Topic: Top 10 Things I Hate About Star Trek

[Dunrobin]

(This has been floating around the Internet for a while, but I just saw it again and it is hysterically funny if you're a Star Trek fan like me.)

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.

[Jimmie Adams]

These observations only apply to the original Star Trek series:

1.  William Shatner.   In reality this man loathes his participation in Star Trek and regards all of it's fans with contempt.  Yet this franchise has made him a multi-millionaire.  It must have been amazing to be in his dressing room before shooting when he laced up his truss, slapped his astro-turf toupee on his head, and went before the cameras to display his high school Strindberg approach to acting with his halting inflection.  There was more than one episode where Kirk "talked" a computer to death.  The episode where Kirk reads the Constitution to some savages is the greatest inducement for projectile vomiting yet known to man, and only Shatner was clueless enough to recite them in that context on national television.  William Shatner is the greatest comic genius of the 20th century and he doesn't even know it.

2.  McCoy always had to clarify his role for the captain; "I'm a doctor, not a bricklayer."  In real life his relatives had his ashes spread at sea when he died because it would have been inevetable that someone would have spraypainted on his tombstone "He's dead Jim."  Those salt shaker diagnostic sensors of his must have set the budget back by 50 cents along with the collander he used for a brain scanner.  McCoy was able to replace people's brains without messing up their hair.

3.  Scotty's plaintive whines:  " I canna do it Captain, the toilets have backed up in to the warp drive and I need time to repair them!"

4.  Instead of issuing someone a red uniform on the Enterprise, why didn't they just put a phaser on kill, shoot the intended recipient and get it over with.

5.  The sets.  The materials for their construction were filched from a dumpster at a furniture store.  They expected us not to notice them by shining a red or purple light on them.  Also the Enterprise circled the same planet in every episode.  They would just alter the color.  The various levels of technology on the Enterprise amazed me.  They could verbally tell the elevator where to take them, but the had to push buttons on the more sophisticated transporter.

6.  The scripts.  I am told some great science fiction writers participated in this.  Yeah right.  Historical inevitability was a recurring theme, Gangland Chicago (where 23rd century Kirk knew all of the 1920's slang words), Spock jammin with interplanetary hippies, Abraham Lincoln sharpening spears before he engages in hand to hand combat, and the obligatory situations where Kirk gets to bang all the beautiful alien girls.

7.  The "Spock's Brain" episode.  Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I rest my case.

"Brain, Brain, What is Brain?"

   

 

[jrvass]

Snips...

"Brain, Brain, What is Brain?"

Oooh! Call on me!

"The brain is an internal organ located in the cranial cavity, and has primary control over the central nervous system. It is lacking or severely atrophied in subjects that are Star Trek fanatics. Thankfully these Specimens do not reproduce successfully in the wild as they are rebuffed by the female gender of the species.

See also: Geek, Pencil-necked; Pocket Protector; and Dates the Hand."
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My older brother and his friends would watch the TV show. I had no say in the TV programming in the afternoon when he came home from school and decided to stay indoors and watch the "mother of all vacuum tubes". If I really wanted to watch something different, I could go down to the basement and watch it on the old B&W TV (an unusual space age device, the electronics were in a wooden cabinet and the TV tube was in a tilt-swivel holder mounted to the wood cabinet.)

Happily, my brother recovered from the Star Trak Syndrome. But over the years I have worked with a few Trekkies that can repeat the dialogues from the latest Star Trek movies

James

[Pilsner Panther]

In the interest of balance, ten things I like about Star Trek:

1. Gates McFadden

2. Oh, never mind, the other nine are also Gates McFadden...



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[Nojaa]

These observations only apply to the original Star Trek series:

4.  Instead of issuing someone a red uniform on the Enterprise, why didn't they just put a phaser on kill, shoot the intended recipient and get it over with.

The red uniforms gave the baddies a good target to shoot at.

 

Nojaa.