Got these over the transom from an old shipmate… 🙂
Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek
10. Noisy doors.
You can’t walk three feet in a starship without some door whooshing or screeching at you. My office building has automatic sliding doors. They’re dead silent. If those doors went “wheet!” every time a person walked through them, about once a month some guy in accounting would snap and go on a shooting rampage. Sorry Scotty, the IEEE has revoked your membership until you learn to master WD-40
9. The Federation.
This organization creeps me out. A planet-wide government that runs everything, and that has abolished money. A veritable planetary DMV. Oh sure, it looks like a cool place when you’re rocketing around in a Federation Starship, but I wonder how the guy driving a Federation dump truck feels about it?
And everyone has to wear those spandex uniforms. Here’s an important fact: Most people, you don’t want to see them in spandex. You’d pay good money to not have to see them. If money hadn’t been abolished, that is. So you’re screwed.
8. Reversing the Polarity.
For cripes sake Giordi, stop reversing the polarity of everything! It might work once in a while, but usually it just screws things up. I have it on good authority that the technicians at Starbase 12 HATE that. Every time the Enterprise comes in for its 10,000 hour checkup, they’ve gotta go through the whole damned ship fixing stuff. “What happened to the toilet in Stateroom 3?” “Well, the plumbing backed up, and Giordi thought he could fix it by reversing the polarity.”
Between Scotty’s poor lubrication habits and Geordi’s damned polarity reversing trick, it’s a wonder the Enterprise doesn’t just spontaneously explode whenever they put the juice to it.
7. Seatbelts.
Yeah, I know this one is overdone, but you’d think that the first time an explosion caused the guy at the nav station to fly over the captain’s head with a good 8 feet of clearance, someone would say, “You know, we might think of inventing some furutistic restraining device to prevent that from happening.” So of course, they did make something like that for the second Enterprise (the first one blew up due to poor lubrication), but what was it? A hard plastic thing that’s locked over your thighs. Oh, I’ll bet THAT feels good in the corners. “Hey look! The leg-bars worked as advertised! There goes Kirk’s torso!”
6. No fuses.
Every time there’s a power surge on the Enterprise the various stations and consoles explode in a shower of sparks and throw their seatbelt-less operators over Picard’s head. If we could get Giordi to stop reversing the polarity for a minute, we could get him to go shopping at the nearest Starship parts store and pick up a few fuses. And while he’s shopping, he could stop at an intergalactic IKEA and pick up a few chairs for the bridge personnel. If you’re going to put me in front of a fuseless exploding console all day, the least you could do is let me sit down.
5. Rule by committee.
Here’s the difference between Star Trek and the best SF show on TV last year:
Star Trek:
Picard: “Arm photon torpedoes!”
Riker: “Captain! Are you sure that’s wise?”
Troi: “Captain! I’m picking up conflicting feelings about this! And, it appears that you’re a ‘fraidy cat.”
Wesley: “Captain, I’m just an annoying punk, but I thought I should say something.”
Worf: “Captain, can I push the button? This is giving me a big Klingon warrior chubby.”
Giordi: “Captain, I think we should reverse the polarity on them first.”
Picard: “I’m so confused. I’m going to go to my stateroom and look
pensive.”
Firefly:
Captain: “Let’s shoot them.”
Crewman: “Are you sure that’s wise?”
Captain: “Do you know what the chain of command is? It’s the chain I’ll BEAT YOU WITH until you realize who’s in command.”
Crewman: “Aye Aye, sir!”
4. A Star Trek quiz:
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and ‘Ensign Gomez’ beam down to a planet. Which one isn’t coming back?
3. Technobabble.
The other night, I couldn’t get my car to start. I solved the problem by reversing the polarity of the car battery, and routing the power through my satellite dish. The resulting subspace plasma caused a rift in the space-time continuum, which created a quantum tunnelling effect that charged the protons in the engine core, thus starting my car. Child’s play, really. As a happy side-effect, I also now get the Spice Channel for free.
2. The Holodeck.
I mean, it’s cool and all. But do you really believe that people would use it to re-create Sherlock Holmes mysteries and old-west saloons? Come on, we all know what the holodeck would be used for. And we also know what the worst job on the Enterprise would be: Having to squeegie the holodeck clean.
1. The Prime Directive.
How stupid is this? Remember when Marvin the Martian was going to blow up the Earth, because it obstructed his view of Venus? And how Bugs Bunny stopped him by stealing the Illudium Q36 Space Modulator? Well, in the Star Trek universe, Bugs would be doing time. Probably in a room filled with Roseanne lookalikes wearing spandex uniforms, walking through doors going WHEET! all day. It would be hell. At least until the Kaboom. The Earth-shattering Kaboom
And most of them are right… LOL
Holodeck. Although not a mental image I needed to have, you are entirely correct.
The deck coating inside the Holodeck must be some sort of super advanced anti-skid.
Maybe it’s self-cleaning, like an oven.
That seems, ….. logical.
And it would save a fortune compared to buying biohazard trash bags.
Brilliant.
Coffee out the nose funny.
Wonderful commentary.
Glad I put the coffee down first. I used Marvin’s Kaboom in a slide for a working-level tech presentation. Got a bunch of snorts and general icebreaking.
Yeah, that needs a Class 1 Beverage warning.
Laugh out loud funny before the first cuppa is done….
“Class 1 Beverage warning”
*SNAG!*
Hey Old NFO;
Yep the “Prime Directive” is the best one….loved the Martin the martian references.
I prefer the “prime beef” directive…to the cooks.
Star Trek didn’t appeal to me.
Perhaps the Firefly segment should read:
Captain: “Let’s shoot them.”
Jayne Cobb: “Already done.”
That ‘Chain of Command’ one is laugh out loud funny, at least in my case. Thanks for the morning chuckle.
I am a fan of ST:TNG, for better or worse. And every one of those complaints is valid. Perhaps, if the Chief Engineer weren’t blind, they’d have better luck at fixing things …
I was never a Star Trek fan; in fact I’ve never been able to watch a whole episode, but the thing that really bothered me (besides the fact that it’s really “‘Gunsmoke’ in PJs” was the “set your phasers to ‘stun'” business. These are life forms that no one’s ever seen before, so how do you know what will stun them? I’d set my phaser to “vaporize” and dial back from there.
In real life spandex is synonymous with Wall Mart… and not in a good way.
All- Glad you enjoyed it! 🙂
Posted from my iPhone.
I take it you never watched Babylon 5 when Tracey Scoggins was the Captain. They did an Episode where their version of the Holodeck included her in the Fantasy So at least Babylon 5 was a little more realistic in that regard.
Re the “Prime Directive”: The most sacred principle in the Federation’s galaxy, yet virtually every episode involves the Enterprise’s crew not merely violating it in a minor way but shredding it and flushing it down waste disposal chute.
Red shirt ensigns had a very short life span.
And I have seen Picard on the street on the Isle St. Louis in Paris. I guess he has an apartment there.
As to the holodeck, so you (the Fed head of FedSpaceNavy) put a friggin squint (term from “Bones” regarding techie people) in charge of a warship and she manages to screw everything up and the ship doesn’t have power to replicate the food and parts from all the stores of molecules the ship has available to replicate food and parts and yet there is power enough for people to fool around in the holodeck and do stupid stuff all the time?
Whut?
Norman coordinate….
And then there’s the whole “We’re bazillion parsecs from the Federation so we have no new parts” thingy and anyone with any experience in any military or fleet business (like truck fleets, rail fleets, fleet fleets, heck even slow fleets…) knows that as soon as critical part X is no longer on the shelf, everything that uses critical part X will suddenly stop functioning. Have two critical part X’s on the shelf? No breakdowns fleetwide. No CPX? Breakdowns everywhere.
By the 2nd season of the 2nd worst Star Trek series, the stupid warship captained by a squint should have looked like something some bubba cobbled together from the local junk yard. And if the bubba was a serious redneck bubba, rather than just a citified bubba, the squint-captained warship should have suddenly been 30% faster, be able to do slick warp burnouts, jump over interstellar rifts, be powered by homebrewed dilithium moonshine, have parts fall off randomly, be able to roll space-coal when faced by more enlightened interstellar prius-cruisers, and, most importantly, immediately attract 5-10 fedpolicecruisers and that right there would have solved the whole “we can’t find our way home” as the crew is perp-walked through the nearest warp-rift back to the pokey on Pluto and the bubbafied warship is impounded.
Seriously.
Even borgish babe couldn’t save that show.
Oh, yeah, what about the ‘chef’ who kept burning food and serving unknown food products, most likely from incompatible genetic backgrounds, to the crew of the good ship Sucksalot? Come on, so much for science and such. The whole reason for replicated food was to solve food incompatibility, right? Or was it to cut the catering staff? I can’t remember.
As to seatbelts, well, bubba the engineer shoulda installed 4 point restraint harnesses everywhere. Just sayin. If you’re gonna bubba-jump an interstellar rift and do interstellar rum-running, then good 4 point restraint harnesses are a must.
And in a starship powered by matter/antimatter annihilation, the only way they can cook food is big iron kettles with wood fires?
And in the first ten episodes, the ship got caught in a “hole in space”, what, six times? That space must have more holes than a Mississippi secondary road.
Then there was the “holograms can manipulate physical objects” thing. And the only doctor was a computer program. Great when this week’s plot complication takes out the computer, which doesn’t seem to have any defense from alien code…
That be a reason for someone making a “Star Dreck” knockoff.
“Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning”
It’s on youtube, or download it from its main site.
Done in 05-ish by Samuli Torssonnen and some Finnish Trek fans. And Babylon 5 fans, because why not?
Full-length live-action movie in Finnish, subtitled in English (or whatever you want). The subtitles themselves are hilarious…
The captain, science officer, and security officer, trapped in the early 21st century, note that events are not unfolding as history described. So, to prepare Earth for its coming contact with the Borg, they set about building the Starfleet as soon as possible…
Making the most efficient use of available resources, they conquer the Russian Federation, set them up with advanced technology, conquer the rest of the world and integrate it into the new not-so-Russian Federation, and then things start to get a little weird…
Re #6 (no fuses). They inherited that design from Voyage to See Whats on the Bottom (an Irwin Allen abomination)…
By the 3rd shake every display tube in the control room would blow out, yet the bay windows out front so they can see the giant squid never cracked.
All- Can’t disagree… LOL
Posted from my iPhone.
I’d laugh, but it’s all true. Except for #5. With Firefly, there’s be no discussion. They’d just shoot. Closest thing they got was from the episode where Niska nabs Mal & Wash.
“This is something The Captain has to do on his own.”
“No! No it ain’t!”
“Oh. Okay.”
*Multiple Mag Dumps Into Bad Guy*
“It’s the chain I go get and beat you with” is an actual line from the show. Said by Jayne when he tried to take over the ship. Again.
Raptor- Jayne would have ALREADY shot… LOL
I had a LOT of trouble concentrating after the Federation dump truck. Oh, damn, my ribs still hurt! 🙂
Bob- Good! 😀