Things in Trek that make me go "gah"!

[Penta]

OK. It's a slow morning, and I've spent the last few days on a Trek ideas binge. Getting a bunch of Trek ideas down in text for the RPG I play on, from Insanely Bad plot ideas to other things.

As I've been doing that, I've been going through everything I have Trek, especially in written form.

And when one does that on a concentrated basis, there are certain things which annoy a person. Things that make you go "gah". Often, these are things we accept, but they still annoy me.

So, yes, I need to vent.

Things which annoy me about canon Trek (and a good deal of fandom too), in no order:

1. The Terran monoculture. Heck, the prevalence of monocultures: Yes, I understand the reasons why. It's easier to write for TV/movies figuring a monoculture.

But especially for humans, it drives me up a tree. For a series that, if you listen to its more dedi - no, let's just call em what they are: rabid fans (and its creator), is all about peace, love, tolerance and IDIC, it seems that there's basically no cultural diversity among humans...or most other species. Even in languages - all the many vibrant and wonderful languages of Earth, replaced by English (in the form of Federation Standard)?

Stop and think about that for a moment. The first thing it makes me do is go "WTF?" English as a lingua franca, sure...But replacing all the other languages? Not gonna happen.

Languages are the bedrock of cultures. Eliminate a language, and the culture just-about-always follows in very short order, whether that language loss is forced or natural.

Even if it were the good thing Trek seems to portray it as (another WTF moment for me), I don't see it happening except through levels of coercion that amount to genocide.

There are reasons why France is obsessive about keeping the French language as free as possible of loanwords and the like, why Quebec insists on using French, why the Germans have passionate battles over spelling. Very good reasons. Reasons that would only get more important after things like the Eugenics Wars and World War 3 and other near-brushes with extinction.

You can extend this to whatever field you like, and can easily extend it beyond Earth. If Trek is so much about tolerance and understanding and IDIC, how come practically everyone from a certain planet is depicted as thinking alike, talking alike, dressing alike (where we see civilians at all!), and so forth. If IDIC matters a damn, where's Star Trek's practicing what it preaches? Where's the Federation's hordes of teenage subcultures, for instance?

2. The overwhelming presence of Starfleet: Again, on a TV show or in a movie, it makes some sense sense why we only see Starfleet. Not really why they can't fit in mention of more than Starfleet in dialogue where the plot allows it, but hey.

However, while some novels have avoided this, generally Starfleet does it all in the UFP:

Starfleet is the military, plus a sort of space-NOAA. Okay. Combining the two makes sense, I suppose.

Starfleet does Coast Guard-y things. Okay. Again, combined with above, makes sense; In the US, the Navy often did this before the Coast Guard was established, and the Army did like things plenty of times along the western frontier.

Starfleet does high-level diplomacy. I suppose it could be arguable, at least in first contact situations. Makes me wonder why the UFP doesn't appear to have its own diplomatic service though.

Starfleet...is the sole intelligence service for the UFP. Hm. We've certainly never heard of a Federation civilian intelligence service, anyway, like the CIA is to the US (as opposed to Starfleet Intelligence's analog to military intelligence units).

Starfleet also does civilian law enforcement, and the Starfleet JAG prosecutes and plea bargains with Richard Bashir, though it could be argued the JAG actually sentences the elder Bashir. (DS9: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?") All of this is despite the defendant's never once having been a member of Starfleet, and hence not possibly coming under the jurisdiction of military law in any sane reading. What the heck?

Starfleet, and this is the kicker...Has flag officers, in uniform, serving on the Federation Council (in either ST4 or ST5, I forget which). Kinda like the Joint Chiefs being members of Congress, ain't it?

Military coup, a la Homefront/Paradise Lost? Who needs it, when Starfleet has its fingers in everything anyway?

I'm sure people can think of other annoying Trek stuff (I can, it'd just go on forever.)...

 

[captcalhoun]

the people in the Council Chamber in TVH may not have been councillors, merely observers. it's not clear.

my biggest peeve is the preponderance of Anglo-American ship names and more the preponderance of Human ship names.

 

[sbk1234]

I can't stand the proliferation of sentient holograms from ST:VOY. That was the one aspect I couldn't stand. It was carried out too far in the few novels I've read. (I know, not canon.)

Also, the use of humanoid to identify non-humans who are human-like. Still a very ethnocentric term, IMHO.

 

[Smellincoffee]

I can't stand the proliferation of sentient holograms from ST:VOY. That was the one aspect I couldn't stand. It was carried out too far in the few novels I've read. (I know, not canon.)

Also, the use of humanoid to identify non-humans who are human-like. Still a very ethnocentric term, IMHO.

It's almost funny when non-humans (like Major Kira) use it.

 

[Myasishchev]

Interspecies breeding and poor biology in general. Poor physics is acceptable (in limited doses) because you need to break physics to get to anywhere interesting, but poor biology (the Ocampa and "Threshold" tie for the worst examples) is much less forgivable.

The undisguised bigotry against genetic engineering. They come off sounding like Protestant fundamentalists half the time, and Hitler the rest.

 

[Penta]

I have a favorite way of getting around the first point, Myasishchev, at least so far as interspecies breeding goes: It may be *possible* to have a kid who's part Vulcan-part Human or whatever, but carrying to term is basically impossible without close medical monitoring (and still a close-run-thing with it), and a fair number of the pregnancies that are carried to term wind up stillborn.

None of that, however, accounts for the simple difficulties in attraction and making a relationship work. Put simply, the simplest way I get around Trek's epic biology fail is by taking into consideration that if human-human relationships are hard, harder when you're of different cultures/faiths/races/etc...Then relationships between different species have got to be insanely hard to navigate. Forget having kids together, first you have to get past the first few dates!

End result? Interspecies relationships are unusual even in the enlightened time of Star Trek - not because of any bigotry, but because even moreso than the often-fraught variety within one species, they just don't work, and people know this. (There are good reasons why Starfleet's Interspecies Relations Handbook is inches thick!) And out of the few relationships that get to the point where having kids is considered, then the biology issues considered above come into play. End result - sure they're possible, but you can go your whole life and never meet a person who's resulted from such a union.

"Undisguised bigotry" against genetic engineering I'm not so sure is a bad thing - really, even a series like Star Trek needs red lines, things that just aren't done. Tinkering with the human(oid) genome certainly sounds like a good candidate!

 

[neozeks]

Stop and think about that for a moment. The first thing it makes me do is go "WTF?" English as a lingua franca, sure...But replacing all the other languages? Not gonna happen.

I don't think other languages are dead. We've certainly heard Picard speak French on occasion. And given the UT, who knows what languages all the crewmembers are actually using?

Starfleet does high-level diplomacy. I suppose it could be arguable, at least in first contact situations. Makes me wonder why the UFP doesn't appear to have its own diplomatic service though.

There's a Diplomatic Service in the novels, I believe.

Starfleet also does civilian law enforcement, and the Starfleet JAG prosecutes and plea bargains with Richard Bashir, though it could be argued the JAG actually sentences the elder Bashir. (DS9: "Doctor Bashir, I Presume?") All of this is despite the defendant's never once having been a member of Starfleet, and hence not possibly coming under the jurisdiction of military law in any sane reading. What the heck?

It's possible Starfleet JAG was just a middle-man between Bashir's dad and civilian judicial authorities.

But yeah, I agree with your general points. I'd also add the complete prevalence of everything human in the Federation.

 

[sojourner]

Yea, gotta agree on the language issue. Where is it ever said that English is now the only language in use on earth?

 

[NessFK]

but poor biology (the Ocampa and "Threshold" tie for the worst examples)

Ugh, the episode Threshold definitely made me go "gah". Looking past the fact that the episode completely craps on the entire concept of natural selection and evolution, but what were they thinking by making humans "evolve" into weird sea-otter looking creatures with flippers? That seems extremely de-evolved.

 

[Shatnertage]

One of them is the way Starfleet folks constantly refer to the species they run into as "aliens." It's like if we were on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and said, "I bought a t-shirt from a foreigner on shore." It just seems like maybe on Earth you'd use that world to describe off-worlders, but once you're into interstellar space, basically everyone is aliens--even you.

 

[shadowedgalaxy]

You know what grinds my gears? Earth is mentioned to have hundreds of spacedocks and orbital facilities. Whenever we see Earth, there is nothing there. Not even the Moon, which was only seen in like ST:III and The Best of Both Worlds.

 

[captcalhoun]

they may be too small to see from long distances or simply out of sight as they orbit the planet. a lot of orbital shots - like the Defiant over Earth in Past Tense - are from pretty close range, like only a few hundred metres away, so the spacedocks, habitats, orbital defence platforms and so on wouldn't be visible anyway. they're probably in higher orbits 'behind the camera'.

 

[Pauln6]

Interspecies breeding and poor biology in general. Poor physics is acceptable (in limited doses) because you need to break physics to get to anywhere interesting, but poor biology (the Ocampa and "Threshold" tie for the worst examples) is much less forgivable.

The undisguised bigotry against genetic engineering. They come off sounding like Protestant fundamentalists half the time, and Hitler the rest.

Yeah I agree with this, especially since genetic engineering would be needed to produce mixed species offspring (if such a thing should ever be considered feasible, which isn't even that debatable) and deal with many diseases. TMP was less prissy, with a Federation member race of clones (the Arcturians) who must have used genetic engineering as their standard method of reproduction.

The language thing never bothered me. I just assume that anybody speaking with an American accent is being translated so only people like Chekov, Ilia, and Troi have bothered to learn to speak standard as a second language for use in everyday life. It doesn't surprise that the UK overran France and wiped out its language, if not its culture. They had it coming.

I also dislike aliens of the week with one defining cultural trait but for an RPG it's easy to take the races and merge them. So instead of being humans with spots (talking unjoined Trill here) maybe Trill retire at 60 through ritual suicide and use empathic metamorphs as diplomatic gifts. In fact, 'retiring' hosts on a specific date is a very sensible way to ensure that a symbiont doesn't die while paragliding over the Sikosian mountains for its host's 80th birthday (or in Kurzon's case a 3sum on Risa).

My idea was to merge themes from other sci fi franchises to make things less rose-tinted so I merged Psi-Corps and Section 31, introduced the B5 and Farscape core races plus Magog from Andromeda, and made Federation politics a bit murkier like during the Dominion War and Shadow War. Replace all-powerful and therefore annoying races like the Q with the more nebulous, power-broking Vorlons and Shadows and you have an amalgam universe with lots of interesting RPG potential. If you want to retain more of a Trek theme, you can always overlay Trek some of those throwaway racial names onto the races from the other franchises so Hyach become Talarians, Drazi become Ktarian, Skaarans become Tholians etc.

 

[Myasishchev]

but poor biology (the Ocampa and "Threshold" tie for the worst examples)

Ugh, the episode Threshold definitely made me go "gah". Looking past the fact that the episode completely craps on the entire concept of natural selection and evolution, but what were they thinking by making humans "evolve" into weird sea-otter looking creatures with flippers? That seems extremely de-evolved.

Iirc, according to Braga, he was trying to get across the (surprisingly correct) point that evolution is not a ladder. Things humans consider to be "higher" forms can and often do change over millions of years into what we consider to be "lower" forms--compare, for example, the feathered majesty of utahraptor to your chicken sandwich.* Of course it's hard to ever see intelligence being selected against, no matter how many calories it requires (300-500 a day in humans), because intelligence is the most game-breaking feature in the game of life there ever was. But still I appreciate the point.

However, the execution of that point was made in probably the most retarded way possible, to the extent, that I think Braga was just coming up with after-the-fact justifications, because someone who "got" evolution like that probably wouldn't write Threshold. Or Genesis. Or most any of the scripts Braga ever wrote that involved any science at all.

*Warning: not necessarily an accurate depiction of the radiation of the theropods, but close enough. I'm sure utahraptor is related to something we consider stupid and tasty. Of course, there are some birds much smarter and more complex than some mammals--crows, parrots, and so forth.

 

[otherjr]

You can extend this to whatever field you like, and can easily extend it beyond Earth. If Trek is so much about tolerance and understanding and IDIC, how come practically everyone from a certain planet is depicted as thinking alike, talking alike, dressing alike (where we see civilians at all!), and so forth. .

I like to think that painting with such broad brushstrokes is a Star trek strength, but i think it has to be done right. Its useful to have a culture which is kinda monoform because they stand for an ideal that the human characters have to deal with. I mean a big part of Trek is the exploration of humanity, so you need to have people with an almost theatrically exaggerated characteristic in order to let the humans react to it and try to understand it, and think about whether its wrong or right etc. So like the Klingons are just ridiculous in their whole honour stance, but they arent the focus of the show, the humans are. Thats why outsider characters like Worf and Quark and Odo and Seven were such breakout characters, it was interesting to see this race which has a totally different way of thinking because it casts a new light on humanity. The fact that they are pretty uniform in their thinking allows them to be bought back again, and it allows the viewer to see them more as a concept to be dealt with and examined, than a legitimate race of aliens.

Take the borg for example. I get really annoyed when people complain about TNG era borg because they just sent like one ship to attack Earth and it wasnt realistic, they would have just sent loads etc. Thing is, the show is not about that, the borg are so great because of what they represent to Picard. It was an interesting concept to take these people totally devoid of freedom, and pair them with a really idealistic captain. Then the great borg episodes of TNG were the ones were the humans were forced to look at the borg and say 'Ok, this is my enemy, but when it really gets down to it, is this way of life worse than mine'?

Also, gagh makes me go "gah"!

 

[KiraDax]

It may sound minisicule by comparison, but I hate the blandness of clothing. Everyone is wearing a different color or cut of one or two styles. Not just one culture or world, too-nearly every race encountered, Federation and non.

What happened to variety?

 

[NessFK]

but poor biology (the Ocampa and "Threshold" tie for the worst examples)

Ugh, the episode Threshold definitely made me go "gah". Looking past the fact that the episode completely craps on the entire concept of natural selection and evolution, but what were they thinking by making humans "evolve" into weird sea-otter looking creatures with flippers? That seems extremely de-evolved.

Iirc, according to Braga, he was trying to get across the (surprisingly correct) point that evolution is not a ladder. Things humans consider to be "higher" forms can and often do change over millions of years into what we consider to be "lower" forms--compare, for example, the feathered majesty of utahraptor to your chicken sandwich.* Of course it's hard to ever see intelligence being selected against, no matter how many calories it requires (300-500 a day in humans), because intelligence is the most game-breaking feature in the game of life there ever was. But still I appreciate the point.

However, the execution of that point was made in probably the most retarded way possible, to the extent, that I think Braga was just coming up with after-the-fact justifications, because someone who "got" evolution like that probably wouldn't write Threshold. Or Genesis. Or most any of the scripts Braga ever wrote that involved any science at all.

*Warning: not necessarily an accurate depiction of the radiation of the theropods, but close enough. I'm sure utahraptor is related to something we consider stupid and tasty. Of course, there are some birds much smarter and more complex than some mammals--crows, parrots, and so forth.

I suppose that's an interesting way to spin it, but as you said, it sounds like a cover-up of stupidity. And any enlightened point about evolution he was trying to make is buried under all kinds of fallacies. The episode implied that evolution was a set, completely internal course that has nothing to do with reproduction or natural selection. Which is something he should have picked up in mandatory high school biology classes.

 

[sojourner]

TMP was less prissy, with a Federation member race of clones (the Arcturians) who must have used genetic engineering as their standard method of reproduction.

I must have missed the scene in TMP where they discussed this. What part of the movie is it in?

 

[captcalhoun]

it's not. it was part of the wardrobe department's notes. or make up department? one or the other. they came up with a load of background info on who a load of the aliens were that appear in TMP in the background, like Saurians can breathe 4 different gases, Arcturians being cloned, the snapping turtle-evolved Rigellians and so on. you won't find it in the Encyclopaedia and if it's on Mem Alpha, it'd be in the Apocrypha sections of articles...

 

[Lieut. Arex]

It's behind-the-scenes info found in The Making of Star Trek - The Motion Picture and various magazine articles over the years, the same source for the details on all the background aliens from TMP. Here's their page on Memory Alpha.