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?
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?
Flirting. Everyone who flirts (especially on TNG) sounds like an LMM trained on HR handouts.
Irish stereotypes. From Finnigan in TOS all the way to “Up The Long Ladder” in TNG… It hasn’t been great.
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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Shoulder pads.
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.
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.
Discovery tried to show some Klingon diversity and a quarter of the fan base went into an absolute tantrum
Pretty sure the most diverse empire in Star Trek is the Borg.
Even more than the federation.
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.
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 never think about that.
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.
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.
Justifying the no money situation. Which DS9’s ‘In the Cards’ highlights as not making any sense.
Money always is a problem, Boimler wins a lot of money playing on DS9 and he doesn’t care at all. It’s not realistic having some characters had a strong motivation with money and other don’t care.
Code of Honor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)) had some issues and wasn’t consistent with Roddenberry’s concept of the Star Trek universe.
I really do hate “Retrospect”.
But I think my answer to the question is “evolution.”
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.
You just wrinkled my brain…
not sure if this has been discussed by the actresses or anyone familiar with the behind scenes situation, but what was with casting a chinese-american and korean-american as japanese women? given the how the imperial aspirations of japan had such a brutalizing affect on those nations, i still find this culturally tone deaf. why did the characters have to be japanese?
referring, of course to keiko o’brien and hoshi sato.
I think it’s safe to say the people in charge appreciated the idea of diversity but had no actual clue. Harry Kim was supposedly Chinese, till Garret Wang told them Kim is Korean surname.
I get it, but also Patrick Stewart was not a french man.
sure, i get that a person from place a can have a role as someone from place b. it’s the magic of acting. i’m not talking about france and britain who have been allies for over a century. the japanese fascists were exceptionally brutal to those they attempted to colonize. there’s a very long and troubled history of “comfort women”. this happened within the last 80 years, so within 50 years of tng. maybe it’s just me, but this always felt really weird to me.
English is kinda like French, in the bigger scheme of things
Not really, is like saying “korean is kinda like japanese”, they are different.
