The Most Dispicible Use Of Technobabble?

[Cyke101]

JD said:

darthraidr said:
The over reliace on technobabble was pretty bad. Futurama sums it up nicely...

Fry: Well, usually on the show someone would come up with a complicated plan then explain it with a simple analogy.

Leela: Hmm. If we can reroute engine power through the primary weapons and reconfigure them to Melllvar's frequency that should overload his electro-quantum structure.

Bender: Like putting too much air in a ballon!

I know this is fro Futurama, but it still helps me to make my point.This is why I've always thought it would have been better if they had simply skipped over the "science" and just used the analogy. IMO it's a waist of time to spout off nonsense crap if you're just going to use the analogy anyway.

That reminds me of an episode of the Venture Bros where Dr. Venture uses technobabble to explain his plan to Dr. Orpheus and Brock Sampson. As Venture is getting more and more detailed and verbose, Orpheus just ends up using spiritual analogies to explain the science, and Sampson, with much subtlety, lets out a yawn.

Suffice it to say, it was a very telling scene about the nature of technobabble

 

[Forbin]

I work for an electronic warfare company. We recently had a series of lectures for our engineers on the history of radar and EW by an eminant Chinese scientist, which we videotaped, and we're in the process of editing. This old fella is not only old ,little and and wizened, but he also sounds just like Yoda - not just his voice, but his sentence structure too!

So we basically have this video lecture of Yoda speaking in technobabble. Okay, it's REAL scientific technical stuff, but to me it sounds just like Yoda speaking technobabble.

 

[JD]

Would it be rude to say that I think that sounds funny?

 

[UnknownSample]

Following written without reading the replies here, because an eye problem limits the time I can spend reading... scanning though, it seems I might agree with people here.

OhZedMasTree said:
You seem to be forgetting the sinful amount of technobabble used in TNG.

The premise of this thread's question I don't agree with, in the first place.

I hate technobabble. Technobabble consists of meaningless made-up words thrown into scripts to dazzle viewers who are easily impressed, and to move the plots along.

The alternative to technobabble is to have smart, creative use of real science in plots, and then to push that science further, speculating on the possible results or implications of it, in the future when that science may have been explored further than it has been today. Science-fiction, in other words. The trick is to explain it so the viewer can follow. That's hard, but a great thing when it's pulled off.

Many fans call all the science in ST "babble" when very often, it isn't "babble" at all. We need more of the valid, smart, well-explained stuff, and less of the babble. If a viewer just doesn't want to hear anything scientific, well, it might be a good idea to accept that that's par for the course with good science-fiction. If I'm watching an historical drama and I'm lost on some of the historical background, I just wish I knew more history. Same with science and SF. When I can follow the logic of the science they're taking us through in Next Gen, though, I love it. It adds a whole new dimension to the story, and gives me things to think about, after.

Around seasons 3 and 4, I think, Next Gen was far more science than babble. Later, when they started routinely inserting the word "tech" into scripts, to indicate places where someone had to make up scientific-sounding words, the party was over. That was babble.

 

[Forbin]

JD said:
Would it be rude to say that I think that sounds funny?

I laugh my ass off every time I watch a segment. My favorite Yoda-like example:
"...and we need to define data function. Data function, I said, how define this, we?"

 

[FordSVT]

I hate when "technobabble" is used as a plot device or deus ex machina, but when you think about it, it probably is "realistic" of the kinds of things people would say in that highly technical environment.

Go watch an episode of ER some time and tell me if you've got a clue what they're talking about if you're not a doctor or nurse. Legal dramas use legalese, military movies have all kinds of acronyms and cross-chatter that means zilch to the average person. I know none of this stuff is completely MADE UP like most of the stuff in Trek is (which is why I've got a huge problem with using it as a plot crutch), but I've got no problem with using the jargon itself as long as it makes some kind of sense on a basic level and it isn't overused. "Connect the doo-hicky and turn up the power" just doesn't sound right coming from an engineer who lives 300 years in the future.

I'm an controls/electrical engineer, and I can remember a techno-babble conversation about power relays and an electromagnetic effect between Geordi and Data that actually sounded plausible on a basic level. Someone on the writing staff knew something that day...

It's the fake, magic particle stuff the grates me the most I think. TNG and TOS had a lot of "increase the power of this" and "reverse the magnetic that to push away"! It was make-believe but it sounded plausibly relevant to what was being presented on screen. Voyager had a lot more of "send a phased magneto-chronoton pulse through the waveguide fluctuator.... blah blah blah" that took me completely out of the moment.

 

[Forbin]

^Come to think of it, I do occasionally hear that kind of techno-conversation in the corridors at work. Like I said, we're an electronic warfare company, so I do occasionally hear a conversation that's almost entirely acronyms and jargon.

 

[jimbtnp2]

Cyke101 said:
^It's also struck me how centralized everything is on a starship in Trek, and how it's almost always a bad idea when power goes down. In real-life, if NASA had adopted such a policy on their spaceflights, Apollo 13 would have been doomed.

But we still love Trek anyways

To be sure, I just want to point out that technobabble *is* necessary, but only when required, a la TOS. If one thinks that ALL technobabble is not only necessary but also innocent, then there are storytelling issues right there that have to be addressed.

Spock didn't talk about the humpback whales sonically remodulating their vocal vibrations to match the signal receptors on the alien probe. The whales just SANG! That's good enough for me

Great post, good examples, its just superior TV and story telling period in TOS vs MT. At least S1-TNG didn't have it

 

[KJM]

Forbin said:
So we basically have this video lecture of Yoda speaking in technobabble. Okay, it's REAL scientific technical stuff, but to me it sounds just like Yoda speaking technobabble.

"Reverse the polarity, we must!"



Okay, I'll shut up now.

 

[Forbin]

"There, again, the power coupling starboard goes!"

 

[Balthier the Great]

UnknownSample said:
Following written without reading the replies here, because an eye problem limits the time I can spend reading... scanning though, it seems I might agree with people here.

OhZedMasTree said:
You seem to be forgetting the sinful amount of technobabble used in TNG.

The premise of this thread's question I don't agree with, in the first place.

I hate technobabble. Technobabble consists of meaningless made-up words thrown into scripts to dazzle viewers who are easily impressed, and to move the plots along.

The alternative to technobabble is to have smart, creative use of real science in plots, and then to push that science further, speculating on the possible results or implications of it, in the future when that science may have been explored further than it has been today. Science-fiction, in other words. The trick is to explain it so the viewer can follow. That's hard, but a great thing when it's pulled off.

Many fans call all the science in ST "babble" when very often, it isn't "babble" at all. We need more of the valid, smart, well-explained stuff, and less of the babble. If a viewer just doesn't want to hear anything scientific, well, it might be a good idea to accept that that's par for the course with good science-fiction. If I'm watching an historical drama and I'm lost on some of the historical background, I just wish I knew more history. Same with science and SF. When I can follow the logic of the science they're taking us through in Next Gen, though, I love it. It adds a whole new dimension to the story, and gives me things to think about, after.

Around seasons 3 and 4, I think, Next Gen was far more science than babble. Later, when they started routinely inserting the word "tech" into scripts, to indicate places where someone had to make up scientific-sounding words, the party was over. That was babble.

Well, I think you start babbling when you have the characters using techspeak to pad things out. Like taking 10 minutes out of an ep just so that Jordi can spout things while tapping at a computer terminal. Doing what he's doing on the computer would only take up a couple seconds of airtime. Have him shout dramatically about rerouting the phasers through the waste reclaimation system, and about each step of the way is filler.

The best handling of a "mechanical failure" plot is apollo 13. They didn't spend 20 minutes explaining each step as they did it. They did their repairs. They built an airfilter out of playing cards and duct tape -- without explaining why they were doing what they were doing. "Houston, we have a problem" is much more dramatic than "The oxygen tank exploded due to static electricity on the stir rod, and it damaged the lithium ion dorsal battery".

"Jack Bauer, we suggest that you use your saltpetre discharge device to introduce lead compounds into the aorta of the insurgent standing next to the octagenarian. In other words shoot the bastard."

 

[Forbin]

Saltpetre?

It's nitro-based powder these days.

 

[Balthier the Great]

Forbin said:
Saltpetre?

It's nitro-based powder these days.

** note to self: DO NOT FAKE TECHNOBABBLE OFF OF WIKIPEDIA.

 

[Forbin]

 

[AJBryant]

Forbin said:
^And why the Enterprise didn't have exhaust-tracking torpedos in the first place, I'll never know. Some of the writers need to study up on the kinds of weapons we already have today.

Frankly, a more serious concern with THAT film is why the Enterprise even HAD any torpedoes for mapping gaseous anomalies -- it was SULU'S ship that had been out doing that, not Kirk's.

ancient said:
NEMESIS had a lot of technobabble that:

1. Made no sense
2. Directly contradicted real science
3. Existed only because the plot required it.

Not to mention my favorite bit of bad science: Crusher, discussing the lethality of Thalaron radiation, says something to the effect that "the smallest particle can kill."

Ummm... radiation is ENERGY, it doesn't have PARTICLES.

Sigh.

I hate technobabble.

As someone pointed out, when you have scripts saying "We have to tech the tech" (that is a quote, if memory serves, of a line that typically appeared in later TNG ep scripts) you have a problem.

It's solving problems bogusly.

Tony

 

[DumbDumb2007]

The entire run of Next gen.