What do you think are some of the worst examples of Treknobabble in the franchise?
And what series do you think does it poorly the most often?
I think Discovery had the worst. It isn’t the technobabbke it self that was the problem, it was how it was delivered.
Everyone seemed to be needed to be the most intelligent person in the room. So one person would start with some sudden realisation and solution, and then another would interrupt them and pick up the idea and then either back to the first person, or yet another person would interrupt. Between then all they’d build a tower of technobabble and deus ex machina, and self congratulatory nonsense. It was just so silly.
Person 1 “wait if we reveresed the polarity of the neutron projector…”
Person 2 “yes! It’d cause a build of tachyons and we’d be able to resonate the electron confabulaotr! Oh but there wouldn’t be enough plasma.”
Person 3: “no wait, that might work! We’d have to recomboulate the manifolds and…”
Person 1: "…that would allow us to recrystallise the warp matrix! Of course!’
Whose a genius? Everyone in the room is a genius! Let’s all give ourselves a round of applause.
That and all the space kung fu.
Disconnected nacelles and programmable matter were complete turn offs for me.
OP asked for examples and the comment in question (along with your reply) gives the appearance that you’re both just making up nonexistent situations in order to complain about a TV show.
reversing polarity is the solution to all of your woes.
When switching from flux core wire to regular wire with shielding gas on my welder it calls to reverse the polarity of the electricity to the welding gun. You have to open it up and swap two wires around. It always cracks me up inside when I’m telling people I had to reverse the polarity of the welder to get a better weld.
A few months ago I bought some old (quite good) speakers. My first step, of course, was to use a calibrated mic to measure them. One measured way better than the other. Took them apart and realized at some point someone had connected wires incorrectly on one of the tweeters causing it to be out of phase. Do you know what this means?
I REVERSED THE POLARITY AND FIXED MY AUDIO PROBLEM. That day I became a Starfleet Engineer.
JJ-Trek, hands down. From “red matter” to interstellar transporter beams to Khan’s magic blood.
The reason it’s so bad is that it’s fucking plot holes galore. By the end of Star Trek (2009), starships are obsolete. By the end of Into Darkness, everyone should be immortal.
Treknobabble is supposed to serve the plot, but this shit undermines the entire premise instead. It’s ridiculous!
Meh, Trek is always terrible at following up after the big movie action. Aging is reversible if Insurrection is canon. Literal resurrection has been possible since at least Khan. Time travel is routine in Voyage Home. None of it makes sense outside of the context of the movie, they’re basically their own canon even before JJ.
“I can’t stop the heterocyclic declination!” (TNG: “Samaritan Snare”)
I’ll try extrapolating the verteron exovector (or something like that)
Harry Kim Voyager S1E1
Thanks, that sent me Googling. “KIM: I’ll try extrapolating the verteron exit vector. No, I can’t get it. There’s a strange phase variance in the radiation stream. We’ll have to wait until the probe exits.” Episode 6 (another wormhole?!) http://www.chakoteya.net/Voyager/106.htm
I’m going through Voyager now and I feel like they do this nonsense more than any of the other Treks thus far.
The thing is that while the technobabble is just that, the process represents how engineering gets done better than most other ‘serious’ SF, albeit at compressed speed.
Voyager did a better job than any at showing how the thinking and problem-solving work gets done - which to me is more the point.
All this criticism seems to come from folks who’ve never seen nerds working in teams being nerds. They seem to want science FICTION to be locked down to concepts that someone with a mid 20th bachelor’s degree in science would know.
Whereas the real life scientists and engineers in my circle react more like Erin Macdonald did when she was working on her physics PhD and saw Voyager. She recognized the process and thought it was cool that some of the newer concepts in gravimetrics were referenced but didn’t sweat the small stuff.
