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.
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.
It wasn’t just explosions. For all exterior shots (in space) on Firefly the only sound was the background music.
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
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.
PZ,
Are you trying to make Lawrence Krauss your mortal enemy?
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.
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.
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.
Ooh, you’ve touched a nerve in many of us. How many years has this stuff being bugging us?
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.
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…
Spaceships. With. Wings.
Spaceships. That. Bank.
Aarrrrrrrrrrrrgh!
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.
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?
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!”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
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.
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.
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…
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.)
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! :)
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…
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?
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.
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.
I recommend this essay on religion in Trek.
They use transporter beams. Why go to the trouble of standing and walking to the loo when the waste can be beamed out of your rectum directly?
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…
#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…
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!
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! ; )
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?
Unless you’re IN the explosion. But then you won’t hear much for long, I suppose.
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
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!
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.)
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….
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.
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.
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.
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”
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.
#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.
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.
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.
” 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.
Kaylee and Inara go in the indeterminate category. Jayne obviously doesn’t believe in anything but himself, Vera and his mother.
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:
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.
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.
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.
gg #35
You mean ‘Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow’?
That’s Dr Who. Call yourself a geek…
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.
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.
“Almost”?
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
DaveX (re: [#26])
I refer you to THIS
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.
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.
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…
Someone mentioned Stargate earlier, and I have to chime in about it.
SG-1 is in my mind one of the most anti-religious show ever to show on TV, and probably helped more than I realize in my journey towards atheism. The premise of the entire show is “Gods are false, and worshipping them enslaves you.” The main characters have spent ten seasons traveling around the galaxy killing gods and saving the masses from religion. The ‘science’ isn’t any better than Trek, but at least they seek scientific quick-fixes rather than supernatural ones.
Unfortunately, they touch on Christian mythology but once (there was one episode where a Goa’uld was playing the part of Satan), and I’m not really sure where I stand on the Asgard’s ploy of “slowly dropping the veil of superstition when the people are deemed ‘ready'”.
I guess the whole of seasons 9 and 10 could be seen as standing against a Christian crusade of ignorance and blind fealty…
I think most people would acknowledge that the story takes priority over exactness in the uses of science. What’s annoying though, is when it wouldn’t detract at all from the story to get the science right, and they still get it wrong! Picard was often described as an archaeology buff, but there isn’t a single episode I can think of in which archaeology came up that it wasn’t peppered with egregious errors. Just goes to show that the writers were indeed sleeping through those freshman Intro to Anthropology lectures they had to do for distribution requirements….
#65: “You mean ‘Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow’?
That’s Dr Who. Call yourself a geek…”
How would I know? I’m not a scientist! Oh, wait; I am a scientist. What I meant to say is, “I’m not a ‘scientist’!” :)
There was a specific reason why the science was trotted out in “deus ex machina” fashion to save the day with jargon: Roddenberry, for all his gifts in getting the show on the air, set up Star Trek up with ground rules that said that 1) the characters can’t be flawed and 2) they can’t have real conflict with each other. Since drama, itself, can be summarily described as “flawed characters in conflict,” he unwittingly cut the drama out of the show by design. The writers were forced to constantly set up external threats that had to be solved by techno-babble gobbledygook.
1)Phasers don’t run out of ammo
2)Phasers can also be set to stun people or cut a hole in a wall
3)Laser weapons are cool, and it’s the future, so there.
#3 is the only answer that matters.
What I really like about the new Battlestar Galactica is that they don’t do this. The Vipers all have thrusters that point in every direction. No one banks because they can simply flip over.
Another common error, though brought to me by TMQ, is still pretty valid. Namely, why do enemy ships randomly run into each other? The galaxy is huge! There’s absolutely no way you could just run into someone in the middle of space.
DaveX: Re ‘Tapestry’ and ‘The Inner Light’… I stopped watching the former when Q showed up, so I can’t really comment. Just got sick of the whole obviousness of the interchange between Picard and him… yeah, yeah, here’s a reasonably healthy humanism contrasted against an irritating, supercilious deity… again. Jacob wrestled the angel, and bully for him. All very nice, but the treatment is about as engaging as anything you find in a Chick tract; I can’t say the franchise generally brought much new or engaging to that dichotomy, never mind how many times they leaned on it. So no, I didn’t give it a chance; I might try to get past that, if I see it come up again, on your recommendation.
Your latter example, however, I’ll give some credit for as fairly well-done… I have seen it, did like it… But it’s an exception, and far from typical, I’m afraid.
As to ‘the humanity that seems to bug you about Star Trek’, I don’t know whose post you were reading, but it sure as hell couldn’t have been mine. What’s wrong with Star Trek isn’t its ‘humanity’… or certainly not that it’s got some excess of it or something. What’s wrong with the franchise in that department is its generally very limited ability to portray (and, for that matter, I suspect, even to grasp) what’s actually interesting in humanity, or to render it with any kind of believability. There’s a generic sameness across the characters portrayed, and a general lack of passion. Where there is passion, it’s frequently melodramatic and one-dimensional. Now and then, they do actually try to write a properly warty, complicated, compromised character, and then the onscreen talent entirely fails to sell it. We get ‘bad boy’ Paris and former rebel Chakotay in Voyager, and the talent is about as believable in either role as would be Mr. Rogers. Not that it matters, anyway…. since the writers aren’t going anywhere much with it, either. I give a little credit to Bakula for making Archer kinda likeable and at once infuriatingly brash and naive, even borderline xenophobic, and Stewart’s Picard, as has often been remarked, actually has some depth… but even there, there’s a certain melba toast quality to the role, most of the time. Still, he looks, at least, like he might have some talent for introspection. I’d invite him to dinner, I guess, and not expect to be bored, which is more than I can say for most of the characters in the series.
But no. Again. The problem with Trek isn’t too much humanity. It’s just their humans aren’t, generally, that interesting.
The science on the Treks was bad, but the drek in the Sci Fi original movies is unbearable. Yet for some reason, I keep subjecting myself to them. Like Black Hole where they start with the idea of accidentally create a mini-black hole at a super collider… Ok, fine, real scientists have discussed the remote possibility of that before.
But then, every potential thing after that they get miserably wrong. The black hole grows rapidly with out additional mass. Later it sits on the surface of the earth eating St. Louis. A “pure energy” creature, with 2 arms and 2 legs, comes out of the hole and starts eating electricity. To fix the problem, they trick the monster back into the black hole… well, it gets sucked into the hole, while the heroes hang on to the universe’s strongest lamp posts and survive. The black hole just goes away then leaving a modest crater in the ground.
The lesson I learned, science is MAGIC!
Black Hole isn’t even the worst of the stuff they show on Sci Fi… for that you need to watch something like Mansquito or Path of Destruction I think they are on a crusade against every form of science.
which is like being a little bit pregnant.
And science fiction being what it is, naturally someone came up with a situation where that phrase is used. “A Deepness in the Sky” by Vernor Vinge contains an intelligent species where individuals consist of four to eight doglike creatures, who individually have animal intelligence, but when close together can integrate their brains using sound to become beings with human intelligence. So when one of the components got pregnant, the whole being described itself as “a little bit pregnant”.
I don’t mind bad science so much in TV and books as long as it is internally consistent, and as long as it is necessary for the story. Sloppy use of bad science when correct science would have worked quite as well does annoy me, however. Get a science advisor to make up dialogue that at least sounds plausible! Most people won’t notice, but a few do and the word may spread.
Battlestar Galactica (the new one) is a mixed bag when it comes to science. On one hand, the have sounds in space. But on the other hand, although the vipers (fighter planes) have wings, they repeatedly show that to turn in space they use nose jets. The wings are for in-atmo maneuvering (and they also mentioned that they use fuel a lot faster in-atmo because they have to run their engines constantly). Then there’s the fact that a surprising number of planets they encounter seem to have an abundance of edible Earth-like flora, but this may be related to the pre-historic migration to or from the 13th colony. Then there’s the fact that humanoid cylons can plug wires into their arms and talk to computers, but yet there’s no way except really complicated molecular analysis to tell a humanoid cylon from a human… eventually you have to just say “what the hell” and enjoy the story. Just like every sci-fi.
I’m not bothered by the reprehensible (but so interesting!) Baltar being the only example of a scientist, but I am a bit bothered by him being the only out atheist (other than Brother Cavil, who is awesome but also evil). Plus, the conversion fantasy is so overdone….
Heroes was a fun watch, but I lost all respect for it in the first episode, when they trotted out the “humans only use 10% of their brain” myth. On the bright side, the rant that was evoked from me actually educated one of my roommates, who previously had thought it was true.
Also, although I loved Firefly, I suspect that if the series had lasted for more than 13 episodes they would eventually have gotten around to some bad science.
If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes
And other science facts,
Just repeat to yourself “It’s just a show,
I should really just relax . . .”
Anticavorite deck plating. Next question?
re: 64 so Star Trek is better than Harlequin Romances or are you talking about the opiate? Either works, but one leads to the Diana Gabaldon tales of very bad rewritten Scottish history, which fits the thread, and the other to sitting in a corner drooling. One leads to Bimbos of the Death Sun
Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg covered this in an essay called “I Ought To Be A Law“, in which he proposed several candidates for something to be called “Sjöberg’s Law”. My favorite of the bunch is this one:
So you see.
Star Trek, in any incarnation, was not written for science professionals. It’s meant for the kiddies, really, and they don’t care about all that. If you think you should get your education from primetime TV, I’ve got the Brooklyn Bridge at a good discount for you.
What Star Trek does (or did, as some argue) is present a fresh perspective to the growing children (with easy-to-follow plotlines and likable characters, again to children and teens); one in which the pursuit of knowledge is a noble goal, where superstitions and bigotry are devalued, but cultural tradition is honored, where dictators are disliked, freedom enjoyed, moral courage rewarded, and the cooperative spirit thrives.
I tell ya, those are all ideals I want my kids to know. Perhaps Star Trek, for all its inadequacies in educating the masses (never a goal of theirs), did more raising the consciousnesses of children to the humanistic worldview than any of us could ever hope to. That’s the kind of show we should see more of. Forget about the science. We’re trying to teach kids more important things. The settings and production values and scientific inaccuracies are secondary to the messages, the themes, and the virtues it extols.
Not all kids are going to grow up to be astronauts, or biologists, or even engineers, so the quibbling minutiae of spaceships making noise in space, or biology being done wrong is pointless. All kids will grow up to be citizens of the human race, and that’s what this show tries to show them by example to do. So get off your high horse of science already. I watch NOVA, Cosmos or Planet Earth for my science fix. I watch Star Trek for my humanist fix.
AJ– I guess I misunderstood something you said earlier. My mistake, sorry. I think the dynamic created by Q got MUCH better after the first season. I remember my father and I having a very similar argument, though– he despised the easy way Q could be used by writers to create a desperate situation for the crew to struggle with; but I enjoyed the ability of Q to contrast knowledge with wisdom, or intellect with humanity. On a lot of levels, Q was something to aspire to– but of course, in many other ways he definitely was not.
Furthermore, I enjoyed a character who frankly declared that he was worshipped as a god on a variety of planets, despite clearly not being one in actuality. The Vorlons in Babylon 5 were interesting to me for much the same reason– not sure if you watched, but the episode where the first Vorlon ambassador left his encounter suit to save the tram… well, every race saw him as an embodiment of their own races’ god. It was a nice touch, considering how wrought with faults the Vorlons could be at times.
I don’t even know where to begin with Battlestar. I think its a tremendous show for nearly every reason– not least of which is the fascinating contrasts between polytheism, monotheism, and atheism. I’m also very interested in how various characters beliefs towards religion are changing as they gain actual information about their situation. Great show.
I protest!
I say I protest!
As a working screenwriter in H’wood (well, I just started getting paid for my screenwriting), do you have any idea at all about how much work goes into butchering the science in a screenplay? Well, not much, really. I mean, it’s just real easy to make shit up and put it on paper, but still, it’s the thought, or lack thereof, that counts, right?
Seriously, folks. I can hear your annoyance at the science in screenplays, and I can understand it. One of the things to remember though is that, much like religion, a screenplay is a compromise with reality, not reality itself. Some of you are saying that reality always wins. True. I didn’t say that the compromise was a good one.
Look, when you are writing a screenplay, not only are there the host of story considerations to think about but there are also all of the practical considerations behind the physical act of creating the screenplay itself. That includes deadlines, studio notes, budget, location, and talent of all the parties involved.
I’m a devout Science Blogs reader, and a Pharyngula Phan. I get what’s going on out there in the world. The thing is, that is a factor in what I wind up writing, but only one of many involved in the final product. There are so many trade offs made along the way to get something made once — and with a TV show like Trek, you are constantly under the gun to do it week in and week out — the science will and does suffer.
Cinema and TV aren’t reality, and thankfully so. Most of reality is long stretches of boredom broken by really memorable moments. Screenplays transform all of the boring moments in memorableness, then offer the whole package up as something more memorable still. The best movies can do is inspire, is dramatize. It’s up to sites like this, and the people who read them, to do the rest.
It always bothered me a little that when two spaceships meet in any incarnation of Star Trek, they are always right-side up with respect to each other. Sure, the galaxy is three-dimensional, but you’d never know it from watching Star Trek.
Re:Spaceships with wings, banking.
You have to at least let the new “Battlestar Galactica” off the hook on this one. They’re at least clueful enough to fit the Viper fighter with attitude thrusters at various points along the body of the ship so it can perform complex maneuvers
. Their grasp of computer science does need some work though.
(I cringe every time they bring up firewalls and networking)
I didn’t see anyone link to a site I’ve enjoyed, called Stupid Movie Physics:
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
Their reviews of the Core and DaVinci Code are laugh-out-loud funny in parts.
#77: I was fairly agnostic when I started watching SG-1, and it really surprised me that a popular American TV show would be so irreverent. I couldn’t help but smile every time the writers put in some bit of dialog that was obviously contrived to assuage the concerns of the religious. Teal’c mentioning the Bible, for example. “I have yet to see a Goa’uld as merciful as your God.” Maybe he was reading a different translation than the ones I’ve seen. My personal favorite bit is whenever Daniel explains to someone that the Goa’uld are ‘acting out’ the mythologies of mankind, when it would obviously be simpler to say that they ARE the mythologies of mankind. All that dying must’ve done a number on his brain.
@TR (#49): Scientific explanations? Fantasy relabeled using treknobabble to make it scientific sounding you mean.
We don’t have ghost just energy patterns capable of possesing people.
Startrek TOS was fun (in a campy kind of way).
Startrek NG and Voyager completely ruined the show with all the moronic (if not imbecilic) abuse of engineering, technology, invention and science seen. And that all because Roddenberry got enough clout with TOS so he could impose his vision of a perfect society on the show (like was said earlier no bad characters and tension between the main cast). Good thing he didn’t work on DS9 and that Berman and Braga had a relative limited input (they did wreck Voyager and Enterprise though).
One of the worst cases of a science blunder was in an early episode (the first?) of the show Primeval. Coming across the skeleton of a human, the “heroes” count the ribs of the remains to see if it was a woman or not. That, coupled with the frequently used line (I may be paraphrasing a bit) “We now know that the past is real” definitely got on my nerves.
SG-1 is in my mind one of the most anti-religious show ever to show on TV…
I rank it right behind Xena: Warrior princess on the irreverance scale.
My jaw was on the FLOOR when Xena used a bullhorn to impersonate Yahweh so as to stop Abraham from killing Issac. And then I laughed until I hurt. Hell, that show even got Hindu fundies up in arms (“arms”, get it?).
The worst thing about science-as-magic isn’t the TV crap per se, but Scientology, which takes this same approach but then claims that it ain’t “fiction”. I’m fine with Harry Potter until someone starts calling it fact.
And at least some of the old religions have some decent art work to go with them. But have you ever seen Scientology “art”? It’s cheesy pulp fiction covers that are then declared to be high art. Ugghh…
But then the Mormons do the same thing (check out their “meditation” room in SLC).
Stick in commercials and Worfs forehead – much more entertaining in a McDonald’s Apple Pie way. As long as everyone knows it’s fake, just enjoy the cheesy gooodness.
How about looking at this a different way – instead of getting the science right for geeks, getting it right for the masses? That way, non-tech people who watch the shows and believe what they see “MIGHT” get interested in an actual line of scientific thought, rather than what currently passes for science?
My kids love Bill Nye, but what comes next to continue fostering that excitement and curiosity?
I don’t know, I thought the whole Hercules/Xena stories were really weak. It’s like the writers just took all the mythology they could find from wherever they could find it and just mashed it up all together. In Greece. WTF?
#64:
“. . .less destructive than a heroine addiction.”
It helps if the heroines are scantily clad.
The science on the Treks was bad, but the drek in the Sci Fi original movies is unbearable.
It should not be a surprise, after all, the Sci-fi channel executives have publicly voiced support for UFO conspiracy theories and X-filesish government cover-ups. Whether it is a marketing strategy or not, I can’t say, but it definitely dedicates the channel to the fringe. Sci-fi channel is the channel with that Ghost patrol show. I kind of doubt that the executives at Sci-fi channel have ever encountered a pseudoscience they didn’t like, for some reason or another.
Cinema and TV aren’t reality, and thankfully so. Most of reality is long stretches of boredom broken by really memorable moments.
I think that the largest problem is not that Cinema and TV aren’t reality, it is that many people confuse the lines between Cinema, TV and Reality. There are a lot of people that I know who embrace stupidly unreal ideas because they saw them on a television show and assume an authority bias. Even with fictional shows, there is an interplay between what is presented and what people will be liable to believe. I know people who have embraced X-files (fiction!) as Fact. If these erroneous ideas propagate back around to put a damper on real, beneficial research by actual scientists, the effect is harmful not just to the work of the scientists, but to everybody who might otherwise benefit from the research.
I honestly don’t know if there is a solution to this problem because I love fantasy and science fiction and I am against censorship, but then I am also a scientist, which means I professionally have to distinguish truth from desire. There are not many professions where people are trained to do this and I feel that people, even skeptical people without this background, and even scientists without peer-review and with unspoken habitual biases, are prone to seeing what we want to see rather than what is actually there. In some cases, it is not easy to distinguish reality from what we want reality to be. From that, I don’t think it’s possible to pen a law that could dictate people think a certain way, regardless of whether people are prone to erroneous conceptions of reality or not.
@ Who Cares (#99)
yeah, scientific explanations in the TREK universe if not in OURS. So what if they use some technobabble. The message is extremely science positive, especially for impressionable children. Remember- it is FICTION.
anyway, why do you care?
“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.”
Maybe that’s why Firefly was so boring. Sorry, I know that show is a sacred cow to many geeks but I found it to be a terrible snooze-fest.
Seriously– three doors on the bridge, and none go to the loo? That’s just mean.
Wait, where’s the third door go then? One for the turbolift, one for the ready-room . . . third door goes where?
(Also, I have always wondered why the “Earthlings” have all dispensed with their ancient mythologies, and yet the Klingons and Bjorans, etc, retain theirs.)
Chakotay was quite obviously spiritual. That aside, I think the reason had to do with Earth having multiple faiths, and therefore the egalitarian society they created would not have a dominant one, whereas other races seem to have just one (this is another nitpick; Earth has diversity among humans whereas most other races are sorta one-size-fits-all in terms of culture), and therefore their egalitarian culture is able to accurately represent all of them while including significant religious expression.
That being said, the Bajorans have their religion because they missed out on falling under the Prime Directive (protection of their ability to develop their culture to starfaring point without interference) due to the Cardassians, who showed up when the only Bajoran attempt at spacefaring was a single voyage that had faded from history to legend; they were about at the point of the Middle Ages, a feudal society with a caste system, mostly ruled by religion.
And the Klingons’ religion is not much of a religion at all, more like a cultural ideal of honor coupled with some legends about ancient warriors. They used to have gods, but according to Worf, “Ancient Klingon warriors slew them milennia ago. They were more trouble than they were worth.”
Besides, nobody in their right mind is going to go knocking on the Klingons’ doors and asking if they’d accepted Jesus Christ as their personal lord and savior.
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.
So true, PZ! So true. I wonder if there’d be any way the directors who hated those horrible science classes they had to take in Gen Ed would think about including scientists from the start?
Nah.
.
Add to that that the Bajorans’ Orbs are a hell of a lot more convincing than any book. Show up in a preindustrial society with glowy shit that grants you visions, you can pretty much be assured of having plenty of believers in whatever you tell them it means.
#105: Whatever floats your boat – high heeled syringes or muscular spoons. But never, ever look twice.
This comment thread would be bereft without at least a mention of Justin B. Rye’s Star Trek Mega-Rant. (See section 3.1, for example, for a list of horribly overpowered plot devices such as android factories and magical lie detectors. Also, section 7, on transporters, is quite excellent–there’s a set of military implications thought out that make the Trek universe as usually portrayed look positively childish.)
Babylon 5 had its own problems, especially in the first season, but it was light years ahead of Trek. Sure, plenty of bits of technology work by magic, but it’s consistent magic, and if they shoot a gun in the third act, they’ve always shown you said gun in the first act–none of this “quick, say a magic incantation!” crap, which makes no damned dramatic sense. Sure, jumpgates work by handwavey magic, but you could be damned sure that Sheridan wouldn’t “depolarize the jumpgate voodoo horsepuck” in order to chase away this week’s Big Bad. (Though, generally speaking, there really wasn’t much of a Big Bad most weeks.)
It is possible, incidentally, to write hard SF which doesn’t involve any sort of magic, and make it pretty interesting. The Passages series is an example (that’s a link to pretty late in the series; use the list of links at the beginning and start with “Passages in the Void”).
I do wonder why Picard didn’t just have the Holodeck summon up Leonidas and his Spartans, while he was at it, plus Kratos, Master Chief, and your very own metal-eating zombie horde.
When you think about it, Trek characters are profoundly short on imagination.
Thank Babylon 5 for that one. The first time I saw a Starfury spin around and shoot backwards was one of several revelatory moments in dramatic SF for me.
I can’t believe there are 113 comments on this thread and no mention of the best sci-fi tv show ever: Red Dwarf.
I liked the way the ST:TNG crew would come across the life work of a recently deceased scientist and Jordie would quickly absorb the totality of his research to date, then extend the work to its natural conclusion.
No, you’re thinking of “A Fire Upon the Deep”; “A Deepness in the Sky” is the one with the Spiders and the Emergents, which takes place in the Slow Zone.
Yes, but then why, in the pilot episode, were they seen turning it on in the decompression bay? I don’t remember cavorite coming with an on/off switch. (Though a certain someone in the first League of Extraordinary Gentlemen definitely wished that it did.)
That’s the cheapest cop-out I’ve ever seen. Sure, it doesn’t have to focus on science–and yet it does, and it does so not because the science is good, but because it is bad, it is inconsistent, and it lets the writers pull themselves out of whatever hole they’ve written themselves into with a bit of treknobabble. The poor science is in turn an excuse for poor writing. We wouldn’t tolerate this kind of shoddy universe-building from a fantasy series; why would we tolerate it in science fiction?
Clearly you’ve missed their tentative dualism and occasional bout of New-Agey hyper-relativist crap. (See “Cogenitor” for a particularly egregious example.)
moops: Yes, Red Dwarf is much more scintifically accurate than most sci-fi – comedic or otherwise. And of course this leads to better storylines, since truth – science – is often stranger than (science) fiction
Star Trek was fictional. You people are seriously debating this shit?
I’m a big fan of James Burke (three series of Connections, plus The Day the Universe Changed) but that’s more history than science. I’ve heard good things about Carl Sagan’s COSMOS, but then again, that’s only one miniseries. The Mythbusters guys use science to answer actual interesting questions, and though their methods aren’t as rigorous as they could possibly be, they do go through their false starts and failed experiments on the way to the conclusion–which sometimes isn’t that conclusive. Kind of like actual science.
Of course, there are also great books popularizing science which are enjoyable, though more demanding of one’s attention. I really liked The Ancestor’s Tale, but I don’t know how accessible it would be to kids of varying ages.
Yes, but technobabble in the real world means something. You can’t just incant magic words at a problem and it’ll go away because your forty-eight minutes are up. Yes, it is, as you put it, FICTION, but it’s POORLY WRITTEN without a good reason for being so. Various other shows (I’ve mentioned Babylon 5; others have mentioned Farscape and Stargate SG-1) manage to avoid the most egregious flaws of Trek. Why should the show be immune to criticism just because you’re a fan?
I’m guessing Hugh is not a scientist.
Trek was hugely influential, and has a number of flaws which aren’t inherent to the central concept, but which make the show(s) much worse. These things are not fictional; the bad science they inculcate into their fans is not fictional. Get it?
Do you come from some strange planet where nobody ever discusses a work of fiction, even a tremendously influential one?
It’s not just the science… There’s an episode of TNG, Peak Performance, that is so completely and utterly devoid of simple story logic that it beggars belief. In order to prepare for the possibility of an all-out war with the Borg, who at this point were still stupendously badass, the Enterprise is going to engage in a combat simulation. Commanding the Enterprise, the Federation’s foremost tactical genius. Opposing them? Riker and a handful of characters, on an obsolete ship that isn’t even functional when Riker takes command. [Pause for effect.] I mean… what precisely does the Federation expect to learn from this? It’d be like the Navy running a mock battle between a modern battleship and, oooh, let’s say The Beagle. “Battle Stations!” There is an unbelievably loud noise. The captain of the battleship surveys the smoking splinters of his opponent. “Next!”.
I disassociated myself from Trek originally through nothing more dramatic than boredom with its trite, twee, beige blandness, but when I saw that episode it pushed me over to the dark side. I can now do an extended freeform rant on just how appalling any given iteration of Star Trek is, at the slightest provocation, and frequently have to be forcibly restrained. That said, Ezri Dax was cute as a button.
Very little of these complaints are unique to Trek or other “big name series”. I refer the lot of you to http://www.tvtropes.org, where you can consider such concepts as the Broken Bridge (“We can’t go anywhere until Scotty’s fixed the warpdrive, so let’s go down to the planet”, the Planet of Hats (“Forsoothian society is built around dramatic arts”), and Applied Phlebotinum. (“Chirally reversed, huh? Well, I can rig one of the small transporters to fix that, but it won’t be ready until after the side plot’s wrapped and the Aesop gets out of the way.” ;-) )
Ooh, fun topic. Yeah, bad technobabble makes it pretty much impossible for me to tolerate what could otherwise be a fun show. Lots of Star Trek is simply unwatchable. Deep Space Nine was generally much better than the other series (and had the whole prophets vs worm-hole aliens thing going too). They also made a decision to seriously limit how much technology would be critical as a plot development device, and instead throw much more of the plot/narrative into people and politics. Always a good choice, especially in SciFi.
People have already mentioned Firefly and Stargate. Though I’d like to point out that Stargate includes technological progress, unlike Star Trek. The techno-wonder invented to save them in one episode is actually part of their bag of tricks later on (in most cases). Of course, by the end of the series, the poor little humans had some seriously powerful technology at their disposal… even if they didn’t quite know how it all worked. Oh… and in early Stargate there was stuff about the actual gate “breaking the laws of physics”, meaning that our understanding of the laws of physics is actually just wrong.
ok, enough babble.
@Grendelkhan (#117)
That’s the cheapest cop-out I’ve ever seen. Sure, it doesn’t have to focus on science–and yet it does, and it does so not because the science is good, but because it is bad, it is inconsistent, and it lets the writers pull themselves out of whatever hole they’ve written themselves into with a bit of treknobabble. The poor science is in turn an excuse for poor writing.
It’s not a cop-out. And I’m sure you’ve seen worse. It’s called entertainment, not science education. And spare me the sanctimonious cries of “bad writing! bad writing!”. Your opinion of bad writing means nothing to me. It seems most people say some particular piece of writing is “bad” because they want to look superior in the eyes of others, positioning themselves as literary critics when they wouldn’t recognize good writing if it bit them on the ass.
We wouldn’t tolerate this kind of shoddy universe-building from a fantasy series; why would we tolerate it in science fiction?
Please. Doctor Who, Battlestar Galactica, Star Wars, Stargate, and yes, even Firefly are all scientifically incompatible. You know why? Because they’re entertainment. Get over yourself.
Clearly you’ve missed their tentative dualism and occasional bout of New-Agey hyper-relativist crap. (See “Cogenitor” for a particularly egregious example.)
Star Trek: Enterprise lost my interest about a month in, when it was discovered the Vulcans were covering up their secret listening post in a temple. It became clear to me then that the producers were trying to capture the angsty teenagers trying to rebel against their parents with the whole Human/Vulcan dissonance.
I never watched Enterprise for my humanist fix.
Star Trek was fictional. You people are seriously debating this shit?
There are a lot of people in this world who respond to fiction as if it were real. There are a lot of people who make decisions based upon fiction. Fiction, its quality and its content, strongly impact the real world, for good or for bad. There are a lot of people who don’t know fiction from otherwise and are not able to discern the difference. Blowing it off as “don’t you know it’s fiction” does not take into account the fact that there are lots of people who place more value on it (or more truth in it) than on the reality of their own lives.
@grendelkhan #120
Why should the show be immune to criticism just because you’re a fan?
Did I say that somewhere? Or do you just not read what a person has written before you respond? I offered my own science criticism of Star Trek, actually. However my main point was that despite the “technobabble” it has an overall science-positive message.
I’m never one to judge, and the world of human sexuality is a wide and varied one, but I refuse to believe anyone could snooze through Gina Torres doing anything, up to and including eating cereal and reading the paper.
The treknobabble isn’t set up earlier in the episode; it acts as a deus ex machina. Occasionally plot devices are set up, but never used. Universe-changing devices are brought in for one episode and promptly forgotten about. Technologies work in subtly different ways depending on what the plot requires. These are not highbrow lit-crit problems; these are simply bad writing.
Yes, they’re incompatible with each other, because they’re different shows. They’re incompatible with our current understanding of the universe, because they’re not hard SF. But they’re internally coherent (well, I can’t speak for all of them, but at least Firefly was), and that’s what matters.
Okay, then take your pick of dodgy ideologies from the series. Also, note that for all its supposed logic, Vulcan ideology consists mainly of mumbo-jumbo. Also, note the extreme technological conservatism, given the tools at their disposal. Not terribly humanistic, I think.
Of course, the whole show wasn’t uniformly representative of bad or creepy ideology, but it certainly had a habit of putting forth a lot of silly ideas.
Actually I personally enjoyed the episode because was clear the whole thing was the writers were just torturing their characters. Fun, fun, fun.
I think the show was summed up for me when I was watching STNG with my dad and the scene featured the ship’s warp drive and I was considering anti-mater. I mean what the heck do they contain it with? My dad said to keep the anti-matter interacting with matter in an uncontrolled fashion was “held in a suspension of disbelief”.
Chris, I happen to know a few peeps who agree with you regarding Ms. Torres, and still others who feel similarly about Jewel Staite. She seems to inspire the most avid and faithful fans… Perhaps it’s that girl-next-door thing. Morena Baccarin, on the other hand, is so astonishingly beautiful she may just scare ’em right off.
As for me, a Mal-Simon hybrid would be just the ticket.
I adore the show, but obviously it’s not for everyone. My Jedi mind tricks have so far failed to produce more than a few
dozen“Firefly” converts…There should be some sort of disclaimer attached to the Serenity movie, though, like: “If you haven’t seen ‘Firefly’, this may not make perfect sense! A solid understanding of the ‘Firefly’ series is recommended!” A friend of mine was criticising the movie, saying “Now, I know what Joss was trying to do, but…” and of course he hadn’t seen a single episode of “Firefly”.
Bah. How could he possibly have known what Joss was trying to do? I gave him a stern look, yes indeed I did!
I took “Remember- it is FICTION” as an attempt to shut down attempts at discussion. If it wasn’t meant that way, then I apologize.
And I disagree. Science isn’t about warp drives and a specific set of jargon; it’s about a particular way of gaining knowledge, a way that doesn’t involve having your fat pulled from the fire by fast talking and forgetting what you learned last week. I’m not saying that nobody engages in clever, scientific thinking in Star Trek that doesn’t involve jargon that no one could conceivably have seen coming, but I can’t think of an example off the top of my head.
I appreciate that TOS and TNG tried to push forth a vision of an ideal future, or at least Gene Roddenberry’s vision of one. But even by the time of TNG, things start to go wrong with the premise. In fact, the show becomes deeply flawed by the time Deep Space Nine comes around. The show goes from promoting secular humanism (or a secularist deism in TOS) to tolerance of ridiculous religious and cultural beliefs: we go from Kirk in TOS telling “Apollo” we’ve outgrown the need for gods, to Picard telling Worf in TNG that if his beliefs are incompatible with his Federation duties he should resign, to the officers of DS9 tolerating the backwards and even savage beliefs of Klingons and Bajorans, to the point where Sisko goes “native” and embraces his role as Emissary of the Prophets wholeheartedly.
This fellow’s site pointed out a lot of the problems with later incarnations of Star Trek. Granted, he’s writing from the bias of a Star Wars fan, but he’s a mechanical engineer and an atheist who brings a lot of rationality to the table. This essay showing how the TNG-era Federation is a Marxist state is quite convincing. He has a point: in TOS, Kirk was always answerable to a civilian bureaucracy. In DS9, we see civilians being tried by a Starfleet officer.
Maybe you noticed this article praising the Simpsons movie for portraying born-again evangelical Ned Flanders as a sympathetic character and not a fire-and-brimstone stereotype. So when do we see a portrayal of a scientist as a compassionate, caring individual who wants to help humanity with her research? If The Golden Compass film does well and we get the two sequels, we might see this with Dr. Mary Malone. When do we get to see a sympathetic atheist character in fiction? One who lives a happy, fulfilled life without acknowledging magic sky fairies? Not one of these Hollywood “atheists” who hate God (but don’t reject his existence) because of some past trauma, until some revelation in the plot renews their faith.
You’re all seriously deluded if you think that Hollywood or TV producers are in the education business.
You’re also deluded if you think that they make movies for scientists or scientifically-educated lay-people.
No! they’re in the money-making business. Oh, once in a while, they goof-up and produce an educational movie, but that’s the rare exception.
How do they make money? They sell to the LCD. If they made movies that made scientific sense, the bulk of the movie-going public wouldn’t get it because they’re scientifically ignorant. They’d stay away in droves and the movie would flop. For each flop they made the movie people would find it harder and harder to get the next gig because they’re not giving the people what they want and can handle.
The business of educating people is not up to Hollywood, but up to our education system. When those standards are raised sufficiently, you’ll find Hollywood will respond, because if they don’t, the educated public will then stay away in droves.
But even then, there will be still dumb blockbusters because that’s what people want to see once in a while, even scientifically educated people.
Anyone who disagrees is welcome to write a solid science movie or TV show and try their luck.
But the bottom line is that it isn’t about the science. It’s about the entertainment. It’s about escapism. It’s about what they can sell. And it’s about what looks cool to the average jo.
Next I suppose you’ll tell us that the TARDIS can’t really be bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. Or that sonic screwdrivers just aren’t that good.
@Grendelkhan (#130)
The writing was never about the technobabble or the technology. It was about the people and about the conflicts. That’s what art is about. Science is about the technobabble and technology.
I never said they weren’t incompatible with each other. I said they are all incompatible with science. I’m almost positive that that tragically cut short western-stylized phantom of a sci-fi show had some concessions to the tropes of entertainment. And even if it didn’t, if it had continued for 698 episodes over 40 years, I’m sure it would have.
The link you provide is just silly. Unconscious racism? The writer is looking too deeply at the superficial nature of the TV medium and saying “Ah-HA! They’re endorsing racism because 8 out of 10 characters are white!” while conveniently ignoring the fact that the show promotes tolerance of other races through the SF convention of regular alien characters.
You’re just missing the point that Star Trek was never about bringing science to the masses. It was about bringing a worldview, raising the consciousness of the people who watched it, and entertaining people. You may as well knock “Reading Rainbow” or “The Electric Company” for being trite and predictable. No one ever made real-life claims based on Star Trek science. If they did, they should be rightly laughed into oblivion, just as they should for just about any TV show. Star Trek inculcates the audience with the idea that standing up for your principles is good, that questioning authorities is good, and that being empathetic to the plight of others is good. And it does it with a general sci-fi setting.
I’m sure if it were set in an automobile manufacturing plant, auto workers nationwide would be crying foul, saying “Why don’t they use the XR240 monkey wrench they had last episode?! That’s the wrong bolt for that flange! Everyone knows that! This show teaches such whacked-out ideas! Bad writing!”
One of my personal annoyances regarding the original Trek is the very loose definition of ‘logic’ that Spock subscribes to.
Many, many times he invoked the magic word incorrectly, which I always found rather ironic.
That said, I agree with the views of those that enjoy the show from a humanist perspective.
And yes Moops, Red Dwarf is the greatest sci-fi tv show ever. :)
Sadly, shows like Babylon 5 made a superficial effort to be physics-compatible, but brought in mysticism and vitalism constantly.
Interestingly, the shows creator, J. Michael Straczynski, is unabashedly an atheist:
http://www.celebatheists.com/?title=J._Michael_Straczynski
In an interview in the October 1995 issue of Sci-Fi Entertainment the interviewer observes “You count yourself as an atheist, yet spiritual matters often set the theme for episodes of the show, and seem to be a large part of the arc. Some would see that as a contradiction.”
Straczynski responds “You have to understand that the writer’s job is to be as honest as he humanly can in his characterizations and his storytelling. And, as I look at the long parade of human history, religion has not gone away in the past 4,000 years of recorded history, nor does it show any sign of going away any time soon.
“One of the worst cases of a science blunder was in an early episode (the first?) of the show Primeval. ”
It’s on ITV. What do you expect?
“Chris, I happen to know a few peeps who agree with you regarding Ms. Torres, and still others who feel similarly about Jewel Staite. She seems to inspire the most avid and faithful fans…”
Count me in the Kaylee/Jewel camp.
“There should be some sort of disclaimer attached to the Serenity movie, though, like: “If you haven’t seen ‘Firefly’, this may not make perfect sense! A solid understanding of the ‘Firefly’ series is recommended!””
I saw Serenity never having seen any Firefly, although I was a huge Buffy fan. I thought it was the best sci-fi flick since Gattaca, and went out and bought the Firefly DVDs. I’ll admit that a) it makes more sense with knowledge of Firefly, and b) the TV show is much better, but it’s still an awesome film in its own right.
Actually, I’ll rephrase that. It makes perfect sense. But a lot of the character related bits – Book, Kaylee/Simon at the end, that Wash moment – have a lot more resonance if you’ve seen the show. On the other hand, for someone who found Firefly boring (you poor, poor soul), the film would probably be an improvement because the action is so compressed and the trademark Whedon dialogue comes so thick and fast.
“This is the captain. We have a little problem with our entry sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence and then… explode. “
“Universal Translator,” it still makes me ill. And sad. There was an obvious need for it in the series, but the idea that one could create a universal translator is based on some seriously sloppy ideas about language(s).
What irritates me the most is when some scientist on a tv show or movie supplies his researched opinion it’s always disregarded in favor of the someone else’s hunch. And the hunch is almost always right! This is especially the case when the scientist is set up as an irritating nerd, and the hunch is supplied by the protagonist of the story.
Yeah, Charles, but then the scientist adjusts something at the back of her head and her hair falls down around her shoulders and she turns all hot, so it evens out.
I can’t believe all these comments from fanboys, and 7 of 9 was mentioned only once. Personally: Rawr! Am I the only one that went week in the knees whenever she said “Comply!”?
There was a press release recently about a physics class that used sci-fi and other hollywood films to teach physics. Great idea!!
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-08/uocf-ups081507.php
also: LOLStarTrek. Im in ur starship, verbing your nouns!
http://granades.com/2007/05/02/loltrek/
Like you can miss the times Daniel quotes things from the Bible, which as an archeologist he recognizes as being echos of the Ori preaching, to try to one up the Priors. Its far more hidden, less direct and very carefully tweaked to be **just** enough non-Christian to let the believers think, “Well, its just some crazy distortion of Christianity.”, while the people that question religion can see damn well that, if anything, Christianity must, by virtue of the time lines involved, actually be a distortion of the Ori religion. Sort of like Jesus being a male *beta* version of the female leader in the last seasons of the show. Alternatively, there may have been a clearly secular version prior to the fall of the Ancients, which the Ori distorted for their cause, and which we distorted as well, for ours, resulting in two poor copies of the original ideologies, but with Gods of one sort or another glued on. After all, the Goa’uld probably mucked up people’s heads with the “idea” of gods, which would logically lead to a distortion of any secular ideology into one with a new god, to replace the ones lost when the Goa’uld where driven off.
To me, the connection between Christianity and the Ori is blindingly clear, especially given how the show turns all assumptions about the origins of “any” such religions on their ears, by introducing alien alternatives to all of them.
As to Battlestar Galactica… Yeah, I want to kick fracking Baltar until my feet hurt for the idiot he is. He’s practically the poster child for the kind of fool the far right insist atheists all act like. And he only got worse when he started getting mixed into Cylon mysticism. Bloody fool doesn’t even have the courage to find a sane explanation for what he is now going through. As he falls more and more into religious thinking, his entire reason for doing so is the same as for doing everything else, cowardice, fear and/or personal greed. And maybe that is the point they are trying to make with him, but I just want to shoot him out an airlock. lol
AA:
Of course Star Trek was racist in comparison to today. I doubt it was even terribly unconscious of that. On the other hand, for late ’60’s US it was quite un-racist (and quite definitely conscious of that). I can’t think of any high ranking military officers who weren’t white anglophones in the late 60s – so two out of 10 is a hell of a lot better than that reality. On the other hand, the idea that centuries into the future, we would still have a white male (and even American) dominated future is racist.
Pretty much all the ST series are racist to some extent or other. We’ve never seen a starship with a Federation and gender diverse crew. What, does it cost too much to put funny ears or noses on most of the bridge crew? Picard is the only non-American, and of course he was backed by an American? Where are the Asians at the helm, etc…
You can go on and on. Our crap TV shows are pretty much the best reflection of our crap society. One of those universal truths.
oof, must they start with one of my biggest pet-peeves “that’s unrealistic!” quibbles?
that was a practical stunt. they really, actually, honestly, jumped a city bus over a gap in an overpass. it’s camera angle that disguises the ramp, and good cinematography that compensates for the fact that the ending point is lower than the starting point. how does everyone THINK they did it? voodoo?
and… really, superpowers break the laws of physics? i’d never have guessed. this one’s another classic:
actually, this one’s breaking just one law: the universal speed of light. there is an old (probably wrong) idea regarding relativity that if you could travel faster than the speed of light, you’d travel backwards in time. ok, well, maybe two laws. strictly speaking, you can’t change the past.
how would making the earth turn backwards turn back time, anyways? i don’t know why so many people think that’s what happened — maybe poor moviemaking, maybe lack of explanation.
that star trek episode in question had a somewhat reasonable-sounding explanation for the “rapid devolution” of the crew. some t-virus was triggering recessive genetic switches for primitive traits — same way you can make chickens grow feathers on their feet and teeth in their mouths. of course, that’s mucking about before an embryo develops, not in a fully-grown adult…
in any event, i always enjoyed reading phil’s “bad astronomy” movie reviews — if you can only find TWO faults with “the core” you should be required to take a remedial geology class.
I remember a friend of mine in law school bitching to me about Jane Austen. A big plot point in Pride and Prejudice involves an entailed will which limited who could inherit. My friend discovered that by the Regency period the courts were throwing out those entailments left, right and center. The book was never the same for him.
Credibility and consistency are nice, but I’ll go for a good story. The human brain is wired for narrative, even if it is flawed. Cutting edge physicists work with the Standard Model, which is known to be garbage, and some even use Newtonian mechanics now and then. They hold their noses and say “action at a distance” like Harry Potter says “accio pizza”. Give me Flash Gordon shoveling radium into the atomic furnace, some hot space princesses, and a rootin’ tootin’ yarn anyday.
“I’m never one to judge, and the world of human sexuality is a wide and varied one, but I refuse to believe anyone could snooze through Gina Torres doing anything, up to and including eating cereal and reading the paper.”
Which cliche was she?
She was the world-weary-but-unflappable, been-through-the-wars-together, unimpeachably-loyal-to-the-captain, occasional-voice-of-reason, happily-married-to-the-pilot cliche. Every show has one.
@TR (#107):
What do I care? You claimed they don’t have fantasy just science. I gave one example (there are many more) of them using fantasy just renamed. What about space zombies? Or pinnocio (although early Data is good).
re 137:
Hear hear. TOS certainly had its share of despicable science howlers (surprised no one has yet mentioned “The Enemy Within”, where the transporter has been induced to split transportees into “good” and “evil” versions just because some mineral-laden ooze got dripped on it) and never pushed its alleged humanist, multicultural values anywhere beyond slightly beyond the dilemmas of its day. (If anyone wants this thread derailed into oblivion, let’s play a favorite geek game of mine: since even the biggest fans of TOS can agree that at least a third of the three seasons’ worth of episodes seriously blow in some way, which third would you triage, to create a “producer’s cut”, strongest-possible two-season TOS?)
Anyway. TOS, at its best, was at least trying to suggest that things could be different than they were, and get us to think about some new things and/or think about old things in new ways–and for me growing up in southeastern Kentucky, in the fog of fundamentalism and worse, those TOS reruns five days a week after school on channel 18 were a great counterbalance to the looming possibility of complete stupidity and xenophobia.* Easy to say we need sterner medicine now, and I suppose we do, but in its time TOS was a good “gateway drug” that helped me to want to seek out better science and better politics and so forth.
–pr
*–As were, by the way, discussions of many of the criticisms of TOS we’re touching on here, that have been popping up in TOS fan material since the beginning–like David Gerrold’s The World of Star Trek back in the early 1970s. From that book, for example, I got a clear proto-feminist sense of how the sexual politics of TOS weren’t all they could/should have been, which was definitely one key push in shaping my worldview about such matters. Where else was I going to find something, at age 9, in southeastern Kentucky, that was going to get me to start thinking critically about such matters, even in a very nascent way? The fact that Gerrold was talking about TOS enabled him to make some other points that got through to me (and that flew under my family’s radar on the way).
“Where are the asians at the helm?”
Er…Captain Sulu?
Really? The closest thing I can think of is telepathy, which is a pretty well-defined Magic. Sure, the Minbari and the Narn have plenty of mystic woo-woo beliefs, but does the show ever claim that they’re right?
And yet the day is saved, and dramatic hay is made, from that treknobabble and that technology. So yes, in a very real sense, the writing was about those things.
So what? As long as the magic is well-defined and self-consistent (and hopefully not passed off as representing the real world; I’m looking at you, Heroes), why would anyone argue that everything had to be hard SF?
Magic gravity generators, off the top of my head. But since they never came in to save the day, I don’t think it bothered anyone but hardcore purists, and believe it or not, I don’t count myself among their number.
Yes, but it’s a poorly done setting, which is what I keep saying. And Trek was the reason that for literally decades, it was nearly impossible to get a new SF show going, and if you did, it never lasted past the third season (until Babylon 5, that is); the studios could just get hot and cold running Roddenberry, as Justin Rye put it, so why would they bother making anything new?
I think this is a bit telling. Trek‘s transgressions are more like showing tires being carved from squat cylindrical sections of rubber tree, and stuck onto the axles with magic gray bubble gum, which turns into lug nuts by the time the car leaves the plant.
Well, it was that or have everyone speaking Esperanto, which I think they floated in the original series somewhere. I consider them to be Babel Fish, made of pure narrativium. (Then you have the TNG episode “Darmok”, where the translator can handle the vocabulary, but not the syntax–I imagine that pisses linguists off to no end.)
Where did this idea come from that consistency is opposed to a good story? Devices and characters who are exactly as powerful as the plot requires (quick, is Xander wimpy enough to get knocked over by a single vamp, or can he solo a Turok-Han? why does the Enterprise have the mumbo-jumbo to beam through shields only when it’s not important?) are evidence of a fraying continuity, which doesn’t bode well for the viewer’s suspension of disbelief.
Yes, but some of us are slightly bitter that it was pretty much the only game in town for so many years. It’s not so much that it was bad–it wasn’t particularly bad, and had some great moments–but that it displaced any other long-running sci-fi for so long. Read some of JMS’s anecdotes about how hard it was to sell B5 because studios already had Trek.
On another note, I was quite surprised to see a non-evil scientist character–and he’s just a scientist, not an action hero with a scientist label like Indiana Jones–in Snakes on a Plane, of all places. I can’t, off the top of my head, think of another scientist in the movies who isn’t the Mad kind.
I cant believe no one mentioned the king of bad science, made for TV disaster movies. My two favorites being 10.5 and Category 6. 10.5 is the story of an earth quake that is making its way down the pacific coast. It takes out Seattle, Portland, San Francisco and is on its way to LA. The movies obvious solution to stop the earthquake is to use Nukes. While Cat 6 is the story of a cat 6 hurricane forming in Lake Michigan above Chicago. This is done by a tropical storm and cold front clashing together or something. I cant remember if they try nukes or not but i am sure they did as that is a staple for the genre.
According to my aged and yellowing TOS blueprints:
The bridge has a “service corridor” that completely circles the bridge. The access door is to the immediate left of the main viewscreen. Go through it, make a right. The next door (on the opposite side of the main viewscreen) is the bathroom. It has a toilet and a sink. And, I assume, a lock on the door.
Now that I dug these up, I wonder what they’re worth on E-Bay?
TR #107: “Remember- it is FICTION.”
Actually, all of the above are FANTASY and have little or nothing to do with science.
One must wonder how beneficial the promotion of misconception is, no matter how apparently “science-positive” such entertainment may be. (Actually, all of these productions are more accurately characterized as “technology-positive”, which reflects THAT popular confusion between science and technology in the public mind).
Producers could obviously vastly improve their science, but they don’t, primarily because: 1. They don’t really care as long as they rake in the bucks (dismissing arguments that improving the science would actually ENHANCE box office revenues) 2. They mistakenly believe that getting the science right would raise production costs, and 3. They snobbishly regard their audience as dumber when it comes to science than they are. They all follow the Hollywood mantra: “Its all about CHEATING the audience.” Most of them get that piece of shit advice in film school from “learned” professors and the rest who come to work in the industry absorb it just by being exposed to these.
Trust me, I know from bitter experience. PZ: “Note to film and TV producers: science grad students work for peanuts. Buy one.”
Oh yes, they buy them alright…for appearances sake, so they can claim their science is ok. (Its almost entirely a Public Relations/psychological crutch thing). But in the film/tv science fiction production world, they almost never CONSULT them after the advisor says one thing too many in criticism of some story concept. Don’t forget, these folks hire the consultants AFTER the stupid script has already been written. The writers and the producers don’t like to have their ideas trashed…and if a consultant is so bold as to provide alternative scenarios more consistent with a plausible science, they often react as if the consultant is attempting to muscle their way into being a co-writer. So they typically ignore them after a few initial consultintg sessions. I could tell you apalling stories.
Happens all the time, believe me.
Just get rid of “Bread and Circuses”. I never again want to see everyone on the bridge get dewy-eyed at the prospect of the Son of God coming to Planet Rome-with-TV. The idea of the episode is that this will lead to some new era of hitherto unknown peace and civility.
It’s a work of fiction, you literal minded jackasses! Ever heard of a little concept called “suspension of disbelief”, it’s pretty much required to enjoy any fictional work, be it sci-fi or contemporary drama.
Why are you willing to accept the realism of a guy named James T. Kirk who lives in the 24th century, but you will nitpick about inaccurate science? It’s not a documentary, you autistic goofballs.
Well, don’t just tease us, tell. Whatever you can write without incriminating yourself, please do.
Deacon:
grendelkhan says, “Well, don’t just tease us, tell. Whatever you can write without incriminating yourself, please do.”
Hmmm…I’ve been trying to think of ways, but it would be very difficult to do so without giving myself away AND giving you the worthwhile juicy bits. Sorry to disappoint, but I’ll have to pass on the request and offer an apology for the “tease”. ANOTHER problem with Hollywoodland is that it also represents one of the highest concentrations of lawyers on the planet, and they can be extremely ravenous. The money is so good, in fact, that lots of them become producers and/or write their own stories…which I suppose can explain a good deal of what that place has been belching forth, especially over the last several decades…
Duh #167 says, “It’s a work of fiction, you literal minded jackasses! Ever heard of a little concept called “suspension of disbelief”, it’s pretty much required to enjoy any fictional work, be it sci-fi or contemporary drama…It’s not a documentary, you autistic goofballs.”
Uh, DUH, Duh, most are aware of that. Some of us are just whining out our preference for GOOD fiction, as opposed to the crap fantasy the industry vomits forth, falsely marketing it as “Science Fiction” (BTW, in case you didn’t realize it, “SCI-FI” has nothing whatsoever to do with authentic SCIENCE FICTION).
You know, some of us ARE a little more serious than others may be about that attribute known as “quality”. We tend to expect it in our FICTION as well. Your complaint evidently reflects a fairly low standard of taste. But we don’t all swallow down corn-syrup swoggle they falsely advertise as fruit juice and pretend it tastes like fruit or is “close enough” not to matter. It DOES matter, it SHOULD matter, it ALWAYS matters to sufficiently discriminating tastes. (The “anti-snob” Snob contingent may cringe and wince at lines like that, but they can stick their hypocrisy up their whazoos sideways. Please).
Talk about a “literal-minded jackass.”
Ah, the divine Firefly! There is the episode in which Saffron first appears, where Jayne has to take down a spacejackers’ station with his Big Damn Gun. We are told the gun “needs oxygen around it” to function but they will have to fire it in vacuum. Hmmm? Of course, they pop the cannon into a spare spacesuit and blast away. But… after the first shot punctured the suit, how much oxygen was left?
What they heck: this was the episode in which Saffron first appeared. I wasn’t thinking physics, I was thinking biology.
So Hugo’s Les Miserables is about the legal system of mid 19th-century France, right? It provides most of the plot movement, so that’s what the book was about? No, the themes and exploration of the nature of good and evil made it as great a novel as it is. Not that Star Trek is on any level as great as Hugo’s masterpiece, it’s proffered as an example of how setting is almost incidental to the thematic concerns of a story.
Again, the writing was never about the science. It was about the messages it transmitted. Stop being so damn bitter.
And there are great efforts that were undertaken by the Star Trek writers to be self-consistent. The difference between this and any of the other series was that Star Trek ran for much longer.
Whosajiggawhat? You’re seriously blaming Star Trek for the lack of SF shows on TV? You don’t think minimal viewership for SF series had anything to do with it? Or lack of audience interest in science fiction? If a powerhouse of a TV show will stifle competition, why are there so many CSIs, Law & Orders, game shows, talent contests and reality shows on TV? A powerhouse franchise in the entertainment industry will only encourage competition, not stifle it.
I think that’s pretty unfair, and it seems to be coming from someone incredibly bitter at the (until recently) success of Star Trek while their favorite shows met the ax.
oh, i forgot my favourite:
ONE POINT TWENTY-ONE JIGGAWATTS?!?
apparently, it was actually spelled “jigga” in the script. we might have missed it back in the 80’s, but now we’re all accustomed to using units in the giga’s, like gigabytes.
“
Well, as you indicated, it was a plot device. Would you have preferred a Babel fish?
I’d complain if they had a robot cowboy angel who knew the true meaning of Christmas ride in on cue to move the plot forward, but they didn’t.
You’ve got to be kidding. Continuity in TOS is so bad that a significant number of fans consider each episode to take place in an alternate universe–not that that’s a bad thing in and of itself, but it certainly contradicts your statement. Later continuity has become a confusing mishmosh so tangled that it makes later seasons of The X-Files look straightforward, what with (off the top of my head) the distributed Borg growing a single point of failure, shields which can or can’t be beamed through depending on the requirements of the plot, and world-changing inventions which are discovered and then discarded–and this doesn’t even mention the incredible vagueness of just what kind of society the UFP is–a pastiche of the UN? of the present-day US? a military autocracy wearing democratic lipstick?
To a certain extent, yes. Of course the problem was enabled by mouth-breating TV execs, but it centered around Star Trek.
The facts on the ground contradict you in this case. Again, I refer you to JMS’s notes. (JMS professes to be a Trek fan, I might add.)
Babylon 5 didn’t get the axe. JMS had a hard time getting out from under Trek‘s shadow, but I don’t see why that would make me bitter. As I said, it makes me cranky that it’s so poorly done, when it could be done much better without necessarily throwing out all the humanism you’re so keen on, and that it inspires such rabid defenses from fans who can’t stand to have their beloved franchise criticized.
“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”
Although this happens repeatedly, there are no seatbelts or harnesses for the crew, and they never think to install any after a battle. That’s not bad science, it’s worse – bad engineering.
The thing I wish we could transfer to our time from Voyager is the marvelous power of moisture. Every time they turned around they were putting a dampening field on something.
TNG did have a “science advisor”, at least for a while. And no, no one paid him any attention. Here’s his (rather amusing) story:
http://www.davekrieger.net/Waves/
If anything, he deserves a medal for preventing the “Nanites take over the ship” episode from being even stupider than it ended up being. I still hate that episode, due to the way the nanotech concept infected ST and other sci-fi projects from that point on.
I’ve always wondered about how suspension of disbelief works. I think it must have something to do with how sort of “seamlessly” the items in question play. I mean, there’s a ghost in Hamlet. Why is that okay, and TNG’s “Sub Rosa” dreck, even according to Trek fans? I don’t know … I think sometimes it is when the weird stuff overwhelms the other factors in the story, but that’s vaguely stated.
Another common error, though brought to me by TMQ, is still pretty valid. Namely, why do enemy ships randomly run into each other? The galaxy is huge! There’s absolutely no way you could just run into someone in the middle of space.
Cain @82:
While space is HUGE, any space fairing civilization would establish common trade routes between known planets, which most ships would stick to, so that in case of an emergency, someone would hear their distress call before the heat death of the universe.
Now, why the Enterprise is always picking them up when they’re out cruising the frontier of charted territory is another question.
Easy Keith. Have a chat to any religionist sometime.