Section 3: PLOTS

3.0 AMNESTY [see postscripts]

I'll pardon such offences as “Spock's Brain” and “Shades of Gray” (ST:TOS3 and ST:TNG2), on the grounds that American TV has a statutory minimum cheese content.  Besides, any real “Star Trek Mark Two” (say, a twenty‐first‐century remake for holovision!) can start from scratch, omitting unworthwhile plots.  I'll confine my comments to defining some types of plotline to beware of.

3.1 CONTINUITY BUSTERS [see footnotes, postscripts]

One of the perils of ST:TOS's planet‐per‐episode format and its improvised continuity was the temptation to throw in oneshot plot devices, to be discovered one week and forgotten the next.  Such dangling plot threads were all very well in the short term; they could be woven by fans into interesting Trekkie novels.  But their cumulative effect when magnified by ST:TNG's projection of the timeline is terrible.  Whatever happened to:

• The android factories in “What are Little Girls Made of?” (ST:TOS1) etc.?
• The good/evil fractionation technique from “The Enemy Within” (ST:TOS1)?
• The standard issue lie detectors they used in “Mudd's Women” (ST:TOS1)?
• The artificial youth‐extending virus (and antidote) from “Miri” (ST:TOS1)?
• The panacea spores they encounter in “This Side of Paradise” (ST:TOS1)?
• The whole antimatter universe out of “The Alternative Factor” (ST:TOS1)?
• The universe‐switching technique devised in “Mirror, Mirror” (ST:TOS2)?
• The memory‐scanning tricorder described in “Wolf in the Fold” (ST:TOS2)?
• The assorted spare Earths explored in “The Omega Glory” (ST:TOS2) et al.?
• The subcutaneous transponders used during “Patterns of Force” (ST:TOS2)?
• The friendly demigods met in “Spectre of the Gun” (ST:TOS3) and so forth?
• The telekinesis‐inducing concoction in “Plato's Stepchildren” (ST:TOS3)?
• The metabolic accelerator drug discovered in “Wink of an Eye” (ST:TOS3)?
• The bodyswapping machine demonstrated in “Turnabout Intruder” (ST:TOS3)?
• Or indeed, how about cloaking devices?  If the Federation can steal them off the Romulans (“The Enterprise Incident”, ST:TOS3), and has captured (“The Voyage Home”, ST:TMP4) and allied (ST:TNG) Klingon craft, why should Starfleet still have to borrow cloakable vessels, as in “The Defector” (ST:TNG3) and “Unification” (ST:TNG5)?

3.2 CAUSALITY BUSTERS [see postscripts]

You may notice that the above omits all the oneshot Star Trek Universe time‐travel techniques; discussing continuity is futile when plots breach causality!  But they could attempt to assume a consistent system of Star Trek chronophysics.  For example:

• Star Trek Universe history is mutable; incautious time‐travellers can abolish their home future (see “The City on the Edge of Forever”, ST:TOS1).  And yet:
• How do cautious timehoppers avoid it (stealing air others would have breathed, etc.)?  Remember; Faster‐Than‐Light drives are (ipso facto) time machines!
• Why in “All Our Yesterdays” (ST:TOS3), “The Voyage Home” (ST:TMP4), “Time's Arrow” (ST:TNG5), and so on do they invariably act as if the future were safely deterministic?
• Why do alternate timelines diverge so little?  Why was Wesley Crusher born (identical) in both “Yesterday's Enterprise” timelines (ST:TNG3)?
• [   This item censored by Starfleet Military Intelligence   ]
• Why does the pilot in “Tomorrow is Yesterday” (ST:TOS1) get amnesia when nobody else does?  Why does he see the Enterprise vanish?  (Et cetera)

Note that traditional time‐paradox dogma can stand little real scrutiny.  Why should an autoassassin “vanish”?  A can of worms better left unopened.

3.3 ONESHOT REVISIONISM [see footnotes, postscripts]

This is a recurring strategic error in the battle for plausible Star Trek continuity.  What happens is that a scriptwriter notices a logical flaw in previous plotlines and pointedly avoids it on this one occasion, in a counter­productive and inconsistent fashion.  Memorable examples include:

• The “Kirk manoeuvre” in “The Wrath of Khan” (ST:TMP2; see 2.3) – supposedly three‐dee, but unconvincing; after all, why should they bother “resurfacing” before the attack?
• The crippled vessel in “The Undiscovered Country” (ST:TMP6) that loses artificial gravity for once.
• The “Picard manoeuvre” in “The Battle” (ST:TNG1) – a sudden burst of warp acceleration, producing unprecedented image‐lag effects (see 2.1).
• The Universal Translator failure in “Darmok” (ST:TNG5); if the grammar's too (infeasibly) alien to handle, why is the vocabulary no problem?

Such revisions call attention to the stupidity of the rule to which they are the one exception, while preventing the use of simple blanket explanations – e.g. if it weren't for “The Wrath of Khan” (ST:TMP2), I could claim all the apparent two‐dimensionality was just a further viewscreen conventionalisation.

3.4 SEQUELITIS [see footnotes, postscripts]

Formularisation is compulsory in commercial TV, and has struck ST:TNG hard.  The NCC1701D now has less time than ever to explore strange new worlds – half the season is prebooked for return visits to the Klingons or Cardassians, and guest spots for Barclay, Ma Troi, Q, Old Uncle Tom Cobleigh and all.  Not that I want to see any fewer Romulan Warbirds, Borg mother[―]ships etc.; I just regret this inevitable loss of novelty in favour of the kind of petty continuity that ST:TOS tried so hard to avoid.

1993 Footnotes

3.1

Remember that the whole message of “Balance of Terror” (ST:TOS1) was that such “secret weapons” are only a temporary advantage; next time they met, Starfleet would have cloaking technology and the Romulans would have, say, quark bombs.

3.3

There is a useful distinction to be made between the kind of “continuity” that refers backward to previously introduced concepts (often taken to the extreme of fannish in‐jokes) and the kind that refers forward to developments planned for later seasons (e.g. the failed attempt in “Conspiracy”, ST:TNG1).  The last and least important kind of “continuity” is the sort of pointless trivia dealt with in the “Nitpicker's Guide” books – give me a “Kneecapper's Guide” any day!  [Footnote postscript: no, that wasn't intended as a “Continuity IRA” joke…]

3.4

The bane of round‐robin universe‐design is the phenomenon of Concept Erosion, of which the Borg are a perfect example.  As introduced in ST:TNG2, they were a threat which should soon have been consuming all of Starfleet's resources; but each time they turn up, they are diluted further by writers who have clearly failed to grasp the point that the Borg are tougher and smarter than anyone else.  Oh, and Uncle Tom Cobleigh is a character in the folk‐ballad “Widecombe Fair” – I've no idea what he's doing in this rant.

1997+ Postscripts

3.0

There's no pardoning cheese like Voyager's; and yes, I am thinking specifically of “Learning Curve” (ST:V1)…  See also my pages on SF Chronophysics, Xenolinguistics, and Exobiology.

3.1

Babylon 5 has scrupulously avoided continuity busters – even the magic Back‐to‐Life machine wasn't forgotten!  Meanwhile Star Trek has juryrigged an excuse for Starfleet's lack of cloaking devices: they signed a treaty (why?!) which gave precise blueprints for the kind of machine they promised never to invent.

3.2

Even as a self‐appointed chronophysics pundit, I found B5's time‐travel superplot very impressive.  On the other hand, the Star Trek movies (as well as ST:TNG7's “And Good Riddance” – sorry, “All Good Things”) have been getting stupider and stupider.

3.3

The Star Trek Universe barely aspires to retrograde continuity, let alone anterograde foreshadowing.  Big Mysteries are never resolved because the writers never had any plausible solution in mind (X‑Files syndrome: the truth is not there), and everybody's Character Reset buttons get pressed after each episode.

3.4

“First Contact” (ST:TMP8) subjects the Borg to further fan‐fiction‐by‐committee concept erosion.  Practically the first two things we learned about the Borg were that they're (a) sexless and (b) decentralised!  The only explanation for the “Borg Queen” is that they've heard of “hive‐minds” (and watched “Aliens”) but know sod‐all about real hives.