Scraped from https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/10-things-i-hate-about-star-trek.104181/ on 12/3/2025
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 Geordie, 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 Geordie thought he could fix it by reversing the polarity."
Between Scotty's poor lubrication habits and Geordie'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 futuristic 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 Geordie 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:
Firefly:
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 tunneling 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 squeegee the holodeck clean.
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 look-alikes wearing spandex uniforms, walking through doors going WHEET! all day. It would be heck. At least until the Kaboom. The Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
If this is the lovely Sonya Gomez, Kirk would make sure that she made it back. Spock and McCoy would have to draw straws.
-Cuhl9. The Federation:
The Federation is described as paradise. There is no dreaded DMV in paradise. This there IS no guy driving a Federation dump truck--the truck drives, and cleans, itself. Try using your imagination more and quit fearing a better tomorrow, miser.
5. Rule by committee:
Except neither scene actually takes place in either show. Picard calls a conference when there's time and cause for it. Mal typically fires when he knows it's tactically a viable move. Otherwise, one is a fool for not seeking counsel in matters beyond their purview and is likely to be offed by someone pissed at being shot at when it was unnecessary.
The rest I'd put on a list too, though not for the same reasons exactly.
Here's one I'd throw on there:
Too many humanoids or humans with little bits of pointless artful junk on their faces. I'll even extend this to minor cultural differences. That a Bajoran has a wrinkled nose and an affinity for religion doesn't make them an extraterrestrial. Christ, there's greater variety between human races than there are in half the Trek alien peoples.
We secretly replaced the Dilithium crystals with New Folger's crystals. Let's see if anyone notices.