Hi! After reading opinions for a long time, I’ve realized that some episodes are quite controversial nowadays. For example, Star Trek: Voyager Season 4, Episode 17, “Retrospect,” has been compared to the #MeToo movement, with some people criticizing how it “handles rape culture unevenly” (as one IMDb review puts it).
This got me thinking: What other things do you feel Star Trek make wrong?
I will preface this comment with I know the reasons why the show is like this, but still bugs me when I watch.
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The number of issues that could have been prevented by having some kind of protective suit are huge. Isolate from toxins, bacteria, viruses. It would have made for some very short episodes.
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Having any kind of idea about real security. Every visitor to the ship has almost free reign to go anywhere and do anything. The computer can be accessed by anyone. You can just wander onto the bridge. No lockouts in any equipment, including things that are critical to crew and ship survival.
- They do have antivirus in the teletransportation room, when there is some toxin, bacteria or virus is because is something really strong.
- True.
The biofilter in the teleporter only works on known diseases and they make that clear repeatedly. And since they are always exploring new places and things, it should be expected that the filters wouldnt work to protect them from much.
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All…of Chakotay. Yes, I know that con artist got hired to give them tips but jeez, I’d change that if I could.
I heard the consultor they hire for know more about Chakotay ethnicity was a scammer, right?
Yep.
Flirting. Everyone who flirts (especially on TNG) sounds like an LMM trained on HR handouts.
hahahaha
Irish stereotypes. From Finnigan in TOS all the way to “Up The Long Ladder” in TNG… It hasn’t been great.
The lack of racial diversity for the empires outside of the Federation makes it feel like somehow only the Federation ever figured out how to work with others. Even problematic caste style situations do not come up enough, let alone just simple variations of races.
The most “diverse” other empire is somehow the Dominion. We know the other empires have other races in them as well. It’s such a Federation centric view of the universe and I feel that it reinforced my America centric mindset because the parallels seem so direct to me. We are diverse, everyone else is easily groupable into divided others. Only we are Free. Only we are willing to work together.
Pretty sure the most diverse empire in Star Trek is the Borg.
Even more than the federation.
Fair but depressing take. I’d say one of the critical parts of diversity in Star Trek is showing how different personalities and backgrounds working together can accomplish more. I just wish it sometimes worked against the Federation as well.
Discovery tried to show some Klingon diversity and a quarter of the fan base went into an absolute tantrum
Life support. It’s always hilarious to me when power going out to life support is treated as an instantly fatal threat. IIRC, if you actually do the calculation it’s ridiculous. If you combine the interior volume of the Enterprise D with its crew count, you would find that the life support system could be offline for MONTHS before the oxygen levels started to substantially drop.
It’s unclear in my viewing EXACTLY what life support is doing.
It’s clear that it has very refined monitoring of compounds present, filtering mechanics, and essentially arbitrary disbursement of reagents.
LaForge: “Computer: flood cargo bay 2 with [the most exotic deep-cut compound that ever was]”
Barret: “Consider it done, I’ve got tons of that shit fucking ready to go and dumping it exactly in the one room is no fucking problem whatsoever”
It was my head cannon that starship operation leaked a ton of not great stuff into the air constantly, and that ongoing room-by-room analysis was always happening and carefully measured filtering and counter-disbursements was just constant. “Make oxygen” was part of it, but wasn’t by a large margin the whole of it.
This is based on nothing other than my feeling that the atmospheric management systems were way too extra.
That’s true. If you assume it’s a lot more than just the O2 supply, it makes more sense. Ok. I have a new fun headcanon.
So, here’s the thing. We know the Federation has multiple species in it. Those species likely have different atmospheric requirements. Sure, we sometimes see crew members wearing breathing apparatus, like the Benzites. But I wonder if every species actually needs its own atmospheric mix? Maybe every species has its own ideal mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc.
That is a problem if everyone has to share the same atmosphere. But what if they didn’t have to? Imagine if the life support system is generating little individual micro atmospheric pockets for every person onboard. Every crew member basically gets to breathe the atmospheric mix of their home planet. Using transporters, force fields, replicators, and good-old-fashioned fans, the ship generates little atmospheric bubbles around each crew member. And those bubbles move with them through the ship.
So would anyone need a breathing apparatus? It’s possible those species just have very unique air requirements that go beyond the capabilities of the life support system to handle. For example, maybe the Benzites require a gas that is poisonous to some other species? You don’t want to make big pockets of that floating around. You minimize the amount of it introduced to the ship by using personal breathing devices.
This would also explain why the system is capable of dispersing arbitrary compounds.
But the need for constant filtration is an interesting point as well. Though that seems like less of an immediately lethal threat than a long-term exposure thing.
For example, maybe the Benzites require a gas that is poisonous to some other species?
They do, yes.
But I wonder if every species actually needs its own atmospheric mix? Maybe every species has its own ideal mixture of oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc.
I don’t think that they do, or if it does, it overlaps enough that it’s effectively a non-existent difference. They would be much more visibly impaired going planetside otherwise, since the ship wouldn’t be able to sustain it.
I know the show often shows life support issues as lack of oxygen, but wouldn’t temperature be a issue much sooner? Maybe not hours, but days?
Honestly, the whole thermodynamics of the Starship Enterprise are an open question. Real spaceships need to be festooned with radiator panels. The Federation ships just deal with waste heat by venting it…somewhere? So it has to have some thermal management system that is beyond our understanding. How that would affect how long a passively cooling starship would take to cool down, I cannot say.
I never think about that.
This is the one that immediately comes to mind for me.
Bro rocked that uniform.
I definitely appreciated that they used that dress across gender boundaries. The dress itself isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that they didn’t give them the choice.
when worn with leggings it looked quite smart. they should have done that from the beginning.
Ah, the skant… you were taken away far too soon.
“That you could see what I had for breakfsat” wow…
Bro, ep 2 (or 3 I forget) is far worse than that skirt. Some racist ass wakanda forever shit going on in that ep.
Khan Noonien Singh has never been portrayed by an actor of the character’s ethnicity, nor have any of his descendants.
Picard didn’t have a French accent
Picard always spoke French, you hear the universally translated version. This theory is disproved in a couple ways, but it’s the best explanation.
I like the implication that, despite speaking French, the translator also gave him a British accent; just 'cause.
You just wrinkled my brain…
He was Corinthian. /s
Change.
Star Trek seems to be allergic to any deviation from the status quo. Everything forward must be recognisable to the past, whereas reality is not like that. Everything has to look recognisable, and be recognisable, even when it doesn’t make sense.
Everything has to have impulse, warp drive, for example, or engines that make it behave much the same. All the alien ships work like that, even centuries into the future, when that makes no sense at all. There has to be a Federation.
There’s very rarely any sort of major lasting change that we see on-screen, and I think what Star Trek needs is that growth.
Star Trek’s biology also tends to be infamously awful. It’s always played fast and loose with it, arguably more so than a lot of the other scientific disciplines it covers.
Barclay’s Cold Virus cure causing Worf to devolve into a precursor species, and several of the crew to evolve into hybrid creatures just because it altered the introns and exons. Doing that doesn’t automatically turn you into something else, or else radiation would be far worse than it is.
Same for the Klingon redundant organs. It’s still the same system, so the Klingon redundancies wouldn’t do much good, unless they had something on their planet that meant they needed it, that isn’t just being a fighter planet.
And it doesn’t really address the physiological differences very well. A human and a Klingon hit the same, and have much of the same vulnerabilities. Worf has slight super-strength, but that’s about it.
When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.
Observe:
In the episode, Siege of AR-558, the Feds are defending a subspace relay behind cover, in an entrenched position with only one approach through a choke point and are getting the absolute SHIT kicked out of them. THIS IS A SOLVED PROBLEM. We solved it in the 19th century. The solution is a machine gun. Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?
Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?
Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?
When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.
In their defence, they explicitly say they are not space military. Everyone else just treats them as such. Just because they’ve got exploration cruisers armed like warships.
Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?
It’s not any more or less explodable than the rest of the ship. But we do see a good reason. The main screens on the bridge are physical on most ships. So if the master computer fails, they don’t lose visibility completely.
Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
Only if you can power it, and if you can afford to power a replicator, chances are, you can power a phaser enough to be useful, and they’re far more versatile devices.
A regular gun using bullets is just a wasteful toy by comparison.
If anything, there’s the question if why they didn’t just run their phasers at wide beam, and deal with it that way.
In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?
There’s no good point. From memory, Worf has to dismantle his badge for it, and it doesn’t last for very long.
Most people just don’t go down where there are bullets flying, and most civilisations use energy weapons like laser cannons.
If bullets were more common, they probably would have them. Similar to why the Borg don’t block bullets with their shields.
Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?
Why have pockets if you can have everyone look like they’re in wetsuits? It’s like why no-one has first aid kits, or emergency supplies on them. Who has time for sensibility if you can have the ✨Aesthetique✨?
It’s worth mentioning they also had a battle bridge, that was buried away inside the ship. I accept them not using it much as a conceit to television (and set costs).
Given that enterprise was foremost a ship of exploration and diplomacy, and how many aliens ended up visiting the bridge. Having a “public” bridge and a battle bridge would make sense.
On AR-558 they’d been run down and were running out. Any heavy weapons they brought had been damaged or expired.
They’re not standard due to the lack of people firing bullets.
Because it’s not easily targeted, I don’t recall anyone deliberately targeting a bridge? Also there’s much more tempting targets and the non-military advantages outweigh the military disadvantages. All the same arguments about why humans have their brains and eyes all up on display rather than burried behind a case of bones!
No idea about the pockets thing. Probably because they’re not motivated by the acquisition of things they don’t think about places to put their things?
Why is this not standard issue?
The number of creative solutions that are devised and then forgotten are too numerous to count. Occasionally there will be a call back to the solution for the diehard fans but I feel like its rare.
I eventually remember that it is what it is. It’s not a hard SciFi setting. The solution is often a bunch of science-sounding words and the deflector dish.
put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
I may be a little fuzzy on the official version of how replicators work. Do they not need feedstock?
I’ve always kind of assumed that they were basically transporters, pulling raw materials out of storage to be materialized as the requested thing. And the similarity in the special effects for the two seems to support that.
Either way, I can’t help but think that an emplaced continuous-fire beam weapon would be more energy efficient and less prone to failure than a replicator-fed slugthrower.
Replicators use a base of neutral material that the system finds easy to use for turning into other stuff. For this kind of specialized application you might use materials close to the end result lowering the energy usage to extend the life of the unit. In DS9 they had self replicating mines that were networked so that the surrounding mines would replicate a detonated mine using the material of the detonated mine.
The real problem is shields. A slugthrower would be completely negated by a personal shield. Against a beam weapon it depends on how much energy it can absorb per second vs. what the beam can shoot.
Letting Rick Burman run rampant for years
I came here to say, “attractive women existing.”
… What?
Seven of Nine was generally poorly handled. From the problems of the “Born Sexy Yesterday” trope, to the male crew members hitting on her. To her costume, and the various bad mothering choices of Janway. To the face that she was so beautified.
I would have preferred her to remain grotesquely Borg for a couple of seasons and slowly be rehabilitated.
Shoulder pads.
It would ruin the concept, so I get why they don’t tackle the topic, but:
The federation, particularly humanity inside of the federation, is run by essentially a military government. There are elections, probably, we never really get to see them, and the decision making process of the admirals is not shown to the viewer, for world building and story telling reasons. The admirals are the problem posers, the calls to adventure, the exposition. “Go there, do this, top secret, very important, blah blah”.
They don’t do misuse them in lore, that much, but even the lesser capable space ships are enormously dangerous. If I recall correctly, there are even some mentions of not being regularly allowed to warp inside solar system boundaries. The risk of misuse or accidents is unimaginable. I’m pretty sure humanity has resigned itself to being ruled by some admiralty board that could order to vaporize the planet. They’re not going to do that, but the implication is certainly… looming.
I also really don’t like how they changed styles after the 80s/90s series. The perceived need to reinvent themselves has yielded mostly bad results. Only “Strange New Worlds” is tolerable, because it’s well done, but it’s still “too much” in my opinion. The special effects are nice, but there was no need to design corridors like that.
Same for uniforms. Look at how much “the suit” has changed since the 1870s. Barely at all.
1870s uniform
Neither humanity nor the Federation are run by a military government. I’m not even sure what gave you that impression. The federation, as its name suggests, is a federal system like the US, or the EU. Each planet retains its political structure while participating in the federation. Earth is the exception where it’s essentially the DC of the federation and is run directly by the federation council. Earth is also unique in being communistic rather than having a currency based economy like most other planets and the federation itself. Starfleet is a human organization that predates the creation of the federation and at that time was absorbed as its military arm. The president of the federation is the commander in chief of Starfleet. There is even a two parter in DS9 where an admiral tries to overthrow the president and fails and it is referred to as a “military coup”.
Neither humanity nor the Federation are run by a military government.
While I agree with you that it’s almost certainly not the intent, we unfortunately have seen that a shocking number of uniformed Starfleet officers sit on the Federation Council.
That was a review board for disciplinary action within Starfleet. The federation council members were there because it was an intragalactic incident.
If Starfleet disciplinary hearings are directly conducted by the UFP president, that raises even more questions, and certainly doesn’t dispel the notion of a “military government”…
Eh, any spaceship capable of even approaching warp speed is a potential star-killer. Like in a very physical sense those ships each have the ability to kill all life within a solar system.
Booker.
Why have Starfleet rules when you just have a dude on your ship that you can call on that just shits on the rules.
And it’s not Mariner-style twisting or bending the rules it’s just complete skirting of them
Also how they can’t arrest him for jeopardizing trillions of people, because his right to pursue happiness.
