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Why Didn't They...

In "The Chute", in order to withstand the prolonged lack of food, they try to forget their hunger... by TALKING ABOUT FOOD!!!

Anybody who's been on a diet knows that you should think about food as little as possible. By thinking about sumptuous meals all you do is stimulate your digestive processes, IE salivates and increases the acidity of your stomach.

If it were a real-life situation Paris and Kim would have quickly realized that their method was a mistake, their own bodies would have made them realized that.
 
Maybe they were just subtly trying to work themselves up into eating their fellow prisoners? It's not cannibalism if they aren't the same species according to the people on the Discovery board.
 
One of my favorite examples of this type of plot fail is from the old Battlestar Galactica. Amazing special effects for its time, but there was no money left for original scripts, apparently, so they ended up doing episodes like "The Gun On Ice Planet Zero." This episode is a complete ripoff of the classic war movie The Guns of Navarone. "Guns" is about Allied soldiers having to destroy two huge German guns protecting each side of a narrow channel of the sea. The Battle Star writers adapt this so that the Fleet has two navigate between two planets where each planet has a massive gun on it.

They never catch on that sailing on the ocean and sailing through space are a little different and that their starships could just go around the planets instead of insisting on going directly between them. Hell, planets rotate for that matter, so I'm not even sure how the guns were supposed to work to begin with.

Mr Laser Beam said:

It's been awhile, but IIRC, the fleet had to head between the planets because the Cylons were maneuvering them into it (i.e. if they'd tried to go around, they would be attacked).

Actually in the (sort of, kind of, partially fact based) original novel and the movie The Guns of Navarone the two guns were in the same bunker on the same island commanding the channel the ships carrying the allied soldiers would have to sail through. The two guns were side by side in the same gun emplacement.

Considering the scale of the island and the channel I always wondered how the allied command could possibly have learned of the situation, came up with a plan, and sent the commandos to the island in time. I have the impression it would have taken the ships with the allied soldiers only hours or a day or two to come in range of the guns and be blasted. It should have been like: "Oh no sir! The garrison reported they were going to sail away six hours ago down the strait by Navarone Island!", "Quick! call them back! Tell them not to sail by Navarone or they'll be sunk!", "Oh no. Intelligence reports just came in, the evacuation ships have been sunk by the guns of Navarone.".

I also wonder why the British soldiers sailed down the channel when the alternative was to land on the neutral Turkish side and be interned for the duration of the war. I guess the soldiers were all super patriotic types who would rather die without being able to shoot back instead of surrendering to the enemy or being interned in a neutral country.

I also wonder why the Germans installed the guns on Navarone Island in the first place, and how they managed to do so in such a distant place.

But The Guns of Navarone is thousands and millions more rational and logical than "The Gun On Ice Planet Zero".

There is only one gun on one planet in "The Gun On Ice Planet Zero", not the two that you remember. But that hardly makes it any more illogical that the fleet can't simply go around Ice Planet Zeo outside the range of the gun. I once wrote a discussion of what it would take to force the colonial fleet to into range of the gun.

I think my conclusion was that the Cylons would need to have so many basestars to herd the colonial fleet toward the gun on Ice Planet Zero that they might as well just have the basestars converge on the Galactica and destroy it without bothering with the gun.
 
If you can just transport someone a fresh new body to solve major medical issues like in Unnatural Selection, why can't you use it to solve every medical problem?
My understanding was that transporter trace approach only worked because this virus changed DNA. Pulaski and Kingsley said this was unusual. The solution was "DNA magic", but at least I felt like they offered a reason they don't use it for all illness.
 
The general answer to the question "Why can't they use transporters to back up humans" is "Transporter buffers n stuff".
 
There is only one gun on one planet in "The Gun On Ice Planet Zero", not the two that you remember.

Well, that's embarrassing. Lorne Greene does climb into a disemboweled tauntaun at one point though, right?
 
Maybe they were just subtly trying to work themselves up into eating their fellow prisoners? It's not cannibalism if they aren't the same species according to the people on the Discovery board.

Well, according to tradition the Klingons are supposed to eat the hearts of their enemies, which makes them cannibals even by that definition. (being cannibal is IMO being willing to eat your own species regardless of you having actually gone through it, the same way you don't have to consummate to know if you're heterosexual or homosexual).
 
Latent Image - Why go to all the trouble of creating an insanely complicated ruse to cover up the crewman's death when all you really need to do is change the Doctor's memory of the last moment of his fateful decision
Surely it is much easier to just delete memories than to create new ones with all the possible contradictions that can happen.
Just delete a few files and you are done.
 
There’s a general excuse in Trek that really huge amounts of data can only be stored in single read memory. Why you can’t save transporter patterns, copy the Doc, etc.

The Trek universe has general issue of having established technology that if always respected would shortcut every story.
 
There’s a general excuse in Trek that really huge amounts of data can only be stored in single read memory. Why you can’t save transporter patterns, copy the Doc, etc.

The Trek universe has general issue of having established technology that if always respected would shortcut every story.

I think most writers have trouble understanding how computer memory works because most of the things they say in that area are outright stupid. Like in "message in a bottle" when B'lanna says that a complex message like a hologram will degrade less than a more rudimentary one like say something akin to morse code. In reality, the exact opposite is true.
 
Mortal Coil: Instead of having Seven come to the rescue with her fabulous new superpower, why not just have Neelix die on the operating table for a few minutes and have the Doctor revive him? The episode is really about his faith, so why involve Seven in such a major way?
Maybe the writers just wanted it to be a "Seven saves the day" episode.
 
There is only one gun on one planet in "The Gun On Ice Planet Zero", not the two that you remember.

Would have been kind of interesting though.

"Commander Adama, it appears the Cylon fleet is forcing us through this narrow strait that is guarded by these two humungous guns on opposite sides!"

"Well, then, we'll have to find a way to disable at least one of them by a specialised team. What do we know of their respective locations?"

"The one gun is on located on an arctic, ice frozen asteroid with forbidding mountains, with ice storms and blizzards raging all the time. It is guarded by at least an entire garisson of Cylons and there seems to be an advanced research centre of some kind. We checked our database, and we'd need a team of specialists -most of which are currently in prison- and our best gear to even stand a chance there. The other gun is located on what seems to be a paradisical planet filled with beatiful women, with only two cylons guarding and handling it. "

"Hmm. Sounds like a typical Cylon trap to me. Let's go for the first gun. Get the specialists and the gear prepared."

<etc etc etc>
 
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One of my favorite examples of this type of plot fail is from the old Battlestar Galactica. Amazing special effects for its time, but there was no money left for original scripts, apparently...
It wasn't about money. They planned to do three TV movies, but as they were making the initial 3-hour event ABC gave them a series order, so they had to scramble to get scripts done, sometimes finishing rewrites of scenes after they'd been filmed. The writing got better in the 2nd half of the season, but in the first half they were filming whatever they could throw together to make their airdates.

And if we're going to condemn "The Gun On Ice Planet Zero" for being a knockoff of "The Guns of Navarone" we gotta nail TOS for "Balance of Terror" for being a knockoff of "The Enemy Below", which it is.
 
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