Star Trek (spoilers are likely)

[masako]

It's mostly the bouts of bad acting and bad writing I object to.

So I just finished watching S3 of Discovery...and this sentiment was in the forefront of my mind for most of it.

Each series has had bad episodes, storylines, and acting, but DIS seems to be rife with all of that. I honestly feel quite cynical about the whole thing, almost like the series was rushed and hobbled together to help launch the CBS/Paramount streaming service.

Michael Burnham is a joke of a lead character. Not because she's female, or black...but because many if not most of her actions seem contrary to what everyone else is working for. She seems less "Federation/Starfleet" than the Romulan refugees in Picard.

I am seemingly among many who agree. The ratings show that 3 cancelled shows have done better than Discovery. Tis not a good sign.

[Ares Land]

I'm reviving this thread because I'm rewatching TOS (I was looking for something definitely not grimdark, for a change.)

My expectations were pretty low, but I'm very surprised at how good it still is.

It's dated of course -- the special effects, though frankly the 2007 CGI aged a lot worse than the original sets, even the perennial reddish stone quarry: the sounds effect too; they should do something about these doors, put some WD-40 on the hinges or something -- You also kind of have to get used to 60's TV conventions (like, anything remotely suspenseful will be accompanied by a dramatic dun-dun-dun.)
On a linguistic note, interestingly, 1960s American English already sounds different from what I'm used to!

Other than that, it's honestly very well-written and the actors were pretty good. I did like the occasional touch of humor here and there (the running gag of Uhura hitting on a nonplussed Spock; Kirk forced into acting as a father figure to a troubled teenage...)

[zompist]

It's dated of course -- the special effects, though frankly the 2007 CGI aged a lot worse than the original sets

This makes me think about TOS set design. I haven't seen the show in decades, but I spent some pleasant time Googling images, and my reactions were:

1. The bridge design holds up well. It looks too simple-- but that was after all the essence of 1960s design. It's a design philosophy-- hide all the messy details-- that meshed perfectly with the actual production constraints. The TNG bridge strikes me as a big step backwards (too much emphasis on overstuffed chairs, while the back wall actually has no chairs at all).

2. The design of the ship itself is gloriously stupid. It doesn't look like anything in previous SF, and honestly it looks completely absurd as a military vessel. (What are the struts holding the engine nacelles made of??) Yet it's also iconic and weirdly beautiful. (Of course we have no idea what a spaceship built in 2245 will look like.) If you had told the original design "make it something that will epitomize our brand for 70 years", it would have seemed impossible, but that's what they did.

[Ares Land]

It's dated of course -- the special effects, though frankly the 2007 CGI aged a lot worse than the original sets

This makes me think about TOS set design. I haven't seen the show in decades, but I spent some pleasant time Googling images, and my reactions were:

1. The bridge design holds up well. It looks too simple-- but that was after all the essence of 1960s design. It's a design philosophy-- hide all the messy details-- that meshed perfectly with the actual production constraints. The TNG bridge strikes me as a big step backwards (too much emphasis on overstuffed chairs, while the back wall actually has no chairs at all).

2. The design of the ship itself is gloriously stupid. It doesn't look like anything in previous SF, and honestly it looks completely absurd as a military vessel. (What are the struts holding the engine nacelles made of??) Yet it's also iconic and weirdly beautiful. (Of course we have no idea what a spaceship built in 2245 will look like.) If you had told the original design "make it something that will epitomize our brand for 70 years", it would have seemed impossible, but that's what they did.

1. I like the bridge design too; from an ergonomics POV, it looks like something that'd actually work. Bridges and control rooms in SF tend to be too dark and cramped -- something that would make sense in a submarine, not so much in a spaceship. The TOS Bridge is a nice exception.

2. Bits of it really make sense in a weird kind of way. Having the engines far away from the saucer section makes a lot of sense. I never really good figure out what the bit the nacelles are attached to is for, that said. (Is that an engine? A giant flashlight?) You also get a sense the design is somehow modular -- as a spaceship would be.
What makes the design stand out from others is that it looks nothing like a brutalist building, a (navy) ship or a plane.
One thing I like is that it doesn't look like it has any windows (or if it has, they're purely decorative). That's probably because of production constraints, but still.

[masako]

https://youtu.be/1jSTMkXqz8o

Mr. Joe Jennings explains the production design philosophy of TOS

[Raphael]

Bridges and control rooms in SF tend to be too dark and cramped -- something that would make sense in a submarine, not so much in a spaceship.

That depends on what the design limitations of any given SF scenario are. I you try to limit the amount of mass you have to move...

[Ares Land]

There's indeed a rationale for cramped control rooms. (Though current designs seem to go for lightweight materials and slightly less cramped space. The ISS actually feels relatively roomy!)

[masako]

As Zomp points out "we have no idea what a spaceship built in 2245 will look like", and I would say that we can barely assert what spacecraft will look like even 50 years from now.

It's kinda silly to measure a show from nearly 60 years ago by either our aesthetics, or even ergonomics. What we can do, by contrast, is assess the show's entertainment value. TOS was well written and had a mostly coherent vision. The modern versions of Trek, are less coherent and seem to be very much just playing to the audience for nostalgia.

[Ares Land]

As Zomp points out "we have no idea what a spaceship built in 2245 will look like", and I would say that we can barely assert what spacecraft will look like even 50 years from now.

Of course! But it's fun to give it a try.

It's kinda silly to measure a show from nearly 60 years ago by either our aesthetics, or even ergonomics. What we can do, by contrast, is assess the show's entertainment value. TOS was well written and had a mostly coherent vision. The modern versions of Trek, are less coherent and seem to be very much just playing to the audience for nostalgia.

On the contrary! The ergonomics, for instance, are relevant to the entertainment value. As zompist and I mentioned, the bridge is done very well... you definitely get a very good idea, from the set design, of who these people are and what exactly they're doing. It's a great way to handle exposition. No one has to actually spell out what Sulu or Uhura's job is -- the information is made clear by other means.
(Granted, we all know who Spock, Sulu and Uhura are through pop culture osmosis, but still.)

The aesthetics are interesting too... you learn quite a few things that way. For instance, that poor CGI ages a lot worse than 60's models. (In the remastered version, external views of the Enterprise are either the original shots, or a '07 CGI version... The CGI really stands out, in a bad way.)
It's nice to get a new look at our assumptions. ST goes for plenty of light, colourful uniforms and unfamiliar fashion. An SF show produced today would likely go for a dark and gritty ship interior, and pseudo-military uniforms.


Continuing my TOS viewing... another thing that's mostly left out in more recent SF shows is that many episodes involve solving some kind of scientific mystery. On the minus side, of course the mystery is couched in technobabble and generally makes little sense... On the plus side, the actual reasoning is sometimes, eh, not bad. (At one point Spock makes the point that the tricorders are designed to measure what their designers felt relevant... which means unknown phenomena might very well be ignored. As an engineer, I found that remark pretty satisfying.)

[Mornche Geddick]

I don't like the human-alien cross-breeding stuff for the same reason Justin B Rye doesn't - it's biologically impossible, obviously, blatantly, in-your-face impossible. But I've thought of a workaround.

Let Spock be a full Vulcan, but let Amanda have been orphaned as a baby and brought up by humans. Spock would imbibe human values indirectly from Amanda, and that would set up any number of character conflicts for him that the writers wanted.

[Moose-tache]

Little known fact: there are not many natural human-alien hybrids in Star Trek. In TNG they dropped a couple easter eggs about the medical assistence needed to knit human and alien DNA. With a few exceptions, most of the hybrids on Star Trek can be canonincally assumed to be the product of scientific fertility assistence.

Plus, they're descended from the unnamed ancient humanoids anyway.

[zompist]

Plus, they're descended from the unnamed ancient humanoids anyway.

That idea drives me up the wall. Larry Niven trotted that one out too, and he's supposed to be a hard science guy.

But eh, the "science" in science fiction is basically physics only, and Newtonian at that, if not Aristotelian. (I wonder if there's a Star Trek episode where, if the engines stop, the ship grinds to a halt.)

[Ares Land]

(I wonder if there's a Star Trek episode where, if the engines stop, the ship grinds to a halt.)

Keeping up with my TOS marathon, there's a strange plot point that keeps coming up: it certainly seems like the Enterprise keeps the engine running to maintain orbit; in any case, if there's anything wrong with the ship, the orbit decays quickly.

In defense of Trek, the engines are treated sensibly: we're never told how they work.
The science is almost entirely fantasy, but there are quite a few neat points being made: the horribly dangerous monster always has a motive, such as protecting its young; sensors can't pick up stuff they haven't been designed to detect; interstellar war is stupid.

Weird bits: the Enterprise crew always ends up on a planet where the local fauna/flora will brainwash you into being happy. Seriously, this seems to be the plot of one episode out of two.
Also, the Enterprise is a research vessel - so the opening monologue says. Yet it's ostensibly an heavily armored battlecruiser, equipped with planet-destroying WMDs. Also, the Entreprise's crew are pacifists (save for the occasional unenlightened redshirt) yet they're never found without a fully loaded gun at hand.

Let Spock be a full Vulcan, but let Amanda have been orphaned as a baby and brought up by humans. Spock would imbibe human values indirectly from Amanda, and that would set up any number of character conflicts for him that the writers wanted.

That makes sense. Though, honestly, I don't really see the point of Spock being half-human anyway. Frankly he would still make sense as a character if he was fully alien.

(Production costs being what they are, I'm willing to let the strangely humanlike aliens slide...)

[zompist]

(I wonder if there's a Star Trek episode where, if the engines stop, the ship grinds to a halt.)

Keeping up with my TOS marathon, there's a strange plot point that keeps coming up: it certainly seems like the Enterprise keeps the engine running to maintain orbit; in any case, if there's anything wrong with the ship, the orbit decays quickly.

Ha, it is Aristotelian!

If anyone's physics are rusty-- Aristotle thought that for an object to maintain a motion, it must expend energy. This seems to be true in everyday life (cars, bodies, things rolling along friction-laden surfaces). Newton taught instead that without an external force, an object remains on its current trajectory forever. (Due to gravity, this might be an orbit.)

[Moose-tache]

Orbits do decay, but it usually takes weeks (or years for objects in orbit around the sun). If I were to play the game of ad-hoc workarounds... Trek does have artificial gravity and levitating objects, so maybe when they say they're "orbiting" a planet, it means they're simply "above" it, and once the power goes out on the forcefield generator, they will plummet to the surface.

I know that there is an in-universe explanation for the "stars" wizzing past the windows, but like all the other incongruities it was made up after the fact.

[Richard W]

Warp engines may explain quite a bit. They need enormous amounts of power (whence the anti-matter batteries). I get the impression that the warping of space would rapidly be dissipated, so maybe they need a tremendous amount of power just to keep going. Of course, as they are travelling through a galaxy, rather than proper space, powerful shields are needed to protect them from the interstellar medium. Finally, with all that power, they might as well have those weapons, just in case. They certainly seem to need them!

[Raphael]

It's a bit weird that I watched and re-watched TNG era Star Trek for decades and never once thought about how creepy a computer system listening to everything you say in your room would be in real life until Amazon started selling Alexa.

[masako]

It's a bit weird that I watched and re-watched TNG era Star Trek for decades and never once thought about how creepy a computer system listening to everything you say in your room would be in real life until Amazon started selling Alexa.

Watch again...the characters say "Computer!" and there is a notification sound that the computer waits for their follow-on instruction. This suggests that the computer is not actively listening until called to do so.

[sangi39]

It's a bit weird that I watched and re-watched TNG era Star Trek for decades and never once thought about how creepy a computer system listening to everything you say in your room would be in real life until Amazon started selling Alexa.

Watch again...the characters say "Computer!" and there is a notification sound that the computer waits for their follow-on instruction. This suggests that the computer is not actively listening until called to do so.

This seems to have been the case for most interactions with the ship's computer in TNG, at least (having a binge of it again at the moment too). There are a couple of example where "computer!" isn't the first spoken word, like when Geordie asks "how about some different music, computer?" which, I assume, would suggest that the computer is passively listening, but only responds when directly addressed (taking into account recently spoken words)

Newer Trek series are.... weird...

On the one hand, the computer now seems to respond to crew without needing a direct response, which could be a) the writers wanting to show that computers then are more advanced than the Alexa-style voice-command systems we have around us today, b) could just be the writers not wanting to write "computer!" into the script several times an episode

On the other hand, the computer also seems to be used a lot less, I think? From what I can remember of TOS (I don't watch it much, to be fair), there was a "library computer" on the ship, which crew could speak to to access files, but the general computer was very hands-on, literally, needing to type and read. So computers in, say, ST:SNW, seem to be keeping in line with the "touch and read" style computer of TOS, while also being much more sophisticated "responds when appropriate" (there are moments where it really looks like the writers are doing that to move the plot, rather than to be a mechanic, so it feels somewhat inconsistent, which, eh... it happens)

I don't mind, to be fair. Star Trek has been running for almost 60 years, and the technology on-screen has had to adapt to that, especially in the case of prequel series, where it has to be familiar, but more fantastical


But, yeah, TNG, the computer was very Alexa. The dataPADDs were very much like a Kindle or an iPad. I suspect that's, in part, a direct response to Star Trek (they depicted a future, so tech people now are borrowing the mechanics and aesthetics, because that's what they perceive as being futuristic). No doubt some tech people now will be looking to create a call-and-response computer system that doesn't rely on a direct call (which will be damn terrifying because it's the whole "I wish that person would go away" when a genie is around and listening scenario. Did you really mean "wish", or does the genie just interpret it that way regardless?)

[Travis B.]

But, yeah, TNG, the computer was very Alexa. The dataPADDs were very much like a Kindle or an iPad. I suspect that's, in part, a direct response to Star Trek (they depicted a future, so tech people now are borrowing the mechanics and aesthetics, because that's what they perceive as being futuristic). No doubt some tech people now will be looking to create a call-and-response computer system that doesn't rely on a direct call (which will be damn terrifying because it's the whole "I wish that person would go away" when a genie is around and listening scenario. Did you really mean "wish", or does the genie just interpret it that way regardless?)

Star Trek reminds me of how the future that we expected to happen didn't happen, but the future we didn't expect to happen any time soon happened soon enough that people who watched TOS would still be alive to experience it firsthand. We are barely closer to being a spacefaring civilization than when TOS was made, even though a lot of science fiction-genre stuff is set at dates that would be within the lifetimes of people alive today, but no one expected how computers, the Internet, smartphones, and like would just take off in an overwhelming fashion, affecting the entire planet, within a matter of decades.