Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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Miller said:
That said, I think Voyager overused the technobabble.
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That's like saying Malcolm Tucker overuses the word 'fuck.'

SFDebris has some great fun trying to analyze the technobabble sometimes. I think one of my favorites was "multispectrum engine designs." The line went something like "What, does that mean it runs on rainbows? Now I can't get the image out of my head of them shoveling carebares into the engine like coal."

I mean it literally is magic. You're saying gibberish words to accomplish a task you couldn't normally.
 
Miller said:
I meant that sometimes you would have a character like B'Elanna say that she's "going to bypass the [word] of the [word] and hopefully [word] the [word]" instead of actually doing the procedure. It's like the writers were trying to justify something that wasn't really necessary.
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I think you misunderstand me.

I was agreeing with you - the point of saying you were understating how badly they would abuse technobabble.
 
Miller said:
I meant that sometimes you would have a character like B'Elanna say that she's "going to bypass the [word] of the [word] and hopefully [word] the [word]" instead of actually doing the procedure. It's like the writers were trying to justify something that wasn't really necessary.
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I think those instances are more or less meant to give the audience the illusion that something is going on while an actress is pointing some blinking prop at another blinking prop. It's so the audience knows that something specific is going on (even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense) and it is a bit more lively than just someone staring at whatever he's doing.
In a way, the technobabble in old Trek supports what is going on, whereas in the new Trek shows it is what is going on.

It's really weird. Technobabble, by definition, is meaningless, but new Trek somehow manages to do it so badly, that it is annoying and you can tell that it doesn't make sense.
 
After a pause I've continued to watch Voyager; I'm now at the end of season 3 (at the Borg/8474 plot), and like some of the posters here told me, the series is getting better compared to seasons 1 and 2.

Anyway, one thing that's kinda silly is the writer's need to let the protagonists make new scientific inventions on the spot when the plot requires it.

Like when in episode 3x26, B'Elanna can't get a transporter lock on the away team, but then she says:

B'Elanna: "I'm going to try a skeletal lock."
Janeway: "A what?"
B'Elanna: "I think I can get a clean lock on the minerals in their bone tissue. I just came up with it, but it might work."

I mean, reeeeeally?
Transporter technology is a big deal in their century.
There must have been thousands of scientists researching it before Voyager left home; countless dissertations written on it; whole research centers doing nothing but experimenting with transporters 24/7 to see what works and what doesn't.
And none of them ever thought, "Uh, could we, like, get a transporter lock on the bones?"
It's up to a bunch of explorers to figure that out in the heat of the moment, where it then of course works flawlessly on the very first try on human guinea pigs?
And could countless other transporter difficulties on TNG and TOS have been averted if they had just thought of that?

I mean I get it, facing technological problems and finding solutions to them is part of SciFi stories, but could the writers try to make it a little more believable?

/end of autistic rant
 
Technobabble appears to have a spectrum. On one end, Colonel McCauley does an EVA to pull solar insulation off an oxidizer tank so the liquid oxygen will boil and raise its pressure so it will flow into the control deck. Moving further on, Scotty drains hand phasers to gain the energy the Galileo 7 needs to fly. Eventually, Mikey Spock uses sonar to find cloaked Klingon vessels at interstellar range.

The apparent spectrum masks a real, qualitative difference. McCauley's trick is perfectly plausible, assuming the math works. Scotty's is not plausible with any modern technology but might make sense given an engine that works like that (and assuming those hand phasers actually carry enough energy to put a shuttlecraft into space). Mikey Spock's interstellar space sonar makes no sense on any level.

It's a move from "This could happen tomorrow" to "this is plausible science fiction" to "The writer is a retard."
 
BScCollateral said:
Technobabble appears to have a spectrum. On one end, Colonel McCauley does an EVA to pull solar insulation off an oxidizer tank so the liquid oxygen will boil and raise its pressure so it will flow into the control deck. Moving further on, Scotty drains hand phasers to gain the energy the Galileo 7 needs to fly. Eventually, Mikey Spock uses sonar to find cloaked Klingon vessels at interstellar range.

The apparent spectrum masks a real, qualitative difference. McCauley's trick is perfectly plausible, assuming the math works. Scotty's is not plausible with any modern technology but might make sense given an engine that works like that (and assuming those hand phasers actually carry enough energy to put a shuttlecraft into space). Mikey Spock's interstellar space sonar makes no sense on any level.

It's a move from "This could happen tomorrow" to "this is plausible science fiction" to "The writer is a retard."
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It's just like a magic system - what it can't do is way more important than what it can do.

You can't beam through shields - ok, that makes sense (otherwise why bother with space battles? just beam teams of raiders onto each other).

But then like any idiot who doesn't understand magic in fiction or the important of maintaining continuity for stories to work, they then go and bend and break the rules, which is why Voyager isn't half as dramatic as DS9.

For an example, look at the episode where the Defiant finds a planet populated by descendants of the crew.

Star Trek (DS9): Children of Time

Star Trek Reviews
sfdebris.com

Sure there's technobabble in there, but it all serves to convey basic ideas to the audience:
  1. They are going to go back and time and get stuck.
  2. They pitch a "third option" to make a duplicate crew to be trapped and let one go home.
  3. Oh wait - no turns out the other people were lying to us the whole time to make sure the time loop happens.
  4. The crew decides they can't wipe out their own future offspring
  5. TWIST to maintain the status quo.
The technobabble in that episode is just a paper curtain made to hide the storyteller just enough to make the story work. Give me a few minutes, and I could copy the script into a fantasy world just as easy.

In any episode we should know how it goes: brief technobabble to basically establish: "we need X amount of time to solve the problem this week." Then you have the drama be the characters trying to run out the clock.

nuWho has also been bad about this in my opinion.
 
Miller said:
I meant that sometimes you would have a character like B'Elanna say that she's "going to bypass the [word] of the [word] and hopefully [word] the [word]" instead of actually doing the procedure. It's like the writers were trying to justify something that wasn't really necessary.
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If we saturate the event horizon with warp particles . . .


Only thing this exchange is missing are random tachyons.
 
Technobabble in Star Trek is a definite problem. If anything, I'd actually say its overwhelmingly the worst problem the franchise has. I think especially to newcomers. A good rule of thumb when looking at technobabble is to examine the vocabulary of the show.

Some examples from TOS: Warp Drive, Communicator, Deflector Screens, Phasers, Photon Torpedo, Tricorder, Duotronics, Dilithium. Perform a small thought experiment for me if you will. Imagine explaining what all of those words mean to someone who has never watched Star Trek, but is vaguely aware of it. I'm betting the majority of people will get tripped up by the Photon Torpedo being a matter/antimatter weapon because the question then comes up "Why is it called a 'photon' torpedo then?" and I can guarentee that everyone will get tripped up by Duotronics. That one I slipped in because the term is actually meaningless and never properly explained in the show. The best you can do is tell someone its a really fast computer. Unless you crack open a technical manual, but if you do that you're already lost the interest and probably pateince of whoever you're talking to. Same with Dilithium.

TOS was this way because audiences back then didn't have a lot of patience for bullshit. In a lot of way the 60s was very matter of fact when it came to things, and stuff like The Twilight Zone had to frame its mysticism with an element of horror or as a thought experiment to compel people. So all of TOS's technobabble had to be easily related and explained. What's a communicator? Oh, its like a radio. What's a phaser? Oh, its like a laser beam. What's warp drive? Oh, it lets the ship travel really fast. Etc.

Jump four movies ahead and look at TNG, which was really the start of where this was breaking the hell down and kind of never really stopped. You get words like multi-dimensional, multiphasic, multispectral, tachyon, particles, trilithium, etc started just getting thrown around willy nilly. It also unleashed the plague of warp plasma on the franchise which technically has a scientific basis but gets treated like magic space dust. The average TV viewer can't tell you what a tachyon is, and even the average Star Trek fan can't tell you why a cloaking device emits them as exhaust.

This peaked in Voyager where some of the lines are just pure word salad. I'm wondering if the writers had some kind of ongoing contest about who could insert the most idiotic and convoluted technobabble into the scripts. Enterprise tried to do damage control on that to some extent but I think they failed horribly. If anything, the vocbulary of Enterprise should have been more down to earth than TOS. We should have been hearing words like nuclear, rocket, armor, missile, fission, fusion, laser etc because Enterprise is closer to our real world technology. Instead they stuck with a bunch of the technical terms from the other series.
 
L50LasPak said:
Some examples from TOS: Warp Drive, Communicator, Deflector Screens, Phasers, Photon Torpedo, Tricorder, Duotronics, Dilithium. Perform a small thought experiment for me if you will. Imagine explaining what all of those words mean to someone who has never watched Star Trek, but is vaguely aware of it. I'm betting the majority of people will get tripped up by the Photon Torpedo being a matter/antimatter weapon because the question then comes up "Why is it called a 'photon' torpedo then?" and I can guarentee that everyone will get tripped up by Duotronics. That one I slipped in because the term is actually meaningless and never properly explained in the show. The best you can do is tell someone its a really fast computer. Unless you crack open a technical manual, but if you do that you're already lost the interest and probably pateince of whoever you're talking to. Same with Dilithium.
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Excellent thought exercise. I'll play.
  • Warp Drive - that's your engine, makes the ship go
  • Communicator - that's their cell phone
  • Deflector Screens - think of it as like the windshield wipers for the ship
  • Phasers - guns. On the ship it's a bigger gun.
  • Photon Torpedo - their new rockets/missiles
  • Tricorder - hand held google
  • Duotronics - computer stuff, think "intel"
  • Dilithium - gas for the engine
Yeah, I know you uber nerds could complain about my examples, but the point is that the audience would at least get the gist of the concept.
 
Neuromantic said:
So I'm here for the watch advice.

What speaks against me just going for order of release?
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Order of release is good. The question is are you looking for the full experience, or a speed run? We could say "avoid these" so you can get through it all faster.

The other catch is sometimes order gets messy, like with TNG releasing in the middle of the TOS movies. I'd say you can either concentrate on series or TOS-first 6 movies - then TNG, etc is a good order.

Also we can spark a flame war here over whether the animated series should count or not. (and at this point, we can call it the GOOD animated series) It's fun for its insanity.

Also once you have finished TOS (if you like it), watch Galaxy Quest.
 
Flexo said:
The other catch is sometimes order gets messy, like with TNG releasing in the middle of the TOS movies. I'd say you can either concentrate on series or TOS-first 6 movies - then TNG, etc is a good order.
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That sounds good. I'm okay with keeping continuity.

Flexo said:
We could say "avoid these" so you can get through it all faster.
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I'd appreciate a list of those. I'll probably still try to watch them.
 
Neuromantic said:
So I'm here for the watch advice.

What speaks against me just going for order of release?
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It really depends on your level of commitment. If you're already sure you want to watch everything, then you may as well watch it in release order.

Just know that you're going to hit at least one big drop in quality (TOS S3 to around the beginning of TNG S3, with the exception of the three good TOS movies in the middle, can be pretty hard to slog through especially if you're binge watching). TNG does eventually get better if you stick with it, and while it doesn't really do a continuous running story like most modern shows, it does have a lot of continuity nods and character development over the course of the series which you'll appreciate more if you have watched from the beginning.
 
Flexo said:
Order of release is good. The question is are you looking for the full experience, or a speed run? We could say "avoid these" so you can get through it all faster.

The other catch is sometimes order gets messy, like with TNG releasing in the middle of the TOS movies. I'd say you can either concentrate on series or TOS-first 6 movies - then TNG, etc is a good order.

Also we can spark a flame war here over whether the animated series should count or not. (and at this point, we can call it the GOOD animated series) It's fun for its insanity.

Also once you have finished TOS (if you like it), watch Galaxy Quest.
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I don't care in what order and what you watch as long as you also watch Deep Space Nine.

Yes I have a The Next Generation avatar, so what? Watch Deep Space Nice (Probably after The Next Generation)

Edit: Kinda hoped I tried to quote Neuromantic there, but I carelessly quoted the wrong person. Long day.
 
Neuromantic said:
So I'm here for the watch advice.

What speaks against me just going for order of release?
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Order of release is fine, TOS is a bit dated but you get used to it real fast. If your looking for a quick run through, then TOS movies - First episode of TNG then skip to the 3rd season and everything after of TNG - TNG movies - all of DS9 (I think its the best trek period) - all of Enterprise (I believe enterprise is criminally under rated despite it playing a bit too fast and loose with canon).

As long as you know the basic concepts of trek (klingons, vulcans, federation etc.) you don't absolutely need to watch TOS, but there are some great episodes and its writing is very strong even if its effects/camera direction is dated. Voyager can be watched anytime after TNG, but it takes place in a completely different part of the universe and it has extreme highs and lows that don't really make it a priority watch. Don't bother with discovery, picard or any of the awful new drek CBS is trying to shove down our throats (unless you want to get drunk and laugh with friends at the awfulness), but that goes without saying.
 
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