M'Benga: Due to the black body infrared spectrum
Sounds like he's cut off, so there may be more.
They seem to be evoking not only film noir, but, also, 20th century visions of a possible future with the airship over the city.
I am hoping for a good episode.
I am hoping for a good episode.
Why is this any more stupid than warp drive which definitely breaks the laws of physical or humans having babies with aliens which goes against basic biology.
Well you see that's different because shut up *
*Tongue in cheek and all credit to SF DEBRIS
Because for better or worse, they're built into the worldbuilding of Trek now.
To be clear, this isn't just an issue with this show, though. Brannon Braga's whole "fun with DNA" thing from TNG/Voyager really hurt Star Trek as a setting, because he pretty clearly didn't understand anything about how either genetics or evolution works.
There would've been ways to explain Spock being half human from TOS that were reasonable, like Vulcans being descended from some group of ancient Humans taken off of Earth and modified by some ancient race like the Iconians. They chose dumb instead. Real, real dumb. Trek isn't better for it.
No.
That was never the intent of the show's original creators.
"Vulcan" was "
Star Trek was never strong on science, anecdotes about GR's consultations with NASA to the contrary.
It's "sciency fiction."
They stuck close enough to popular middle school astronomy and a little mechanical engineering to look plausible to audiences of the time. That's about it.
"DNA" was barely part of the vocabulary of popular newspaper science writing when Roddenberry started pitching in LA.
By the time you get to explaining the ridiculous biology of Trek "aliens," it's all fruit of the poisoned tree.
Despite the best efforts of some science-literate staffers at TNG,* the tech explanations in Trek did become increasingly nonsensical, mainly as consequence of the command to explain more and more magical woo-woo in overly specific terms. But trying to stick Brannon Braga because DNA with this one is unsupportable foolishness.
Some of the most egregious examples of wand-waving technobabble were on DS9, after all.
"Let's shrink a shuttlecraft and do Fantastic Voyage!"
*Most of them not on the writing staff.
Star trek is science fantasy. It is a largely dumb show, despite what the purists say. It never was and never will be hard science. Like there is sound it space for crying out loud but having a star whose light spectrum makes everything black and white, is a bridge too far? Give me a break.
I understand - and agree - that Trek isn't hard sci-fi. I also read a lot of classic sci-fi growing up because my mother was a fan as well - Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Pohl, Niven, etc. I understand what was within the normal range of science fiction at the time. Gene wasn't going to use Mission of Gravity or something as a guide to how rigorous Trek should've been. So like, I know that Joseph W. Campbell was into the idea of psychic powers, and the government was doing real research into them at the time, so ESP was not fantasy-coded, but something found in fairly rigorous sci-fi.
By the standards of late 1950s/early 1960s sci-fi, TOS seems...middle of the pack? It's not rigorous sci-fi, but it's not quite pulp either.
Braga was behind Genesis and Threshold. The former shows DNA as a plot device to allow for "de-evolving" - a concept that makes no sense, and the internal rules are even broken due to rule of cool (Barclay as a spider? Why not?). The latter seems to imply that the evolution of humanity is going in a fixed direction. Braga has said in interviews he was influenced by the ideas of Stephen Jay Gould that things don't have to evolve to be more complex, but evolution is shaped by the environment, so the idea that you can just spin the clock forward millions of years is just rocks in head stupid.
DS9 wisely made the decision to try and avoid technobabble once it got to its later seasons. Some of the stuff with the Pah-wraiths and the like got a little too close to fantasy to me, but I appreciated that in general their response to the convoluted nonsensical underpinnings to Trek science and technology was just to mostly avoid it.
No. Star Wars is science fantasy. That's the series with space wizards, laser swords, noble households, destiny, good and evil, etc. It's just a bunch of classic fantasy tropes with a sheen of tech on it.
Star Trek has very dodgy science, but it's mostly written as sci-fi. You have a crew of competent professionals who investigate a problem and troubleshoot a solution. There are rational explanations to things that happen, even if the characters don't get all the answers. Secular humanism is foundational to its ethos. As David Brin noted in this 1999 article:
That elitist attitude towards heroes is what made TNG so insufferable with the characters. TOS was not some enamored by better humans nor did it explain everything.
Naw. I think the technobabble behind the DNA stuff wasn't too bad.
And this was not remarkably different or worse than Trek's hand-waving treatment of science in general.
it's not even notable.
Trek is as much a fantasy property as Star Wars. It's simply a different fantasy with different themes and concerns.
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No one complained when Dr Who basically copied it
Warp drive is necessary for the show to even exist at all -- without that break from reality, there's no interstellar travel and no Starship Enterprise. So that gets a pass.
Human/alien interbreeding absolutely is dumb and I never liked it, even when I was watching TNG and DS9 as a teen. Where I chafe against the but Trek has always been stupid defense is it doesn't seem to care about context: what is this break from reality adding to the show? Is it really necessary to tell this story in this way? And when Trek had really, really implausible or outright stupid science in past episodes, why is that a blanket defense for new dumb science being added now, in 2026? I would prefer the writers minimize the total number of silly, stupid, or outright insulting ideas in Trek.
If I were rebooting Trek, I'd pare the "alien" species down to handful of the most important races (Vulcans, Klingons, Romulans, Borg, maybe the Cardassians) and make them all genetically engineered human offshoots. Any real alien life would be truly bizarre and unlike Earth life. I think Project Hail Mary shows how well that can work for modern audiences.
Let Star Trek be Star Trek. Let some other show be "genetically engineered human offshoots".
Exactly. All of this always boils down to "We can fix Star Trek by making a different show and calling it Star Trek."
"Star Trek has never been strongly founded in real science" is not "Star Trek has always been stupid." The latter is a straw man, and a dishonest characterization.
I'm sure you'll give my advice the same level of attention that Star Trek gives science advisors.When I gain majority control of Paramount I'll be sure to call and consult you.
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