The Nads of the Many Outweigh the Nads of the Few
Retired life in the summer is filled with the excesses of summer - drinking and eating and travelling. The winter is something of a downtime, and a respite from the summer. It is filled with wintertime activities - drinking and eating and exercise. While on the treadmill, rowing machine, or afterwards in the sauna, it is good to stream an old TV show, otherwise you're just staring at the wall and unless there's a bug on it you can quickly guess the plot. I've decided to go through all of the various Star Trek spinoffs and am currently most of the way through Next Generation. Now that I am almost all of the way through the series I can see some patterns that escaped me years ago watching the show first run.
The first thing is that there are no cleaners on board. I have never seen anyone with a bucket on wheels anywhere on the Enterprise. Shouldn't the floor be all sticky? I think if I were a red shirt and told to beam down to the planet's surface and knowing I wasn't coming back anyway I would make a really giant disgusting mess somewhere first so they would have something to remember me by for a few episodes. And what sort of giant disgusting mess you ask? Well I also notice there are no toilets on the Enterprise. Probably to cut down on the need for cleaners. I guess they just dump on a transporter pad and send it to the Klingons or something.
There's also a certain lack of - what's the word - plotlines. It seems like the writers have a big carnival wheel that they spin to get ideas, but that wheel only has "Transporter/Holodeck/Warp Drive/Computer/Commander Data/Other Technology Accident", "Time Thing - Paradox or Some Such", "Some New Alien Species That Really Looks Like An Out Of Work Actor But With Tons Of Makeup", "It's Time For A Distress Call", "When's the Last Time We Saw 'Q'?" and "Mawkish Touchy-Feely Episode" written on it. Although one day the wheel must have been out having its warp core realigned and they had to bring in an outside writer who came up with "The Inner Light" which won a Hugo award which hardly ever happens to a teleplay. But mostly the plot lines are easily categorized and the "science" part of the fiction needs some serious work.
For instance, the away teams have a delightful disregard for any of the logistics that I'm almost certain must accompany travelling to new planets. Never having done it myself I must confess that it is possible you can just beam down to a new planet and assume you'll survive, but really. I have never seen a space suit on an away team member. Not even a handkerchief doused with urine. Do they ever beam down to a planet that isn't just like California? Even if the planet they are beaming down to by some miracle has an atmosphere with an Oxygen/Nitrogen mix and nothing overtly fatal in it, and also an atmospheric pressure that doesn't make people explode either inwards or outwards, has a clear delineation between atmosphere and not atmosphere that can support the weight of a person, a temperature that works with spandex uniforms and some kind of mechanism for toning down the deathrays coming off the nearby star, surely at some point they're going to beam into some other planet's idea of downtown Beijing and die from smog anyway.
And what's up with transporters? As I understand it they "read" you and then recreate you somewhere else. Wouldn't that make two of you? Or do they destroy the original as soon as the camera is distracted? Even if they can recreate all of you in some other location, did they do any tests with clergy as part of the approval process for these things, I want to know. I'd hate to get to the pearly gates and have St. Peter say, "Sorry, we don't take copies. Originals only please.” Of course he'd say it in Latin so no one would understand him. I speak mostly English myself.
Speaking of which, why is it that you can travel anywhere in the galaxy and the people you meet all speak English? Why not Esperanto? I mean English is the natural choice for a universal language in my unbiased opinion but what if the Xarelto people on Zantac 75 didn't get the memo? I think they side-stepped the language thing in some episode and said there was a universal translator thingy working in the background but then shouldn't everyone appear badly dubbed? Anyhow, judging by the early attempts at a universal translator that I have seen in my travels it would simply be a large man in a Hawaiian shirt speaking English very slowly and loud while staring at everyone like they were idiots.
Which brings me to Phasers. As we all know, Cardassians are the vilest, evilest race in the known universe. What confuses me is, when you shoot one with a phaser, and they kind of disappear, how does the phaser know when to stop? It seems to neatly envelope all of the bad guy including clothes, but not, say, take out a patch of the floor he is standing on. Does the phaser ever make a mistake? I for one would like to see a phaser be a little more cautious about that expensive floor. It might be tile or a nice hardwood, a phaser isn't going to know. It should stop disintegrating people at maybe the knees or groin. But then I guess they'd need cleaners.