INCONSISTENCIES AND NITPICKING

 The Next Generation (seasons 7 and Movies)

INTERFACE

Picard said that the Hera’s last known position was 300 light years away. Geordi said the Hera was in this system 10 days previously. According to the Star Trek Encyclopedia, the time it would take to travel 300 light years at the maximum cruising speed would be approximately 2 months. (if my math is correct). Though they may have either shaken the engines apart to get that far so quickly, or used a wormhole or something.

FORCE OF NATURE

The whole idea of a warp restriction complicates and compromises the rhythm of the show. It seems to be an unnecessary restriction, and the writers appear to have shot themselves in the foot, for they’re going to have to regularly adhere to this rule from hereon in. Yet how many times can we expect to see the Enterprise, or any other ship, on DS9 for instance breaking the warp 5 limit unnecessarily? Because as I understood it, the threat wasn’t exclusively limited to that one specific area of space.

INHERITANCE

Is it even slightly plausible that this woman really didn’t know she was an android? After so many years, wouldn’t it have struck her as being odd that she never had the need to go to the bathroom? Or that she didn’t ever get hungry, never slept, bled, or had her hair cut etc. etc……?

THE PEGASUS

Twelve years previously, Riker was an ensign on the USS Pegasus. Six years after that, he moved to the Enterprise, as First Officer! Is it normal to move up the ranks so quickly? Before the Enterprise Riker was First Officer on the Hood, so he made that rank from ensign in less than those six years. What about poor old Data? He’s been a Lieutenant Commander for just about ever! For at least the entire duration of his Enterprise tour. That’s basically 15 years or so, from ‘ENCOUNTER AT FARPOINT’ to ‘STAR TREK: NEMESIS’, and without even a hint of a promotion. (I know it’s just a TV show and they don’t want to shake things up too dramatically). But most other officers have enjoyed various advancements in their careers. For instance, Riker has the opportunity of having his own ship several times, Worf became a Lieutenant Commander in Star Trek: Generations, Geordi also had the same promotion a few years earlier, Wesley was still at school and flying the damn ship, yet Data, like a computer on legs was ignored. He literally had to guilt trip Picard to giving temporary command of the Sutherland in 'REDEMPTION'!

ALL GOOD THINGS

Picard has a totally contrasting personality in this episode (neurological disease or not). In the ‘future’ segments he is an exuberant, feisty old geezer, not really consistent with what we know of Picard’s restful, sombre character.

In Data’s lounge at Cambridge, he asks the wall-station to be concealed by his mantel shelf/fire place hologram. As it appears, his cat is clearly visible sitting on the shelf. Does this mean Data has a holographic cat?!

Still in Data’s lounge, when the aged Picard awakes, Geordi says the line, "First of all Captain, there is no Neutral Zone." Yet several times later in the episode (in the same future time period) we hear the Neutral Zone being referred to. After all, it contains the ‘Devron System’ –the crux of the show. The grey looking Worf himself helped the Pasteur cross the Neutral Zone. So it obviously does exist.

In the shuttle with Tasha, Picard stated that he’d never been aboard a Galaxy Class starship, but has seen the blueprints. Once aboard, he immediately takes command. Is it wise to employ a Captain who hasn’t even looked around his ship yet, not to mention getting the chance to understand and get used to the new crew, systems, designs and technology, etc. hands on? I mean, the prototype USS Galaxy must already be up and running, so you'd have thought he'd had a tour or paid a visit in order to get a feel of this new class ship he is about to command.

The dialogue delivered by Troi for her scenes during the period prior to Farpoint was done without the original ‘Betazoid’ accent she had during the first couple of seasons. In the original pilot, she did have a distinct accent. But praise must go to the creators for a recreation of the First season Enterprise, crew, costumes , hairstyles etc. Most impressive, and accurate.

If Ogawa’s baby grew younger in her womb due to the temporal anomaly, why didn’t anyone else actually grow younger? Especially the children onboard?

On the first season Enterprise, Picard, on observing the anomaly after just seeing at a later time period states "so, it is larger in the past….". How can he tell visually, from just seeing it on the viewscreen? No such measurement or reading was known by Picard. For all one knows, that Enterprise could have just been slightly closer to anomaly in that time period?

Medical ship or no medical ship, why would Starfleet equip a state of the art starship, like the USS Pasteur, which is obviously a very valuable piece of hardware, with so little in the way of defensive capabilities? Worf states that the Pasteur is no match for the Klingon ships, so why don’t they simply arm the medical ships in the fleet with the same weapons specifications as on a regular starship? War ethics (if there’s such a thing) may have an unwritten rule stating that one shouldn’t fire on a medical or hospital ship, but sometimes an enemy will be unscrupulous enough to ignore the fact that it’s an ‘out of bounds target’. The Borg for instance would wipe anything out. It makes no sense for such a vessel to be so under armed, in deep space you never what peril you’ll encounter.

Data said there was a convergence of tachyon pulses –3 different pulses but all from the Enterprise’s deflector array (creating the anomaly), meaning that they all came from the Enterprise but from 3 different time periods, meeting at one point in space. Yet only two of the Enterprises used a pulse. In the future time frame, it was the Pasteur that emitted the pulse, as confirmed by Picard with his frantic pleas with the aged Riker in Ten Forward. Though we didn’t get to see the Pasteur fire the beam, but it’s in the dialogue. The future Enterprise certainly fired no such energy beam.

When the Enterprise enters the anomaly, we see the other two Enterprises on the viewscreen. We see them from the front, then from behind and also from the side. They change places a number of times, seen from different angles upon different Enterprise viewscreens. But they don’t maintain a constant position in relation to each other. It’s as if all three ships are forever swapping places.

A major Nitpick now: Q blamed Picard for the impending destruction of Humanity etc, by causing the anomaly. But it wasn’t actually Picard that started it, it was Data. It was he who suggested they use "the deflector to emit an inverse tachyon pulse," to scan beyond the subspace barrier, which hence caused the anomaly to form in the first place, and started the whole ball rolling.

In a different way to Data, Q was responsible for the anomaly. If he hadn’t been sending Picard back and forth through time, the Captain wouldn’t have had the opportunity to use the other pulses. Remember it was 3 pulses from 3 different time periods that caused the anomaly to form and grow backwards in time. Without Q, Picard wouldn’t have brought the idea of the tachyon pulses back through time with him, hence encouraging the other crews to use it. Picard really was the fall guy here. In basic terms, Q deliberately instigated this entire crisis, and placed Picard in the centre to see if he had the intelligence and 'imagination' to resolve it.

I just don’t get how this anomaly started. In order for it to exist, it has to have a starting point, ie, an initial cause and eventual effect -simple physics, and then it grows larger from that point. So the Pasteur started the anomaly in the future, searching for an anomaly Picard had seen in the past but which hadn’t yet formed in the future. So they fire the beam at the co-ordinates, which in this future time frame is empty space, and this somehow triggers an anti-time reaction. How? For whatever reason and however it occurred, this began the gestation of the thing, and it starts growing bigger backwards in time, so what part did the Pasteur actually play in causing the thing? Because, in effect, the other two Enterprises in the past, simply fed the anomaly with their tachyon beams –but did not contribute to its formation. Is this how it happened? I can’t get my head round it, I’m not a theoretical physicist, just a Star Trek fan! If all this was to happen though, wouldn’t the future they’re in be evidence that the anomaly did no harm in the past, after all, they are still there? If it was to annihilate humanity at the beginnings of life on Earth, the change of time-line would be instantaneous; changing around them and wiping them from history (or the future) without anyone realising what had happened. This being the case, they should just say, "hey, we’re still here, everything’s okay, and since this is an anti-time anomaly and it’s going backwards, and we’re going forwards we should just wait until the event horizon is reached, and the anomaly will disappear". If it’s getting bigger the further back you go, it’s getting smaller as time moves forward. So they should just hang around and chill, for sooner or later the thing’s going to just shrink into nothingness.

In ‘STAR TREK: GENERATIONS’, the Enterprise-D was destroyed hands down. Yet in the future sequences of ‘ALL GOOD THINGS’, it appears quite operational. Picard confirmed the ship’s destruction in ‘GENERATIONS’ by saying it was unsalvageable. Yet here we see it quite nicely salvaged. One could say that this ‘future’ was only a possible future; one created by Q, and a time-line that had already started to change by the end of the episode. But could it change so radically for the ship to be so completely destroyed a short while later?

Q’s lips now seem to have taken on a bluish hue, something I hadn’t noticed before. It at least has some dark coloration. This trend is continued in both ‘DEATH WISH’ and ‘THE Q AND THE GRAY’, on Voyager.  

STAR TREK: GENERATIONS

In regard to the emotion chip in Data’s quarters, it is suggested that it is the same chip extracted from Lore after he was disassembled in ‘DESCENT Part 2’. Like many others, I noticed the different appearance of the chip also –it being a lot larger, and having a different shape. Well, it is possible, if one wants to theorise, that it had at some point been upgraded and modified by Data, and perhaps Geordi, to be compatible with his slightly different systems, so it would be there for him at any given time in the future for when he wishes to install it. Perhaps that might explain the difference.

After inserting the chip, Data goes to Ten Forward. There he experiences dislike for a certain drink. To him the drink is ‘revolting’. Hang on a minute. Data has an emotion chip, so how does this allow him to taste? I understand the emotional reaction –he simply doesn’t like it. But we have been led to believe that he only has the ability to analyse the contents of a drink, but not to taste them per se.

When Soren launches the missile at the sun, it gets dark very quickly. In reality, such an effect would've taken several minutes, as a certain distance has to be traversed by the light waves to reach the planet before any observable change is noted.

This "won’t be installed until Tuesday," thing is completely ridiculous. Such key systems as weapons and tractor beams are, one would believe, fully integrated into the ship’s structure, and are not simply ‘delivered’, like a pizza on one idle Tuesday afternoon! The entire starship would've been built at the ship construction yards from the keel up (to use a maritime term), so everything would be built into, and around each other, as according to the specs. And it also seems ridiculous that Starfleet would launch a brand new ship without such fundamental capabilities as basic defence. Insane, insane I tell you!!!!

This problem has already been noticed, but I still wanted my penny’s worth. Captain Harriman is the most useless, ineffectual excuse for an officer I’ve ever seen on a starship Bridge. What friends in high places does he have? And what, one wonders, has he achieved in his career to attain promotion from a simple Ensign? -and then up through the rest of the ranks until becoming Captain! –and on top of that to achieve such a prestigious assignment as the Enterprise! I think Starfleet, on the showing of this hopeless maiden voyage should open up a serious enquiry and reassign the position! Was Harriman Captain Smith of the Titanic in a former life?

STAR TREK: FIRST CONTACT

This could be one of the most major Nitpicks yet, and I’m sure myriad others noticed it as well. Apart from the Borg, the main concept of this film surrounds the scientist Zefram Cochrane developing his warp ship, and making first contact with an extraterrestrial race. But according to established Trek canon itself, Zefram Cochrane isn’t a human, he’s an alien!! In the original Star Trek episode ‘METAMORPHOSIS’, Kirk refers to Cochrane as being from Alpha Centauri, which happens to be about four and a half light years from here, so it is definitely not a terrestrial location! Perhaps the elderly Cochrane moved to this star system later on in life? But it’s still peculiar that Kirk would refer to him as "of Alpha Centauri". If he is indeed 'of Alpha Centauri' it makes the whole film utterly redundant, causing its entire plot structure to fall apart, and that would be a pity, because it was an enjoyable movie. But if he were to be a rock ’n’ roll lovin’ alien scientist working on Earth, then a ‘First Contact’ event had already occurred, him being non-human. So the film really should have been called: Star Trek: First ‘Vulcan’ Contact.(!)

One could also say that the Cochrane of ‘METAMORPHOSIS’ was nothing like the Cochrane in the movie. And not just physically either. In the 1960’s episode he was a wise, calm, collected man of ethics and high moral standing. In the film however, all he wanted to do was to get smashed on booze and retire to an island populated by naked women! The whole things seems poorly thought through. I wish the Star Trek writers would do a little more research. It's only a matter of pushing a tape into a VCR and watching over an episode which had already portrayed Cochrane. The only other way to explain this away is that between this first contact scenario, and his meeting with Kirk two centuries later, he made some kind of extreme transformation of features, and ideology.

Another problem that really bothered me was the end sequence. Picture this: Right at the end, a spacecraft from another civilisation lands on Earth for the very first time. An extraterrestrial walks down the ramp, and speaks….perfect English! And without a translator in sight. All they had to do was script one line of Vulcan language and subtitle ‘Live long, and prosper’. That would have been far more plausible.

(STAR TREK :INSURRECTION will come eventully)

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