Susan e-mailed me the following list of things about Star Trek that iritate Dan at the Happy Fun Pundit. I've adapted the article, originally found here, for your conveniece.
(Note: This list does not necessarily reflect the likes or dislikes of your truly)
Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek
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
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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!"
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and 'Ensign Gomez' beam down to a planet. Which one isn't coming back?
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.
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.
Share this page with family and friends…even complete strangers. It's up to you. Whatever floats your boat.
Click the icon below to select the method of sharing.
John Luckhurst & Simon Northwood commented at 7:35 AM on June 17, 2003:
A truly excellent site, and one that will surely piss off star trek fans all over the 'federation'.
Good show.
Nobody commented at 6:02 PM on June 17, 2003:
Thanks for the comment! (You are the first people to post here that I didn't know in person. :)
JediLeprecaun commented at 8:19 AM on May 18, 2004:
This was good, especially the bit on Worf's Klingon warrior chubby. Star Trek is total crap, not to mention racist. There was an episode where the crew lands on a warlike planet (not the one klingons come from that I don't know the name of) where all the people on it are black, and also get some weird pleasure from watching people kill eachother. Oh and let's not for get how they were dressed.
Jonathan commented at 11:14 PM on May 18, 2004:
Racist? What Star Trek are you watching? The closest they came to racism was, in fact, the original look for the Klingons, where they looked kind of South Asian-ish. But really, this was the show that pointed out that the people with the black on the right side of their black and white faces were no different than those who had white on the right side.
Star Trek also had the first interracial kiss on American television.
So what Star Trek were you watching that was racist?
(And Klingons are from Klingon. I mean... c'mon!)
Nobody commented at 2:09 AM on May 20, 2004:
I think he's talking about the second episode of Next Generation, where Tasha Yar was compelled to fight a woman where the winner was married to the "king." All of the characters on the alien planet were played by black actors. If that's the specific episode we're discussing, I didn't see any racism--just a horrible story.
Hurm Partners