Science fiction pet hate
- Thread starter Deckerd
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What gets me - even worse than humanoid aliens and alien/human hybrids - is the assumption that aliens have genitalia that would be even remotely enticing to a human!
I always thought it would have been hilarious on a show like TNG to have Riker hit on some random alien babe on Risa or somewhere...and then have to deal with the awkwardness when she drops her drawers to discover that those alien females have penises too...
The premise of the story is classic sci fi: are artificial beings equal to humans, and if so, on what basis? (In other words: what is a human?)
Most sci fi on TV isn't sci fi at its core. BSG is a war/survival story, for instance. The Cylons could have been a colony of humans that was pissed off at being pushed around. But in Caprica, you can't do the story if the Cylons aren't AI.
Even Star Trek is really just space cops/military/exploring strange new cultures which always seem to be human cultures with a bit of window-dressing. Individual episodes may rely on sci fi elements, but overall, you could transport Star Trek to the Old West and retain its essential features. (In fact, Star Trek famously started out as a Western transported to outer space.)
I don't mind that a sci fi show isn't sci fi at its core. If I took that attitude, I wouldn't have much to watch. Just noting that it's interesting to see a "true" sci fi show on TV at long last.
And that reminds me: why is there so little attention paid to the technology of clothing! If Starfleet insists on going into battle in pajamas, that shouldn't be a problem, if those pajamas are made out of high-tech fabric that is strong enough to deflect energy weapons, yet light as silk. These people have FTL engines, so fabric technology should be a snap.
And that leads me to a rant about mismatches in technology levels in general. You have FTL engines but no seatbelts (or other means of restraint) on your spaceships and the consoles explode into a dangerous hail of sparks. Why don't away teams wear goggles with head's-up displays to tell them that the Klingons are sneaking up on them around the next hill (or tech implanted in their eyeballs, if that wouldn't squick them out too much.)
Star Trek has a cultural excuse for why there isn't more advanced genetic manipulation or technology enhancements of humans in their futuristic milieu, but in general there should be a lot more enhancements to humans in the future - once somebody starts giving their kids higher IQ before they're born, or swapping weak human legs for nice strong mechanical ones, the arms-race aspect will increasingly force everyone to follow suit. We rarely see societies where this fascinating problem is an issue.
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What gets me - even worse than humanoid aliens and alien/human hybrids - is the assumption that aliens have genitalia that would be even remotely enticing to a human!
There was an episode on Voyager, The Disease, in which Harry Kim refers to the difference in genitalia with his alien lover. Unexpected in Enterprise makes more sense if you assume the same. But then, right thinking people hate Voyager and Enterprise, so does that count?
Looking over the thread, I think all the bete noirs fundamentally boil down to one thing: Forcing something everyday into a science fictional context. The artistic ineptitude just jangles.
I don't disagree. I just wish it pushed the SF aspects a little more to the front. The AI and VR stuff gets lost in all the family drama and mobsters elements.
What bothers me most in sci-fi is the total lack of realism when it comes to a "bad guy's" wardrobe, or furniture... stuff like the absurdity of Shinzon's costume in NEM, or the costume of the reptilian Xindi... I mean seriously... how the frak can anything be comfortable in that crap? Number one, the whole thing would take like over two hours to get into, and then, how the hell could you go to the bathroom in such a silly getup? Is it even machine washable? The whole design process of stuff like that just shows a total ignorance of what a humanoid form would consider comfortable... ESPECIALLY for a "military" uniform, which should be totally no-nonsense, save for maybe a few little badges or decorations... but nothing so absolutely absurd as in the examples above.
As for furniture... I frakking HATE it when we see the bad guy interrogate or torture someone in a frakkin' "chair of doom", which is made out of stainless steel, and has every bladed weapon known to the universe slapped onto it, to make it look fearsome, and has metal hand and foot cuffs... I mean, really? Gimme a frakkin' break... if you're gonna interrogate or torture someone, you just do it... you don't need Dr. Sinestro's chair of doom to do it. The CIA doesn't use such crap... they just use a normal chair. Besides, who makes those evil chairs, anyway? I wanna see the factory that makes them, and the packaging they come in, and the warranty card.
Same applies to any stupid "magical" weapons, like wooden staffs that just happen to emit bolts of lethal energy. Again, who the hell makes this stuff, and where is it sold? Where is the power/energy source? I want stuff that THOUGHT is put into. On Star Trek, you can envision a phaser being a real weapon, that is mass-produced in a UFP factory somewhere... we have seen phasers taken apart, and we can believe that they could be real devices, with real inner workings.
Ugh... I hate schlocky shit, lol.
As for furniture... I frakking HATE it when we see the bad guy interrogate or torture someone in a frakkin' "chair of doom", which is made out of stainless steel, and has every bladed weapon known to the universe slapped onto it, to make it look fearsome, and has metal hand and foot cuffs... I mean, really? Gimme a frakkin' break... if you're gonna interrogate or torture someone, you just do it... you don't need Dr. Sinestro's chair of doom to do it. The CIA doesn't use such crap... they just use a normal chair. Besides, who makes those evil chairs, anyway? I wanna see the factory that makes them, and the packaging they come in, and the warranty card.
Same applies to any stupid "magical" weapons, like wooden staffs that just happen to emit bolts of lethal energy. Again, who the hell makes this stuff, and where is it sold? Where is the power/energy source? I want stuff that THOUGHT is put into. On Star Trek, you can envision a phaser being a real weapon, that is mass-produced in a UFP factory somewhere... we have seen phasers taken apart, and we can believe that they could be real devices, with real inner workings.
Ugh... I hate schlocky shit, lol.
*furiously takes notes of what to avoid doing in his SF anthology*
Ugh, technology mismatch. The very existence of the transporter and the replicator should be incompatible with the rest of Star Trek technology. The only reason they appears to be compatible is that the characters act like idiots when it comes to using them. The potential of matter/energy conversion has an unbelievable number ofapplications. Consider that episode where they had a dying Romulan on board and they had trouble finding a blood donor. Why do you need a donor? Just take a sample of his own blood and replicate it. In fact, why should anyone ever need transplants or artificial replacements at all? Just store their pattern in the replicator and produce it on command. "Romulan Blood, type AB Negative." "Skin Tissue, Human." "Worf's Left Arm." "Captain Picard's Heart."
It should totally change the nature of warfare, too. We see that ship-to-ship combat is usually conducted by firing energy beams or self-propelled torpedoes that deliver their damage with an explosion. So why limit yourself to firing physical attacks that can be blocked? If you have a transporter, just use it to transport 50 photon torpedoes next to the enemy ship. Better yet, don't bother rematerializing them. Being able to convert matter into energy means the transporter beam should be able to deliver the energy bound up in 50 photon torpedoes, all at once. Then sit back and watch. Can't beam through shields? No problem; deliver the payload right outside their shields and see how long they hold out.
I'll grant you that in emergency situations, the transporters or replicators may be offline. But they don't bother doing these things even when they work.
The real answer, of course, is the transporter was Gene's handwave to the problem of getting people to the surface in a hurry. As such, it's not the sort of thing that should ever be used as the key to an episode, as it was in "Second Chances" or "The Enemy Within." It opens up too many cans of worms. Either keep it in its place as a background device, just like the UT, or get rid of it completely.
Why is Geordi the only one who wears a VISOR? With the amount of mileage he gets out of it just on the ship, it should be indispensible to other engineers, technicians, astronomers, physicians, scouts, commandos.... There's no reason a sighted person couldn't have the receptacles implanted the same way, then remove the VISOR when he's not using it.
Not as much as you think. They already behave "magical", considering that they can apparently disintegrate an object with NO side effects. No explosion of superheated steam, no liberation of all the energy in the human body in a miniature fission reaction. Just ... nothing. Where does all that energy or matter go, anyway?
Painfully obvious explanations for the audience, Trek being a major culprit with the standard, "Oh, you mean it's like [insert random lie-to-children explanation]".
I'm not a big fan of the movie but I decided to pull out and re-watch "The Matrix" yesterday. Boy, I didn't realize how many scenes there were where Trinity or Neo end up explaining stuff to the audience. It's particularly annoying in cases where you'd expect the character not to have to ask (e.g. why the hell doesn't Neo, as a certified geek, know what an EMP is?) or where you'd think the makers would show the audience a little more respect (how many people going to a movie like "The Matrix" do not know the term A.I.?).
I realize this problem isn't always easy to get around but, wow, sometimes it's really painful to watch.
I'm not a big fan of the movie but I decided to pull out and re-watch "The Matrix" yesterday. Boy, I didn't realize how many scenes there were where Trinity or Neo end up explaining stuff to the audience. It's particularly annoying in cases where you'd expect the character not to have to ask (e.g. why the hell doesn't Neo, as a certified geek, know what an EMP is?) or where you'd think the makers would show the audience a little more respect (how many people going to a movie like "The Matrix" do not know the term A.I.?).
I realize this problem isn't always easy to get around but, wow, sometimes it's really painful to watch.
Yes, Roddenberry put in the teleporter just to cut out "boring" scenes of landing on planets, and doing away with supposed dead time when the characters were merely traveling, instead of interacting or dying or whatever.
In suspense, thriller and action movies, there are often little stretches of dialogue explaining why the cell phone isn't working. This of course highlights that the writers are setting up a physical jeopardy situation that could be resolved by the cell phone. Not only are we not surprised but we are reminded how arbitrary it all is. The excuse has to be more or less plausible, too.
Like cell phones, the teleporter can resolve physical jeopardy plots. The logical answer, not relying on physical jeopardy plots, is detested. As a result, Star Trek invented reasons for the teleporter (and other amazing gadgets) not being able to save the day. The reasons almost invariably involved some technical jargon.
In the spin off series, as writers who hated science became more and more prominent, the reasons no longer had to make sense. Plot mechanics merely demanded some sort of gibberish about why these superdevices wouldn't save the day. And at the appropriate time, namely, when the use of the superdevices was convenient for the plot, more gibberish about how said superdevice(s) came to work were required. As a result, no matter how much these people hated big words, there they kept coming back.
To put it another way, the origin of the infamous technobabble was the perceived (but false) need to complicate a plot for (meaningless) tension. A supplementary source of technobabble was to set up a nonsensical premise.
The moral is that fidelity to standard notions of dramatic necessity can be completely destructive in the long run.
In suspense, thriller and action movies, there are often little stretches of dialogue explaining why the cell phone isn't working. This of course highlights that the writers are setting up a physical jeopardy situation that could be resolved by the cell phone. Not only are we not surprised but we are reminded how arbitrary it all is. The excuse has to be more or less plausible, too.
Like cell phones, the teleporter can resolve physical jeopardy plots. The logical answer, not relying on physical jeopardy plots, is detested. As a result, Star Trek invented reasons for the teleporter (and other amazing gadgets) not being able to save the day. The reasons almost invariably involved some technical jargon.
In the spin off series, as writers who hated science became more and more prominent, the reasons no longer had to make sense. Plot mechanics merely demanded some sort of gibberish about why these superdevices wouldn't save the day. And at the appropriate time, namely, when the use of the superdevices was convenient for the plot, more gibberish about how said superdevice(s) came to work were required. As a result, no matter how much these people hated big words, there they kept coming back.
To put it another way, the origin of the infamous technobabble was the perceived (but false) need to complicate a plot for (meaningless) tension. A supplementary source of technobabble was to set up a nonsensical premise.
The moral is that fidelity to standard notions of dramatic necessity can be completely destructive in the long run.
Seriously????? Even the shows written, produced or consulted by Naren Shankar who has a B.Sc., M.S. and Ph.D degrees in Engineering, Physics and Electrical Engineering from Cornell University? Seriously?
EVERY space mission always goes wrong, some lunatic is aboard, and almost everybody dies. Mission to Mars, Red Planet, Sunshine, Event Horizon, 2001, Armageddon, countless more. And of course there's always a mix of military and civilian personel, and of course everybody hates each other, and everyone aboard is an unprofessional egomaniac.
And Pandorum, that god awful abortion of a science fiction movie. It starts with a fucking great premise: astronauts awaking from "hypersleep", with no memory who the hell they are and what their mission is (kinda like that TNG episode). And then they discover... ZOMBIES. And then there's running and shouting and screaming and running and screaming and running and dying and... what a waste.
And Pandorum, that god awful abortion of a science fiction movie. It starts with a fucking great premise: astronauts awaking from "hypersleep", with no memory who the hell they are and what their mission is (kinda like that TNG episode). And then they discover... ZOMBIES. And then there's running and shouting and screaming and running and screaming and running and dying and... what a waste.
Rii
Rear Admiral
But that would weaken the film's far stronger allegory of post-9/11 America.
I hear that.
He was going for a post-9/11 allegory in a 1997 movie?
Those psychics in the movie must have been working overtime to help Verhoeven craft a post-9/11 allegory four years before it happened.
Gotcha.
Rii
Rear Admiral
Of course not. But the film works better (as a satire) if one pretends otherwise. For the film to be a satire of the novel, it would actually have to resemble the novel in some shape or form. Both the film and the novel are decent works; but almost entirely unrelated.
Verhoeven and the scriptwriter were satirizing militarism, and science fiction in general. There were too many easy shots at the novel he didn't bother with, starting with Rico's Olympic size swimming pool. It may be wounding, but they just didn't take the novel very seriously.
Spinrad's The Iron Dream should be required reading for SF fans. Funny how it's disappeared from the shelves, isn't it?
PS Yes, Naren Shankar too. His commitment to expediting supposed drama over common sense continues with the science at CSI. They know what they're doing. There was a scene in one of the self-referential, pomo/twee episodes where Hodges talks about how dramatic a certain test would be for the camera. Grissom protests that the test takes hours to perform and is exciting as paint drying. Hodges triumphantly declares that a thirty second montage will make it cool. The science is pretty decent on CSI in principle but glossing over such realities means the show as a whole is perfectly misleading.
Spinrad's The Iron Dream should be required reading for SF fans. Funny how it's disappeared from the shelves, isn't it?
PS Yes, Naren Shankar too. His commitment to expediting supposed drama over common sense continues with the science at CSI. They know what they're doing. There was a scene in one of the self-referential, pomo/twee episodes where Hodges talks about how dramatic a certain test would be for the camera. Grissom protests that the test takes hours to perform and is exciting as paint drying. Hodges triumphantly declares that a thirty second montage will make it cool. The science is pretty decent on CSI in principle but glossing over such realities means the show as a whole is perfectly misleading.
I did not really like Avatar. I hated that movie. I wanted an enjoyable experience, not propaganda. It was obviously less a movie and more of an ad campaign. Notice how the Na'Vi are depicted as strong, healthy, high-minded beings while the Marines are depicted as corrupt, greedy idiots. A political viewpoint does not make a good movie! Do you hear me, James Cameron? DO YOU!?!? IF I HAD A HUNDRED BLU-RAY COPIES OF YOUR MOVIE, I'D THROW THEM IN THE FURNACE WITHOUT EVEN TRYING TO SELL THEM! AND IT'D BE HARDLY WITH THE COAL IT WOULD REQUIRE! (gasp, pant)
... Okay, I'm done.
... Okay, I'm done.
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