March 1, 28 J.E.
Star Trek never really sat well with me. The first series was okay, I guess, because it was more of a Twilight Zone in space, but it still had its rather Earth-shaking flaws. A great example is that almost every alien race looks almost the same a regular person (except painted blue sometimes). Furthermore, and even more ghastly, is the fact that they all seem to have no problem procreating with each other. We can't even reproduce with our closest terrestrial relatives, let alone a race spawned half-way across the damn galaxy with different colored blood and radically different body chemistry! BUT, it was the 60's, and some people still didn't believe that blacks and whites could have viable children, so I guess that's OK. After all, they were making a point with the show half the time.
Then came Star Trek: the Next Generation. In spite of the millions of fans, STNG is a very, very lame show. They continue with the ludicrously easy cross-breeding of identical looking alien races, everybody speaks English, and every problem can be solved by recalibrating the harmonics of the dilythium thingamajig. They have CHILDREN on military vessels, a holo-deck which has endangered the ship more often than the Klingons, and an entity of unknown origin holding an officer's rank! Deep Space 9 and Start Trek: Voyager came next, and they were both equally lame in the same ways, although DS9 was a bit more sophisticated from what I've gathered.
But what REALLY bugs me about all of the Start Treks is the grade school grasp of physics, astronomy, and reality that the writers apparently have. I'm not a physicist or an astronomer, and I see tons of things that make me shake my head in disgust. A true professional in those fields would probably go insane.
An example: The last episode of TNG I saw (the first in a long, long time) centered around Counselor Deanna Troi (who was half human and half Betazoid, another human-like, genetically compatible, completely alien species). She got impregnated by some glowing ball of energy. Meanwhile, the crew is transporting some plague germs in special super containment units. So Troi gets knocked up by this energy entity, and it grows so quickly that she finishes the term in about a day. She gives birth to a boy, who ages to about 12 in just a couple of days. Meanwhile, the plague germs start reproducing and threaten to break out of containment because of some weird radiation on the ship. The crew is hurting for a solution, because if they just eject it, another ship could crash into it. The alien in the kid, though, realizes that IT is causing the germs to reproduce, and so it leaves. That episode was so lame on so many levels, it's hard to know where to start.
First, I don't know how the hell a chick could survive going full term with a kid in 24 hours. I'm foreseeing the abdominal skin tearing and guts splattering all over the wall. Second, there's no way she could have given birth to a boy, since she has no Y chromosome! Third, they all marvel at how fast the kid is growing, yet his clothes always fit him perfectly, and he's not eating non-stop. Where is all that extra mass coming from?
"But that's alien stuff!" shouts the freak with the Vulcan ears. "Aliens can be capable of anything!"
Fine. Well what about the germs? They were afraid of someone hitting a three cubic-foot container in the vastness of space? Come ON! You'd see a baseball team finish its season with a perfect record before you'd hit that stupid thing! And hell, why not shoot it into a sun? Or vaporize it with you phasers? Retards. Talk about twisting reality to fit a plot, and a weak one at that.
This is, of course, far from an isolated occurrence. Start Trek episodes are rife with blatant disregard for even the most elementary physics. I remember an episode where the heroic Star Trek people shot out the engines of an enemy vessel. "They're decelerating!" one of them exclaimed proudly. You're in SPACE, morons! You don't decelerate in space!
There are SO many others. Voyager was the worst, speaking from the point of view from an infrequent viewer. Some of their plot seeds must have sprung directly from the minds of lunatics. Of course, ALL of the Star Treks engage in time travel as easily as people go to the bathroom, with all of the idiotic "changing the past" bullshit that goes along with it. If time travel was so Goddamn easy, why not go back in time and nuke the Klingons while they're still in the stone age? Or save Lincoln? Or watch that good TV show you missed because you were wasting your time watching Star Trek?
Well, whatever. Thank God for Babylon 5.