Well, as great as it was, there was more than one, to be sure. However, one of the biggest ones is that the premise of the show was totally nullified by the show's format. Episodic television, with a reset button at the end of every episode, so you could pick up a show here or there and know the premise at the start of each of them. However, TNG, Voyager and Enterprise (and to a lesser extent TOS) were all predicated on exploration. What did they find that ever changed anything? Space tourism is a better description. Just look at the context of what they did find in all of those episodes - new ideas, new cultures, new science, hell even near divine beings (like Q, the Metrons, the Organians, the Greek Gods) - and none of it ever affected the composition or social structure of the Federation. Can you imagine the social fallout of meeting Q? A being who will not omniscient was darn near omnipotent! Or the Borg? You telling me the Federation wouldn't go serious right wing hawk mode knowing those guys might be coming by any time? Hell, almost the entire starfleet is capable of time travel. And look at Insurrection - the Federation was on the verge of wiping out disease, and Picard stopped it because of his personal morality. That didn't even have individual consequences for Picard - certainly some pissed off mother that's son died when he didn't have to would have dropped a bucket of blood on Picard's shiny dome at some point. Fun adventure stories, and a few classics. But the very premise of the show was made impotent by its format. Any other culture changing stories you can think of?
Well, the problems you bitch about caused by episodic television can't really be addressed by episodic television. Hell, just for one random example, the cellular casting on the Shore Leave Planet would be able to repair all injury. Think of how that would transform the Federation. Foremost being, no life jeopardy for away teams short of phaser vaporization. Doesn't take much more thinking to realize the various tech advances would suck all the drama out of the show pretty quick. Hell, we got a taste of that later down the line with Seven's magic nanoprobes. Yeah, even with a quality show like Trek, you have to come to terms with the "repeat to yourself 'it's just a show, I should really just relax'", barrier. Fiction has it's limits, you haven't really discovered anything new.
Transporters. Got a paper cut? Cycle yourself through the transporter and you can heal it. Everyone lives forever. End episode. End concept. Roll credits.
Ensign Whatever died this week? No problem. Use the transporter and make a new copy of him from the last time he used it. McCoy: "He's dead, Jim." Kirk: "Shit, that's the third time. Well, have Scotty beam down another copy. When he gets here, tell him to be more careful this time..."
I will admit, even though its an integral part of trek, the transporter is the least believable piece of technology in the whole trekverse. I think transporter tech would make warp drive look like child's play.
I always wondered if the transporter could work as a Fountain of Youth? Or would it also erase later memories? For the matter of that, I should think that if it DIDN'T take your memory "rngrams" or whatever, then you could use the thing to reassemble your atoms in whatever form you had a pattern for. ?
Replicators ruined Voyager I think replicators were the worst piece of tech ever invented, when it comes to drama anyway. Voyager, 70 years from home, but we have replicators, so no worrying about food, parts, whatever. The got the shit shot out of them one week, next week, the paint matched again. The show's premise was a good one, but thanks to replicators, no drama, no sense of we're fucked. Transporters I can excuse, they were only there to show them getting from place to place quickly, without having to go through shuttlecraft crap. they only had 40 min to tell a story. Also, a shuttlecraft in the backround constantly would have been lame
The problem with the transporter was the way it was written in the series. When they explained it as a "matter transporter", something that took people and objects apart at the subatomic level, transmitted them across great distances, and then reassembed them.......it was inevitable that the transporter would basically become a god device. That is something that you could count on to do just about anything. If the entire Trek franchise is one day rebooted, I would make the transporter simply a kind of personal warp field projector. Able to send people through subspace to another location (like a stargate or the transport rings on the show Stargate SG-1). But only for short distances. Say a maximum of one tenth of a light second (30,000 kilometers).
Replicators were just another example of lazy writing. If you had written replicators as they should have been, that they took enormous amounts of energy to use...thus would have to be used sparingly or not at all, then Voyager becomes much more believable. But part of why Voyager was "shiny and new" every week was pure Brannon Braga. In an interview, Braga actually said that if you saw the ship and crew slowingly breaking down and wearing out over the years that the show would become "too depressing". So he and Berman basically agreed that Voyager would be "The Next Generation in the Delta Quadrant".
I cannot post in this thread (beyond this statement). Anything I would say would needlessly raise my blood pressure and accomplish little else.
Well, given how not only didn't they happen to use it for atom manipulation in TOS, but didn't use it when it really would have been handy to do so, and other solutions made no sense in the face of knowledge of it being an atom manipulator, I tend to think the transporter as depicted in TOS could have just as easily been a warp gate, or some kind of full-body quantum jumper. Of course, it was used as an atom manipulator from TAS onward, and the cat was out of the bag. Aaanyhoo, in general response to both your transporter/replicator rants, while on the one hand, I agree atom smashers for food and liesure in a situation where you're trying to conserve power is ludacrous, there's just no escaping that a humanity that's risen to the stars 300 years hence will have mastered atom engineering, and indeed, particle engineering. So, if not replicators, it'd be some other form of nano-construction and nano-medicine. Yeah, yeah, I know, story wise, they could get exposed to frinkifrat particles that waste their nanites in the same way one would want their replicators broken, but, there's as many ways to bring 'em back, and Braga would've used 'em, cuz he loves magic tech. It ain't the tech, it's the writers.
I forgot about that. Apparently old runabouts have more memory than all of DS9. I guess that's tech inconsistency #2779.
Pattern buffers. They store the pattern as a constantly re-scanned particle stream in a cyclotron, and not direct computer memory. It took that huge amount of data in that DS9 episode for the computer to substitute as pattern buffers. That's the Okuda tech explanation. But I've found ways around even that.
Pretty much. TOS doesn't even try to say how they worked, so Okuda thought it out to death, and retconned his explanation into all of Trek via TNG backhistory and ENT. But, even his explanation doesn't explain how pattern buffers and quantum resolution scanners work, So, all you have to do is jump in where he left off, make up frinkifratters that are inside the pattern buffers and scanners, and bam.
You're assuming facts not in evidence and in one case ignoring those that are. Among all the Trek series thus far, we've seen almost nothing of what goes on with the civilians. I can only think of about four or five episodes that tells us anything about the non-Starfleet civilian population in any detail: the DS9 two-parter where Earth was going crazy over the Changeling threat, the DS9 one with Vanessa Williams, Enterprise's "Home," and TNG's "Family" (although that was mostly about Picard's bro rather than the civilian population as a whole.) So we can't really say whether what they found changed anything or not in Federation culture, because we have insufficient info about Federation culture. For all we know, there may be millions of Continuumists in Picard's time, or Organian worshippers, or whatever. For all we know, specific information discovered about androids in TOS helped Soong in creating Data and Lore, or Zimmerman do his work with holograms. The institution of the Warp 5 speed limit might have had a huge impact on how goods and services got from one place to another. I bet someone could spin profound changes to Federation culture on the whole from almost any given episode. In terms of going right-wing hawk mode because of the Borg et al, the DS9 episode with Vanessa Williams (I think it was "Let He Who Is Without Sin..." or some such) addressed that straight-away. There was a faction that thought the Federation was too soft and cited Risa as a prime example of the harm the Dominion and the Borg could cause. They even enlisted Worf to sign up as they committed terrorist acts to prove their point.
You assuming that there may be huge influences on Federation culture based on your supposition there might 'for all we know be millions of Continuumists.' And you start your comments with I'm assuming facts not in evidence? How absurd. We see dozens if not hundreds of examples of Federation culture throughout the over a six hundred episodes and 11 movies. There are all the same athiestic monoculture - about the only counter-culture group I can think of are the hippies in the TOS Eden episode. We see Sisko's dad at length and of course tons on Jake, we see Lwaxana, Picard's brother, Data's creator, we see Trill, we see Worf's adopted family, Ezri's mining family, O'Brien's wife and child, Geordi's fascination with Leah Brahms, Mayweather's spacer family, Kim's girlfriend, Risa, Andor, Vulcan, etc ad nauseum. And perhaps a dozen different colonies, from the one Sam Kirk died on to the terraformers on TNG. If there are large influences on Federation culture that come from anything outside their own membership, there's almost no evidence of it. About the only example we do see is one throw away episode on Risa. You are correct on that one point. Other than that, all that time exploring strange new worlds seems to not affect the basic life of anyone in the Federation at all. Considering we have onscreen time of about 200 years, it wouldn't be too difficult to suppose that their should be more evidence. Perhaps you could count the Maquis as an anti-federation influence. Actually the best show that dealt with that was Enterprise. The isolationists in the last episode were one of the few examples. But then again, all that does is reinforce the principles of the Federation - the isolationists are without a doubt the bad guys. The Federation does affect other cultures though, often in huge ways. Enterprise had humans saving Vulcan from themselves by the reintroduction of Surak's teachings, DS9 had the Federation affecting both the Ferengi and the Cardassians, TNG and later Voyager had a theme of introducing individuality to the Borg.
Realistically, with the development of holograms, that's it for Starfleet. Holographic ships with the ability to create holographic crew and away teams, and never a human (or a ship) being destroyed again, ever. Much of Trek's tech was self-defeating in terms of story. Take replicators. I'd have designed a shipwide replicator system that would repair damage as soon as it was inflicted. Maybe backed up by nanos. But yeah, when you have a lot of whiz-bang technology, it's hard to keep up the drama.
Well, even assuming your premise is valid, we didn't get to the self-aware hologram stage really until Voyager. You had Moriarity, who was locked away and never had the key, then nothing until the EMH - who was relegated to trash scrubbing duties IIRC. Really all holograms are is a form of potentially sentient AIs. And no, I don't think we were any where near the Federation members giving up space travel in order to let the holograms take over. That might have been a more interesting arc than the redo we got of Data's rights parroted through the Doctor in Voyager. But it isn't just the tech - cultures interact and mesh too. It was just assumed that Federation culture was innately superior and assimilated everyone else.
Can you prove that there are not millions of Continuumists? All I am saying is that we have only seen a sliver of non-Starfleet people in all the series. Add every Federation citizen that's been on screen in the various series and movies, and you're talking about incredibly generously 500,000 characters with speaking roles out of a Federation population that has to be in the billions or trillions. Can you really extrapolate from those 500,000 characters what the culture is like for the billions or trillions we don't see? Especially when most of the people we do see are a) in Starfleet and b) we see them only in a moment of crisis and in a limited context? We can't really say what Federation culture is like apart from a few general points, and even some of them contradict each other. The abolition of money talked about by Picard seems to contradict the many references to credits in the series, for example. There's an Enterprise episode in which Archer refers to the Dalai Lama and the Vatican still being around in his time. There are various references in TOS to belief in God, including the fact that the ship has a chapel as seen in "Balance of Terror" and the time in "Who Mourns for Adonais" where Kirk responds, "We have no need for gods. We find the one quite sufficient," indicating that he himself is a believer in a god. The Vulcans clearly have their own religious beliefs, as shown in TAS and the movies. I'm sure I could come up with other examples of religion in the Federation if I tried. Yes, we see these people and colonies. But how much do we get to know about how they live their lives on a day-to-day basis, and how much do we get to learn about how representative of the larger Federation culture they are (to the extent there even is indeed such a thing as "the larger Federation culture")? As far as I can tell, not much. We don't get to see much of Federation culture outside of Starfleet other than when an immediate crisis is brewing, period. Again, my point is how can you say that with any confidence since we don't really get to see the basic lives of people in the Federation at all? Even the examples of people you named, we don't know how they lead their basic lives. This raises a different point than the one you started with. It's not the episodic nature of the show that's to blame for not showing what, if any, influences these discoveries made on the Federation. It's the theme that the writers chose to say essentially, "Humans are good and wonderful and the epitome of civilization" as one of the guiding principles of Trek. The other factor is the focus on Starfleet personnel.
Of course I can. It doesn't exist in any canonical reference - it's the same as saying the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus are real characters in the Federation. After all, it never says they don't exist, right? Your very premise is completely illogical and absurd from the very beginning. We have hundreds of examples of specifics of Federation culture. If the shows were all based on the premise of deep space exploration and we never saw any examples of Federation life you would be correct. But we do see example after example of that life. Yes, everyone who we didn't see on the show could be a purple skinned Venutian devil worshipper. But that obviously wasn't the writers intent, and they rarely if ever addressed the cultural impact of their shows premise. Perhaps the audience wasn't ready for that, but it would have been interesting to me. Just like the Pathenon still exists in modern times. That doesn't mean there are any practicing buddhists or catholics. Are ANY of the human characters religious? Yep, back when humans in Trek were human. Can you see Picard making the same speech? Or even Sisko or Janeway? For the most part religion in Trek is dealt with as an example of things humans don't do - and there is quite a bit of skepticism when it is encountered. Knock yourself out then. The Federation is largely depicted as athiestic, and even the Vulcans religion is far more like a philosophy. They never speak of dieties, only the dictates of logic. You mean beside them being a society that is a technocracy but often is depicted as agrarian, philosophical but atheistic, values education and self-fulfillment beyond all else, is socialistic due to their magic matter machine, and hasn't shown an ounce of invention in music or culture past rediscovering the works of the classical composers? Guess some people were paying more attention than others. We have quite a bit of information on Federation society. It raises a different point but doesn't invalidate the first one. Because of the magic reset button we simply see little if any progress - the Federation is stagnant, largely because of a concious decision by the producers that you didn't need to know any back story to enjoy an episode. Look at the Warp 5 issue - end of the ep, things are limited to Warp 5 becaue of the degredation in subspace. Next ep, totally ignored. Never referenced again. We can assume they found a way around it - but we are never told that. Without a doubt, part of the problem was that past the basics they didn't want to make any changes to the prime aspects of the story, which included the benevolent guidance of the Federation and the Prime Directive. Hell, that's one of the writer guidelines for Trek. You can't make any changes if you write a Trek novel. Which is absurd when you realize they don't consider anything in the Trek novels as canon anyway - let them make any change they want, you are going to ignore it by definition. Such a limited scope is fine for a series. But after five series, 11 movies, and countless books, it ensures stagnation. And it affects the quality of the story telling, because there are so many changes that logically derive from the stories they told previously.
