What do you think are some of the worst examples of Treknobabble in the franchise?
And what series do you think does it poorly the most often?
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JJ-Trek, hands down. From “red matter” to interstellar transporter beams to Khan’s magic blood.
The reason it’s so bad is that it’s fucking plot holes galore. By the end of Star Trek (2009), starships are obsolete. By the end of Into Darkness, everyone should be immortal.
Treknobabble is supposed to serve the plot, but this shit undermines the entire premise instead. It’s ridiculous!
Let’s not forget the “cold” fusion bomb that froze lava.
What blew my mind about that whole intro is they hid the entire ship UNDERWATER AT THE SHORELINE with a severe risk of damage to the local terrain and sea life instead of, you know, being in orbit.
I’ll try extrapolating the verteron exovector (or something like that)
Harry Kim Voyager S1E1
I’m going through Voyager now and I feel like they do this nonsense more than any of the other Treks thus far.
The thing is that while the technobabble is just that, the process represents how engineering gets done better than most other ‘serious’ SF, albeit at compressed speed.
Voyager did a better job than any at showing how the thinking and problem-solving work gets done - which to me is more the point.
All this criticism seems to come from folks who’ve never seen nerds working in teams being nerds. They seem to want science FICTION to be locked down to concepts that someone with a mid 20th bachelor’s degree in science would know.
Whereas the real life scientists and engineers in my circle react more like Erin Macdonald did when she was working on her physics PhD and saw Voyager. She recognized the process and thought it was cool that some of the newer concepts in gravimetrics were referenced but didn’t sweat the small stuff.
