RobertScorpio
Pariah
What are some of TREK's biggest continuity goofs??
TREK Continuity goofs
- Thread starter RobertScorpio
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One that springs to mind is the fact that Squire of Gothos implies that the show takes place around the 27th century while other episodes place it in the 22nd or--now established as "canon"--the 23rd.
As I just noted in another thread over in the ENT forum: Romulans have a cloaked ship in "Minefield," which was otherwise, IMO, a really good episode.
ETA:
Archer's father died when he was a kid; Archer father gave him advice after he joined Starfleet.
Trip and T'Pol have a son in E2 (which doesn't have the usual amnesia factor despite the timeline being changed so that their kids should never have existed even though the kids needed to exist so they timeline could be changed so they wouldn't exist -- God I hate temporal paradoxes...).
Meanwhile, in Demons, there is no mention of Lorian and everybody seems surprised to discover that a Vulcan-human hybrid is possible.
Fraidy cat Hoshi had a black belt in her Starfleet days but is utterly incabable of defending herself hand-to-hand while aboard Enterprise.
Don't take it personally anybody... I love ENT which is why I'm most familiar with the details of the show and the puzzle pieces that don't fit.
ETA:
Archer's father died when he was a kid; Archer father gave him advice after he joined Starfleet.
Trip and T'Pol have a son in E2 (which doesn't have the usual amnesia factor despite the timeline being changed so that their kids should never have existed even though the kids needed to exist so they timeline could be changed so they wouldn't exist -- God I hate temporal paradoxes...).
Meanwhile, in Demons, there is no mention of Lorian and everybody seems surprised to discover that a Vulcan-human hybrid is possible.
Fraidy cat Hoshi had a black belt in her Starfleet days but is utterly incabable of defending herself hand-to-hand while aboard Enterprise.
Don't take it personally anybody... I love ENT which is why I'm most familiar with the details of the show and the puzzle pieces that don't fit.
Biggest continuity goofs? Oooh now that's a tough one to quantify. Are you looking for goofs in relation to the evil 'C' word that sounds a bit like a sort of large gun <shudder>, or do you just mean production errors that made it onto screen.
I.e; do you want "James R Kirk" vs "James T Kirk" or are you after LaForge's phaser falling off his belt and landing right in the middle of shot as Riker is getting sucked into Armus from TNG's 'Skin of Evil' only to magically reappear back on his belt in the next shot?
One of my personal favourite for the latter would be in TNG's 'The Inner Light' in which Picard collapses on the bridge and is being administered to by Crusher. When we return to the scene after a fantasy interlude, the dear doctor is still in the same position, still earnestly caring for the captain, only with a completely different hairstyle! (She clearly got bored in the commercial break...)
I.e; do you want "James R Kirk" vs "James T Kirk" or are you after LaForge's phaser falling off his belt and landing right in the middle of shot as Riker is getting sucked into Armus from TNG's 'Skin of Evil' only to magically reappear back on his belt in the next shot?
One of my personal favourite for the latter would be in TNG's 'The Inner Light' in which Picard collapses on the bridge and is being administered to by Crusher. When we return to the scene after a fantasy interlude, the dear doctor is still in the same position, still earnestly caring for the captain, only with a completely different hairstyle! (She clearly got bored in the commercial break...)
RobertScorpio
Pariah
Either I guess. I was aiming for story content, but I love those kinds you just mentioned. For those, I like when the one where you can see the camera man blowing a bubble gum bubble in the reflection of some mirror thingy on the Romulan senator's desk as Spock/data/Picard make their escape...
If you like the goofs that made it on screen, have you tried checking out the Nitpicker's guides by Phil Farrand? From memory he did ones for TOS, TNG and DS that were published in paperback, and i think if you Google (other search engines available folks!) 'Nitpicker central' that he set up a group discussing them.
Don't get me wrong, some production errors get particularly anal attention. But i remember chuckling heartily along with some of the points raised.
ST:WOK for example. Ok, Khan and his buds more marooned on Ceti Alpha V and all was well. Then Ceti Alpha VI exploded, throwing the former planet into a wider orbit making it near uninhabitable and which the crew of the Reliant would later mistake for Ceti Alpha VI....
Hang on a minute, the crew of the Reliant, on a CHARTING mission, LOOKING FOR PLANETS, entered the Ceti Alpha system and nobody noticed that when they counted those big blips on the sensor screen that they were one short?!?! How did an ENTIRE PLANET go missing and a crew of people LOOKING for planets failed to notice it? <snicker> It's daft really, but you don't mind..
Then there's the plain daft stuff like reflections of camera crew or Kirk's hair being parted on the wrong side because the director needed him to look the other way and rather than re-filiming, just flipped the film around..
I guess it's all how you view your Trek I suppose, I'd like to think that I can laugh along with things that are a bit daft and silly, hell because i'm enjoying the program/film. I firmly acknowledge that the details are everything for some people (seriously, check out the debate that started after the teaser for the new movie aired about whether WELDING would still take place...geeze guys....)
Redshirt-Widow - I agree. I have no problem acknowledging the goofy elements of Trek and/or the outright mistakes while still enjoying the show. I think it can be a fun exercise to try and reconcile and explain the inconsistencies and mistakes, but some take it way too far and miss the forest for the trees.
Wow, I don't know why, but that has never hit me. If he hadn't disintegrated, I think ol' Captain Terrell should've been brought up on charges of incompetence.
Didn't Greg Cox explain that one (how Chekov et al. could have missed Ceti Alpha V and VI) in the Eugenics Wars novels? I *think* it was something like this: when Ceti Alpha VI exploded, V got kicked into a larger orbit, causing Chekov to mistake it for VI (counting inward from the outermost planet in the system). Debris from VI could have obscured the view of the other planets.
Here's a question *I* have: exactly how did Ceti Alpha VI bite the dust in the first place? Planets don't just explode for no reason.
Here's a question *I* have: exactly how did Ceti Alpha VI bite the dust in the first place? Planets don't just explode for no reason.
And the exploding planet just happened to blow it into the exact same orbit as Ceti Alpha VI? So what was in place of Ceti Alpha V's original position? And what caused that?
To answer your question, who knows how the planet blew up, perhaps instead we should ask how the heel an entire system or planets randomly plays hide and seek?
Excuse the sarcasm, it's not intended to insult, but merely prove the point:- If we go into these things too deep, then we ignore the whole premise that it was a necessary plot-device in what is regarded as probably one on the best ST movies ever. It's worth a chuckle at times, as are all goofs, but the minute we start delving ito the depths of them, do we not lose the enjoyment we gained from the show/movie in the first place?
<Faithfully promises not to drag this OT anymore>
^ I didn't think that Ceti Alpha V ended up in *exactly the same orbit* as VI did, I only suggested that Chekov mistook one planet for the other simply because of its place in the order. Meaning, he assumed V was VI because he counted inward from the outer edge of the system.
IIRC the same thing happens during the few in-show seconds that pass between BOBW Part I and BOBW Part II (her uniform seems to have changed shade too, guess that's a lighting thing?).
Here's some from TOS
The year is the obvious one. There are several shows where it disputes the year. Squire of Gothos says it was 800 years after the French Napoleon era which would be the 26th century I think. Space Seed says it's only been 200 years since the 1990s which you can say okay it's 250 maybe, so that's just a minor one. Changling says it's 300 years. There's more that probably mess up but that's off the top of my head.
Spock talks about his mother as in past tense in 2 episodes(Corbomite Menuever and The Naked Time), but they are alive in Journey to Babel. Also how would Kirk not know who his first officer's parents were. Especially when Sarek is presented as important as he is and he is married with a human. It didn't seem that Vulcans and humans were married a lot from anything else. I just find is strange that Kirk having served with Spock for years(according to Amok Time) didn't know who Spock's parents were.
TWOK-How did Khan recognize Chekov when he wasn't on the Enterprise when Khan was.
The year is the obvious one. There are several shows where it disputes the year. Squire of Gothos says it was 800 years after the French Napoleon era which would be the 26th century I think. Space Seed says it's only been 200 years since the 1990s which you can say okay it's 250 maybe, so that's just a minor one. Changling says it's 300 years. There's more that probably mess up but that's off the top of my head.
Spock talks about his mother as in past tense in 2 episodes(Corbomite Menuever and The Naked Time), but they are alive in Journey to Babel. Also how would Kirk not know who his first officer's parents were. Especially when Sarek is presented as important as he is and he is married with a human. It didn't seem that Vulcans and humans were married a lot from anything else. I just find is strange that Kirk having served with Spock for years(according to Amok Time) didn't know who Spock's parents were.
TWOK-How did Khan recognize Chekov when he wasn't on the Enterprise when Khan was.
Speaking of Spock's parents... in Where No Man Has Gone Before Spock mentions that "one of my ancestors married a human female" which seems an odd way to refer to one's parents!
The classic would be how the heck Khan remembered Chekov in TWOK, when Chekov wasn't on the show yet in Space Seed.
Yes, I am well familiar with all the explanations that have been tossed around - Chekov was on the ship, just not a bridge officer, and we didn't see when Khan encountered him, yadda, yadda, yadda.
But the simple truth is Chekov was not a character yet. So Khan shouldn't have remembered him.
Yes, I am well familiar with all the explanations that have been tossed around - Chekov was on the ship, just not a bridge officer, and we didn't see when Khan encountered him, yadda, yadda, yadda.
But the simple truth is Chekov was not a character yet. So Khan shouldn't have remembered him.
Surprised no one's mentioned this yet: phasers shooting out of the torpedo tube in Darmok.
Chekov was on the enterprise, he just hadn't been cast yet, internal continuity wise Catspaw saved Star Trek 2 on that one, as Chekov appears in catspaw and the stardate for that is before space seed, so the character just not being seen is a better explanation then chekov came on board got transferred off the ship and the transferred back.
You know, there's actually another hint that suggests Chekov was onboard in the first season. In second season's "The Deadly Years" Kirk makes a reference to corbomite and Chekov and Sulu exchange knowing looks. One could conclude that Chekov knew of Kirk's bluff and was therefore on the Enterprise in first season's "The Corbomite Maneuver".
In the TWOK novelization, the planetary problems were explained somewhat. Ceti Alpha VI is said to be the moon of Ceti Alpha V (although the numbering system doesn't make sense in that case) and was geologically unstable, causing it to eventually explode. That seems somewhat more practical, since the explosion would have been far more devastating to CA5 if 6 were a planet of equal mass or more.
The system is also said to have only been minimally charted, and Chekov did detect anomalies on the Reliant when she entered the system. He know something was wrong, but didn't remember Khan until it was too late and he and Terrell were already captured.
The system is also said to have only been minimally charted, and Chekov did detect anomalies on the Reliant when she entered the system. He know something was wrong, but didn't remember Khan until it was too late and he and Terrell were already captured.
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