Was the worst glut of technobabble on Voyager?

[Ragitsu]

Good afternoon.

Of the four pre-Enterprise series, did Star Trek: Voyager feature the greatest abundance of technobabble?

 

[Orac]

There's a plasma surge in the xenon containment node lubricator.

 

[Jayson1]

No that was TNG. What Voyager was worst at was the tagged on false jeopardy scenes were it felt like ever week you had some aliens being hostile for no reason were they are basically telling them to leave or they will open fire and of course you usually get a scene of the ship fighting the other alien ship and doing that bridge tech action talk like "shields at 47%" or take "invasive actions."

 

[at Quark's]

Not sure how to measure that. A count of words like 'matrix'. 'inverter', 'quantum', 'algorithm', and the like, perhaps?

Besides that, not all technobabble is equal. I would distinguish between good technobabble (is functional within the story to some degree and gives a general idea of what must be done, isn't used too far out of context, and conveys the impression that these people are highly trained specialists who just use these words to communicate a lot of information in a compact manner), and there's bad technobabble (a meaningless string of tech-y sounding words to obfuscate that there really isn't a problem you couldn't solve easily whithout said technobabble). Of course these are just the two extremes.

 

[XCV330]

it's difficult to measure who had the worst. But if we could reconfigure the deflector dish to emit a wobblygon particle stream and cross-defenestrate to ionic snow-leopard plasma array at JUST the right moment, I think it might suddenly fade into view.

 

[dupersuper]

Good afternoon.

Of the four pre-Enterprise series, did Star Trek: Voyager feature the greatest abundance of technobabble?

Yes: also of Enterprise and the post Enterprise shows.

 

[Ragitsu]

"Glut" may be a somewhat imprecise choice on my part. I guess the presentation of Voyager's scripts is what leads me to pay special attention to the technobabble.

 

[Ragitsu]

EMH2: "Doctor, some...thing just went offline."
EMH: "...specifically?"
EMH2: "The secondary gyrodyne relays and the propulsion field intermatrix have depolarised."
EMH: (rolling eyes) "In English!"
EMH2: "I'm just reading what it says here!"

 

[Vale]

it's difficult to measure who had the worst. But if we could reconfigure the deflector dish to emit a wobblygon particle stream and cross-defenestrate to ionic snow-leopard plasma array at JUST the right moment, I think it might suddenly fade into view.

And I said bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish,
That's the way we do things, lad, we're making shit up as we wish
The Klingons and the Romulans pose no threat to us
'Cause if we find we're in a bind we just make some shit up...

 

[JirinPanthosa]

Having technobabble isn't the problem so much as when they exclusively use it to solve the problem.

 

[Ragitsu]

Having technobabble isn't the problem so much as when they exclusively use it to solve the problem.

When an immovable technobabble meets an unstoppable technobabble.

 

[JirinPanthosa]

When an immovable technobabble meets an unstoppable technobabble.

Good technobabble is decoration and flavor. Bad technobabble is a substitute for story.

 

[Farscape One]

TNG and VGR were both pretty high on the technobabble scale. I would say VOYAGER is worse mostly because of how it was delivered. Out of all the leads of all the shows, LeVar Burton might have been the best to deliver all the technobabble because he felt the most believable. He really had it nailed down to a science. (Pun intended.)

 

[NCC-73515]

But y'all do know what a bilateral kelilactiral is, right?

 

[Akiraprise]

Well, of course we do, we are not stupid!