My wife and I laugh because we rewatch NIGHT COURT and the characters talk about driving across Manhattan and being places in 5 minutes, or just taking an hour for break. The travel times never make sense.
The curse(?) of small universe syndrome
- Thread starter Laura Cynthia Chambers
- Start date
I used to laugh watching 24 seeing Jack Bauer traips across all of Southern California as if it were all a small town.
Those Morning Rush Hours that Jack gets stuck in, that's real, I deal with that all the time here in SoCal.
If you don't plan your morning trips during the work week, you can waste a lot of time on the road being stuck in traffic.
And then add in that TOS was influenced by the Age of Sail and Hornblower. A time when nearly all ship to shore (home) communication took weeks or months.
Like the ravens on Game of Thrones.
Subspace ravens.
Speed of plot.
So same day..... OK
Only if the plot demands it. Hence "speed of plot."
The other one that used to bug me a bit and make everything feel smallish was the one where the Enterprise was the ONLY ship in the area that could investigate / render aid / whatever the plot of the week was. You mean the Federation doesn't or won't put more ships in different sectors and only relies on one single solitary ship..
You would think that sector 001 would have at least one starship stationed there routinely. Why leave your core unprotected?
So the story can happen.
Nah, the core worlds are just saying nyah nyah I dare you to come get us
That made sense in the context of TOS, where the ship was way out on the frontier. The whole idea was that Starfleet vessels were the only instruments of Federation law and authority that far from civilization, the only thing that people in danger could turn to way out there, analogous to how frontier marshals in the Old West were the only law around. And it was one of the rules of TOS and TNG -- explicitly stated in the TNG series bible -- that deep space should never be treated as a local neighborhood, that interstellar travel should take weeks or at least days, so you couldn't expect any more distant ships to be able to reach you in time. (Although even TOS ignored that on occasion, notably in "That Which Survives.")
That falls apart in cases like TMP where the planet in danger is the capital of the Federation and really should have more than one starship to defend it. And it falls apart in the modern shows that have abandoned the old travel-time rules and assume that a starship can get anywhere it needs to go in a matter of hours or less, or that Starfleet can assemble a whole fleet of dozens of ships as easily and quickly as organizing a flash mob, as we saw in Prodigy and Lower Decks. Nobody understands how to write frontier narratives anymore.
Or even TNG. That fleet that got smooshed by the Borg didn't take long to assemble, and they never asked others for help like the Romulans or Klingons. Why were there no BOP's in that fight since they are supposed to be allies?
Succinct assessment by both of you. The needs of the plot form the story.
Even the Apollo 11 movie skipped the uneventful parts of the tale.
Hansen said in BOBW that "the Klingons are sending warships" to Wolf 359, but the only story that's ever shown those ships as part of the battle was an issue of Marvel's Voyager comic (where Voyager encountered a temporal rift connecting to the battle). The makers of DS9: "Emissary" must have forgotten that line, or assumed the Klingons couldn't get there in time.
As for fleet assembly, the fleet at Wolf 359 was only around 40 ships, while in the Dominion War we routinely saw much larger armadas and were told they were only divisions of a much larger Starfleet. My interpretation has always been that the 40 ships they assembled were those that already patrolled close to the heart of Federation territory (because Wolf 359 is less than 8 light-years from Earth), so they were the only ships that could assemble in time, while the majority of the fleet was out exploring the frontier or patrolling the borders and couldn't reach Wolf 359 in time. That seems like the best explanation for why the "large" fleet at Wolf 359 was so much smaller than the Dominion War fleets, which were assembled over months so there was time to call back the hundreds of ships on the frontier.
And don't even get me started on Picard season 3. Now, to be clear, I love Picard season 3 and I am a big defender of it, even though I know there are many detractors here. However, the absurdity of the idea that for Frontier Day literally the entirety of Starfleet was supposed to assemble at Earth is so absurd as to make sex with your grandmother's candle ghost seem reasonable. Imagine if the United States military said that on July 4th this year, literally our entire military was to leave everywhere else on the planet and just hang out in Washington, DC for a parade. Good grief.
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