Star Trek Tech Problems

I wanted to start with, “one of the things that annoys me is…” but I’m a bit scared to. I feel like I might be opening Pandora’s box by doing so. Once I get started like that, who knows when and where I’ll stop… if ever. Now the problem is that I’ve been sitting here for five minutes trying to come up with a better staring point. Since it appears I can’t, I’ll just forgo the opening altogether and get right to the meat.

Well actually, before I get right to the meat let me start with this warning. This post doesn’t actually contain enough of a spoiler to ruin the new Star Trek movie, but if you one of those ultra whiny people who hasn’t seen the new Star Trek movie yet, STFU if you were a real fan you’d have seen it by now. You’ve no room to complain you LOSER! Now go buy your Terminator Salvation tickets, you’ve only got a day left till it opens.

Okay here we go. I hate that in the movie they introduced the transporter technology that allows them to beam from a planet to a ship that has been at warp for at least a day. They even talk about being able to beam from planet to planet. All this does is make future story lines harder to write because they are removing the whole “space is big and it takes time to get from one place to another.”

They do this all the time, especially in Star Trek. Somebody writes a throw away bit where ensign nobody on the bridge scans a planet and is able to find specific people who aren’t wearing something that allows them to be identified. Now all future story lines have to have some sort of anomaly blocking the scanners because it would ruin the story if they could just take 5 seconds to just scan for them on the planet. It happens so much that you really can’t call them anomalies anymore, they are normalities.

What is it with the writers of these shows that constantly dig themselves into some stupid plot hole that they need to just suddenly just jump out of? They dug the whole, they should fill it back in! The more of these stupid, throw away things they pull out of their hats to quickly solve some silly problem that they could have written around, the more they risk causing future story lines to be even more lame.

Come to think of it, wasn't there a Next Generation episode where they discovered that high warp speeds were teaching the fabric of space time apart? And they were going to slow down the warp speeds of starships? All this because the writers had kept upping the warp speeds in episodes story lines to the point where they were just popping around the universe with enough time to deliver medical supplies to planet that for some reason couldn't use the magic transporter/replicator technology to produce the supplies themselves and stop for take out on the way? Isn't that the way the transporter/replicators work? Sure you can wiggle and squirm some explanation around it, but you wouldn't have to if some writer, editor, or producer had thought an earlier story through better.

Back to the movie specifically, the whole premise behind the ice planet was pretty thin to start with. The more I think about it the more stupid the premise is. They should have just tossed that whole idea and wrote something else to introduce those characters.

Here is a list of things wrong with the ice planet and since they are spoilers you'll have to mouse over them to read them:

• It’s right next to Vulcan, so close you can actually see the planet Vulcan in the sky. Is it a moon of Vulcan? Maybe some Trekkie can enlighten me on this one.

• Why is there a Federation base on this planet/moon next to Vulcan? It is implied to be some backwater base where they’ve thrown Scotty as punishment. But isn’t Vulcan one of the major planets in the galaxy? Hardly backwater.

• So Mr. Evil Romulan Villain Guy, who’s name I’ve already forgotten and am too lazy to look up even though the actor who played him was actually at the theatre here in Vegas where I saw the movie. He gave a little speech before the movie and was signing autographs afterwards. Anyway, we are expected to believe he is soooo pissed at Spock (who I guess we are supposed to call Spock Prime now) that he waits 20 years for him to pop out from the future, just so he can toss him, relatively unharmed, onto this ice planet/moon just so he can watch Vulcan be destroyed? Is that what you would do, assuming you were a vindictive, overly intense, evil, Romulan villain guy? Or would you instead beat him within an inch of his life, make him watch the planet be destroyed from you ship parked right next to it, then kill him, toss him, whatever?

• New Spock is so pissed at Kirk, and afraid to even have him on the ship, that he tosses him in some shuttle thing and crash lands him on the ice planet/moon. Yeah, that seems like the logical thing to do.

• Then, in another of my favorite, over-used, Star Trek plot devices: out of all the places on a whole planet (moon, whatever) Kick and Spock Prime just happen to run into each other.

Now after all that, don't you think they could have found a better way to get Kirk, Spock Prime, and Scotty together? But instead in the next movie we can look forward to hearing something like, "OMG! Teh evil Kingons are like invading Uranus! And some unknown space anomaly is preventing us from beaming over there! Oh noes!"

Alright, that is enough complaining. Do you remember when I used to write cool stuff that was fun to read on my blog. Yeah, me neither. It's been that long.