The "I hate that Star Trek created ____" Thread

No, but Picard shot JR.

 

Right. But the rest of your premise was fine, so it doesn't destroy the thread. If anything, it stimulates discussion, because people here (and by here, I mean 'The Internet' ) just love to talk about how wrong someone is, too.

 

IIRC, David Lynch never wanted to answer the question who killed Laura Palmer but they put pressure on him to identify the killer.

Just a look at "Unification" and the lack of prosthetics applied to Mr. Nimoy just reveals that it was a lame idea. Vulcans and Romulans were biologically related, just separated by 5,000 years or so and according to Spock's appearance in aforementioned episode there still must have been plenty of Romulans looking like Vulcans.

Bob

 

Since this is in the TNG forum, I'll keep this related to TNG.

My personal nit pick is the seemingly complete ERASURE of the Constitution Class ships (both TOS and TNG) from TV, with the exception of four episodes that i can think of:

1. Naked Now (TNG, a split second screen shot of a connie in the LCARS database)
2. Best OF Both Worlds (very debateable...wreckage that appears to be a connie, but unconfirmed and could just as easily be another class)
3.Trials and Tribble-ations (DS9, Enterprise)
4. In a Mirror, Darkly (ENT, appearance of the Defiant)

Personally, the Constitution class is still my favorite class of ship. Sure they would have been old by the TNG era, but how can so many Miranda class ships, which were really variants of the Connie, still be in service (they were cannon fodder in the Dominion War, and made appearances in TNG as well), but not the Constitution class?

I was never a fan of the Constellation class, and really think that Picard's Stargazer should have been a Constitution class. In fact, I believe that was the original intent, and TNG Season 1 even had a model of a Connie in his ready room on a few episodes.

Such a missed opportunity that the only refit Connies we ever saw were Enterprise and Enterprise-A. Just because the Enterprise A was retired, doesn't necessarily mean ALL Constitution Class ships, especially newly-build ones modeled on the refit design, needed to be retired. They may not necessarily have been the backbone of Starfleet by the TNG era, but if the Miranda Classes can serve side-by-side the Excelsior, Galaxy, Nebula, Ambassador, or even the Oberth classes, why not the Constitution refit styles?

The biggest thing that bothered me about TNG's version of the Romulans were the stupid uniforms. At least DS9 and Nemesis toned THAT down.

The TNG Romulan forehead was jarring at first for me, too, but I always (my personal canon) chalked that up to genetic hybridization as the ancestors of the Romulans intermarried with other species during their journey from Vulcan to Romulus. Some had the "V" on the forehead, others didn't. So Spock standing next to TNG Romulans isn't so unexplainable to me.

I think that theory holds up for me, except for Tallera (played by Robin Curtis AKA Saavik #2, no less), a Vulcan separatist masquerading as a Romulan, unless she had some cosmetic surgery!

 

I hate that Star Trek created tribbles. They have been nothing but trouble.

 

No, that was Natima Lang, who was Tasha Yar's aunt.

 

And she was also Harlan Ellison's sister, I believe.

 

I hate that Star Trek created the 24th century as a new canvas.

 

Then, in the spirit of this thread, I hate that Star Trek created the idea of a fanbase that loves to point out that people are wrong.

And now, I eagerly await everyone telling me how wrong I am!

 

Absolutely!

 

I hate how TNG dumbed down Trek. Worst were the redesigned Romulans, insulting viewer intelligence by assuming we are too stupid to differentiate them from Vulcans without a new bumpy forehead.

I hate that TNG moved away from colourful alien designs (see: TOS, TMP, STIV) and kept to formulaic bumpy forehead human aliens.

I hate all the babytalk technobabble which TNG introduced into the Trekverse. Whoever thought it warranted a place beyond background chatter was very very wrong. I'd often wonder how much shorter the episodes would be if it was cut, trimming "quantum phase scanner" into "scanner", "tri-axlating energy signature" with "energy signature" etc.

I hate that TNG introduced us to "evolved humans" of the 24th century who have no interpersonal conflict and look down their noses at the rest of the galaxy (thankfully this angle was mostly dropped from DS9, Voyager and the TNG movies)

 

Depends on the genre, possibly. Cliffhangers may not have been routine on sci-fi shows (which is kinda peculiar considering they were a staple of "Buck Rogers" and "Flash Gordon" back in the day), but prime-time soaps like "Dallas" and "Dynasty" and "Falcon Crest" and so on were all about their serialized plot twists and cliffhangers.

Star Trek, and genre shows in general, were a bit late to the party there . . . .

 

Wiki says Soap was the first primetime American show to use a cliffhanger season ending.

 

Interesting. I was wondering about "Peyton Place," but wasn't motivated to look it up.

 

Now, that was never actually confirmed...Harlan was asked if she was, at an old "Chico and the Man" Convention in Schenectady, but he only shook his head and said "F-ing Roddenberry"...

 

Suggestion to OP: change the name of your Thread to, "Discussion of the Origin of Cliffhangers", or some such...

...just a thought!...

 

In fact, I agree with all your points, but yes the technobabbling is really not an improvement. I'm a fan of Geordi/Data's tandem, but not when they're in the Scotty/Spock position. Scotty has always been intelligible and Spock lines wheren't full of mystical physics. It doesn't mean it was realistic, but at least the actors and the viewers are able to understand what they're talking about.

Somes week ago, I rewatched The Drumhead between two discs of TOS season 3.

Spock and Scotty would have simply said there was a microscopical breach in the structure. And Picard himself plays that game...we're far from Kirk who doesn't know quadrotriticale despite he's a cultured guy.

 

The problem with this thread is that almost anything we think Trek created will probably turn out to have an earlier antecedent. Trek's importance lies more in popularizing tropes and concepts that already existed. For instance, it didn't invent warp propulsion, subspace, tractor beams, deflector shields, teleportation, alternate universes, non-interference directives, etc. At best it lays claim to certain specific terminology like "phaser," "photon torpedo," and "tricorder," but equivalent technologies had existed in earlier fiction.

And before that, The Danny Thomas Show spun off The Andy Griffith Show, which spun off Gomer Pyle, USMC. And there was Paul Henning's trilogy of rural shows, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres, and The Beverly Hillbillies, which shared a common universe. The Man from UNCLE spun off The Girl from UNCLE. The Dukes of Hazzard had a short-lived spinoff called Enos during its run (which I believe was the debut of TNG composer Dennis McCarthy!). And there's the curious case of William Dozier's Batman and The Green Hornet, which treated one another as fictional shows within their respective realities, yet then had a crossover episode!

The Trek producers seemed to want each "hero" ship to be essentially unique. Not only did we rarely see a Connie in the modern shows, but DS9's Dominion War fleets almost never used an Intrepid-class or Sovereign-class ship. The only reason they used an Intrepid-class ship in "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" is because most of the episode was set on the ship and it was cheaper to use the standing Voyager sets than to build sets for a different Starfleet class. I figure the only reason they used so many Galaxy-class ships in DS9 is because the Ent-D had been superseded by the E at that point, so there'd be no confusion.