RDM VS Technobabble, vol. 2

[Mach5]

http://trekmovie.com/2010/10/27/syf...ica-moore-talks-trek-technobabble-nitpickers/

"My experience in Star Trek taught me that technobabble could just swamp the drama in a show. Especially in a space opera, where you’re on ships in space and dealing with technical things, technobabble becomes a crutch to get into and out of situations. It just leaches all the drama away. The audience doesn’t know what the hell you’re talking about, and you’re making it up anyway. You make up a problem with the Enterprise warp drive, and then you solve it with a made-up problem, too."

I just love the way someone responded to this in the comments:

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The guy who showed us Captain Kirk’s ultimate paradise fantasy to be chopping wood, cooking eggs, riding horses and revisiting a “new” lost love instead of his son’s mother, and then used a non-sensical time-travel device to have an excuse bring Kirk and Picard together just to throw Kirk off a bridge to make Picard feel better about his lost brother and nephew tells us that the important thing is to be true to the characters?

He’s not completely untalented, but he is completely an arrogant douche sometimes.

Not the mention the fact that the last ST episode on which he ever worked (Barge of the dead) ended up being 0.5% sci-fi, and 99.5% fantasy...



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[Michael]

Of course everything he says is correct. When you use technobabble to resolve a story it sucks every drama out of it.

Not the mention the fact that the last ST episode on which he ever worked (Barge of the dead) ended up being 0.5% sci-fi, and 99.5% fantasy...

And? How does that diminish what he says about technobabble and characters?

 

[Mach5]

And? How does that diminish what he says about technobabble and characters?

I was just commenting on this:

He’s not completely untalented, but he is completely an arrogant douche sometimes.

When you use technobabble to resolve a story it sucks every drama out of it.

Same could be said about his famous "God did it" Deus ex machina thingy...

I dare you to name ten episodes in which it was technobabblethat that resolved everything.

 

[Anwar]

Moore is just as guilty of theobabble as any Trek is of Technobabble, so this is the kettle and the pot situation really...

 

[Michael]

I dare you to name ten episodes in which it was technobabblethat that resolved everything.

"The Cloud", "Threshold", "Tuvix", "The Swarm", "Macrocosm", "Endgame", "Relativity", "Alice", "Dragon's Teeth", "Drive".

Curiously, all of them are Voyager episodes.

 

[Anwar]

"Tuvix" no more was solved via technobabble than "Enemy Within" was.

"Macrocosm" was solved by Janeway luring all the virus monsters into one place and blowing them up.

Endgame was a clusterf*** but it was time-travel that drove the plot.

Relativity, again time-travel.

I haven't watch those others in a while.

 

[stj]

I dare you to name ten episodes in which it was technobabblethat that resolved everything.

"The Cloud", "Threshold", "Tuvix", "The Swarm", "Macrocosm", "Endgame", "Relativity", "Alice", "Dragon's Teeth", "Drive".

Curiously, all of them are Voyager episodes.

The Cloud was a character piece, about Janeway and Torres, Neelix and Kes mainly. To spell it out, Janeway's commitment to helping others, even bizarrely alien others who might not even be sapient or even sentient, was thrust into Neelix and Kes face. Neelix chose to become morale officer. The Janeway/Torres cooperation at the end was intended to show why Janeway picks Torres as chief engineer. Any big words involved are of no other importance.

Threshold has no drama. It's just a piece of Tom Paris emo which has to be reset at the end because otherwise they wouldn't have the character left around. This is one reason why it really is a bad episode.

Tuvix, as noted above, is not resolved by technobabble but by Janeway's decision to revive Tuvok and Neelix. The big words are just to set up a (preposterous) dilemma, then to allow Janeway to make a choice.

The Swarm is another nearly plotless piece. Janeway meets Assholes in Space, Kicks Ass. It's a bad episode because it's a trivial decision. The Doctor subplot is a soft reboot for the character.

Macrocosm is another simple adventure story, without a dramatic choice to be made. It's just, does Janeway win?
As noted, the strategy is the important thing, not the big words.

Endgame is resolved by the Admiral sacrificing herself. A kamikaze attack on the Borg is not technobabble in itself.

Relativity is a good bit of a comedy. It actually explains very little, which is why it's hard to closely follow the plot. Since it doesn't really explain much, it's hard to see how any sane person could rant about the technobabble.

Alice is another slice of Tom Paris emo. Tom Paris is a dreadful character but that's not a technobabble problem.

Dragon's Teeth ends with the good guys losing. How this qualifies as technobabble solving all the problems is another crazy complaint.

Drive is about Tom Paris being the perfect husband, in spite of Torres' not getting that he's not unthinking, he's just not pussywhipped. That's an ugly story but it's not one resolved by technobabble. The Harry Kim subplot doesn't matter because Garret Wang was just a token.

There is one common element in the list above, which is arbitrarily singling Voyager out for some bad science episodes. This is nonsense, because Ron D. Moore was complaining about big words, not bad science.

 

[JarodRussell]

I guess Moore hates House M.D. and CSI, too.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Of course everything he says is correct. When you use technobabble to resolve a story it sucks every drama out of it.

Yep. Technobabble is a waste of time.

Star Trek is fantasy dressed up with a few tropes that we agree to call "science fiction." SF is nothing but a subgenre of fantasy anyway.

A Trek fan calling Moore an "arrogant douche" for stating the obvious is just someone whose ox got gored.

 

[Jack Bauer]

It's the typical drooling fanboy response...take offense at something obvious and rather innocuous. Always getting their panties in a bunch over trivialities.

 

[Shatnertage]

^You should see the Doctor Who forum, and RTD's discussion of the Doctor's regeneration limits. You'd think he was pouring sugar in everyone's gas tank from how personally some folks have taken it.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

^You should see the Doctor Who forum, and RTD's discussion of the Doctor's regeneration limits. You'd think he was pouring sugar in everyone's gas tank from how personally some folks have taken it.

Really.

What's laughable there is the notion that the BBC would ever for a moment consider letting the Doctor expire after twelve (or however many) "regenerations." These things are commercial properties, people - they have never, ever been anything else. Because a disappointed viewer announces that they're "done" with this or that show because it's failed some critical, personal expectation means nothing as long as enough people remain enthusiastic and supportive of it for the owners to continue it. That's true for DW, Trek, Avatar or nuBSG (I notice that "Blood And Chrome" has been upgraded from Internet content to a real series...).

 

[Pemmer Harge]

RDM's certainly not completely innocent when it comes to technobabble solutions (BSG Epiphanies, anyone?), but he does have a point, I think. I do find it hard to care when the solution to the crisis boils down to remodulating the anti-polaron-confinement-deflector array to emit an ant-chroniton pulse. Too much technobabble makes me zone out.

 

[Shatnertage]

^ I tend to tune it out, too. What RDM said strikes me as pretty true. I'm not exhaustively familiar with his work, so I can't say whether he's guilty of doing this, but at the very least avoiding technobabble is something to strive for.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Technobabble is used, for plot reasons, in two basic ways:

1) To dress up magical nonsense as "science" or somehow plausibly speculative - ie, we need to make our characters de-age/devolve or shrink in size or remain able to move about while the Universe is "frozen in time" or some similar foolishness;

2) To distract from the continual reuse of the same two or three cliches for purposes of creating complication or jeopardy: the ship is always threatened or a conveniently crucial piece of tech doesn't work (transporters, communciations, sensors, life support) but we're using different techie-sounding gibberish to describe it this week, and different nonsense to solve it, so it's a different story - damn it!

 

[Pemmer Harge]

Technobabble is used, for plot reasons, in two basic ways:

1) To dress up magical nonsense as "science" or somehow plausibly speculative - ie, we need to make our characters de-age/devolve or shrink in size or remain able to move about while the Universe is "frozen in time" or some similar foolishness;

2) To distract from the continual reuse of the same two or three cliches for purposes of creating complication or jeopardy: the ship is always threatened or a conveniently crucial piece of tech doesn't work (transporters, communciations, sensors, life support) but we're using different techie-sounding gibberish to describe it this week, and different nonsense to solve it, so it's a different story - damn it!

I find the first type more acceptable than the second. It's the sort of stuff that something like Doctor Who runs on. Yes, it's nonsense, but it allows for some entertaining stories.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Do the same stories but cut out the technobabble - reduce it to one or two single-syllable words and get the hell on with it. The original Star Trek sent people to another f---ing Universe with the words "ion storm" and that was not one bit less believable than all of this tripe about "cascading verteron particles."

The charming thing about DW is that no one takes the technobabble at all seriously - it's written in a silly fashion, to be rattled off in a manic stream by David Tennant and thus disposed of with a wink and a chuckle.

 

[Jack Bauer]

Definitely...Dr. Who plays it for fun while Trek (especially TNG and Voyager) do it as if it's a serious scientific paper even though it's total BS. At least Dr. Who treats it as BS from the get go.

 

[Shatnertage]

Do the same stories but cut out the technobabble - reduce it to one or two single-syllable words and get the hell on with it. The original Star Trek sent people to another f---ing Universe with the words "ion storm" and that was not one bit less believable than all of this tripe about "cascading verteron particles."

The charming thing about DW is that no one takes the technobabble at all seriously - it's written in a silly fashion, to be rattled off in a manic stream by David Tennant and thus disposed of with a wink and a chuckle.

WHAT? You really can't do whatever the plot needs you to do by reversing the polarity of the neutron flow? I don't believe they got the science wrong. What lazy, lazy writing.

 

[Anwar]

I don't see what the issue with technobabble is. I mean, "The Visitor" is one of DS9's best episodes and the logic behind Sisko being unstuck in time was the same technobabble you hear in VOY. No one cared there or said it took away from the story.