The "I hate that Star Trek created ____" Thread

[KaineMorrison]

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.

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.

DATA: We have made micro-tomographic analyses of the dilithium chamber, the hatch mounting, the blast pattern from the explosion.
LAFORGE: We did mass spectrometer readings of the residue for chemical content, sifted through the debris for bomb fragments
[...]
PICARD: There are submicron fractures in the metal casing.
LAFORGE: That's right. A breakdown of the atomic cohesive structure.
[...]
DATA: Those fractures suggest nothing more than simple neutron fatigue. I would speculate that when the engine was last inspected at McKinley station, the hatch casing was replaced with one which had an undetectable defect.

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 Bolded and underlined are the only words I don't recognize or understand, and I'm too lazy to look them up right now.

 

[KaineMorrison]

I hate that I can no longer remember what ships are/were what class. Though this is due to me being away from Trek for so very long.

 

[Melakon]

I hate that I can no longer list every episode title from memory.

 

[KaineMorrison]

I hate that I can no longer list every episode title from memory.

Every Episode? Or just Every TNG Episode?

 

[Melakon]

Every. Once the Animated Series began, I lost track.

 

[Nerys Myk]

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.

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.

DATA: We have made micro-tomographic analyses of the dilithium chamber, the hatch mounting, the blast pattern from the explosion.
LAFORGE: We did mass spectrometer readings of the residue for chemical content, sifted through the debris for bomb fragments
[...]
PICARD: There are submicron fractures in the metal casing.
LAFORGE: That's right. A breakdown of the atomic cohesive structure.
[...]
DATA: Those fractures suggest nothing more than simple neutron fatigue. I would speculate that when the engine was last inspected at McKinley station, the hatch casing was replaced with one which had an undetectable defect.

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 Bolded and underlined are the only words I don't recognize or understand, and I'm too lazy to look them up right now.

quadro (four) triticale ( a real world grain)

 

[Spider]

I hate that Star Trek created Ferengi. Dreadful creatures, I hate them.

 

[Christopher]

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

DATA: We have made micro-tomographic analyses of the dilithium chamber, the hatch mounting, the blast pattern from the explosion.
LAFORGE: We did mass spectrometer readings of the residue for chemical content, sifted through the debris for bomb fragments
[...]
PICARD: There are submicron fractures in the metal casing.
LAFORGE: That's right. A breakdown of the atomic cohesive structure.
[...]
DATA: Those fractures suggest nothing more than simple neutron fatigue. I would speculate that when the engine was last inspected at McKinley station, the hatch casing was replaced with one which had an undetectable defect.

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 Bolded and underlined are the only words I don't recognize or understand, and I'm too lazy to look them up right now.

Tomography basically means "examining by slices" -- scanning something's innards in 3 dimensions by moving through it one slice/layer at a time, like a CAT scan or MRI, or like the medical-bed scan of the Ilia probe in ST:TMP.

 

[Greg Cox]

The point is not so much that the audience can't understand all the technobabble, but that it often just ends up slowing things down and cluttering the dialogue with lots of unnecessary scientific-sounding verbiage.

(No doubt I've been guilty of this myself on occasion.)

And when you compare TOS to the latter-day shows, you can see where the technobabble starts to get out of hand sometimes. Throwing in lots of futuristic-sounding scientific jargon doesn't necessarily make a scene more dramatic or exciting--and may even have the opposite effect!

 

[Christopher]

The thing is, early TNG's tech talk actually made a reasonable amount of scientific sense, thanks to the research of folks like Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda. So most of what they were saying was pretty much a legitimate justification of what we were being shown. For instance, "Evolution"'s portrayal of a periodic nova star was so good it could've been shown in an astronomy class, and the explanation of the "Yesterday's Enterprise" time warp as a "Kerr loop" was basically a real thing (despite mistakenly using "superstring" to mean "cosmic string").

But the later seasons and shows increasingly discarded legitimate science for invented particles-of-the-week and careless gibberish. Not to mention a tendency to treat technical terms as meaningless sounds. In "Caretaker," the description of the Caretaker as a sporocystian life form meant that it was a kind of life form that reproduced by forming spores in a certain way, a biological description. But in "Cold Fire," they were suddenly nattering about "sporocystian energy," which is a complete non sequitur. The writers just tossed in the word that had been used to describe the Caretaker before and didn't bother to understand what it meant and what it didn't mean. That's what I consider real technobabble -- technical-sounding talk that's actually gibberish, as opposed to informed, reasonable scientific exposition like early TNG tended to have.

So I think the problem is that TNG established the pattern of heavy expository dialogue because it was trying to be plausible and reasonable, perhaps trying a bit too hard in that respect and riding a bit too heavily on the exposition; and then later producers maintained that pattern without bothering to give it the same substance, so that it just became noise.

 

[BillJ]

I love the episode "The Measure of a Man" but hate the impact it had down the road. Non-sense with the exo-comps and holographic rights had me rolling my eyes.

 

[KaineMorrison]

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 Bolded and underlined are the only words I don't recognize or understand, and I'm too lazy to look them up right now.

quadro (four) triticale ( a real world grain)

I knew the "Quad" part. I didn't have it changed.
Thanks about the Grain though.

 

[Armored Saint]

The point is not so much that the audience can't understand all the technobabble, but that it often just ends up slowing things down and cluttering the dialogue with lots of unnecessary scientific-sounding verbiage.

This! The Drumhead is an episode moral and justice and then, Agents Nerd and Nerdier make their "expert" report with "expert" language to explain idea like they were French sociologists.

I don't read your novels Greg and Christopher, so I don't know if you deserve to have your intrasubdermal ionic structure completely isolated from it quadriolic vibrations.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I love the episode "The Measure of a Man" but hate the impact it had down the road. Non-sense with the exo-comps and holographic rights had me rolling my eyes.

I understand your problem with "holographic rights" - after all, if anything was self-aware and worthy of the rights, it was the computer emitting the hologram and actually doing the "thinking", not the hologram itself. But I'm not clear on why you thought the exo-comps were nonsense. Bias against non-humanoid life, even in machine form? Or just the cheesy ham-fisted way some of the episode was written and acted in general?

 

[Christopher]

quadro (four) triticale ( a real world grain)

I knew the "Quad" part. I didn't have it changed.
Thanks about the Grain though.

The point is that you seemed to think it was quad + rotriticale, when it's actually quadro + triticale. The actual Latin prefix for "four" is quadr- (from quattuor) followed by various different vowels -- usually quadri- as in quadrilateral or quadrisyllabic, but often found in variant forms like quadruple, quadrennial, quadratic. In fact, the "quadro-" form is quite anomalous; it probably should've been quadritriticale instead, but that's harder to pronounce.

 

[Timewalker]

^ I think it's so well-remembered because didn't it have the most disappointing resolution of all time (the infamous "it was just a dream" episode)?

The "how did Bobby Ewing get into Pam's shower over a year after he died?" cliffhanger was the one where the previous season was all just some bizarre dream of Pam's. It was nice to have Patrick Duffy back on the show, but some other good storylines got erased as a result of the reset.

"Best of Both Worlds" wasn't even the biggest summer cliffhanger of 1990, when Twin Peaks had become a pop-culture phenomenon.

It was big enough that my boyfriend - someone who didn't normally fret over TV shows - called me immediately after the cliffhanger ending, all excited and saying, "I can't wait until next week!"

"You'll have to wait a bit longer than that," I told him. "This was the last show of the season. We don't get to see what happens next until September, maybe October."

He was aghast. "That's not FAIR!!!" he wailed.

 

[USS Triumphant]

^ I think it's so well-remembered because didn't it have the most disappointing resolution of all time (the infamous "it was just a dream" episode)?

The "how did Bobby Ewing get into Pam's shower over a year after he died?" cliffhanger was the one where the previous season was all just some bizarre dream of Pam's. It was nice to have Patrick Duffy back on the show, but some other good storylines got erased as a result of the reset.

Not to mention that it is the only time I'm aware of that something like that actually hosed continuity on an entirely different show in order to press the reset button: Knots Landing, the spin-off from Dallas, had several key events during the year that involved interaction with characters from Dallas - including Gary Ewing being informed of his brother Bobby's death. The producers of Knots Landing chose to leave Bobby dead in their series, and never crossed over with Dallas again for the remainder of Knots Landing.

 

[Armored Saint]

He was aghast. "That's not FAIR!!!" he wailed.

What's not fair is when I bought the DVD last year while I was watching the series on Netflix and said to myself cool, there will have Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Bowie and Harry Dean Stanton with Kyle MacLachlan...to finally have 100 minutes of Lara Palmer screaming, crying and laughing.

 

[Timewalker]

He was aghast. "That's not FAIR!!!" he wailed.

What's not fair is when I bought the DVD last year while I was watching the series on Netflix and said to myself cool, there will have Chris Isaak, Kiefer Sutherland, David Bowie and Harry Dean Stanton with Kyle MacLachlan...to finally have 100 minutes of Lara Palmer screaming, crying and laughing.

To clarify, I was referring to TNG, not Twin Peaks. I've never seen more than a couple of episodes of TP, although I do really like the theme music.

 

[Greg Cox]

The point is not so much that the audience can't understand all the technobabble, but that it often just ends up slowing things down and cluttering the dialogue with lots of unnecessary scientific-sounding verbiage.

This! The Drumhead is an episode moral and justice and then, Agents Nerd and Nerdier make their "expert" report with "expert" language to explain idea like they were French sociologists.

I don't read your novels Greg and Christopher, so I don't know if you deserve to have your intrasubdermal ionic structure completely isolated from it quadriolic vibrations.

In a nutshell, it's the difference between:

"Captain! The engines cannot take it anymore!"

And:

"Captain! The primary matter-antimatter conversion chamber is undergoing an exponential quantum disruption cascade, resulting in a catastrophic field integrity inversion!"

As dialogue goes, I know which version I prefer!