Never to be seen/heard from/used again

[jaime]

Or at the very least, that gun that can beam bullets on DS9 should have been a lot more in-demand.

Both of those moments always remind me of the early DS9 novel 'fallen heroes' where Dax replicates a nasty Klingon machine gun to deal with energy weapon reflecting enemies. It also featured cultural dissonance for U.K. Readers, when toddler Molly burnt her 'fanny' on a radioactive deck plate. (It's a lot like any given Voyager episode that is time loop reset after everyone dies throughout the episode.) extra confusing because I think the writer had a welsh name. Took me right out of the book as a teen...I don't think I had even heard the American version of the word. Anyway, the energy reflecting faceless troopers taking over the station and the method for dealing them seemed very very similar to later Ds9 episodes.

 

[Balok's Decoy]

In Pen Pals, Dr Pulaski is able to erase Sarjenka's memories up to when she first heard from Data. I was thinking about that last night when I was watching Time's Arrow -- they could have stunned Sam Clemens (that's with an "e"), erased his memory, and just left him in an alley. Problem solved.

 

[FormerLurker]

If you tell viewers repeatedly that so-and-so is a hologram and will always BE a hologram, and make that part of who and what the character is, as with Picardo's Dr and Rimmer, of course all the viewers get it. If you spend entire episodes exploring what it means for those characters to be holograms, of course everyone gets it (anyone who cares to, if SF ideas appeal to you).

However, if you hurriedly insert a line in an already-established show with no previous hologramatic communication system that, suddenly, they have one, and that if they see a guy standing in the corner of the room it's not really a guy standing in the corner of the room but a 3D picture of one... AND they instantly move on to the main story of the episode, you'd better have a pretty strong flicker or something.

A problem in fandom: "I picked up on it, therefore anyone and everyone with brains should be expected to." We are not good samples of the audience. Some of us are powerfully driven to notice all bits of exposition and tech details. Others wait to be drawn in by story first.

Isn't this what I said, though with very different wording?