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Enterprise plot holes

djberg96 on 2002-11-15T19:41:28

I forgot to mention that I watched another episode of Enterprise on Wednesday night. This one fell into the "total suck" category.

SPOILER ALERT for those who haven't seen it and are planning on watching it yet.

  • First, there is no universal translator, so how is it everyone speaks English? Hoshi is becoming less and less useful it seems.
  • Second, if you're going to rescue one piece of minor technology, why would you bring 8 more with you?
  • Third, who tries to tackle 3 armed guards and a bartender when you've got a phasor in your hand?
  • Fourth, if you don't want to fire the phasor to avoid exposing its technology, why did you bring it in the first place?
  • So frigging what if they have a communicator?! What are they going to do with it? It would take years to reverse engineer, and by then the tension/war might be over. Cut your losses.
There are some other gripes I have with the show. 10 months without shore leave?! Jesus. Anyone who's served in the military knows that the crewman would be humping the walls at that point, and the pregnancy rate would be ridiculous.

That, or it's been, "pass the salt, Peter" the entire show. I haven't verified this, but I once heard from a guy in the Navy that the pregnancy rate on a carrier was something like 50%, and I'm pretty sure they never go without shore leave more than 6 months.

I know they did *barely* touch on this subject, but only with regards to the Captain. Anyway, the show seems to be getting more lame.

Speaking of alien technology ...

Ovid on 2002-11-15T21:49:37

djberg96 wrote: "So frigging what if they have a communicator?! What are they going to do with it? It would take years to reverse engineer..."

Note that much of the following is reconstructed from my rather poor memory of an article, so rather than add a disclaimer after every sentence, I'll add it now: everything I am writing is probably wrong.

I was once reading an article that was talking about what we would do if a UFO ever did crash-land here. Since it's impossible to test, the author created a "thought experiment". He speculated about what would happen if a modern nuclear weapon landed in the US, unexploded, sometime around WWI. Would we then have acquired a super weapon decades before we were supposed to and then be able to take over the world?

Well, no. What are they going to do with the damned thing? They didn't have the mettalurgical technology to analyze what the materials. They couldn't appreciate the plastics and the computer technology would be completely undecipherable. The author finally concluded the only thing that they would learn is how to make ultra-high resistance resistors. Not much use back then. Heck, they might not even know that it was a weapon.

My thought is that a more appopriate thought experiment might be: what would happen if my car fell into the hands of 1st century Europeans? It would be absolutely useless to them. If aliens could easily travel between star systems, I doubt we'd learn much from their version of teens wrecking a car on cruise night.

Of course, even the above takes into account the fact that such technology was created by human minds. They finders could read the letters and certain engineering techniques might be clear. When it comes to alien technologies, we have no idea of the physical environment under which the technology was generated, much less the mental environment.

since it's in the future

hfb on 2002-11-15T22:52:31

maybe it's not too much to be optimistic and think that organised religion is extinct and that contraception is much more advanced and plentiful. Of course, it's already a stretch to think the human race will last that far into the future but that's the nice thing about fantasy, it can be wildly optimistic. Besides, didn't one of the guys get pregnant on the show already? Now that's what I call optimism! :)

Re:since it's in the future

koschei on 2002-11-16T00:49:47

Isn't Enterprise only 150 years in the future or so? You really have that little faith in the human race surviving that small a period?

Re:since it's in the future

hfb on 2002-11-16T00:59:24

considering that life on earth is at the grace of a very delicate ecological balance and that balance is being currently challenged, yes. Of course, humankind is more like a virus and a few may escape during the last days the earth can sustain life so that they may inflict the same fate on another unsuspecting planet.

What would they do with a communicator?

brian_d_foy on 2002-11-16T00:56:36

Despite not watching Enterprise, I did watch Star Trek. A left-behind communicator gave rise to a
criminal society in some episode. As for their dunderheaded black ops, it's like anything else. People do things in the most complicated way. Want to know how the US military wanted to smuggle technology into the middle east in the 1980s? There were lots of parachutes and SCUBA tanks involved. How did the operators actually do it? Commercial flight, diplomatic pouch, and rental car. Just let the Enterprise zap the gizmo from orbit, then jet off to the next liberty port. duh!

As for extended sea tours---I know a few people who were on aircraft carriers for two tours (six months) back to back, but the US was in the middle of Desert Shield. It does happen. Sure glad I'm not a sailor. :)

Continuity Errors

ziggy on 2002-11-18T03:35:41

Unfortunately, if you look at any plot in ST:E, it loses all sense of continuity (and, dare I say, plausibility) before they cue the title sequence.

In this case, they have a communications device which can communicate with the Enterprise and yet they need to send the entire bridge crew to rescue it. Of course, earlier in the series they've successfully demonstrated the use of the transporter to send and receive inorganic equipment. (Oh, and they did rescue the Captain with the transporter once.)

I'll grant that it's necessary to suspend some disbelief to follow what's going on in Gene Rodenberry's universe. But when even those farsical rules aren't being followed, the whole show gets to be tedious. It's not fun anymore to watch for its car wreck potential.

Re:Continuity Errors

pudge on 2002-11-18T15:04:40

Unfortunately, if you look at any plot in ST:E, it loses all sense of continuity (and, dare I say, plausibility) before they cue the title sequence

That's just to dull your senses for when the theme song comes on.