Which of these 8 dropped Star Trek plots would you most like a continuation to?


8. Gary Seven. Actually, he was good in the John Byrne comics and in the novel Assignment: Eternity, but recasting him to appear again would be fun, maybe in conjunction with the Department of Temporal Investigations.


7. The kids from Miri. Actually, I don't really think we need to return to this plotline. What else is there to say about them?



6. Balok. I don't agree with this one. One of the Strange New Worlds collections features a story about Voyager encountering Bailey in the Delta Quadrant, that's enough for me.



5. The Kelvans. Unless Trek gets to the point that intergalactic travel is possible, I don't really see the point. It would make an interesting seasonlong arc akin to the Xindi or Stargate Universe, but you must remember that only the Kelvans that we met assumed humanoid form, the rest would be very alien.



4. Gillian Taylor. What else is there to her story that needs to be told? Again, there's a Strange New Worlds story (costarring Carol Marcus!) that continues her story enough for me.


3. The Gorn. You'd have to do a lot to flesh out this culture to make them interesting enough to visit. Let them stay in the novels and comics.


2. Charvanek. This one I agree with. They could've done so much more with her. Eventually she could've become sort of the Romulan version of Commander Shran (Nate just referenced Enterprise, lock your doors!). Her appearances in the TOS novels and the Vulcan's Soul trilogy were great.



1. The Guardian on the Edge of Forever. I agree with this one as well. The Guardian had tremendous potential. The Yesterday Saga books are great, his interactions with Q in the Q Continuum Trilogy, etc. A Strange New Worlds story even showed that the Department of Temporal Investigations has been known to use the Guardian on occasion.

PNQ: What do you think is the stupidest or most unnecessary subplot in a two-parter?


I'm watching "Time's Arrow" and it's amazing how much the Mrs. Carmichael subplot annoys me. She uses up screentime that could've been better spent fleshing out the villains or making the Mark Twain stuff a bit more meaningful.

In "Trials and Tribbleations" Worf says that Darvin's real name is Darvin.


PNQ: Huh? The guy's name is Gralmek, "Arne Darvin" is just an alias!

why do they wear spacesuits in among us if they breathe air

In "Blaze of Glory" Eddington complains about the replicated food. I suddenly wonder...


PNQ: If you're so uptight about replicated food, why would you join Starfleet in the first place?



I mean, one of the unspoken rules of Starfleet is "the vast majority of your food will be replicated", right?



I'm sorry, I just hate Eddington in particular and DS9's handling of the Maquis in general.



I rewatched "The Maquis" the other day and got so annoyed about how they handled the introduction. They were building on multiple NextGen episodes from the past, and STILL didn't write them correctly. The only way any of this makes sense is if the original DMZ leaders lied to the colonists in the beginning. Every single DMZ leader, every single colony. Which will never sound plausible to me.

I've been pondering how to flesh out the Voyager aliens so there are fewer blatant knockoffs of Alpha Quadrant races...


PNQ: Other ideas?


The first thing that comes to mind for the Kazon is a twist on the Ferengi. Instead of money (the Delta Quadrant doesn't seem to have anything approaching a de facto universal currency like gold-pressed latinum), they covet resources. In their area of the quadrant water isn't as plentiful as elsewhere, and they don't have anything approaching replicator technology. Expand it beyond just water, what about fertile cropland, mines of usable ore, fungi with medical purposes. They play Settlers of Cataan instead of Monopoly like the Ferengi do.



KAR: I must protect my territory. Territory is power.


As for the Hirogen, hunting shouldn't be their only hat. Emphasis shouldn't just be on the kill, but it should instead be on showing superiority by becoming better than their prey. Outthinking them, predicting their movements, and above all not being discovered. Good predators don't reveal themselves until just before they attack. The Hirogen shouldn't even be a known quantity, nobody should know their name until Voyager outthinks them. What if Voyager encounters a number of races who talk of their destroyed ships and outposts, but who have no idea who did it? The sensor network should be hard to find and extremely resiliant. There was no need to destroy it, just have the Hirogen increase their computer security and increase the number of ships guarding the network. Eventually Voyager would be made to detour around it to avoid the Hirogen.

Very unhappy things in The Cry of the Onlies.


They also encounter First Federation technology in Ragnarok.



The Kelvans could be a starting point for brainstorming a Starfleet ship that ends up in the Andromeda galaxy or whichever galaxy they were from.

Also First Frontier.

There's so much sabotage and general shenanigans in space that life support is on the fritz more often than not, wearing the suits just saves time

Why would you join Starfleet if you don't like the transporter?

Ah, the transporter. One place where I have to admit that Pulaski's character wasn't well written. McCoy would gripe, but he never avoided the thing. He understood that it was a necessity to do his job. Except for that one time, Barclay sucked it up and beamed anyway. But Pulaski? She didn't even have a transporter trace, which meant that she almost died in "Unnatural Selection" because of her stubbornness. "Unnatural Selection" was Stardate 42494.8, "The Child" was 42073.1. That means that she avoided using the transporter for FIVE MONTHS! For a starship I find that inexplicable, especially the flagship. Especially for the Chief Medical Officer.



I recall McCoy referring to himself as "Chief Surgeon" of the Enterprise once. I wonder if some ships have two separate jobs for this, one to handle the crew as a whole along with away missions (McCoy was also the ship's psychologist, remember) and one to stay in Sickbay to handle the bigger medical problems. What if Pulaski wasn't really "Chief Medical Officer" but was really "Chief Surgeon", a non-senior officer position that stays onboard ship at all times. What if there was another unseen doctor who handled the away team stuff?

One of the TNG TV Tropes pages calls the Universal Translator "maybe above all the rest, the single biggest "don't think about this too much" technology in all of Star Trek."


PNQ: Opinions?


After all, as presented the UT has to be able to do the following:
1. Scan the language centers of the brains of everyone in range to form a translation matrix that can be used on the fly.
2. Listen to the speaker's voice to not only translate the words, but also create a copycat artificial voice so everyone doesn't sound like Stephen Hawking.
3. Not only translate based on universal linguistic principles (and let's not even get into how THAT works), but restructure the translation to sound more natural to the ears of the specific person wearing the combadge.

4. Create holographic projections of lips over everyone in range so the lips look like they're speaking the language of whoever is wearing the UT AND not conflict with the projections of the other combadges in range.
5. Obey rules specialized for each language on what to translate or not translate (i.e. say "bat'leth", not "sword of honor", say "Gul" not "Captain").
6. Mute the sound of the original words to not overlap with the computer-generated translation. Oh, and be able to do this for dozens of people in dozens of different places speaking dozens of languages SIMULTANEOUSLY.


Kinda makes the Babel Fish sound less implausible, doesn't it?

I taste pennies now after reading this. That's bad, right?

Of course, the weird thing is that in TOS the only confirmed appearance of the UT was in "Metamorphosis." You know, the one where they try to translate energy pulses being "spoken" by a creature that doesn't have vocal chords or any of a thousand different reference points that a UT would need to extract a language? In all other episodes everyone just happens to speak English! Not even "Federation Standard", but outright English!



Maybe I'll buy that the Klingons learned English to communicate with the Federation. Maybe I'll buy that the Guardian of Forever has something akin to a UT to allow it to talk to visitors. But that doesn't allow for the dozens of other cases where everyone just speaks English. How did the residents of Sigma Iota II read The Book? How can the Fabrini speak anything close to our language if they've been isolated for ten thousand years! Even Vulcan society doesn't go that far back!

And don't forget that a big chunk of a combadge is just solid gold.

Too bad you'll never see Discovery. S2E4 "An Obol for Charon" will throw three more monkey wrenches into your thought process about the UT.

So a comment on a random YouTube video suggests that Uhura couldn't speak Klingon because Nomad wiped that knowledge from her mind and she didn't relearn it.


PNQ: Opinions?


Yeah, no. She had over twenty years to relearn a language as important as Klingon. Remember that she was an instructor at Starfleet Academy for many years, she had the time.

So I watched a fan trailer for DS9 again...


PNQ: What kind of plot could a DS9 movie have had?

So I'm watching yet another Shakespeare adaptation that moves the setting to the present but keeps the original prose...


PNQ: Is keeping the original dialogue necessary for a true adaptation of Shakespeare? Is his genius only present in his dialogue, with the characters, plotlines, etc. secondary in importance?


I wish I could see an adaptation of Shakespeare that had the original setting, characters, plot, etc. but updated the language. No more iambic pentameter, no references to obscure myths that were well-known to the Elizabethans but not to us, no words that are now extinct. It must be possible.

Frank Sinatra, "The Way You Look Tonight"


(still think Fred Astaire did it better, but I have a question about Frank's version...)


Some commenters are saying that Frank is pronouncing "warm" more like "worm" at 0:50.


PNQ: Do you hear it?


I don't. I hear "wahrm", sure, but it never gets to "worm." That's just his accent, it's not something to make fun of.


EDIT: Upon rewatching I realize the joke was about a typo with the onscreen lyrics. Oops.

It turns out he dropped a lot of references to current events into his plays as well. The porter in Macbeth who goes on about equivocating, for example, is referring to the then-recent discovery that Jesuits had been teaching English Catholics how to not-lie in order to hide priests from the authorities.


At the end of the day, it all comes down to what you feel is important to you, to the integrity of the play, and to the audience.

Doomcock made a video about Brie Larson and Captain Marvel. I won't link to the video because you guys don't seem to like him, although I must mention that he made a Voyage Home joke in this one.



PNQ: Was Brie Larson herself the problem in the Marvel movies?


I don't care about behind the scenes drama. That's the director's problem, not mine. Star Trek itself has had its share of demanding and hard-to-work with actors, with the Shat himself as only one example.



My problem with her performance in Captain Marvel, etc. was that she didn't have enough to do to showcase a wide variety of emotions and performance types. And that's a writing problem, not an acting problem. I won't be watching Captain Marvel again because I don't like the fundamental story and tone, not because of Larson's performance. She didn't have enough to work with in the first place.

There's a few Marvel movies I haven't seen, and Captain Marvel is one of them. I haven't heard anything that would turn me off from seeing it.

Watch it once for the connections to the rest of the MCU, but don't expect to enjoy yourself very much. Or maybe I'm just bored of fish-out-of-water plots, or amnesiac-must-rebuild-their-past-life plots, or whole-life-turns-out-to-be-a-lie plots, and so on and so forth.

Who owns DS9?


An odd name for a video about the history of the station. After all, the answer is Bajor, of course. The Federation was only administering it, Starfleet was only protecting it.

So I'm reading a DS9 novel and there's a named Dominion ship in it...


PNQ: Does the Dominion seem like the kind of organization that would name its ships as opposed to alphanumerical designations?


Most known races name their ships for reasons that wouldn't apply to the Dominion, right? The Jem'Hadar and Vorta aren't bred with artistic sensibilities, and the Founders wouldn't want to follow the customs of solids, would they?

So I'm watching "Birthright" again...


PNQ: Did they do the "everyone thinks the food is awful except for Worf" joke more often than Riker's eggs and Geordi's pasta?

I found myself pondering this question. I'll expand the parameters...


PNQ1: When/if you have children old enough to watch Trek, in what order will you introduce them to the franchise?
PNQ2: What Trek won't you show them, letting them discover it on their own if they want to?


A key issue is that the primitive (I hesitate to say "cheap") style of TOS will be a major turnoff for some. I refer you to earlier comments I've made about people not liking black and white movies JUST because they're black and white, it's the same thing.


In many ways STIV would be a good intro, it's lighter on the scifi and heavier on the humor and character work. Too bad it refers to STII and STIII events.


PNQ3: Would the bite-sized nature of TAS be a reasonable introduction, or does it rely too much on TOS lore and '70s weirdness?

I can answer this one really easily: I showed my daughter who she was named after first and let her make up her mind.

It probably was the wrong move, but she was curious and asked me.

(Her name's Annika, BTW.)

I wouldn't try to introduce a child to ALL of TOS at once, but they should at least see Trouble With Tribbles, Balance of Terror, Journey to Babel, etc. towards the start.


Then TNG starting at Season Three.



I would never use TAS as an introduction to children. Yeah, it's only half an hour and it's a cartoon, but it's an OLD cartoon. Putting aside the continual references to TOS (which aren't a bad thing for older viewers who have seen TOS), it's cheaply animated and falls victim to the the old trap hole I've mentioned before: older filmmaking tech is offputting to those not used to it.

I can agree with this.

Hopefully Prodigy is a good jumping off point for younger audiences. I hope it will be good to go when my son is old enough to start understanding that stuff.

So STIII made the mistake of calling the Enterprise "twenty years old" when it's really forty. Whatever, the point is that Admiral Morrow called it too old to bother repairing.



PNQ1: Why did Starfleet send years to do a complete overhaul on the ship if it's going to be called out of date and useless in ten years or so?
PNQ2: Don't we see oodles of OLD Excelsior classes in TNG? Like, a LOT of them. I can't buy that the majority of them were built in the 24th century, the Ambassador-class should've overtaken them if so.

PNQ3: Building starships takes years, even in the 24th century (you have to assume that "Best of Both Worlds" made the shipyards start production full-time and never stopped due to the increased threats). If Scotty can get the ship back to spec in a few weeks, why not let him? It's gotta be cheaper to fix a ship than build a new one.

PNQ4: What's the most damage we've seen a starship suffer and still be able to be repaired to full capability? The E-D was pretty battered after Best of Both Worlds, Voyager after the Borg/8472 War, etc. Did Khan really do that much damage all things considered?

PNQ5: If you really think about it, the worst of Khan's attack would be those initial phaser hits when the Enterprise didn't have its shields up. Of course ablative armor didn't exist yet, but the damage seemed to be concentrated on the warp distribution system in order to cripple the Enterprise. Plasma conduits can be replaced, hull segments can be replaced. And Scotty was ready to do it.

So in "The Ultimate Computer" M-5 didn't recommend McCoy for the landing party because any injured crewman could be beamed up.


PNQ: How often has a doctor been essential on a landing party because contact is lost with the ship?


The answer is: A LOT! While I could certainly argue that you don't need the CMO on every away mission, someone trained in medicine should whenever they're going into an unknown environment. And in the episode this is the first time anyone from Starfleet will be visiting this planet, who knows how many exploding rocks or salt vampires or dikronium clouds or mugatos or whatever else could be down there? Unless they really do treat the redshirts like mineshaft canaries on purpose, a doctor will always be necessary.

I found myself wondering the following...


PNQ: Which Star Trek captain actor was most well-known before joining Trek?


To the general TV-watching audience, I mean. I don't want to get into the intricacies of who might've seen Shatner or Stewart on stage.



It seems that it would be Bakula, but am I missing something?



As for which actor I knew best before they appeared on Trek it would be Bakula of course (my parents were HUGE Quantum Leap fans). However, I did see Chris Pine in Princess Diaries 2.



As for ALL Trek actors, in terms of sheer popularity across the spectrum, could it be LeVar Burton? Between Roots and Reading Rainbow I think he had his place in pop culture solidified.



Mention must also be made of the 1988 movie Roots: The Gift. It features LeVar Burton, Kate Mulgrew, Avery Brooks, AND Tim Russ.

In "Rascals" Guinan refers to a planet as "the most beautiful in the quadrant"...


PNQ: Given the range of species in the Federation (assume we're just talking about the Federation), could they really agree on one planet as "the most beautiful?"


Yeah, Guinan was using hyperbole, but it makes you think. Most of the humans irrationally consider Earth the most beautiful, but what about other races? It's noted that Trill can handle the cold easier than most races, Ferengi don't like bright light, Klingons seem to prefer forests, Cardassians love the heat, etc. There are even humans who don't like nature at all and love to stay inside.



This of course opens other questions relating to internal clocks and other nuances of biology. I wonder how long it takes for a 26-hr/day Bajoran to get used to a 24-hr/day, it probably took Sisko and crew weeks to get used to it. Frankly it made sense for DS9 to match a Bajoran day when the station was in orbit, but now that it's in deep space and the planet is a three hour trip away, a different "time zone" seemed to be indicated.


Then again, did everyone in Bajoran space agree to follow a 26-hour day system to facilitate trade? Is the entire DMZ operating on a 26-hour day? It makes you wonder.

So I'm watching "Descent" again, and I note that when the holodeck shuts down it removes the characters before removing the room itself.



PNQ: While it stands to reason that the "puppets" require a lot more processing power than a simple "set". But could it be that each category of projection has its own category of projectors?



Think of sprite comics. The artists put down a "backdrop", then put sprites on top of it on a different "layer". What if holodecks also have different "layers"? You could imagine the illusionary food being its own layer. Perhaps when musical instruments are present they have to be on a layer that's more "real" than ordinary props, an almost-but-not-quite replicated layer.

Following on from a YouTube video...


PNQ: .gif-is it "jiff (jiffy without the y)" or "giff (gift without the t)"?


I use the former, it's just easier to say.

How commas have affected government/legal matters.


PNQ: Do you use the Oxford comma?


That is, the comma before the "and" at the end of a list.


X, Y, and Z or X, Y and Z?

jiff and of course I use the Oxford comma, it is best practice.

So I stumbled upon the old saying "a boat is a hole in the water that you throw money into" again...


PNQ: If you had the money for storage, maintenance, etc. for a recreational vehicle, what kind would you want?



By "recreational vehicle" I'll cast a wide net. RVs, ATVs, canoes, sailboats, dirt bikes, hang glider, whatever. We'll also assume that you have the time and opportunity to actually use the thing on a regular basis.



If you already have one, you have to choose something in a different category.

PNQ: Vulcan mind-meld vs Jedi mind-trick-who wins?


An interesting question. It depends on the mental training of both sides. Spock vs. Obi-Wan? Are we talking at a distance, or within the mindscape of a mind-meld? Does Spock get to use the Stone of Gol?



Give each of them the weapon of the other (lightsabre and lirpa, say the lirpa is lightsabre-proof)? I think Spock is more trained in traditional weapons, he'd win.



I think if Spock managed a mind-meld, he'd win. Jedi don't look like they deal with direct mind manipulation, that's a Sith thing.



Can Spock be tricked with a mind-trick? Also an interesting question. A casual "you want to go home and reevaluate your life", not a chance. A directed "see what I want you to see", possibly. Then again, I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that Vulcans can train themselves to see through illusions like that.



So after achieving near-Kolinar on Mount Seleya, I think Spock would win.

I'm sure KJ would like a little ~4-person fishing boat to putter around in.

PNQ: In "Best of Both Worlds" did Guinan know that Picard would be saved because she knows that he hasn't gone back in time to meet her in "Time's Arrow" yet?


Because it's an interesting question. El-Aurians can sense changes in the timeline, so is it possible that they know that their knowledge of future events can be changed, or can be fulfilled by alternate timeline versions of people?