Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Calling B.S. on Star Trek

Someone had to. It might as well be a talking dinosaur.

The issue in an ongoing series is once you've done it and it wasn't a fluke, it's like you've shown that one of your characters got Superman powers. And then in the next episode when a building is about to fall over on someone, Superman's running around in circles saying "Oh no what do we do? Frig frig frig" and the audience is sitting there, furrowing their brows, one hand on their chin.

I'm with T-Rex on this one. Star Trek made time travel too easy for it to be a compelling plot point in later episodes, and T-Rex is right to wonder why they don't do it all the time!

My own personal pet peeve with Star Trek concerns warp travel. If it takes seven (or twelve or twenty) days to get to the next starbase at warp three but only three seconds at warp nine, then why not go full speed all the time! C'mon, it makes no sense to be dawdling about the universe in a huge ship with a well-trained crew when you could be handling crises in an instant!

Captain, we need to dock at Station 33.3 for vital repairs.

Very good. Set a course. Warp five. Engage.

But Captain, that will take us 23 hours. We can get there in like ten minutes if we just go warp nine.

Oh. OK, I forgot. Let's do it then. Warp nine. Engage.


Makes sense to me.

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