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?
When being a “space military”, Starfleet is shockingly bad at being a “space military”.
Observe:
In the episode, Siege of AR-558, the Feds are defending a subspace relay behind cover, in an entrenched position with only one approach through a choke point and are getting the absolute SHIT kicked out of them. THIS IS A SOLVED PROBLEM. We solved it in the 19th century. The solution is a machine gun. Hell, put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
In the episode A Fistful of Datas, Worf jury rigs a personal shield to deflect bullets. Awesome. Why is this not standard issue?
Why is the bridge, the nerve center of the ship, put on the top center of the saucer where it can be easily targeted and blown up?
Why does no one have pockets after the 22nd century?
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.
This is the one that immediately comes to mind for me.
I definitely appreciated that they used that dress across gender boundaries. The dress itself isn’t the problem, it’s the fact that they didn’t give them the choice.
when worn with leggings it looked quite smart. they should have done that from the beginning.
Ah, the skant… you were taken away far too soon.
Bro rocked that uniform.
“That you could see what I had for breakfsat” wow…
Languages.
Letting Rick Burman run rampant for years
I came here to say, “attractive women existing.”
… What?
It would ruin the concept, so I get why they don’t tackle the topic, but:
The federation, particularly humanity inside of the federation, is run by essentially a military government. There are elections, probably, we never really get to see them, and the decision making process of the admirals is not shown to the viewer, for world building and story telling reasons. The admirals are the problem posers, the calls to adventure, the exposition. “Go there, do this, top secret, very important, blah blah”.
They don’t do misuse them in lore, that much, but even the lesser capable space ships are enormously dangerous. If I recall correctly, there are even some mentions of not being regularly allowed to warp inside solar system boundaries. The risk of misuse or accidents is unimaginable. I’m pretty sure humanity has resigned itself to being ruled by some admiralty board that could order to vaporize the planet. They’re not going to do that, but the implication is certainly… looming.
I also really don’t like how they changed styles after the 80s/90s series. The perceived need to reinvent themselves has yielded mostly bad results. Only “Strange New Worlds” is tolerable, because it’s well done, but it’s still “too much” in my opinion. The special effects are nice, but there was no need to design corridors like that.
Same for uniforms. Look at how much “the suit” has changed since the 1870s. Barely at all.
edit I misread, these are minor things. My actual answer is Star Trek has never put enough women in decision making positions in the creation of Star Trek and all of Star Trek’s success is despite that.
spoiler
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Bicycles, where the fuck are all the bicycles? The last transportation anyone would choose to use when we could teleport everywhere would be bicycles because they are pleasant af, they are also super useful for exploring planets. I get filming people on bicycles “doesn’t look cool” but it annoys me. Also put all the power density of spaceships into an electric bicycle? It would go for years and years and years on a charge…
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Where are all the dogs? For the humans but also space dogs should probably be far more common, do you really think humans are alone in domesticating dogs to get an edge?
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Spaceships would have lots of board games on them and people would be obsessed with them, far more than the holodecks necessarily. Star Trek sort of does this with the poker table meetups that happen in TNG.
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Spaceships, especially long haul ones, would ALL unless they were purely military ships have a garden/park section in them where real native plants were grown from the aliens homeplanet. This would be necessary for mental health as a place crew could go.
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Teleporting is too easy without enough costs, so storytelling always has to justify itself around not being able to use teleporting to solve the issue.
- Well, we got the TNG crew in a dune buggy at least, but you’re right, mountain bikes would be way better exploring rando planets.
- Klingons have targs, right?
- How many eps across all the shows did they show Kaltoh, 3D Chess, etc?
- Didn’t Keiko maintain one in the Enterprise and then eventually converted space on DS9 into one?
4 - garden areas were shown in a few places, and any tech Trekkie can tell you that even schematics of early ships had such places.
Page seven showing the botany level
1701-D blueprints had a lot more, being a bigger ship.
For 3 they sort of did, but the entire show is stuck in a boomer mentality that video games are a kind of a meaningless drug or distraction unless it is chess or heavily chess coded and a symbol for masculine intelligence.
Whatever it is just games are magic because all you need is another human and time to discover new things and unfold a rich experience and both are in abundance on a starship journeying through space.
edit I appreciate the thorough response but if I were to write scifi the garden/small park space would be a part of virtually ever spacefaring civilizations spacecraft, for health (for humans even just seeing pictures of plants improves our health), for cultural and spiritual reasons, for a sense of home and rhythm… There would be a thousand names for these spaces, maybe we humans would use “heart” or something like it to refer to that part of a spaceship but it would not be our idea, it would be highly unusual not to find analogs in other alien spacefaring species within their ships for the same reasons.
Additionally I would include as a scifi author the nuance and ethics around how pirates might board your ship and steal all your valuables but arbitrarily destroying the “heart” or garden even for pirates would be considered especially heinous as no matter who you are in space the thought of not being around plants, even if you are doomed to die or especially if you are, is kind of scarier than almost anything else if you are unfathomably far from home.
I don’t know, call me weird or just a nature lover but I firmly believe having a “heart” to a deep space spaceship is just as important as having a faster than light drive… which leads thematically into a natural justification for why shuttlecraft are capable of FTL travel but people still rely on big ships unlike say Star Wars where smaller ships are used for long distance tansportation just as much as big ones are.
It all ties back into the basic thematic fantasy of scifi that we can “leave earth and expand” is a twisted lie, we can only bring earth with us to new places, if we extract ourselves from earth truly, we die, we are not islands biologically.
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1st seasons
I personally like first season of TNG, people usually overhate the two first season of TNG.
i harp on this a lot but Enterprise’s Cogenitor is a deeply distriburing episode that everyone involved with should be ashamed of
Absolutely, this was the first thing that came to mind.
Riker kills a guy for looking like him.
You mean his clone? He didn’t kill it, right?
In “Up the Long Ladder” some clones were made of him. He vaporized them.
They shouldn’t have been made without his permission like that, but I also think there was definitely something skeevy about him killing them. There was a significant unaddressed issue here, and so I’d count this as “handling it poorly.”
Yes, it does count as handling it poorly.
Not Thomas Riker - the clone from “Up The Long Ladder.”
I completly forgot the plot of that episode.
It’s definitely not the first problematic aspect people think of.
He doesn’t kill Tom.
