…and this is a 
The aggravation of Trek
Category: Entertainment • Science
Posted on: August 21, 2007 9:00 AM, by PZ Myers
Ars Technica has an article on bad science in entertainment, with a list of items that were particularly annoying:
Any time Star Trek tried to do biology. They may have been awful with all the other areas of science, but I'm a biologist, and I know they were awful with this. Note to film and TV producers: science grad students work for peanuts. Buy one.
Quixote follows through with a specific example:
Take an example from an episode of Star Trek- The Next Generation. There's a big disaster as everyone evolves backward into insects (small problem right there…) and Beverly Crusher is saying, "The DNA! It's degrading into amino acids!"
Yikes, I missed that one … but that's no surprise, I found Star Trek pretty much unwatchable and usually turned it off or turned away in disgust. The science was atrocious in truly stupid ways, and was usually just trotted out as a deus ex machina rendered in technical gobbledygook to end an episode.
But I can also say why they wouldn't hire a grad student or even ask for free technical advice on the science in their shows: because we'd tell them it's bunk from word one and they ought to scrap it and rewrite. Can you imagine how I'd respond to their devolving into insects script? I wouldn't just tell them the word they want is "nucleic", not "amino," or that we don't have a descendant:ancestor relationship to any insects — I'd tell them that they aren't examining evolution at all, but ontogeny, and you don't get to reverse a developmental process in that way, since you're actually talking about unfolding a novel ontogenetic process in the individuals on the show. And I certainly wouldn't allow them to magically undo the new insectoid features in their stars at the end of the episode. And then they'd tell me they're shooting the episode next week, and they'll call me in the future if they need any more science consulting.
If you want good science in a program, it can't be just a dictionary check on a few technical terms — it has to be rooted in the premise. Most writers aren't going to let you trash the whole basis of their story.
Comments
This is why Firefly got such a cult following among the scientifically-literate: Joss Whedon actually made the occasional token attempt to get at least some of the science right (or at least to made sense within the confines of his fictional universe). I remember a friend of mine almost in tears over the fact that when spaceships blow up in the vacuum of space in the Firefly universe, they do so soundlessly -- the way they would in real life.
Posted by: Phoenix Woman | August 21, 2007 9:15 AM
It wasn't just explosions. For all exterior shots (in space) on Firefly the only sound was the background music.
Posted by: John Marley | August 21, 2007 9:30 AM
I remember that episode: it was a bloody awful 1, to boot.
Being pedantic here - Deanna became a fish, Worf became a monster of some sort (who still wanted to mate w/the fish 'counsellor'), Barkeley became a spider, Riker becomes a caveman...yeah, it was bloody stupid, even before I learned anything about evolution.
http://www.answers.com/topic/genesis-star-trek-the-next-generation
Posted by: Krystalline Apostate | August 21, 2007 9:30 AM
TNG had their good episodes, but that one was horrible. I prefer Voyager, which I found to be much more realistic even in terms of fantasy.
Posted by: Tom @Thoughtsic.com | August 21, 2007 9:33 AM
PZ,
Are you trying to make Lawrence Krauss your mortal enemy?
Posted by: The Science Pundit | August 21, 2007 9:39 AM
I remember an episode in which Ro Lauren and Jordie get "phased" out of contact with normal matter by an accident involving the transporter and an experimental Romulan cloaking device, while responding to a Romulan ship's distress signal. (How come they can operate on our side of the neutral zone and we can't operate on their side; plus they can have cloaking devices and we can't; who negotiated that treaty anyway?) Thereafter, Ro and Jordie wander the Enterprise like ghosts, seeing and hearing but not being seen or heard, walking through walls. Jordie, like a typical engineer, figures something has happened and sets out to discover what and try to reverse it. Ro Lauren, like a typical Bejoran female, figures she's dead and in the spirit world, and goes around listening to her friends and foes discuss her, and saying things to them which she lacked the gumption to say in life. A situation rife with dramatic possibilities, but with total contempt for science and logic. Items:
1. If they're out of phase with normal matter, how do they see and hear? Light and sound affect them, but they don't affect light and sound?
2. Same question with regard to the Enterprise's gravity field generators. How come they act like they're in gravity?
3. What in blazes are they breathing? Out-of-phase oxygen?
4. If they walk through walls, how come they don't sink through floors? As they walk and run through the ship, what are their feet pushing off against?
The main reason I watched is that it was the only show that showed any respect for the engineering profession (I'm still waiting for "L.A. Engineer" or "Boston Civil") - even though the Chief Engineer was out-ranked by the Captain, the First Officer, the Doctor, the Android, and the Human Resources Officer.
Posted by: JimV | August 21, 2007 9:43 AM
The reason why science was "trotted out as a deus ex machina rendered in technical gobbledygook to end an episode" is that that's what they used their science guys to do. They didn't say "we've written this, is it realistic?", they said "we need the plot to go in this direction, can you give us some technical sounding gibberish that achieves this?"
My personal bugbear was the inventions which crop up in one episode and are never heard of again. In one episode of Deep Space Nine someone coupled a gun with a transporter to make a device which would fire a bullet and transport it to the desired destination, where it would carry on with the same velocity until it hit the target. It was never seen again, and everyone just carried on with phasers and disruptors as before.
And don't get me started on distances.
Posted by: Jon Eccles | August 21, 2007 9:48 AM
My favorite was in the original series when they were trying to find someone hiding in an empty ship by searching for their heart beat. They used a sensor whose listening power had been raised by one to the fourth power.
Posted by: Joe | August 21, 2007 9:51 AM
Ooh, you've touched a nerve in many of us. How many years has this stuff being bugging us?
Posted by: Jon Eccles | August 21, 2007 9:51 AM
I've come to accept the usual scientifically inaccurate cliches in entertainment, along with all the other unrealistic cliches. But what really irritates me is the portrayal of scientists. I don't know how many movies/t.v. shows I've seen in the past few month that have an amoral, selfish scientist that doesn't care about anything other than getting his test results for his secret research with a narcissistic hidden agenda. And all they need is a few harsh, brutally down-to-earth sound bites from a six-year-old or a drugged, half-conscious hospital patient to make them realize how horrible they really are.
Posted by: casual reader | August 21, 2007 9:55 AM
Phoenix Woman wrote: "I remember a friend of mine almost in tears over the fact that when spaceships blow up in the vacuum of space in the Firefly universe, they do so soundlessly -- the way they would in real life."
I just finally got around to watching all of the Firefly episodes, and I'm in tears that there won't be any more of them...
Posted by: gg | August 21, 2007 9:57 AM
Spaceships. With. Wings.
Spaceships. That. Bank.
Aarrrrrrrrrrrrgh!
Posted by: Donalbain | August 21, 2007 9:57 AM
You cannot take a show whose basic premise requires technologies that violate our understanding of physics and hold it to standards of scientific plausibility.
The science in Star Trek is often horrible, of course, and horrible in deeply obvious ways. But it's the way that it's inaccurate that's offensive, not that it's inaccurate.
Sadly, shows like Babylon 5 made a superficial effort to be physics-compatible, but brought in mysticism and vitalism constantly. No one wants hard science to get mixed up in their fantasy, it seems.
Oh, and PZ: you lose ten geek cred for not liking Star Trek, and a hundred for basing your dislike on a single episode.
Posted by: Caledonian | August 21, 2007 9:57 AM
As a Trekkie (no, I make no claims the level of
obsessiongenius of Trekkers) I feel I must protest.Not that Trek didn't produce some totally ridiculous "scientific explanations" mind you, but it was NEVER about the science, it was about the social issues (well, at least in TOS, TNG just rotted from the get-go)
If we can buy that whole "the galaxy was seeded by humanoid aliens" thing explaining the similarities between species... If we can overlook the Styrofoam boulders and the plastic flora on alien worlds... can't we just overlook some really, really bad biology?
Posted by: dorid | August 21, 2007 9:58 AM
I never really watched Trek for the science, but for the morality plays. Although most of TNG was silly, some episodes were quite good. The one where Picard is tortured springs to mind. When my creationist family gangs up on me, I sometimes say to myself, "there are four lights!".
Posted by: jeff | August 21, 2007 9:58 AM
My favourite (read: worst) is the episode of Voyager where the crew escape a black hole via a 'crack in the event horizon'.
Just... no.
Posted by: Despard | August 21, 2007 10:00 AM
I had a similar discussion with someone about the show Heroes* when she was positing that some of the powers seemed more geneticly based than others:
You can't realy apply external scientific knowlege to things like telekenesis or flying (really that just a special case of telekenesis). There's simmply NO explanation that has anything to do with physics as we know it. To say that one physical impossibility seems more genetic than another doesn't make much sense to me. Really it's all *magic* and can only be analyzed according to whatever rules are promulgated internaly. "People are geneticly predisposed to magic," isn't any different from "There are elves living in our midst," or "Aliens can fly faster than light."
IMHO it's not so much about the level of suspension of disbelief, but about it's first derivitive. So long as there are no discontinuities in the SoD I'm fine. It's when the unrealism level jumps up and down randomly that I'm disappointed. The problem with Trek is the extant to which some of the stories are written as psuedo-techno-puzzles whose level of correspondence the real world varries wildly between episodes.
*I love that show, even though much of it is absurdly impossible.
Posted by: Jim A. | August 21, 2007 10:01 AM
The flip side is that whilst the science, plots, technology, and most of the actors were all crap, the series (or at least the original series) postulated people (humans and aliens) living and working with each other without evident racism, species-ism, and horrible -isms, and with a degree of concern for the environment, and anticipating impacts (sometimes farfetched) of actions and inactions.
Posted by: blf | August 21, 2007 10:07 AM
I know Trek was all about the stories about society (at least the original one was), but they didn't have to invent rank nonsense to do it. Firefly has already been mentioned as a show that was also all about the stories and the interactions, and they didn't need to glue styrofoam blobs on people's foreheads and invent unbelievable science to do it.
Posted by: PZ Myers | August 21, 2007 10:10 AM
I worry about how shows like Heroes and movies like X-Men affect the average person's perception of what evolution is. But maybe it's a non-issue.
But for me when i'm watching shows with bad science or mysticism i just tell myself "it's taking place in a universe where this does make sense". It's when shows and movies actually contradict themselves that i get annoyed.
By the way, the new Babylon 5 movie is horrible in every aspect except for the special effects. It's a shame, i loved the show.
Posted by: Brian W. | August 21, 2007 10:18 AM
I was once at an author's reading (if memory serves it was William Gibson) and someone asked him about Star Trek and his response is what I associate with Star Trek - especially next generation.
There is no money, there are no advertisements, everyone works for the common good, and there is no evident racism. In other words its "marxism".
So a completely unrealistic future. [grin]
Posted by: yoshi | August 21, 2007 10:22 AM
I'm a lifelong Star Trek fan. I love the show despite its flaws. And yes, one of its flaws was that it really did not do evolution very well -- but think about it: a show on national network television, starting in the 1960s, that even MENTIONED evolution, and spoke about it as a matter of fact, not "theory" or speculation! That, to me, is a good thing.
Posted by: Stegve | August 21, 2007 10:23 AM
Yes, Firefly was good. I watched a couple episodes and said to myself, "This is great. It won't last a season".
Star Trek was not so much intended to be scientifically accurate. Gene Roddenberry had in mind a new kind of social mythology. I've often contended that if more people watched Star Trek, they would not necessarily be more scientifically literate, but the world would be a better place. If people would just sit down for a hour once or twice a week and believe that a society based on merit, tolerance, and diversity was within the realm of human possibility and that scientific advancement would be instrumental in achieving it, then the world would indeed be a better place.
Posted by: Cappy | August 21, 2007 10:24 AM
Don't forget the Voyager episode in which the crew achieves Warp 10 (infinite speed), and then Janeway and Paris start to de-evolve into some sort of lizards or something...
Posted by: Stegve | August 21, 2007 10:28 AM
The Voyager episode Distant Origin had probably the worst evolutionary biology ever in it.
They make a hologram of a dinosaur (specifically a hadrosaur), and then "evolve" it another 65 million years to see what it would look like today...
Posted by: wintermute | August 21, 2007 10:29 AM
I'll stick up for Star Trek. While I never really got big into TOS (it looked fairly hokey by the time I was watching it in re-re-runs) I still had a pretty good appreciation for some of the interesting plots, morals, etc.
As for TNG, I loved it. Happily memorized all the characters, terms, etc.. the only thing that ever bothered me was the lack of a bathroom. Seriously-- three doors on the bridge, and none go to the loo? That's just mean.
But seriously, I don't watch television programs for my science education, especially those that aren't making any big claims to be getting things accurate or realistic. It's one thing to pick at an alleged "procedural drama" like CSI for having bad science, and clearly another to worry overmuch about a show set in the 24th century.
Posted by: DaveX | August 21, 2007 10:31 AM
Star Trek couldn't even get simple orbital mechanics right. I remember one glaring error in Star Trek TNG where they wanted to raise periapsis of an asteroid (mistakenly but understandably called perigee in the show) so they applied delta V there. Sorry guys, it just don�t work that way. The most efficient place to apply your delta V to change an orbital altitude is on the opposite side. To change perigee, fire your thrusters at apogee.
And don't even talk to me about the original series where they'd lose power and suddenly start burning in.
And of course I still watched every episode because it was the only game in town.
Posted by: Salad Is Slaughter | August 21, 2007 10:34 AM
How about in an episode of Law & Order, when their pathologist character referred to an abalone as a "bivalve mollusc"? That really pissed me off. Thirty seconds of research on the inter-web would have solved that problem.
Posted by: MarcusA | August 21, 2007 10:40 AM
Yes, Firefly was good. I watched a couple episodes and said to myself, "This is great. It won't last a season".
Yup.
As for CSI: It's not so much that the science is bad, it's that the way it's used is misleading. Crime labs are often cash-poor, so they're not going to have the latest and greatest high-tech gizmos, and if they are, they will be using them sparingly as they are expensive to buy, own and use. But on the show, we're seeing homeless guys getting autopsies with a level of thoroughness usually reserved for assassinated heads of state. Na. Ga. Hap. Pen.
Posted by: Phoenix Woman | August 21, 2007 10:42 AM
But with no Trek, there would be no Firefly, it's show evolution. Trek had already buried itself into a scientific unreality hole by the time TNG came along, and that was the established (and extremely successful) formula.
You should at least appreciate the distinctly anti-religous tone that the true Trek episodes(under Roddenberry) consistently employed. Firefly has zealots on its crew, but in Star Trek, Picard has overtly denounced religion and religious intolerence. The first two series' postulated that a peaceful society required secularization. Voyager and DS9 moved away from this instead showing a more multicultural approach to religion.
As it seems many here have not watched much trek, you may be interested in this article:
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/religion.htm
Which thoroughly reviews the "anti-religious" nature of many of the episodes and its characters, from a religious perspective. Skip past the references down to the series summaries.
Mainstreaming ideas like this is something I'm all for.
Posted by: Thom Denick | August 21, 2007 10:43 AM
Actually, I thought that the portrayal of science in Star Trek was very good in some of its aspects. While they did often just make things up as they go along, it was often implied that science is important, and that the modes of thought that are required by science are virtues: doubt, skepticism, intent to learn, questioning of authority...
It was also a very atheistic show: in one episode of TNG Picard referred to the possibility of a certain race regaining religion as "condemning them to darkness".
I think there were a lot of good things in those shows, and they should not be dismissed out of hand.
Posted by: Valhar2000 | August 21, 2007 10:45 AM
I still prefer Star Trek -- where the made-up plot devices have scientific "explanations" -- to the X-Files -- where the made-up plot devices have supernatural "explanations".
Posted by: Sonja | August 21, 2007 10:45 AM
I've got that one covered. It may be that certain ships witih "wings" (like the Klingon cruisers from the original series) used them to get their warp nacelles far away from the crew section of the spaceship, possibly because of radiation. Remember, the Klingons weren't that fussy about safety, and might have preferred to just move them away than to keep them leakproof in the first place.
Another justification for some of the later winged spaceships is that many of them were capable of, and used for, in-atmosphere flight, where wings would be useful.
As for "banking" during turns, I have developed a rationalization for that, as well: keep in mind that all these ships have artificial gravity, in which "down" is towards the ventral surface of the ship. In a turning situation, things on board the ship tend to behave as if there is a force pushing everything on the ship to the outside of the turn (the so-called "centrifugal" force). Pilots of these ships may have found that if they tilt the ship into the turn (i.e., bank it), there is some advantage in terms of the operation of the artificial gravity, or some other aspect of the various force fields that operate throughout the ship. By lining up the "centrifugal force" with the artificial gravity, maybe they get more efficient use of power or something. (Keep in mind that when a Star Trek ship's shields are hit by a phaser blast or something, the ship shakes and suffers as though it had been physically hit -- supposedly this is because of some sort of feedback or inefficiency in the shield mechanism. So it wouldn't surprise me that there might be other interactions among the various fields generated and used throughout the ship.)
Posted by: Stegve | August 21, 2007 10:49 AM
Yes, Voyager provided a lot of candidates for the worst biology idea ever. Like the Ocampa apparently being able to produce only one child in a lifetime?
If we can buy that whole "the galaxy was seeded by humanoid aliens" thing explaining the similarities between species...
About that. Assuming that the galaxy indeed was seeded by humanoid aliens, and further assuming that evolution was capable of "going backwards", shouldn't everyone in such an event start looking more similar instead of degrading into various lizards and insects all the time? Some internal consistency here is all I ask! :)
Posted by: windy | August 21, 2007 10:53 AM
The biggest beef I had with Star Trek's use of science was its deus-ex-machina application of it: "We're trapped. Wait - if we reverse the polarity of the quantum thingamagigs, we can produce a tachyon flux that will get us out of this mess!"
In spite of it, though, I respect the broader goals of the show. One thing I don't think has been mentioned yet is that, although the science is often flawed, Star Trek presents an incredibly optimistic and positive view of science. Instead of science being shown as some sort of Frankenstein-esque illustration of man's evil and hubris, it is shown as a civilizing force. That alone makes Star Trek almost unique amongst science fiction shows.
I remember as a kid being really annoyed with Star Trek, 'cause that dumb Kirk would just sit around and talk with people instead of blasting them like they would do in Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers. I clearly didn't get it as a kid...
Posted by: gg | August 21, 2007 10:53 AM
It always seemed to me that for a ship that could fly faster than light, an "event horizon" would not be much of a barrier -- I mean, just fly out of the black hole! The event horizon is not a physical barrier, it's just a distance from the singularity at which the escape velocity is lightspeed. The Voyager could fly many times faster than lightspeed -- so, what's the problem?
Posted by: Stegve | August 21, 2007 10:53 AM
Look, I liked Firefly as much as the next guy, but honestly, the science wasn't up to much. They just didn't rub it in your face with technobabble. Where did the shipboard gravity come from - even when all systems were offline? Just how far apart are all those planets, and how does that work with any sensible model of planet formation or orbital dynamics? What sort of speed are they travelling at, and why do they never have to calculate time dilation factors? Are there any mutually-compatible answers to these questions? I could go on (and on, and on...)
Personally, I preferred the Farscape approach - "We know this doesn't appear to make sense. Tough. It's fun!"
You see, the thing with fiction is that it's about stories. They don't have to be true, or even plausible in the real world. That's what makes it fiction.
Posted by: Dunc | August 21, 2007 10:55 AM
While this is way off the Star Trek thread, my biggest gripe came in the movie IQ, which had a ton of flaky science, including a hilarious send up of behavioral psychology and a marvelous bonkers read of cold fusion -- but also had Meg Ryan demonstrating how much physics she knew with the line "...and protons are so much bigger than atoms."
Sigh.
Posted by: bos | August 21, 2007 10:56 AM
Posted by: wintermute | August 21, 2007 10:56 AM
Posted by: llewelly | August 21, 2007 10:57 AM
I love Star Trek (in all its incarnations), Heroes, Doctor Who, Torchwood.. (Basically I'm a big geek.) Yes, the science in all these shows is crap (my personal favourite was the ST: Voyager episode "Ex Post facto", in which B'Lanna Torres spoke of a "crack in the event horizon of the black hole", which is like being a little bit pregnant.
However, these shows aren't about the science; the SF is ust a vehicle for exploring the human condition. That's what makes these shows so much fun.
PZ, you're a spoilsport. But I guess you've just devolved into slime...
Posted by: Kimpatsu | August 21, 2007 10:59 AM
#40 wrote: "Why go to the trouble of standing and walking to the loo when the waste can be beamed out of your rectum directly?"
This gives me horrible images of what kind of pranks might be played by the recruits at the Federation Academy...
Posted by: gg | August 21, 2007 10:59 AM
My vote is for Firefly as the best series. Jos would even throw in humor at the expense if the fantasy science. When it is revealed that River is telepathic, Wash says 'what, is this science fiction?' to which his wife turns to him 'you live on a spaceship hon.'. Best Sci-Fi line ever!
Posted by: joe | August 21, 2007 11:00 AM
Even in this the show was not consistent. Recall the pilot episode of Next Generation in which Dr. Crusher buys a bolt of cloth (oh, is the good Doctor into sewing?), and tells the merchant to charge it to her starship. And what about the gold-pressed latinum so often mentioned in Deep Space Nine? So there is some use of currency, at least.
And in another episode, Dr. Crusher tells another character, "I live in an ideal society." That could ONLY be a Marxist paradise! ; )
Posted by: Stegve | August 21, 2007 11:01 AM
My favorite line from the original Star Trek was, in the context of an emergency, "Set gravity to automatic." What had it been on before...manual?
Posted by: Greg Peterson | August 21, 2007 11:01 AM
Unless you're IN the explosion. But then you won't hear much for long, I suppose.
Posted by: Jon | August 21, 2007 11:02 AM
While pointing out scientific inaccuracies in TV/cinema science FICTION is fun....ya gotta realize, folks, that such behavior officially, and possibly, irrevocably makes you(us) as NERDY as actor Justin Long's Brandon character in Galaxy Quest.
Just sayin'..... :D
Posted by: gingerbaker | August 21, 2007 11:09 AM
According to my Star Trek: The Next Generation U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D Bluprints (how's THAT for Trek geekiness?), the bridge DOES have a head. It's on the opposite side of the bridge from the ready room, starboard of the tactical console.
Now, the ORIGINAL Enterprise didn't seem to have one!
Posted by: Stegve | August 21, 2007 11:09 AM
Like others have pointed out, you should give Star Trek kudos for always invoking a scientific explanation instead of a mystical one, even if they bumble up the science itself. Star Trek promotes a secular, rational and skeptical approach to the universe that is sorely lacking in most other science fiction. I seriously give TNG (which started when I was an impressionable 13) part credit for making me into the atheist I am today.
That said, it always really bugged me when Beverley looked at someone's DNA in a microscope and you could see little double helixes floating around. And she would say something like, "He seems to have such and such mutation in his DNA!" But I am willing to overlook these things because the show is so beautiful in other ways. Gene Roddenberry should be counted among the great, influential atheists of our times.
(Also, I have always wondered why the "Earthlings" have all dispensed with their ancient mythologies, and yet the Klingons and Bjorans, etc, retain theirs.)
Posted by: TR | August 21, 2007 11:10 AM
OK, I guess ill be the first to say the only reason I watched TNG was from Tasha Yar and Deanna Troi. Tight suits, not as tight as 7 of 9...but damn close. Ahhh to be a teenager again....
Posted by: Firemancarl | August 21, 2007 11:13 AM
What gets left out is that the greatest discovery in Trek (and other SF universes) is "wantum mechanics". If the director wantum, the writer creates the mechanics.
Posted by: just | August 21, 2007 11:17 AM
I think this solves the bathroom problem:
http://enterpriserestroom.ytmnd.com/
If this doesn't get me a Molly, I don't know WHAT will.
Posted by: DaveX | August 21, 2007 11:18 AM
I have this argument with my brother all the time. He's a screenwriter in Hollywood. Occasionally I get a script he's working on to read and proceed to correct him on the bad science. His reply is always the same: "not enough people will notice to make it worth changing."
And he's right. Successful storytelling requires some suspension of disbelief from the audience. When the audience doesn't understand that what is being presented is wrong, or can't happen, they have no reason to disbelieve. If they understood the science, they would care, and Hollywood would have to keep it accurate in order to get anybody to watch. Bad movie science is a symptom of a general lack of understanding science. Fix that, and the movie science will follow.
He has a blog entry that covers one of the more egregious examples of bad movie science.
Posted by: tsg | August 21, 2007 11:25 AM
Screw all this. What I can never, never forgive Star Trek for is those pants! Those hideous shin-length bell-bottoms which told me in no uncertain terms that our future fashion universe was shrinking.
Those pants, especially on the paunchy Kirk, were enough to make me dread the future. Not to mention the hysteria and panic they would generate on any world which had developed even the most rudimentary sense of good taste.
Those pants were fashion phasers set on 'destroy"
Posted by: Mooser | August 21, 2007 11:27 AM
JimV, in regard to the episode where the characters are out of "phase" and can walk through walls but don't fall through the floor, the same premise had been used in Stargate SG-1 a few times. They had enough of a sense humor such that in the 100th episode when someone is filming a fictionalized version of the show inside the show one of the characters asks how if she is going to be out-of-phase why she doesn't fall through the floor.
Posted by: Joshua | August 21, 2007 11:31 AM
#53: "Bad movie science is a symptom of a general lack of understanding science. Fix that, and the movie science will follow."
That's very true, and you can see it in the historical evolution of science fiction. Science fiction in the 'golden age' of the 50's and 60's, particularly television representations of it, was rife with absurdities which make the Star Trek goofs people here are complaining about look like Nobel work (check out Specimen: Unknown, in the original Outer Limits series). The audience got savvier, probably in large part due to an increase in public awareness following the moon landings, and the sci-fi got (relatively) more sophisticated. It's still not perfect, obviously, but science fiction would be a sad, sad literary field if everything had to be 'hard' science.
Posted by: gg | August 21, 2007 11:34 AM
JimV (Comment #6):
If I recall correctly, in TOS they actually got this "out of phase" thing right. In that episode, Kirk was somehow caught in a phase shift while checking out some other disabled starship, but in this case, he was really disconnected from current reality but somehow phasing in-and out around the enterprise (I don't recall that they ever explained why he would be necessarilly drawn to the enterprise), but they had to rush to get him back as he was breathing the O2 in the spacesuite he was wearing and that was rapidly running out - none of the seen and yet not-seen of the TNG episode you described.
Posted by: denny | August 21, 2007 11:37 AM
Well... Ain't just trying to piss anyone off, but I honesty find the whole of the Trek franchise painfully mediocre television. And it's not just the 'science'--which, as mentioned, is generally utterly and completely mangled down to a sludgy technobabble pablum... And never mind it was annoyingly polluted with 'theology', too, frequently, really (TNG, for all intents and purposes, genuinely had some of that... in the intermittent Deus Ex Machina 'Q' character... a typically awkward device from dreadfully obvious writers who seem to feel they need a magical man who can disappear and is generally effectively omnipotent if they're going to give the human species a chance to say a few qualified words in defense of its own virtues.)
Hell, leaving all of that flaming stupidity, the characterization generally sucks, too. With a very few shining examples, there's really not much meat on the bones; the notion of complex, believable human characters interacting in complex, human ways is clearly far, far beyond most of the writers. The dialogue is frequently nothing short of agonizingly obvious. I've hardly ever seen a complication in a romantic subplot that didn't make me cringe with the sheer prefab two dimensionality of it: oh, the male lead is married to his ship/his career, oh, they're from different worlds, got different nose bumps, whatever. You get one-note talent for most of the parts. The so-called morality plays are almost inevitably brutally didactic. It's not quite that it's universally awful... it's just so unambitious and predictable. Like they stamp script and casting outta some mould somewhere on an assembly line in Taiwan.
The original series occasionally had a certain hokey charm--there's an innocence about it, now and then, that's kinda nice... again, if you overlook the frequent didacticism, and the just over the top hammishness of Shatner, or manage to treat that as part of the package. The rest of the series all have a very little to recommend them, now and then.... I'd mention TNG for building a relatively interesting ensemble cast that did interact a little more three dimensionally, over the life of the series, Enterprise, even, for doing drama right now and then... but overall, again, it's all generally really mediocre stuff, at best.
I generally like sci fi... Books, cinema and television, but Trek is mostly just... I dunno... pablum. Unambitious, frequently boring, mostly incredibly uninteresting pablum.
Posted by: AJ Milne | August 21, 2007 11:42 AM
" Firefly has zealots on its crew, but in Star Trek, Picard has overtly denounced religion and religious intolerence. "
Eh? Mal is a lapsed believer turned confirmed atheist. River tries to "fix" the Bible because it doesn't make sense. Book is of course a preacher (or he says he is, anyway), but is rather undogmatic about his faith. Zoe, Wash and Simon have indeterminate beliefs, as far as I can recall, but certainly none of them are zealots.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | August 21, 2007 11:42 AM
Kaylee and Inara go in the indeterminate category. Jayne obviously doesn't believe in anything but himself, Vera and his mother.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | August 21, 2007 11:44 AM
Stegve wrote
I'll have to dig out my blueprints of the original Enterprise (how's that for even older geekiness) but I'm pretty sure it did.I do remember at least one episode of Babylon 5 where Sheridan wanted a quiet word with Garibaldi so they adjourned to one of the station's loos.
Another thing is that B5 was never afraid to tackle the more difficult questions in science, as in this scene:
Posted by: Ian H Spedding FCD | August 21, 2007 11:46 AM
The problem I think, is this:
Most people do not properly understand the science used in sci-fi. Also, 'hard' sci-fi tends to be terminally boring because the writers focused on the science instead of writing a good story.
I'd like for there to be more accurate science in my sci-fi, but unti then I'll settle for Firefly level realism. (at least they made an attempt) I'm a big fan of all kinds of things that aren't remotely realistic anyway (mecha for instance), so I can't exactly take the conceptual high ground.
Posted by: Mechalith | August 21, 2007 11:48 AM
AJ-- Two episodes you should make sure you watch, then: "Tapestry" and "The Inner Light"... I don't see how you can claim these are pablum, or unambitious.
Besides, if you away with too much of the humanity that seems to bug you about Star Trek, you'll end up with a Hal Clement novel, ugh.
Posted by: DaveX | August 21, 2007 11:50 AM
Space is boring, from a personal human angle. Big, empty, all it's scales are out of whack with anything human. About the only interesting stories you can realistically tell about space w/humans involve generation ships - which is just shifting the problem by just making space an irrelevant background to a non-space story.
So is the claim that we should drop all science fiction that isn't set in a lab? Some sexy scientists doing "exciting" gels all day? All lawyer shows should also be realistic - talking with the secretary, doing billing, photocopying documents, arguing with partners about parking spaces. And doctor shows should be primarily about insurance codes. You know, some folks watch TV specifically because it's a moronic waste of time, but less destructive than a heroine addiction.
There's being cranky, and then there's just being an ass.
Posted by: frog | August 21, 2007 12:15 PM
gg #35
You mean 'Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow'?
That's Dr Who. Call yourself a geek...
Posted by: Don | August 21, 2007 12:24 PM
Firefly has already been mentioned as a show that was also all about the stories and the interactions
To bad it was mind-numbingly tedious.
Posted by: Tukla in Iowa | August 21, 2007 12:24 PM
personally, i think the scientific standards of verity represented by the original "flash gordon" serials is the best. i especially enjoyed the notion of instantaneous interplanetary radio contact without any time lag. not to mention the little model rocket ships with smoke coming out of the end, where you could almost see the wires they were hanging from.
Posted by: r@d@r | August 21, 2007 12:26 PM
"Almost"?
Posted by: Kseniya | August 21, 2007 12:29 PM
While I loved Firefly, I'll point out that the series itself couldn't decide whether it was in Interplanetary or Interstellar space and routinely mashed up space jargon as a result. I think every sci-fi series is going to have its problems; something to do with how the education of the creators helps isolate them from their supposed subject matter--you know, kinda like how spending all your time in church reading that one book isolates you from knowing anything else.
While I agree that there is little constant medium to propagate sound waves in space, I would point out that an expanding plume of gas or micro debris hitting your ship's hull will definitely make noise that you can hear. Anything that changes your ambient pressure will make a noise if the period of the oscillation's harmonics are audible when they reach your ears. I would argue that "sound" in space is dependent on context and observer.
Posted by: viggen | August 21, 2007 12:31 PM
As a nutjob obsessive on the subject, I'm going to point out that so far as the general population is concerned, science occupies exactly the same position in their minds as Krondar, Lord of Thunder.
As a result, almost all science fiction is just another branch of fantasy. Arthur C. Clarke famously said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." So far as the average car-ape is concerned, that includes refrigerators, radios, heck, even fire! Of course the magic in these fairy tales is gussied up with some hip polysyllabic jargon. That's our culture and those are our abracadabras.
Even most so-called hard SF is really no more credible than the Oz books. Look at Larry Niven -- his Known Space series has psychic powers, FTL travel, magical substances like scrith and General Products hulls, and an extraterrestrial origin for hominids and great apes. It's regarded as hard SF by most readers...
It's a special thrill to run across fiction that demonstrated a real understanding of science, or even a sincere fascination with the poetry produced by research. You can't expect to run across it that often and when you do, you'll usually be able to poke holes in it if you care to take the trouble.
That's why all you working scientists have an obligation to the writing community to place yourself at our beck and call and make your intellectual investments freely available to any who ask... and actually, a lot of people do just that. Let's give 'em a hand! It's not their fault we're ignorant.
And I'll confess that despite the fact that Trek was consistently on the cutting edge of T & A display I found it unwatchable. My wife loved it but she believes in healing crystals.
Posted by: Sean Craven | August 21, 2007 12:38 PM
This is the main thing I have against the otherwise incredible new Battlestar Galactica. Freakin' Gaius Baltar. In the miniseries the military and civilian main characters go out of their way to spare him and get him aboard the ship, because he's "one of the greatest minds of our time", thus setting up all the misery he wreaks over the next three seasons. So far he's been responsible for the genocide of most of humanity, passing a nuclear warhead to a terrorist organization, freeing an assassin who murders an admiral, the occupation of a planet by robot overlords, and general unrest and stagnation among the population. The only good thing he ever did--curing the president's cancer--he brings up at every opportunity. He's a self-serving, obsequious narcissist who lies about everything, including his research. Everybody who ever trusts him has an epiphany where they realize their mistake. He's the sort of person whose first instinct upon learning that he had initiated a nuclear holocaust is to call his lawyer.
All this is very well crafted and makes for an interesting character, but he's the only scientist among the crew. In this (moderately) technically advanced society, which has such things as FTL drives and artificial gravity, he's the face of science.
Also, the doctor is like Bones, but grumpier.
Posted by: cbutterb | August 21, 2007 12:41 PM
"Ya! Ya! I trust you to do the math, Pilot" - John Crichton
Farscape remains the perfect antidote to the sort of narrative numbing techno-babble that saturated later Trek. It's not that science, per se, wasn't important to Farscape's creators, it's just that they had enough common sense to know that protracted dialogue intended to rationalize fantasy 'science' for the viewer would only subtract from the momentum of the storytelling--which has yet to be bested, by the way.
Posted by: Gil | August 21, 2007 12:42 PM
DaveX (re: [#26])
I refer you to THIS
Posted by: dorid | August 21, 2007 12:45 PM
Scienctific research plays a pretty minimal role in BSG, though, as is understandable in a survival situation. Engineering is far more important in the show, with the only science of note that I can think of being the Cylon test and the cancer cure.
Posted by: Ginger Yellow | August 21, 2007 1:00 PM
I liked many episodes of the original Star Trek. At first, there WERE Caltech students as ad hoc science advisors, now and then. It was they who came up with "warp factor = cube root of velocity in units of C" and the like.
Originally, Eugene Wesley "Gene" Roddenberry, (August 19, 1921 - October 24, 1991), whom I'd met and spoken to, bought teleplays from actual Science Fiction authors, such as Norman Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, and so forth.
Later, the derived series only looked at teleplays by people with at least 10 produced teleplays in their past. This made slicker, more professional stories in terms of character and dialogue and pacing, but the folks who wrote for cop shows, hospital shows, and soap operas were less likely to know ANY science rfiction, let alone any science.
I contributed one plot point to original Trek, about the digits of pi never ending.
I do prefer Firefly and Babylon 5 to the later Trek derivatives. And, though the bastards never paid me, it's just as well that I was uncredited as Technical Advisor to Philadelphia Experiment 2, replacing Dr. Tom McDonouigh, who'd been paid and credited for the first of the pair.
I also did rewrite for the most popular episode of "The Wizard" -- the one written by Steve Barnes, where a robots is caught, literally red-handed, standing by a murdered human, in apparent violation of Asimov's Laws of Robotics. I thought that my plot was cute. Had there been a second season, I'd have been a staff writer and exeutive technical advisor. Oh well.
Posted by: Jonathan Vos Post | August 21, 2007 1:01 PM
I must say, Farscape hooked me for life when, after their shield generator exploded in a Trek-like shower of sparks, Crichton remarked "Haven't you people ever heard of FUSES!?!?"
In one episode of Deep Space Nine someone coupled a gun with a transporter to make a device which would fire a bullet and transport it to the desired destination...
OK, Trek and guns... WTF? We've got The Borg right? And The Borg have overun thousands and thousands of planets and The Borg can adapt to their enemy's weapons right? So how does Warf kill one? With a knife... A KNIFE! Never seen THAT one before!? And then Picard wipes out a half dozen of them in First Contact with a Tommy Gun. The Borg have also never encountered high speed kinetic projectiles before either.
Why equip your guys with phasers at all? A god damned .38 special would be more effective... and more accurate! There's a DS:9 where Cisco and some guys ambush a Dominion patrol at a range of 50 meters... and don't hit a thing! MUSKETS would have been more accurate! Hell, a well thrown rock would have been more effective...
Posted by: Sarcastro |