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?
The lack of racial diversity for the empires outside of the Federation makes it feel like somehow only the Federation ever figured out how to work with others. Even problematic caste style situations do not come up enough, let alone just simple variations of races.
The most “diverse” other empire is somehow the Dominion. We know the other empires have other races in them as well. It’s such a Federation centric view of the universe and I feel that it reinforced my America centric mindset because the parallels seem so direct to me. We are diverse, everyone else is easily groupable into divided others. Only we are Free. Only we are willing to work together.
Life support. It’s always hilarious to me when power going out to life support is treated as an instantly fatal threat. IIRC, if you actually do the calculation it’s ridiculous. If you combine the interior volume of the Enterprise D with its crew count, you would find that the life support system could be offline for MONTHS before the oxygen levels started to substantially drop.
I never think about that.
Booker.
Why have Starfleet rules when you just have a dude on your ship that you can call on that just shits on the rules.
And it’s not Mariner-style twisting or bending the rules it’s just complete skirting of them
Also how they can’t arrest him for jeopardizing trillions of people, because his right to pursue happiness.
Khan Noonien Singh has never been portrayed by an actor of the character’s ethnicity, nor have any of his descendants.
You just wrinkled my brain…
Code of Honor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_of_Honor_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation)) had some issues and wasn’t consistent with Roddenberry’s concept of the Star Trek universe.
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?
put a specialized micro replicator that just makes bullets in place of the magazine and you essentially have an infinite ammo cheat.
I may be a little fuzzy on the official version of how replicators work. Do they not need feedstock?
I’ve always kind of assumed that they were basically transporters, pulling raw materials out of storage to be materialized as the requested thing. And the similarity in the special effects for the two seems to support that.
Either way, I can’t help but think that an emplaced continuous-fire beam weapon would be more energy efficient and less prone to failure than a replicator-fed slugthrower.
Replicators use a base of neutral material that the system finds easy to use for turning into other stuff. For this kind of specialized application you might use materials close to the end result lowering the energy usage to extend the life of the unit. In DS9 they had self replicating mines that were networked so that the surrounding mines would replicate a detonated mine using the material of the detonated mine.
The real problem is shields. A slugthrower would be completely negated by a personal shield. Against a beam weapon it depends on how much energy it can absorb per second vs. what the beam can shoot.
This is the one that immediately comes to mind for me.
“That you could see what I had for breakfsat” wow…
Bro, ep 2 (or 3 I forget) is far worse than that skirt. Some racist ass wakanda forever shit going on in that ep.
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.
I get it, but also Patrick Stewart was not a french man.
sure, i get that a person from place a can have a role as someone from place b. it’s the magic of acting. i’m not talking about france and britain who have been allies for over a century. the japanese fascists were exceptionally brutal to those they attempted to colonize. there’s a very long and troubled history of “comfort women”. this happened within the last 80 years, so within 50 years of tng. maybe it’s just me, but this always felt really weird to me.
English is kinda like French, in the bigger scheme of things
Not really, is like saying “korean is kinda like japanese”, they are different.
Letting Rick Burman run rampant for years
I came here to say, “attractive women existing.”
… What?
I really do hate “Retrospect”.
But I think my answer to the question is “evolution.”
Justifying the no money situation. Which DS9’s ‘In the Cards’ highlights as not making any sense.
Money always is a problem, Boimler wins a lot of money playing on DS9 and he doesn’t care at all. It’s not realistic having some characters had a strong motivation with money and other don’t care.
1st seasons
I personally like first season of TNG, people usually overhate the two first season of TNG.
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.
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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.
i harp on this a lot but Enterprise’s Cogenitor is a deeply distriburing episode that everyone involved with should be ashamed of
Is that the one where Phlox convinces Archer to do a genocide? Because that episode was genuinely fucked
Absolutely, this was the first thing that came to mind.
