatomy and I don't know about any freakin' inner eyelid. Just before the commercial you're as blind as a bat and right after the break, you pull an inner eyelid out of the air so you can see again. What about you inner bullshit?"

Blame bad writing, not Trek. You might as well start blaming the ancient Greeks who came up with a deus ex machina ending first.

 

[Triskelion]

Welcome to the world of episodic television, RobertScorpio.

Trek is no worse than the detective who reveals the killer five minutes before the end of the show, relying on leaps of imagination masked as logic to connect clues that have little in common. A good lawyer would get most of Columbo's opponents off, at least those who didn't confess thirty seconds before the final fade to black.

lol, exactly! Ever watched the show House? Every single episode, without fail- they wouldn't revel the cause of the medical meltdown until exactly 3 minutes before it ended. Whenever I'd get anxious about the mystery being solved, I'd look at the clock and be like "oh, it's not 8:57 yet."

Anyway, my favorite has got to be an episode in Voyager, when B'elanna actually says, "I just thought of this!" She tweaks something, and the entire problem is solved.

that was one of my few wtf moments.

I bet, I just bet it was using a "skeletal lock" on the transporter.

VOY was notorious for those technobabble solutions. Rotate frequencies! Adjust the phase variance! Feedback the pulse! Run like hell!

 

[RobertScorpio]

Welcome to the world of episodic television, RobertScorpio.

Trek is no worse than the detective who reveals the killer five minutes before the end of the show, relying on leaps of imagination masked as logic to connect clues that have little in common. A good lawyer would get most of Columbo's opponents off, at least those who didn't confess thirty seconds before the final fade to black.

lol, exactly! Ever watched the show House? Every single episode, without fail- they wouldn't revel the cause of the medical meltdown until exactly 3 minutes before it ended. Whenever I'd get anxious about the mystery being solved, I'd look at the clock and be like "oh, it's not 8:57 yet."

Anyway, my favorite has got to be an episode in Voyager, when B'elanna actually says, "I just thought of this!" She tweaks something, and the entire problem is solved.

that was one of my few wtf moments.

I bet, I just bet it was using a "skeletal lock" on the transporter.

VOY was notorious for those technobabble solutions. Rotate frequencies! Adjust the phase variance! Feedback the pulse! Run like hell!

Yep..I think that is why 'normal' people don't gravitate toward the later TREKS as much as they still do to TOS. I think the technobabble really was a bubble buster. It seeme that TNG and onward, they needed to find some real theory, perhaps with JPL input, to explain what was going on....WRONG WRONG WRONG..just tell a good story. If there are people who need some real theory to explain a TV SHOW, then they represent %.00005 of the rest of us....IMO.

Rob

 

[Mistral]

This kind of ending is emblematic of Trek. When it worked, it was great. I suggest the second Moriarty episode on TNG as an example. But I think the open-ended stories worked best, like Far Beyond the Stars, or the ones that told a "complete" story with balance like "The Inner Light" on TNG, or "The Visitor" on DS9.