Star Trek/Fridge

• The new Star Trek film? There's a lot that bothers me about it, but let's just focus on that scene at the end where Scotty jettisons and detonates the warp cores. It's silly, right? The Enterprise is already at maximum warp, traveling at bajillion times the speed of light, and it's struggling against the gravitational pull to just remain stationary. Explosions don't go that fast, so it shouldn't even reach the ship. But then it dawned on me that that's all completely irrelevant in light of what Scotty does. Do you know what he does? He does a Rocket Jump with a spaceship. How cool is that?
  • Not to mention that the ship is engulfed in the explosion and not damaged. The hull was already cracking!!!
  • Another troper mentioned this on the Headscratchers page. The reason why Kirk was the only one not in uniform is because he wasn't a legitimate officer of Starfleet yet. But at the end, when he graduates and becomes captain, he is seen finally wearing the familiar command gold shirt. Also in a symbolic sense, Kirk had grown up from a wild, emotional boy to the Captain that we all know and love.
    • A more minor example from The Gunheart. Thing is, at first it bugged the hell out of me how Nero sounded. He frankly seemed less like a galactic threat and more like a truck driver... than I realized that, for all intents and purposes, he was a truck driver.
      • That's assuming the ship IS just a mining vessel and not a case of "oh that? it's a... laser drill, yeah."
        • Isn't drilling into rock pretty much what mining is all about? I would think that a mining vessel would be more likely to have a state-of-the-art laser drill than a military vessel.
      • Well, compare military vehicles and heavy mining equipment ^{[dead link]} of today. Not hard to imagine a plain old mining vessel being bigger and tougher than a military vessel.
      • Bigger, yes. Tougher? Why does a mining vehicle need armor, point defenses, maneuverability etc.? I wouldn't bet on that digging machine over the tank... but in Nero's case, he also has future-future technology and was already tooled up for revenge, so the bets are off really.
        • Armor - just in case they get hit by shrapnel, or it could be some advanced super-ultra-mega-light and strong new metal that they use in the future. Missiles/torpedoes/whatever the hell you call them- They might not be used for attack at all, they might be used for... softening up a crust of a planet so the drill can get through (like dynamite!) And the hole the drill makes is much larger than than a single torpedo, hence their multiple explosive warheads. Maneuverability? The faster you get into position, the faster you get the job done. In fact, there's a lot of tools and vehicles that where not designed as weapons, but can be used as weapons.
          • It's a frequent comment as to why the Narada carried such heavy ordnance, but the thing is... it was probably equipped with some really weak torpedoes that the Enterprise-E would have laughed at. You see, in Star Trek Enterprise, Mirror Universe Archer gains access to a 23rd century Constitution-class starship... and absolutely wipes the floor with every 22nd century ship he encounters. So what happens when a 24th century ship meets a 23rd century Starfleet? The exact same thing.
          • If whichever minerals the Narada had been built to mine were rare enough to be worth retrieving en masse from distant planets, rather than scooping them up in any old asteroid field, then presumably they're also valuable enough to be worth stealing. 24th century Romulan space may not be the most peaceful of neighborhoods, so including some weapons and armor on Nero's vessel might just be a way to ensure it can get home with its cargo.
  • I always wondered why Uhura and McCoy are always taking the same transport as Kirk, from Iowa to San Francisco, when Uhura is from Africa and McCoy from Georgia. Then I realized that Uhura was probably in Iowa to tour the Riverside shipyard with a class (taught by Pike?) or something, and that if there was already a transport for all those cadets leaving from Iowa, McCoy probably started out in Georgia that morning and was essentially catching a connecting flight.
  • The first time I saw the film, I was completely new to Star Trek. After getting into the Original Series and the old movies, I was struck by the subtle irony in the scene where Kirk and Spock meet for the first time. The two of them meet because Kirk cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test, which is darkly ironic given the Aesop of Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan. Also, Spock tells Kirk that "A Captain cannot cheat death," but obviously Kirk did cheat death in Star Trek III the Search For Spock, by saving Spock.
  • Many people have complained at how Kirk gets his captaincy so soon after being a cadet at the movie's end. Then I remembered in the original canon, it was stated that Kirk was the youngest captain in Starfleet history, at least at the time of TOS. So, the more things change, the more they stay the same! -Premonition 45
    • Not younger than Ensign Mary Sue!
    • Kirk was in his 30's during TOS (roughly William Shatner's actual age, in fact). Young for a naval captain, but not terribly unreasonable—multiple episodes show that he's legitimately earned the respect of his peers (and the resentment of those who envy his success, just like Real Life). TOS Kirk also went through all the other ranks first, and wasn't a screwup at the Academy. The new Kirk by comparison is definitely in Mary Sue territory.
    • Not a screwup. To get through a 4 year program in 3 years requires a great deal of dedication and skill. As far as the supposed simplicity of the Kobayashi Maru hack, the hard part was in designing a cracking program that would get through the Academy's firewalls in the first place to enter the counterfeit code! And he took the test twice before even starting to resort to cheating, not to pass the test but to make a point about it.
  • One thing that I wondered was why Nero was so intent on preemptive revenge, other than being a psycho-evil douche. Then I remembered: if you could travel back in time to kill an evil dictator or genocidal alien race, would you do it? It's the same thing as a time-traveling hero seeking preemptive revenge before the act! Could you kill baby Hitler? That's not a good idea.
    • So the Romulan equivalent of that trope is Kirk's Time Travel Exemption Act? Particularly since it's hinted that it made Kirk rise to power sooner?
    • Technically speaking, it would be the Spock Time Travel Exemption Act (Nero's purpose was to destroy Spock, not Kirk, who had no involvement in the events that prompted Nero's Roaring Rampage of Revenge) although it does have the same effect by 1) allowing Spock to rise to power sooner as well and 2) introducing a second Spock to the new timeline, one with a lifetime of experience to draw from while mentoring the younger version of himself.
  • Any Trek fan by now knows that the NX-01 Enterprise is the only important ship that survived from the main timeline; however, logically there is still one craft that should have survived the transition... the Krenim Temporal Ship from Star Trek Voyager! This ship possesses temporal shields that protect it from any change in the timeline; however, the USS Voyager wiped it from the main timeline by lowering its shields and destroying its core. Thanks to Nero's incursion, wiping Voyager from history, the Krenim and their weapon should have resurrected and thanks to its newly regenerated shields, should be perfectly unaffected - allowing them to once more freely travel the Delta Quadrant, wiping out civilizations and molding the galaxy to its own design...
    • V'ger also survived, as did Nomad and the Botany Bay. How the new crew will deal with those significant threats remains to be seen. And those are just the human-made vessels that predate the timeline split.
  • Many people have commented on the fact that in Star Trek Enterprise, we saw Agent Daniels and his Time Agency watching for changes in the timeline, and logically, should have immediately prevented Nero from killing Kirk's father. However, Archer not only ended the Temporal Cold War back in 1944, but effectively wiped its effects from history. Depending on how much you believe in the Timey-Wimey Ball effect, this quite possibly wiped the Time Agency and its constant monitoring of history and instead left in its place a very small department that consists of things like the USS Relativity and that small time pod from TNG. Why? Something that always happens during peace time; the Federation got lazy and comfortable. The budget for chrono-monitoring was lowered and as a result, the Federation became less Time Lord and more Doc Brown's DeLorean (in fact, considering we never see Daniels again after this point is pretty good evidence that he was wiped from history). In short, Daniels and crew either weren't paying attention or simply didn't have the technology to track and defeat Nero... if this happened during the Temporal Cold War, we probably would have had an epic meeting between Kirk and Archer instead of Kirk and Old Spock...
  • It has confused many as to why the USS Kelvin looked so different to anything else in the Prime Timeline, but then I realized the obvious fact; the Kelvin was a concept craft. In the original universe the altered uniforms, the window on the bridge, the shuttlecraft that looked far more advanced than the Galileo class from the prime 1701 Enterprise - all of which were either dead ends or deemed impractical or expensive for the Prime Universe. This happens in real life with sports cars; many manufacturers release one of the kind cars that showcase exactly what they can do if money and resources were no object. So what changed? economics. If you compare the Prime and Alternate Federation, it's clear the Prime Universe has far less money/resources than the alternate universe. Maybe one of the survivors of the Kelvin would leave Starfleet and go on to become a great businessman, maybe it was the cold war with the Klingons... regardless in the new timeline, the Kelvin was considered the birth of a new, more advanced breed of starship. Alternatively, the Federation changed the uniforms and viewscreen to the Kelvin concept variant as a mark of respect for the fallen.
  • A simpler explanation: The destruction of the Kelvin, if it is such a concept craft, must have made Starfleet crap its pants about what could wield such power, leading to Starfleet investing much more into hardening their ships for combat than exploration. It's not the first time we've seen such destruction leading to beefier ships: Wolf-359 led to the much more powerful ships you see in First Contact, DS9, and so on.
  • While I liked how each of the core crew members were given moments to shine, it still seemed that Sulu had been gypped by only getting one good scene- the fight on the drill. Then I realized: if Sulu hadn't left the parking brake on, the Enterprise would have gotten to Vulcan at the same time as the other ships. Kirk wouldn't have had enough time to warn Pike and Spock that it was a trap. The Enterprise would have been annihilated with the rest of the fleet, due to not having enough time to raise the shields and go on full alert. Without the Enterprise, Nero would have easily destroyed Earth with the Red Matter. By leaving the parking brake on, Sulu unwittingly saved all of Starfleet.
• I had a general dislike for many parts of Star Trek First Contact (such as The Borg Queen... okay, that's about it, but I REALLY hated the Borg Queen). Watching Sci-Fi Debris' review for "Q Who", however, paints a truly bizarre picture, as the being who once put humanity on trial for barbarism is the one who sets the Borg on humanity. Picard's talk about how humanity was evolved and better can be seen as a prompting for their introduction to the Borg by Q. Because a few years later, Picard would lose his humanity to the Borg... but once free, he harbors a blinding hatred of the Borg. In the end, we see Picard become Captain Ahab with the Borg as his White Whale. And to quote Sci-Fi Debris, "Somewhere, Q is laughing." - Sines
• What I hated about Star Trek Generations when I first watched it was how it kept targeting Kirk for death. The first time (with him being blown into the Nexus while he's realigning the deflector shields to save the Enterprise-B) was relieved later in the film only to have him die 10 minutes later, and it really frustrated me how they treated one of the most loved characters in the history of Sci Fi. Now skip ahead several years later to 2009, and the new Star Trek comes out, showing how even in an altered timeline, Kirk still finds his way to the Captain's chair. That was when something clicked in my head.
  • The Motion Picture: Kirk has been promoted to Admiral, but goes on a mission where the one person who will be Captain after it's over is killed off, leaving Kirk in command.
  • The Wrath of Khan: Spock is Captain of the Enterprise, and Kirk is merely meant to be inspecting the new trainees; cue Heroic Sacrifice by the Vulcan and Kirk having to take the ship back home.
  • The Search for Spock: The Enterprise is scheduled to be turned to scrap, and all crew members are on shore leave until their new assignments are decided. Kirk finds out that there's a chance to bring Spock back from the dead, and along with his old crew, steals it.
  • The Voyage Home: After saving the world from an alien probe, Kirk is demoted to Captain, and placed in command of a new starship. Its name - Enterprise-A.
  • The Final Frontier: Kirk is trying to enjoy his free time whilst the new Enterprise is being sorted out to make it spaceworthy, when suddenly a hostage situation occurs and the Enterprise's crew has to sort it out, and the next half hour or so is centered around how Kirk tries to take back his ship from Sybok.
  • The Undiscovered Country: The Enterprise is up once more for decommissioning, with one last mission to perform. However Kirk and McCoy are arrested and charged with murdering a Klingon Ambassador, and thus sent to the most terrifying prison in the galaxy. And somehow - despite all odds, the two of them escape and go on with the rest of the crew and that of the Excelsior, go on to save the day.
  • And then we come to Generations: Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov come aboard the new Enterprise-B moments before it finds itself caught in an energy ribbon trying to save some refugees. Someone has to go realign the deflector array to create a way out of the energy ribbon, and Captain Harriman says that he'll go whilst Kirk stays on the bridge in command. Kirk objects, saying he'll go on the basis that it's Harriman's ship, and its role as Captain to stay in it. This is the important bit. All his life after first commanding the Enterprise, fate has continually found ways to get him back in the Captain's chair, and he's gone along with it, seeing it as his place. However, by the point in his life where he says "No." to being in the chair, fate then tries to kill him for it. It failed aboard the Enterprise-B because of the energy ribbon transporting him to the Nexus, and once he leaves it, death shortly follows after him once more, and Kirk dies. The film was more than just passing the torch onto a new generation, it was a tribute to Kirk, in that being Captain of a ship named 'Enterprise' was, is, and always will be his destiny - his life. The day he leaves that Captain's chair forever is the end of his life, and that of an era. --Meraxa
    • hskshjahjsvja. Woah. Mind = blown.
• By the fourth season of TNG, Riker was actively turning down a promotion to captain and his own command, yet somehow he stays a Commander and First Officer for almost a decade after Generations. It seems like ignoring continuity to keep him around for the movies, until you remember that Riker was in command of the Enterprise-D when it was destroyed. Losing the Federation's flag ship is the sort of thing that sets your career back a decade or two.
  • A bit harsh though. Saves Earth and maybe the entire Federation from the Borg that destroyed 39 Starfleet ships in "Best of Both Worlds", no promotion. Loses one ship, stays Commander for 10 years.
    • Which is why he wasn't reduced in rank, and received a posting to the new Enterprise. Also, you have to consider he made several blunders during the battle in Generations and he had at least one powerful enemy in Starfleet Command (Captain Jellico, who may well have been an admiral by that time). So, the end result is a wash for Riker and he ends up waiting eight years to get his own command.
    • He's turning down promotions because he LIKES his role as First Officer. Think back to the pilot. Riker states flat out the Captain's job is to stay on the ship and command from there, as he's too important for away missions. Using that philosophy, Riker gets to be Kirk—running around on alien worlds, making out with alien chicks, getting in phaser fights in caves, etc. If he took a promotion, he'd be stuck on the bridge while HIS XO got to run around, doing all the fun stuff.
    • The end of Generations makes no secret of Riker's ambitions: "I always thought I'd have a crack at that chair one day." "That chair" being the captain's chair from the destroyed Enterprise-D, which he's looking at as he says this. He figures it'll be easier for him to get there from the seat on Picard's right instead of from the Captain's chair on another ship.
  • It occurred to me that the last time Riker accepted a promotion, which took him elsewhere was on Betazed, and he left Deanna Troi behind, something he expresses regret for. Now that they're on the same ship, he doesn't want to take a promotion because he doesn't want to repeat his mistake. When does he take the promotion? Only after he and Troi are wed.
• For years, Trekkies (or Trekkers if you're that butthurt about it) have been at odds over which is the best Star Trek movie: The Wrath of Khan, The Voyage Home, or First Contact. This Troper just realized that they are not at odds at all. All three of those movies, although primarily sci-fi, are part of a different subgenre: The Wrath of Khan is a submarine warfare drama, The Voyage Home is a comedy, and First Contact is a horror movie.
  • In addition, The Undiscovered Country, which could also contend for the title, is a political thriller.
  • First Contact is not just any kind of horror movie, to be specific it's a vampire movie. (Look at how the Borg assimilate people by using two spikes in the neck (vampire bite), and their resting cubicles where they remain at rest (upright coffin?) --Biodroid
    • The Borg also have a distinct resemblance to zombies—drones are mindless former individuals who have no drive other than to consume. The First Contact redesign of the Borg intentionally gave drones the appearance of rotting from the inside.
• Star Trek IV and Star Trek The Motion Picture have the same plot! Something very alien and way too powerful for any meaningful confrontation is coming to destroy the Earth, and it's all caused by something humanity did thoughtlessly around the beginning of the twenty-first century. Kirk and crew figure out that it's asking for something (Whales; its creator), and solve the problem by forking it over, which makes the Big Powerful Alien Thing go away.
• Also, Star Trek The Motion Picture is the justification for the Clean, Professional, Roddenbery-Style clean future: what it shows us is a universe that is BIG AND SCARY AND WANTS TO KILL YOU. The leading things which endanger people are:
  • Commuting to work (The Vulcan Science Officer)
  • Putting the Cool Ship in gear (The wormhole that nearly destroys the Enterprise)
  • Just standing around doing nothing when a powerful computer scans you (Ilia)
  • Saying hi to a centuries-old NASA probe that wants its mommy (Decker)
• Basically, the message of this movie is "In space, entirely mundane things can kill you without warning, and without even really meaning to, so if we've got a snowball's chance, we're going to have to keep it clean and do things by the book".
  • After the new Star Trek movie came out, I realized what the main difference is between Star Trek and Star Wars. Star Wars is a fantasy story of war and political intrigue. Star Trek is an adventure story about the many dangers of exploring the unknown. Short of both taking place in space, they have almost nothing in common between them.
• In Star Trek Generations when the Klingons have taken Geordi prisoner and he is being interrogated, Soran asks if Geordi ever considered a prosthetic to make him look more "normal", and Geordi sarcastically asks, "What's normal?" to which Soran replies, "Normal, Mr. La Forge, is what everybody else is, and you are not." At first I thought this was just an insult directed at Geordi, until I saw the wisdom Soran was showing - everyone has personal quirks and problems which makes them feel abnormal compared to everyone else who doesn't have them. They just don't realize that the people they are comparing themselves to also have other quirks and problems that make them feel abnormal. i.e. from any one person's point of view, everybody else is normal and that person is not. However, even though this would seem to imply that people shouldn't worry about being normal, Geordi obviously didn't understand this, as in Star Trek First Contact, he had gotten a prosthetic to make himself look more "normal".
  • Actually I came to the conclusion instantly upon seeing Geordi in First Contact, that he had gotten the ocular implants, because he was guilty and taking steps to correct his mistakes. Earlier in the series, in the second season in fact, Dr. Pulaski had asked Geordi as to why he didn't already have ocular implants. He said he was afraid he would lose the incredible vision the VISOR grants, with being able to see almost the entire EM spectrum. But in Generations when he was captured, the Klingons used him to spy on the Enterprise's vital systems. Seeing as how his VISOR was used to successfully destroy the Enterprise-D, I imagine he wanted to avoid that ever happening in the future. And this was the second time his VISOR was used against him; the first time, someone actually used it to brainwash him into being an assassin.
    • • It just hit me: Geordi said he didn't want ocular implants because of their limitations in 2365, but had ocular in "First Contact" which is set in 2373. Technology probably improved in that time frame to make implants a much better option.- Otakukun
  • Also, Geordi has always had a special relationship with technology. His best friend is Data, as a result of this mentality. This is also shown when he falls for a hologram. I think the idea of having his eyes upgraded, and more integrated into his body would have been appealing for him.
    • This troper is going back to re-watch all the Borg episodes for Geordi's points of view. Especially the one with Hugh.
      • Us tropers are apparently not the first to notice this. In the novel Vendetta by Peter David, the crew recover an assimilated human woman and attempt to restore her humanity. Three guesses who tries hardest to bond with her...
• Kirk's overt reaction to Spock on the bridge, and Spock's flight to Gol in the first place, in Star Trek the Motion Picture never quite made sense to me, until I heard a theory that Something Of A Romantic Nature had happened between them after the end of the five-year mission. That's what sent Spock fleeing to a place centered around purging all emotion. That's why Kirk looks like the sun has just come out for the first time in years when Spock shows up. And that scene in Sickbay, with Spock's admission of "this simple feeling"? That was them getting back together... for good. Thank you, The Ships Closet. ~User:Across The Stars
• For years, I never realized that the President in Star Trek VI the Undiscovered Country was blind. Suddenly, the opaque pair of glasses he wears when looking at the Operation Retrieve plans make sense: they're an early form of the VISOR. Also, when Kirk dives over the podium and knocks him out of the way of assassin fire, he'd have no idea who did it—which is why Kirk says to him: "Kirk. Enterprise."
  • That one was actually more or less confirmed by Michael & Denise Okuda in the DVD text commentary for that movie—he was at least intended to be blind originally.
• In First Contact, Many fans have commented on the absurdity of Data gaining an almost Terminator level of bullet resistance to a hail of machine gun fire when in the series, he nearly suffered critical damage from an arrow. But in a similar way to Geordi replacing his VISOR due to the half dozen times it was used against him, Data was genre savvy enough to retrofit himself with steel plating. If you look at everything he has sustained over the years, it is incredible to think he didn't take this decision earlier. In addition to the arrow incident, there was the time he was nearly destroyed by a pre-warp civilization he had accidentally irradiated, the time he was nearly destroyed by a colony he was trying to evacuate, the time an insane art-collector kidnapped him and repeatedly threatened him with with a disruptor... it would also explain why he displayed such never before seen agility against the Son'a officers trying to attack him at the start of Insurrection... Data had replaced his slower and weaker original legs with some capable of falling thirty feet (an accomplishment Geordi doubted he could achieve in the first series of TNG when faced with a far shorter drop).
  • This would also explain why Data acts as an inflation device in Insurrection, despite having preciously described as sinking to the bottom of a lake in "Descent, Part II."
  • Many fans have also commented how the Defiant, a ship designed to fight Borg, was missing every Deep Space Nine regular except for Worf, despite the fact that Sisko was probably itching for some payback for the death of his wife. But actually if you check the stardates, Sisko's current activity was pursuing the Maquis traitor Eddington throughout the Badlands, which not only removed him from the fight, but a large part of his senior staff also. One of the rare occasions that the Star Trek script writers actually did their continuity homework...
    • It's also quite possible that Starfleet opted to do to Sisko what they did with Picard - declare his 'emotional integrity' compromised because of what he lost at Wolf 359 and not allow him to join the fight.
    • Being busy hunting Eddington would also explain why Chief O'Brien wasn't there. Too bad he didn't at least get a cameo, though.
• The transition from sneaky, underhanded TOS-era Klingons to an honor-bound Proud Warrior Race in TNG-era is jarring to many people, to say the least. But then, you have to take into account that most information on TNG-era Klingons is heard from Worf. Worf, who was orphaned at a young age, rescued, and raised in a culture radically different from his own - of course he idolizes and glorifies his original culture. Duras and Chancellor Gowron go to great lengths to demonstrate that the Klingons are as sneaky, underhanded, and backstabbing as ever.
  • Worf probably got most of his information about Klingon culture second-hand from humans and books; never really having any practical education from other Klingons. Seems like there's a good chance that, having never really known any other Klingons growing up, his idea of Klingons is an idealized one pieced together from whatever source material he could find.
• A bit of a mind screw here but considering Universe-2 now knows the fate of Romulus, you can bet they are planing to save it and have a few decades and Original!Spock to perfect Red Matter, which means Universe-2 Nero could wind up the greatest ally of the Federation for saving Romulus!
• Here's an interesting one from the Undiscovered Country. How could Valeris have quoted Kirk's famous outburst of let them all die (just before her Mind Rape) if he was alone with Spock during the whole conversation. Take a closer look at that scene: just out of shadow behind the giant glass Starfleet logos there is indeed a woman standing there and listening to every single word they say. But what makes this Valeris and not just some random person? Spock was training her as a protege - of course he would have brought her along to his historic meeting at Starfleet Command. All she needed to do was quietly slip in (maybe with help from one of the crooked Admirals if her security clearance wasn't high enough) and no one would be any the wiser.
  • How did the Klingon Jailer know which of the two Kirk's to shoot? the shape shifter had removed her leg cuffs whilst Kirk hadn't. Knowing full well that neither of them could have broken free; he logically shot the one person in the entire prison who could have slid out of those restraints.
• After the breakup of the Narada, when the Enterprise is trying to escape the black hole, the ship is losing ground in the attempt, even though at maximum warp she should be tearing across the cosmos. A few months after watching the movie, it hit me why: When the port nacelle was struck earlier in the film by the wreckage of the Mayflower's saucer, it started a creeping damage burnout in the Enterprise's warp nacelles. After the last jump from Titan to the Narada's position, the warp coils were in such bad shape they could barely even hold Warp 1, let alone the speeds the Enterprise SHOULD be capable of.
  • Actually, it was more like they were pushing the engines to their limit, and should have thusly been going at high warp, but the sheer gravitational pull of the "black hole" was so strong that it overwhelmed what the ship could do. The only option was to seal the anomaly so as to remove what was holding them there—and in so doing, they shot forward because they were now unimpeded from travelling at warp speed (not simply because the explosion threw them free).
• What about the equation of transwarp beaming? Doesn't that knowledge give Starfleet ridiculous power? Even in the 24th century, transwarp anything seems to provide a devastating advantage.

The Series

Fridge Brilliance

• At first, Star Trek appears to violate tactical logic by lacking any true examples of a Space Fighter, a standard among rival Space Opera settings Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, Farscape, Stargate, Andromeda, etc. After all, small, maneuverable fighter crafts can target a larger opponent's vulnerable points in ways a bigger ship can't. Then you realize Deflector Shields mean ships don't have weak points! The only way to defeat an opponent is by mustering enough force to overload their shields, making small ships all but useless in direct combat.
  • It's probably over-stating it to say energy shields are decisive in rendering starfighters ineffective (although they certainly effect the role starfights play in combat and how they are designed). Shields can be redirected to protect an area under the heaviest threat, leaving other areas partially or completely vulnerable. This can allow a heavier combatant to lay down fire against one section of the ship, drawing the defender's shields, while a fast maneuverable ship performs a flanking attack on the defender's exposed section. Remember too that energy shields are standard equipment for most ships in Star Wars, where starfighters play a big role in combat. Also, on Star Trek Deep Space Nine, we do see a number of smaller craft perform the role of starfighters during fleet engagements, though they're generally larger than an X-Wing or a Viper (and this isn't counting the Bajoran and Maquis resistance fighters, which were pretty much classic sci-fi starfighters). The absence of traditional starfighters from Star Trek can probably be attributed to the accuracy of weaponry, particularly phasers and disrupters. Being little just means you have less armor and a smaller powerplant with which to generate shields and power weapons, so the "fighters" of Star Trek are larger than those in franchises where less precise weaponary is the norm.
    • The Defiant misses more than any other Starfleet vessel on the show, this is probably due to the limited arc of her forward phasers. If you watch the battle between the Defiant and the USS Lakota in Paradise Lost, you'll see that Defiant misses her target several times, but the Lakota doesn't miss even once.
  • Tell me what's easier to hit: 1 massive ship, or 1000 tiny ships attacking from all directions? In WWII, big ships did not have weak spots either, yet they still used bombers and torpedo planes to attack them. One German battleship took a huge number of hits just to get it to start sinking, and that took days to finish.
    • But ships are slowed down by water drag while aircraft are free from it. Despite what most science fiction implies, that doesn't apply in space. So a better analogy would be speedboats versus a battleship.
    • Star Trek ships have been demonstrated to be far more maneuverable than ships in other franchises. The Enterprise-E is 700 meters long, and yet can maneuver quite well for a ship of its size. In addition, phasers can be deadly accurate, as the Enterprise-D was able to eliminate a squadron of fighter craft in about two seconds, without even so much as flinching.
    • The comment about WWII big ships not having week spots is absolutely incorrect. Ships like the Bismark had an armor belt around the ship. Anything above or below this belt was considerably weaker. That was the reason dive bombers and torpedo planes were used, they were able to hit above and below the armor belt to damage the deck and hull respectively. The critical shot that doomed the Bismark to be scuttled was a torpedo strike (from a torpedo plane) jamming the rudder (a weak spot) causing the ship to effectively go round in circles. I imagine that the limiting factor of fighters in the TOS was due to their inability to mount a warp drive on ships that small at that time. Without warp drive, fighters could only be used locally within a system, or off a carrier type vessel that would be vulnerable to attacks from starships and unable to effect a speedy withdrawal w/o abandoning their fighters.
    • Weakness is also relative. It's entirely possible that at that time it wasn't possible to fit a shuttle-sized craft with powerful enough weapons (or the support systems for those weapons) to get through a very large ship's very strong defences at any points. Remember the Defiant was mainly notable for being grossly overpowered for its frame, and doesn't appear to be engineered to the same "high" standard as other Federation ships. Type-X phaser arrays are absolutely huge, and torpedo bays can cover an entire deck.
• At first, the absence of any form of data corruption attacks in Star Trek struck me as a kind of Zeerust element that had crept into the show over time: computer viruses were entirely unknown in the 1960's, but the casual viewer today might wonder why someone doesn't try to hack the Enterprise (or the Enterprise crew try to hack a Klingon ship, etc.) But in reality any race advanced enough to build starships with AI-capable computers and has reason to fear its neighbors likely also has strong enough security to render these attacks either ineffective or easily reversed (by contrast, take the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, where the Cylon attack on the humans hinged around their being able to exploit a backdoor in the Colonial defense network created by one of their agents. The mothballed Galactica's lack of a modern computer network is the only reason it survives). Oddly enough, this has the result of TOS appearing to have stronger computer security than its successors (particularly in episodes where the ship/Data/etc. get hacked by an outside entity). --Snarf
  • • There is some hacking in Star Trek, but it usually involves either a more advanced alien race, or physical access to the computer they want to mess with. In normal battle situations, the computers probably just refuse to execute any code being transmitted by an enemy ship. --Dr Lunar
    • Let's not forget the use of a (rather flimsy) prefix code that allowed Spock to hack into the Reliant's command console to lower its shields.
• Star Trek the Original Series:
  • When I first watched the Original Series episode "Galileo Seven", I was simply appalled by how the humans treat Spock throughout this episode. A shuttle carrying 7 men crashes on an unknown planet, with no way to return to the Enterprise that's waiting in orbit. Spock is the commanding officer of the mission, and throughout the episode uses logic as his guide to solving what appears to be an extremely dangerous situation with very little chance of survival. The humans, however, dispute his every move, constantly admonishing him for his lack of emotions. For instance, he assumes that the hostile creatures on the planet will be scared off by their display of phaser power. He also refuses to spend time burying a fallen Red Shirt. The humans get increasingly annoyed at this, naturally. The episode even ends with everyone (including Kirk) poking fun at Spock's logical way. This goes on for the entire episode. Now, if you examine the episode objectively, putting aside any assumptions regarding whether Spock is doing the right thing, it quickly becomes clear that Spock is actually functioning exceptionally well at the task of getting them out of a very deadly situation alive: 5 of 7 crewmen eventually escape what for all intents and purposes is a no-win scenario. Spock makes one mistake: misjudging the alien monsters' reaction to the phasers, but it was one that anyone could've made: the aliens behaved irrationally, but was there any real reason to assume they would (or wouldn't, for that matter)? Spock's discharging of the shuttle's fuel at the end to create a flare was the only logical solution once they realized the Enterprise was gone. The humans keep suggesting that that decision was Spock showing "despair" - an emotion - but really that's just their own interpretation. It doesn't hold much water when you think what else anyone could have possibly done in the same situation. Taking a risk does not mean you're desperate, especially when not taking that risk would be even less likely to provide positive results. In short, Spock was really doing the most logical actions throughout the entire episode and overall this saved his men! Now, bear with me, because I haven't even started talking about the Fridge Brilliance here. If we take the above, and add back the factor of the human crew members constantly picking on Spock and criticizing every decision he makes (not to mention the terrible "ha ha Spock went soft" bit at the end), it becomes apparent that the lesson of the episode is that Humans Are the Real Monsters and that logic is the best tool a commander can have in life-or-death situations. The humans are simply incapable of understanding what Spock did for them precisely by sticking to logic the entire way through. Instead they slam him every time he does not behave as they would expect a human commander (read: Kirk) to behave. This is without even mentioning the fact that Kirk himself would probably have made the same exact decisions as Spock made, only naturally he wouldn't have to work through so much opposition. In fact, Kirk rarely takes any time to bury his Red Shirts - certainly not when surrounded by a tribe of gigantic hostile creatures. Kirk wouldn't hesitate to leave a man behind on the planet if it meant saving everybody else, he certainly did that on more than one occasion in other episodes. Therefore the question about this episode becomes totally different: why would the writer portray the humans like this? Was he trying to make a message about how logic isn't always the answer? If that is the case, then everything clearly backfires once you make a thorough inspection as above and realize that Spock was handling everything with pure logic and succeeded as well as could possibly be expected. Was the writer so at a loss on how to get this point across that the resulting episode actually teaches the completely opposite lesson (i.e. that logic is the answer and humans are bastards)? No, I actually think it's the exact opposite of that. The writer (one Oliver Crawford) actually wanted to portray Spock as the coolest SOB in the galaxy, and point out how useful it is to think logically. That's why Spock's decisions are so flawless that he basically wins the scenario single-handedly, and under constant duress from his own men. But if the writer would've just done this at face value, Spock would've easily become the Creator's Pet of the episode, coming off as a smarter-than-thou know-it-all, and instantly gaining the audience's disrespect - since after all we are humans too, and instinctively treat Spock as a weirdo alien who needs to be kept in check so that he doesn't start sacrificing his men for some "logical greater good". No, instead Crawford used Reverse Psychology. He let Spock do everything right, but he kept him sympathetic by having the humans constantly question him regardless. So while watching, the audience is not even aware of what they're seeing. They think the message is that logic is not always the answer, because that's what the humans in the episode keep saying, and are never actually TOLD that the lesson of the episode is the opposite of that. So the audience maintains one belief about the point of the episode, but the actual message that comes across is different, whether you notice it or otherwise. Hence Spock comes across as just-sympathetic-enough ("Awww, he caved and did the emotional thing at the end..."), but whether you realize it or not the episode still conveys the message that you can truly depend on logic as your most powerful tool. It's ingenious... If true. --Headrock
    • Also consider that the fact it wasn't just logic v. emotion it was human v. vulcan. The original troper points out that Kirk probably would have made the same decisions yet not had to put up with as much crap from it. This stems from the misconception that vulcans don't feel emotion and therefore incapable of understanding humans. One of the many indications that even in the 23rd century, bigotry is still alive and well.
  • In the original Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Metamorphosis", Zefram Cochrane's reaction to seeing the Federation commissioner essentially amounted to "Hey hot girl, let's jump in bed together!" At first, I viewed it as a typical example of the show's 1960s mindset... but then I remembered Cochrane's characterization in Star Trek First Contact as a libidinous party animal. Okay, there's no way that was done on purpose, but it does make more sense if you view it that way. --Insert Witty Name Here
    • Young healthy male marooned on planet for decades + newly marooned female = Hormone explosion. Doesn't really take lot of analysis to see why he'd be all over her. She's the first live female he's seen in decades.
  • In the episode Where No Man Has Gone Before, Kirk's best friend Gary Mitchell is zapped by an energy barrier which amplifies his ESP abilities. What i've failed to realize for twenty years is that Gary starts the episode with jet black hair and ends with distinct grey streaks. Remember, he is already stated to possess heightened ESP abilities which technically make it part of his biology - his ESP is powered by his own lifeforce! On repeated viewing, this actually increases Kirk's dilemma; if he chooses to keep Mitchell alive instead of kill or abandon him, Kirk would almost certainly recover his friend's sanity due to losing his powers through the passage of time - as long as he runs the risk of Mitchell destroying the ship first...
• Star Trek the Next Generation:
  • In the TNG episode "Samaritan Snare", Picard recounts to Wesley how he got into a fight with Nausicaans, only to get stabbed through the heart. He remembers looking at his wound and laughing for some reason. SF Debris theorizes that it's because when Q lets Picard relive that scenario during "Tapestry" (after making himself worse off earlier), he's laughing because he knows everything's in order once again. Even if he's going to die in the future, he's going to die as a person who actually did something with his life.
  • The first time I saw Datalore, I dismissed part of the plot as just "Wesley is right but gets ignored because he's a kid". I saw it again recently and realized that there's a lot more going on. The first time Wesley gets yelled at, they do listen to what he says (Riker goes to check his theory, and finds some evidence that he's wrong); the reason he gets hassled is that how he said it was unacceptably rude—not a small deal in a quasimilitary organization like Starfleet. The second time (the infamous "Shut up, Wesley!" scene), if you look closely at Picard's face (and consider that right after that scene, he sends security to arrest "Data", who--as Wesley realized first--has been replaced by his evil twin), you can see that he's figuring everything out for himself. Meanwhile, this annoying kid is talking and talking while he's trying to think and not telling him anything he doesn't know. "Shut up, Wesley" is not an instance of Adults Are Useless—it's an instance of Stop Helping Me!.
  • Just now re-watching the season three episode "The Price", it dawned on me that Troi, upon asking the computer for a nutritionally void comfort-food sundae before reading a series of letters from her overbearing mother, receives a snarky, passive-aggressive talking-to from the computer in response. The computer is voiced by Majel Barrett, who also plays Troi's mom. Perfect.
    • There was one instance where Troi's Mother actually wonders aloud about the computer's voice.
  • Here's a wacky fan theory that some of the writers have actually commented on its unlikeliness (but likewise never refuted it outright): In the episode "Yesterday's Enterprise", there is a highly militarized version of Starfleet in a losing war with the Klingons. Then it hit me: "Yesterday's Enterprise" actually takes place in the Mirror Universe! At the end of the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror", Kirk leaves goatee-Spock with the objective of overthrowing the Terran Empire and setting up a more Federation-like government, which in DS9 we find out leads to the Terrans being overthrown by the Klingons and Cardassians (although the Klingons are considered the major partner in the alliance). What the viewers are seeing is what the post-Spock reformed Empire was like prior to being overrun by the Klingons.
• Star Trek Deep Space Nine
  • Captain Sisko, at the end of the last episode of Deep Space Nine, left his treasured baseball in his old office at the station. He never leaves the station permanently unless he takes his baseball with him. Oh yeah. He'll be back someday. ;)
  • "In the Hands of the Prophets" was always Anvilicious. What made it anvilicious most of all was that the religious zealot (Winn) almost immediately jumped to terrorism to solve the problem. This became brilliant when I realized something: it's really just the hammer and nail problem. For 50 years, the Bajorans had been solving all of their problems with terrorism; that's all entire generations of them knew. And it worked; the Cardassians left. So peace breaks out, and how do they propose to fix a relatively minor dispute? Terrorism. It also explains why the coup attempt seems to come at the end of the season seemed to come off so well. -Korval
  • You don't really need the apocrypha of Deep Space Nine to know that Mila is Garak's mother; if anything, their first interactions on-screen confirmed it in my mind. Considering Tain never acknowledged Garak as his own son until he was dying, it's the only explanation for why Garak grew up in Tain's house... then again, Garak could just be a child of another household servant, but Mila is the only one he has ever displayed fondness for, so I think Mila being his mother would be the best explanation.
    • This also explains exactly why Garak being Tain's son has been such a closely guarded secret. It was established earlier that any Cardassian who has been exposed as having an affair is looked upon quite disfavorably, so any word about Garak being the product of an affair between Tain and his housekeeper would bring all of Tain's various enemies down on him pretty quickly. Plus, there was that bit in "The Die Is Cast" where Tain wants to have Mila killed along with his rivals during his rise to power because she knows dangerous things that could undermine him.
  • In the episode, "The Assignment" it would seem strange that the prophets would not have expected the Pah Wraith's return and surprise attack - them being timeless, able to see anywhen at once, would have surely seen it coming from the beginning of time and taken precautions against it. But of course because the attack failed, it's possible they never did or never will find out about it - if they were looking out of the wormhole it would just look like DS9 zapping a shuttlecraft with something - so it's possible they simply don't know about the attempt.
    • Alternatively, not being stuck in linear time, the ones living in the wormhole were entirely aware of how the episode would end, and didn't feel any intervention was necessary.
  • Look at how mirror Bashier acts: he's an aggressive idiot who is constantly unable to grasp the full scope of both his actions and any of the major events around him. Now originally I thought that this was just another Mirrior re-imagined character but consider that Prime Bashier was genetically altered to become a genius and suddenly Mirror Bashier's actions suddenly becomes clearer: this is what the real Bashier would have become without the surgery.
• Star Trek Enterprise:
  • Consider the opening song to Star Trek Enterprise. People say that it doesn't sound like a Star Trek theme song - it's the wrong genre, it has words, etc., etc... Consider, though, that "Where My Heart Will Take Me" is set at the beginning; for the Trek universe, it was the original genre, and the themes everyone's more familiar with came later... after the Federation was created, and the society being portrayed had changed. As for the lyrics, they (fairly blatantly) describe humanity's determination to advance, expand, and move forward.
    • For additional brilliance, consider that it was originally a song from Patch Adams, only one line was changed to make it the theme to Star Trek Enterprise, and that same song would make a perfect Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann AMV theme.
  • Similar to the above, many people were more than a little put off by the fact that Klingons in Enterprise had their ridges, with (initially) no explanation of why they suddenly gain and lose them over a period of only a few hundred years. Eventually, Enterprise explained what happened to cause the loss of ridges: While experimenting with the Augmentation procedures used on people like Khan, the human augment DNA made them look more human-like. It mixed with a virus and spread throughout the population, and eventually they found a cure for it and were able to change back to their normal "ridged" look. Now, one known side effect of the Augmentation procedure is a drastic increase in violence and bizarrely aggressive behavior. Apply this to the Klingons, and what's known about them throughout TNG and beyond: Klingons in the TNG era respect honor as a warrior above all else, and try to uphold that in all things. Klingons in the TOS era are ruthless and deceptive, employing tactics that are far from honorable. No onscreen explanation for their prior behavior is ever given. However, by thinking about this with the augmentation in mind, it becomes obvious: the only period in the whole canon where the Federation and Klingons are really at war (the short time in Deep Space Nine excepted) is during the TOS era - the very era where the entire population is afflicted with a condition that makes them unnecessarily aggressive. Now, note how in the TOS movies, the Klingons are starting to get their ridges back: at the exact same time, they're also starting to actively seek peace with the Federation. Coincidence? Likely, but when you put it all together it makes perfect sense, and wonderfully explains the transition from Exclusively Evil to Proud Warrior Race through obvious canon means.
  • I always tried to be forgiving to Star Trek Enterprise, partially because of my love of Star Trek and because I felt it was better than most others shows on television anyway. But one episode I found hard to justify, "Regeneration" with the Borg making an appearance 200 years before they should have. The episode itself I found to be rather good, actually, despite the chronological issues and other anachronistic details. The Borg hadn't been that frightening since Star Trek First Contact (no Borg Queen to humanize them), and in fact ties directly into that movie. It even has a sly Stable Time Loop thrown in. But when I started to think over the skewed Borg chronology depicted in Star Trek Voyager, I realized that Enterprise was trying to make more sense of the logistics behind their very first appearance in Star Trek the Next Generation. In that episode, Guinan had to inform the crew of who the Borg were, being that she was a refugee from a Borg attack. Wouldn't The Federation have at least some knowledge of their existence, especially since they were harboring refugees? While the "Regeneration" episode didn't explain everything, it did acknowledge that there was some info on them and was likely classified until the Enterprise-D made official first contact with a Borg Cube. --KJ Mackley
    • It's explicitly stated in Voyager that there were at least rumors of the Borg before Enterprise-D encountered them. Seven's parents went looking for them about a decade before official first contact. Also in the first episode with the Borg, they mention that a planet attacked by the Borg looks just like the remains of Federation and Romulan outposts that were destroyed along the Neutral Zone. Which implies the Borg were already making moves into the Federation's neighborhood. So yeah, the Enterprise Borg episode actually fits surprisingly well. --Dr Lunar
• Though probably just a product of confused writers, some of the oddities in the Voyager characters do make perfect sense. Maybe midway through the series, Chakotay is suddenly always counseling Janeway about the consequences of her plans, and is distrustful of Seven of Nine; this all being after Seska's betrayal. Seven's attraction to Chakotay in later seasons seemed sudden to a lot of viewers, her only explanation being, "The Commander has... admirable qualities." Seven, at this point, is trying hard to become as human as she can, and who's the most un-Borg person on the ship? Chakotay. It's only a shame the writers didn't explore these ideas more deeply in the actual show.
• Star Trek writers don't seem to get evolution, always portraying it wrongly. But, although IRL it would be wrong, evolution in star trek is merely consistent. All potential evolution lines are hardwired into a species' DNA, with the actual circumstances determining how it ends up. This realization actually makes every plot involving evolution make sense.
• The Borg are often criticized for attacking the Federation with only one cube (and trying it twice), while at the same time doing things against humanity that they do not do against other species (messing around with time travel, trying to "seduce" people like Locutus of Borg and Seven of Nine to rejoin the Collective, etc.) However, the Borg are not actually interested in humanity. Like the Kazon, humanity is described as inferior and its technology pales before the Collective's. However, the Borg ARE interested in Q. Q first brought them into the line of sight of a Borg cube, and saved them right as they were about to be assimilated. The Borg want to know more about Q (since being semi-omnipotent puts you pretty high on the Collective wishlist) but at the same time they know they can't fight Q directly and thus want to cut their losses by only sending one cube at a time. The Borg, in a sense, are right that doing things like traveling through time and picking specific human representatives attract Q's attention, if the game Star Trek: Borg is to be believed. -Freiberg
  • There's an alternate possibility, one that can amp up the Fridge Horror of the matter. The Borg can't innovate. It's one of their biggest flaws. Their advancement depends on the advancement of the species that they assimilate, the knowledge that they gain in the process of assimilation. They send a single cube against Earth not because they're actively attempting to assimilate the Federation at this time, but because they're FORCING the Federation to develop new ideas and technologies and use them against them. Once they reach a point where the Borg can handle anything the Federation throws at them, they'll finish the job and be all the stronger for it, with the new technologies, theories, and ideas that the Federation has developed to counter the Borg.
    • The Borg innovate all the time, it's how their "adaptation" works. They're often shown using traditional scanning and analysis techniques. (Seriously, the idea that the Borg have to assimilate to gain knowledge is one of the most spectacularly incoherent things Voyager ever threw out; you pretty much have to ignore it if you want them to make sense.)
  • Then again, there is definitely a Humans Are Special vibe throughout the franchise. Q mentioned that one day in the distant future, humanity would surpass the Q Continuum. One of Soval's lines in Star Trek Enterprise (one of the last before his death) mentions how humans can be as warlike and emotional as the Klingons or Andorians one moment, and then turn around and use cold hard logic the next. The Bajoran Prophets, a race of omnipotent energy beings that exist outside of normal time, specifically created a human to serve as their emissary to a completely different race. The Borg realize this quality of humans, which is why they sent a cube thousands of light years outside their territory, twice, in order to assimilate this quality. Problem is, assimilating the physical body doesn't assimilate the humanity. That has a great deal to do with why the Borg Queen tries to get a fully individual human to work for her.
  • Several theories about the Borg's creation from licensed non-canon works mention the crew of an ENT era ship being integrated into a neural network and becoming the first drones, while others mention the V'Ger entity being involved in the Borg's creation. According to these, humans might actually be the origin species of the Borg.
• So why, despite being warned by Kes in Before and After, do the Voyager crew completely forget about the Krenim by the time of Year of Hell? Simple. Anorax did it. It is stated that he had been manipulating time for over 200 years; and had probably altered it a good dozen times between the two episodes. The Voyager that took centre stage during Before and After is a completely different ship to the one featured in Year of Hell. This also explains the disappearance of Species 8472 and Seven of Nine.
• A little bit of Fridge Horror in the backstory of Star Trek: There was a Third World War, and it was devastating on a global scale, killing half a billion people and ending most formal governments on the planet. And it's a "future" war. It hasn't happened yet. As optimistic as the Trek universe is, it still predicts a horrible end to everything we know and love, and further it seems to imply that it needs to happen. The post-apocalyptic dark age is the kick in the pants the human race needs to start building a better society. Things do get better, but they have to get a lot worse first...and everything about 21st-century society has to die for it to work.