I never liked the speed limit rule, nor the idea Warp Drive damages space-time. I think this episode would have done better if it was just this specific area of space that was suffering because it is rare in some way, akin to a delicate ecosystem not touched until it was just recently discovered.
@@thedigodragon It'd have been fine as commentary had they actually let the episode have long term consequences and then followed through by showing those consequences and the sacrifices that have to be made. But that's now how television worked back then and that's not how Star Trek has ever worked past or present. Serialized television in the US was in its infancy when that episode aired and Star Trek was and still is about using bullshit technobabble as a magic wand to make problems go away. Which means that the idea of the episode was bad because it should have been obvious that no one would every follow up on it. Ironically, it in a way makes room for metacommentary on how we're dealing with that exact sort of problem: pretend it isn't happening or that it's too big a problem and do nothing about it rather than making any sacrifices. Even the supposedly enlightened utopian society will just stick their heads in the sand if the reality is too unpleasant.
I remembered hating this episode, but I didn't remember just how many ways it was bad, holy cow. The subplots are even more inane than the main plot, and that's really saying something. Her plan was to create the disaster she had warned about, because . . . why? Apparently this has _never happened before,_ and people won't take the idea seriously until it does. So . . . wait for it to happen, right? That makes more sense than doing it yourself. It's as if, to prove the danger of nuclear winter, disarmament activists detonated 100 nukes to start one.
@@EebstertheGreat Well when you put it like that it almost sounds like real life. No really. Look what's currently happening in real life. The Plastic Environmental issue that they're talking about, has what, 30% lobbyists that threaten and try to coerce people into saying " _muh recyclin' works!_ " even though, it's proven that recycling doesn't work and it's just big fat megacorps that want to earn money while subsequently contributing even harder to global warming. We aren't taking it seriously, and those that are taking it seriously aren't being heard, and those that don't want it to be heard in the first place are doing their damndest to try and handwave the issue away. I think people should look at this episode in a different light, while still acknowleding how bad the scientist is. Would the crew of the Enterprise, given a serious damn to this if it had resorted peacefully?
@@thedigodragon Well, yeah... because this episode demonstrated (again) that the writers really didn't understand the concept of warp drive. It has nothing to do with subspace. Subspace was invented by early writers to explain how their communications can travel fast enough to be useful. But warp creates a gravitational "warp" in normal space time, which allows the ship to go FTL by technically not really moving at all.
My headcanon is that the sister was plain wrong. The warp core breach of her ship interacted with the Tetryon fields, mentioned earlier in the episode, and the Subspace rift it created is unrelated to her work. A false positive because of shoddy scientific work. Voyager's variable nacelle pylons are simply a new technology to increase warp drive efficiency to get the Warp 9.975 cruising speed. And all her "heroic self-sacrifice" brought... was the uncounted deaths on her home planet due to climate change she caused.
I like this headcanon a lot, I hope you don't mind if I adopt it as my own! The sister's 'scientific' attitude is too reckless and her desperate 'proof' is simply obscene in its violence. I don't have words for how insane she is.
@@xBINARYGODx Why should I follow your headcanon when you apparently don't enjoy speculating about in-universe reasons for something (especially the stupid parts)? My headcanon is my headcanon. Yours is yours. I don't demand you to make my headcanon your own... unlike you. So, kindly frak off.
That's possible - but i got the feeling they had a finished script that was all about the environmental story and then realized it was way too short when filming. Happened with other episodes too, like with 30 Days on Voyager, where the whole frame story of Tom sitting in the brigg was added because they didn't get to feature length.
I propose a way to fix this episode. Dump the warp stuff, and focus the episode entirely on Spot. But, have him turn into a tiger and begin hunting down the crew, Alien style. But at the same time, Data has persuaded picard that Spot must be brought in alive so that the transformation can be reversed. Now we have a much better (albeit somewhat strange) episode.
No no no. The scientist has been manipulated by creatures in subspace. Her sudden rash action opened a portal to their realm and they got aboard the Enterprise through Geordi manipulating the sensors to make an easier bridge for them to enter through. They appear as monsters to hunt down the crew. But they did not understand they were dealing with the perfect organism. It's structural perfection matched only by its hostility. So once again, the day is saved by, Spot.
When you have change the nature of your universe for a single episode plot that is a something that should be thought out. Clearly this was not. I remember how in Stargate when they started having starships with transporters and the writers bitching how they had to start writing around the transporters which they had just introduced...
Gotta love, too, how the solution was just to have the nacelles move a little. I mean... what? I guess that's the reason they never actually stated that onscreen. The original idea was dumb, the solution was even dumber, and they knew it.
@@Swiftbow I love the solution with the Intrepid-class. Of course the nacelles on ALL previous ships had the same angle, so that's what caused the problem ... or maybe not. Just a stupid gimmick, like the warp nacelles not being connected to the ships in the 32nd century ...
According to Jeri Taylor, the episode's B plot originally involved Geordi's sister coming on-board the Enterprise to help him adjust to the death of his mother in the earlier Season 7 episode "Interface". But she ordered it removed out of concern that the viewers who hadn't seen that episode wouldn't understand what happened.
Surely there would have been a way to weave that in naturally. A story about a dead parent can be done without it having been an episode. Like with Riker’s mother.
@@danielyeshe They introduced us to Kurn without having to constantly remind us about Mogh. They gave/cursed us with Alexander despite K'ehleyr only showing up once before. I swear, Pillar and Behr were the only showrunners who had any idea what they were doing.
If true thats insulting to trek fans, they could follow completed plots and themes but they wouldn't understand something that could easily be waved into to a few lines of dialog?
If we do the fan theory stuff: It could be that starfleet was experimenting with variable geometry nacelles on the Intrepid, and after this event a fleet wide search went out to find data on ships that did less damage to subspace, the Intrepid's data showed it's unique design was better, and that pushed more into production after this event.
You know, the whole "warp travel is destroying subspace" was an interesting idea in TNG. But unfortunately, I remember it coming up like two times after it was introduced, and each time it was in relation to how the ship got a permit to disregard that speed limit...
"Swept under the rug" and "only referenced when we've got an exception to ignore it" are sadly the most realistic analogies this episode ended up providing.
The workaround I remember is that writers confined it only to this small section of the Galaxy for some reason, and so it got ignored by most scripts and such.
It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but it doesn’t work for this series. An episodic show with the scope being half of the galaxy is not the right place for it. It would work in a series that was planned out, but you can’t just dig up a script from the fan mail vault and dump “the basis for this series being possible is actually destroying the universe” in the final season of a show that is mostly supposed to be viewed as a series of self contained episodes.
@@hariman7727 No, they said the speed-limit was going to be introduced everywhere. It's like TP said: it was mentioned again, but the Enterprise was allowed to go beyond it thanks to emergencies. And then Voyager claimed the problem was fixed with the Intrepid-class - and from the looks of it all the older ships were retrofitted. But i think it would have worked way better if it just happened in that region. If this applies to the whole galaxy then it seems really weird nobody noticed something elsewhere - and also warp-travel has been a thing for a long time, so ...
All the TNG actors were under the impression they would be coming back for a season 8 at this point in the show's run. Since it was painfully evident they ran out of ideas in season 7, I can only imagine they would have been scraping the bottom of the barrel in that season 8.
I remember Marina Sirtis saying she felt the show should have kept going, but I'm assuming she was more focused on having fun with her castmates and just staying working. I remember even at the time, it was clear the series was in decline. The episode that made that unavoidable was, appropriately, The Descent. Good thing we still got The Pegasus.
Episodes like this are a good argument against having a set episode count for a season. Because really, it feels like season 7 would've been better served trimming its episode count a bit so they could focus on trying to better refine the ones that were good ideas.
For a lot of complaints towards the new shows having less episodes per season, and less seasons on top of that, I wonder if theyre even aware of how all three TNG era shows were running on fumes by their 7th seasons with just as many mixed/bad as good.
@@myriadmediamusingsI think the issue is that even the six or eight episode series are stretched thin by that point now. There's series that are obviously half of what the plot intended and the other half is just filler because it's a movie that got six or eight episodes.
@@hariman7727 Exactly. It didn't fix this problem, it just made sure we don't get the standalone gems. We still get the bad filler (look at most of Season 4 Discovery, or Season 1 Picard) in the middle of a stretched-too-thin feature film plot.
It was a different time. Not so many channels, not so many other options for things to do. You were expected to air the same show, every week, all year long. And half of them were supposed to be new, as reruns always got worse ratings. 100 episodes was the magic number for syndication and years of continued profits, and every producer wanted to get to it ASAP.
@@hariman7727 That's because our standards for TV shows are so much higher now (and rightfully so). You don't make filler episodes these days unless you have a really, really good idea for a standalone.
As a fan of TECH drama on TNG increasing sensor efficiency and being immediately notified by the bridge that something was picked up on sensors was pretty cool.
Which I don't recall ever even coming up in the show itself. Ironically, because Voyager was under special circumstances trying to get home fast, and never traversing the same space more than once, it doesn't even matter.
I'm going to give this episode's message an A+. An environmentalist making things worse because they are so fixated on one problem that their shoddy science makes things worse for everyone, sounds a hell of a lot like the response to nuclear power getting us into this climate change hellhole.
The USS Intrepid may not have those nacelles. Voyager was likely being built during this time, so in theory the hey could have whipped the bendy nacelles up and slapped em onto this ship that was already being built to test them out.
The thing is that if one of these rifts happened close enough to the planet, it is an extinction event. So she didn't cause what she was trying to prevent. That makes a huge difference IMO.
Warp drive shouldn't be useable near planets or any large gravitational mass. The object's gravity would disrupt the warp field. But warp is usually treated as nearly magical in Star Trek, rather than using the actual scientific theory.
It sure would b crazy if environmental activists started doing pointless and harmful things that at best negatively disposed the public to their cause and at worst harmed others needlessly. Its good such things only exist in the realm of fiction.
Damn you really tore this episode a new subspace-rift! Not unjustified though. That "scientist" witch was more a religious fanatic. Is it wrong that I liked the Spot sub-plot, a bit of slice-of-life on the Enterprise? Warp-drives causing environmental damage could have been an interesting idea to use later, but it just got handwaved away.
Nothing wrong with enjoying a little slice-of-life antics. Some of the best Dragon Ball content to come out of Super was stuff showing the characters between the main sagas after all.
It doesn't make sense, though. Warp is a gravitational bubble. If warp damages subspace, then every single star and planet would be doing the same damage. And black holes would rip everything asunder.
@@Swiftbow The only way it can make sense would be if subspace was weak in that system. Of course, this is just me playing devil's advocate for the contrived message episode and if it was really this one system the more logical way to fix this would be evacuating the planet instead of imposing a speed limit on shups that would never pass through it anyway.
Ah, the warp speed limit. As Linkara put it, it’s an example of “destroying your own storytelling engine”. (Somewhat literally in this case). It’s a lesson more creators should take to heart. Before you make a huge change to your setting, consider how you might be hampering future writers. In a story about exploring space, nerfing the space ships is like finally getting Gilligan and his friends off the island. Once you do that, what is the show about?
@@nitePhyyre And Discovery even had an episode that did this exact same plot, where the Spore Drive was destroying everything. *Everything*. And then they forgot about it and pretended it's fine. Even when they moved to the future where everyone blew up due to bad warp drive.
I have similar contempt to Solo trying to establish hyperdrives as needed a separate fuel, and there only being few planets that can provide it. Because if you treat that as canonical going forward, then it completely screws up Star Wars FTL to resemble Dune. And the Hyperdrive ram of Episode 8 is also setting breaking with the vast numbers of hyperdrives allowing for the potential of mass weaponization of prolific technology to cause such warfare that even 40k would be telling you to tone it down.
The thing I never hear anyone talk about in relation to this episode is that she actually didn't prove anything. The research confirmed that a massive burst would have caused a problem, but they weren't convinced that it accumulated over time. So she went out and... Created a massive burst.
I think you missed the point of the conversion rate "game" Geordi had going on. It's a link to the main plot on the warp drive, that he and other engineers are clowning around trying to win benchmark contests, while being blissfully ignorant the piece of equipment they're faffing with is doing all this damage to subspace. Akin to pimping your ride, pre the times knowing your vehicle contributes to climate change.
Me, trying to read waaay too much into the cat plot: Does Spot represent Nature, which can be studied and understood, but never tamed? Or does Spot represent us, and our habits, which resist training even when it's for our own good??
This episode would be much better if they made it into a holodeck episode. For example Data and Geordi decide to use holodeck to get help with Spot, so they request cat expert, but due to negative subspace wedgie they end up with cat expert, thousand misbehaving holographic cats, not enough litter boxes and safety protocols disabled...
I thought this when I first this episode in the 1990's and I'll say it again... Paint Drying: The Next Generation... I never got the warp destroying the environment back when I first watched it because I was too goddamn bored. I only watched it all the way through years later to find out what someone was referencing.
Ah, while this episode pretty much was a hard sit even back in the 90s, I really don't think the working title "Season they ran out of ideas" is completly fair. They had some very good ones in this season too. I found the quality loss in the last season of DS9 more noteable when they pushed their war back for more spiritual ghoststories and a singing hologram, but I never hear Chuck damn the whole season as "Season they forgot what their plot was" for that either. I mean that one also had some good stuff in between, so I'm a little confused why Season 7 of TNG gets a way rougher treatment.
Taken as a whole it’s quite clear the show had begun to decline in the last two seasons. They were not inclined to advance these characters any further and these characters are largely the same as they were in season 2. Geordi career might have advanced 12 years in one season but he’s still the same person. They all are. That means the writers look for message shows. Or start fleshing out characters families which doesn’t work this late in the show.
Introducing a new character in the last season of DS9 was such a dumb move. It derailed the momentum of the show since several episodes were focused on Ezri. The war plot was practically put on hold so we can learn about this uninteresting character to replace Dax who already largely receded into the background by season 6 anyway. Many guest stars were brought to the fore who played pivotal roles and felt like main characters, so there was no need to even replace Dax, imo. Anyway, I guess my point is season 7 of DS9 had a very different problem from TNG's season 7 and it was completely avoidable. TNG just ran out of steam.
@@rc8937 Having Ezri as a replacement Dax was an odd choice for sure, maybe they should just have been Daxless for that last Season, I didn’t dislike Ezri, she just didn’t have any room to grow. A bigger problem was the whole Pah Wraith story combined with a Dukat who needed something to do after Waltz, that was imo worse than Dax since he somehow was like a new character at this point, so a similar issue, episodes were needed to present the new him. While DS9 spiraled downwards starting mid season 6, TNG just had more mediocre episodes in that last season (no doubt about that). It just seems like DS9 gets less flak for it, guess SFdebris is more of a DS9 person in the end.
In all fairness, Data and Spot were hilarious, due to data not understanding cats and also due to Brent Spiner being able to play something so with a straight face. A completely forgot the engineering and ferengi parts of this episode. And the environmentalism part of the episode is typically preachy and pointless because it's a contrived lesson instead of a discussion on how to protect the environment without reducing us to horse and buggy days/killing half the planet at minimum due to the inability to produce food because the environmentalists are also against modern food production. There's certain Central African countries that implemented full-on environmentalist food production and within a year or two their government was deposed because the people were starving due to low food production. But that country's environmentalism score was through the roof!... Based on the blood of the people who starved and suffered.
I think this episode got one thring right and that the activists in it, which remind me of modern groups like just stop oil who basically go about blocking traffic and actively try to ruin everyday's people's lives and demand we all stop living lives and just return to just surviving. A good example is the people who think we should live under the same conditions as we did during lockdowns as they were good for the environment.
Historically protests don't work unless you are making yourself a pain in the general publics ass. We have seen recently that low key protests are ineffective and easily dismissed. Kneeling at a football game is as gentle a protest as one could hope for and he still caught shit for it and nothing changed, so, as Data points out, terrorism is an effective tool for social change. And it's entirely the fault of people like you that choose to dismiss less radical protests.
I like the fact Chuck brings up the Voyager connection. Even at the time being a dumb kid when this came out I found the whole warp speed limit thing odd. But I guess considering the double nickels wasn't that old to someone in 1993 by from my point of view as a kid the speed limit was always 55 it just was a thing. But star ships already have natural speed limits because of how fast they can go and that isa much bigger factor to most ship captains than some random subspace damage.
I don't get what they wanted to do, assuming they had actually kept the warp-drive limitation going forward. Is it all warp drives or would we just see a switch to like, the type the Romulans use? Was this about limiting how far the show could explore?
It seems pretty clear they weren't thinking about anything but their *message.* The _Enterprise_ D spent most of its time as a courier, a fire truck, or a consulate. Very little actual exploring.
Is this episode the reason we have moronic plots in later shows (which aer shit on their own right but include stupid modifications because of this *looks at floating engines of STD* )
When it comes to the interpid that gordi is competing with its probably just a different ship named intrepid this episode takes place a couple of years before voyager starts so it's possible to have new ship built by then
If that is the case, then what would have happened was the ship must have been destroyed/lost/retired and then pretty quickly decided to reuse the name. And I find it being retired unlikely if it must be new enough for it's engine conversion ratio could compete with the flagship. So that leaves them being destroyed/lost and then no one had any problem with quickly replacing them. Which I suppose matches with Gene's "There is no need for mourning in the future."
@@takeru3159I think it could be the Intrepid D or something because the Intrepid shows up on the Original Series. It could've been rebuilt/refitted like the Enterprise has been.
@@takeru3159 Ships have been lost in real life with no one killed but the ship beyond repair. It could have been an old ship that got a refit as a technology demonstrator. An energy being could have turned it into a pumpkin and transported the crew to medieval Europe. There are infinite explanations.
@takeru3159 it doesn't necessarily need to compete with the Enterprise in absolute terms, Jeordie is talking percentages, the Intrepid could be a 50 year old Excelsior class with refits bringing it up close to current standards, from that point on the engineer is looking to improve things incrementally from ita slightly trailing position. So Geordie and they go by percentages over baseline. Also, all the work discussed is specifically the reaction chamber of the warp core, it's plausible that an older or lesser ship would have an all but identical warp core even if on the whole the ships systems ate lacking compared to the new and well integrated ship. Think of an old car with a primitive suspension a floppy chassis and poor aerodynamics, but with a late model engine swapped in, something that's very common. This owner challenges a friend who owns a brand new car with the same engine in it to see who can tune to the greatest brake specific fuel consumption. Since this is entirely an engine related process the shortfalls of the older platform don't really play a part.
Regarding the Intrepid issue: I completely agree with your assessment of the Voyager writing team; however, I can make a case that works around their incompetence...which means I have to do their homework for them. To be honest, I'd rather do homework for Berman's team than do any for Kurtzman's Hacks. There are two possibilities: 1. The Intrepid mentioned in this episode is not an Intrepid Class ship, likely an Excelsior, Ambassador or an old Constellation Class ship. Considering the timetable of TNG's final season and Voyager's first episode, The Intrepid Class was likely already a work in progress due to the threat of the Borg and was nearing the final stages of completion when that DumbA$$ Scientist martyred her way into an idiotic death to prove her TARD point. A FAR MORE BRILLIANT Scientist quickly solved this issue, and it was quickly fast-tracked into the class's design, it was THAT easy of a fix to this Stupidity in Sub-Space. The old Intrepid was decommissioned sometime before season 7 ended and first Intrepid class ship was launched with Voyager being completed sometime afterwards. Or... 2. Everything I said above is still the same, except the Intrepid Class wasn't the original name for the class. The U.S.S. Intrepid was still decommissioned as planned and some Starfleet admiral thought the "Kurtzman Class" sounded extremely lame, and had it changed to the Intrepid. Both are plausible.
Considering that the Federation seems to go for the US/British method of naming the ships when they order them, it seems likely something spectacularly destructive happened to the _Intrepid_ if the name was both unexpectedly free _and_ commemorating it was a big enough deal that something like the next ship out of the shipyards was regifted its name.
I honestly forgot the Spot/Data/Geordi episode is the same episode as the Terrorists/Warp Drive Bad episode. They don't go together and both were p*ss poorly handled. Edit: I really don't like this episode. If it's not being a slog to get through, it's being preachy and insufferable.
Far be it from me to defend *FREAKING VOYAGER,* of all shows, but... here we are. The existence of USS _Intrepid_ at the time of this episode does not break continuity with USS _Voyager,_ an _Intrepid_-class ship, being built with modified propulsion arrangements based on information derived from this episode. it's not at all unusual for different members of a given class of ship to differ in their details; on the contrary, it is entirely ordinary and expected, especially for larger vessels which are slower to build. This is why, for example, people who really know ships can often identify which specific ship from a given class appears in a photograph, even if the photo doesn't show the ship's name or hull number. Furthermore, those differences can be quite substantial, resulting in significant differences in performance across members of the same class (see the US Navy's battleships of the early Dreadnought era, which were generally ordered in pairs - one of each pair propelled by the brand-new geared steam turbines, and the other with the older, tried-and-tested (but less powerful) Vertical Triple Expansion engines). That said - given the general level of knowledge of matters naval on display throughout the run of the show(s), I'm pretty confident that this is an example of the writers hitting the mark by accident. It's entirely possible that none of them even noticed that they'd already used the name Intrepid in TNG; and even if they did, it's nearly certain they simply thought re-using a ship name was a bit of clever continuity, with no idea what it actually meant for USS _Voyager_ to be an _"Intrepid_-class" ship.
A more simple explanation is the writers used the name Intrepid to mirror TOS, in which the Enterprise had a sister ship of that name which got destroyed. A quick way to hint the Intrepid is another Galaxy class ship in this episode.
History nit-pick: the only time the USN did the mixed propulsion thing was the _Delaware_ class, in part because the Navy (justifiably) didn't believe the US industrial base was quite 'there' with making battleship turbines. That said, it's a valid point that different ships of the same class are by no means identical; creations at that scale are almost always artisinal creations, with the official blueprints more suggestions for how they're supposed to go rather than an exact representation. Some of the French pre-dreadnought classes illustrate this far better than the differences within the _Delawares,_ though, where if the ships were built in different shipyards you probably couldn't tell they were 'sisters.'
The thing is, other species in Trek have had warp travel for millenia before humans even built spaceships. For example the Vulcans: Romulus was colonized from Vulcan millenia before. If all warp tracel constantly damaged subspace, you would imagine something had been noticed long before by various space empires? So it's more likely that subspace was "damaged" by something unknown in that specific area near the planet. With climate chance due to humans releasing massive amounts of CO2 and Methane from burning fossile fuels (for the past 220 years) and cutting down forests (for the past 5000 years since the Bronze age) and the side effect of acidification of the oceans, we have comparisons (for example the Permian Extinction) and can directly observe the effects worldwide.
Spot thing could work if it was more a metaphor for some other issue of controlling someone. But they didn't do that, it was just padding. As for the environmental message, why not something like a trial or stumbling onto a long dead civilization, and show an embittered, despairing scientist who watched their people descend into ruin by something they spent decades trying to warn about. Make it a tragedy and a contrast to ST idealism by reminding the Enterprise crew that sometimes people screw up, and when they do it's not always WW3 and humanity gets a second chance. Sometimes you just die.
To be fair, not all starship classes are named after their lead ship. Starfleet's first starships were called the NX class, not the Enterprise class, the Parliament class ships are named after cities that serve as the seats of parliamentary democracies (such as the USS Vancouver) but I don't believe there's a USS Parliament. The California class ships are named after places in California but I don't believe that there's a USS California.
I suspect that you'd find that those ships are _also_ referred to by their lead ship. The British R-class battleships are also known as the _Revenge_ class, Flower class corvettes are sometimes called _Gladiolus_ class, and so on.
@@km_icebear After the foundation of the Federation, yes. From that point on, NX is used to denote prototypes/testbed ships. But before that, NX was the name of the NX class of starships, the first ships in Starfleet. But either way, that doesn't invalidate the point that not all starship classes are named after their lead ship.
People criticise Discovery episodes for all sorts of dialogue and emotion that seem inappropriate to the tense scenes that they’re in, amongst numerous other alleged issues. But it really can’t be as bad as these attempts at “slice of life” scenes, with Data & Geordi just doing the most yawn-worthy parts of their jobs, whilst doing nothing to further the story.
I must have seen this episode two or three times, but only remembered the failed environmental message. Then again there's nothing rememberable about all the padding. Yeah, it really didn't work. And the interesting point is that the problems caused by the warp-drive are only seen in this part of space - yet they say they need a speed-limit everywhere. Even though warp-travel has been a thing for a pretty long time. Of course you can say that maybe this region is more vulnerable thanks to subspace-anomalies that have always been around and this will eventually happen elsewhere too. But it still seems weird. No wonder this was ignored in the future - with only Voyager remarking that the Intrepid-class has an upgraded warp-drive that doesn't cause damage like this. Problem solved!
So the danger of warp drive is that it MIGHT cause a problem. Maybe. Rather like mankind doing stuff might lead to climate change. And this idiot episode led onto to ridiculous restrictions on warp speed in other episodes until the producers got tired of the idea.
A big problem of trying to make an allegory about climate change, is the fact the actual science is indeed neuanced and more complicated than an 1 hour story. Trying to condense environmental activists conflict with general society who doesn't want to change behavior, became too ham fisted, and failed to show the point... Unless the point was environmental activists are nuts, which seems doubtful based on how progressive Trek ends to be.
That lady m8ght have been wrong, but you arr way to hard on her. It's brushing up against hysteria. She reminds me a lot of Lois Gibbs, one of the great unsung American heroes. Of course everyone always leaves out the part about how she ultimately won her battle, but I digress.
I like this episode because it draws a parallel with global warming today. 30 years later many people still reject that global warming is real. The evidence of it is everywhere.
It's also worth noting that recently research has shown that vitamin d deficiency from a lack of sun exposure causes for more problems for the human body, including a greater risk of heart attack, stroke, and many other things. It is also worth noting that the same research pointed out that most skin cancers are benign and if everybody is aware of the risk of skin cancer and catches it early it is very easy to remove safely. But when the current doctors are confronted by this their reply is "oh, we would never raise our patients risk of skin cancer, that would be unethical!" But continuing the current standing wisdom and raising the risk of so many other problems (actually almost guaranteeing various other problems) is ethical to them. Because they say so. This isn't isolated either. The same effect has happened with salt intake, which actually guarantees repeat heart attacks if you decrease a person's salt intake after a heart attack. Butter was considered evil McKillar until margarine was proven worse, but butter and fats are still considered evil by many, even though you need fat in your diet to process your vitamins and risk malnutrition on a low fat diet. Soy can actually throw a body out of balance by either increasing estrogen-like chemicals too much in women, which actually causes breast cancer to develop far faster in the presence of soy, but can also screw up a male body, causing various issues and sometimes what is called estrogen dominance syndrome. Oh, and Einstein's theories weren't fully adopted until the generation after he introduced them, because the generation at the time refused to consider them because they had their modern wisdom. So it actually doesn't surprise me if the researchers in this episode did try proper channels, and got rebuffed because Starfleet had their research and they didn't care what anybody else said. I still condemn the researchers for being terrorists by the end of the episode, and for the plot line of the warp drives destroying the universe being stupid. But the scientific community and governments ignoring evidence of them being wrong? Utterly and completely believable because I've seen it dozens of times. And that's without considering things like the Tuskegee experiments and other events caused by government malfeasance or idiocy which killed people. If you look up Ruby ridge and you dig into it, the wife of the man in that standoff was killed because a sniper shot through a door against orders because the orders were to not shoot through a door if the target behind was not 100% sure. But the sniper shot through the door anyway and then got cleared because he was following orders, despite the shot that killed wife disobeying orders. So yeah, Starfleet ignoring evidence of a problem doesn't surprise me. Starfleet actually causing a lot of the problems wouldn't surprise me either.
I'm glad I'm not the only person on TH-cam who can go on a rant about known examples of scientific and governmental malfeasance while making sense and not coming across like a crazy person who just learned English yesterday. Also, Ruby Ridge was WAAAAY worse than just that. The entire opp against the Weavers was illegal and retaliation for Randy not taking entrapment bait, and Viki Weaver was pregnant and almost at full term when her and her baby were murdered by a government sniper, who's manslaughter charges (even though the homicide was intentional ) were later dropped.
Massive Vitamin D deficiency causes health problems, yes, for example osteoporosis. HEART ATTACKS AND STROKES ARE NOT AMONG THEM. Also, your dumb conspiracy theory ass seems to be unaware that humans can also get sufficient Vitamin D from specific foods; there are lists, look it up. How do you think people in the arctic circle (i.e. the Inuit) have survived for millenia? Reduced skin pigmentation in populations living at higher latitudes is also an evolutionary adaptation to lack of sunlight in long winter months. And finally, modern technology has graced us with UV lamps. But you would rather get skin cancer. and for people living in countries without a proper health care (like the USA), visits to hospitals, surgery and cancer treatment can quickly become financially ruinous.
Given both its historical isolationism and how that isolationism was forcibly ended, Japan might possibly be the least apropos country on Earth for the metaphor here, but there could also be a strong parallel. A better episode might have explored that, but the writers also liked cats.
Uuuuurrrrgh this one. And that whole warp speed limit rule was so impactful, many writers later just disregarded or worked around it.
I never liked the speed limit rule, nor the idea Warp Drive damages space-time. I think this episode would have done better if it was just this specific area of space that was suffering because it is rare in some way, akin to a delicate ecosystem not touched until it was just recently discovered.
@@thedigodragon It'd have been fine as commentary had they actually let the episode have long term consequences and then followed through by showing those consequences and the sacrifices that have to be made. But that's now how television worked back then and that's not how Star Trek has ever worked past or present. Serialized television in the US was in its infancy when that episode aired and Star Trek was and still is about using bullshit technobabble as a magic wand to make problems go away. Which means that the idea of the episode was bad because it should have been obvious that no one would every follow up on it.
Ironically, it in a way makes room for metacommentary on how we're dealing with that exact sort of problem: pretend it isn't happening or that it's too big a problem and do nothing about it rather than making any sacrifices. Even the supposedly enlightened utopian society will just stick their heads in the sand if the reality is too unpleasant.
I remembered hating this episode, but I didn't remember just how many ways it was bad, holy cow. The subplots are even more inane than the main plot, and that's really saying something. Her plan was to create the disaster she had warned about, because . . . why? Apparently this has _never happened before,_ and people won't take the idea seriously until it does. So . . . wait for it to happen, right? That makes more sense than doing it yourself.
It's as if, to prove the danger of nuclear winter, disarmament activists detonated 100 nukes to start one.
@@EebstertheGreat Well when you put it like that it almost sounds like real life.
No really. Look what's currently happening in real life. The Plastic Environmental issue that they're talking about, has what, 30% lobbyists that threaten and try to coerce people into saying " _muh recyclin' works!_ " even though, it's proven that recycling doesn't work and it's just big fat megacorps that want to earn money while subsequently contributing even harder to global warming. We aren't taking it seriously, and those that are taking it seriously aren't being heard, and those that don't want it to be heard in the first place are doing their damndest to try and handwave the issue away.
I think people should look at this episode in a different light, while still acknowleding how bad the scientist is.
Would the crew of the Enterprise, given a serious damn to this if it had resorted peacefully?
@@thedigodragon Well, yeah... because this episode demonstrated (again) that the writers really didn't understand the concept of warp drive. It has nothing to do with subspace. Subspace was invented by early writers to explain how their communications can travel fast enough to be useful. But warp creates a gravitational "warp" in normal space time, which allows the ship to go FTL by technically not really moving at all.
My headcanon is that the sister was plain wrong.
The warp core breach of her ship interacted with the Tetryon fields, mentioned earlier in the episode, and the Subspace rift it created is unrelated to her work.
A false positive because of shoddy scientific work.
Voyager's variable nacelle pylons are simply a new technology to increase warp drive efficiency to get the Warp 9.975 cruising speed.
And all her "heroic self-sacrifice" brought... was the uncounted deaths on her home planet due to climate change she caused.
I like this headcanon a lot, I hope you don't mind if I adopt it as my own! The sister's 'scientific' attitude is too reckless and her desperate 'proof' is simply obscene in its violence. I don't have words for how insane she is.
@@xBINARYGODx
Why should I follow your headcanon when you apparently don't enjoy speculating about in-universe reasons for something (especially the stupid parts)?
My headcanon is my headcanon.
Yours is yours.
I don't demand you to make my headcanon your own... unlike you.
So, kindly frak off.
Summary: Some aliens are mad about climate change so they shoot the radiator of an ambulance while it was on the way to a call.
This episode had a very, "wait, the script is due to tomorrow?!" feel.
That's possible - but i got the feeling they had a finished script that was all about the environmental story and then realized it was way too short when filming.
Happened with other episodes too, like with 30 Days on Voyager, where the whole frame story of Tom sitting in the brigg was added because they didn't get to feature length.
Honestly I love seeing the crew doing basic stuff like data taking care of his cat.
A day in the life, anthology style could be a delight
Like he knows anything about cats anyway. At first he thought Spot was male. And later on Spot had kittens!
I propose a way to fix this episode. Dump the warp stuff, and focus the episode entirely on Spot. But, have him turn into a tiger and begin hunting down the crew, Alien style. But at the same time, Data has persuaded picard that Spot must be brought in alive so that the transformation can be reversed. Now we have a much better (albeit somewhat strange) episode.
I mean, we once had Riker turn into a Neanderthal and Barclay turn into a man-spider...
No no no. The scientist has been manipulated by creatures in subspace. Her sudden rash action opened a portal to their realm and they got aboard the Enterprise through Geordi manipulating the sensors to make an easier bridge for them to enter through. They appear as monsters to hunt down the crew. But they did not understand they were dealing with the perfect organism. It's structural perfection matched only by its hostility.
So once again, the day is saved by, Spot.
I'd watch that for a dollar!
@@TF2CrunchyFrog And Spot was turned into a an iguana ...
@@lordmontymord8701 well that’s just common knowledge, all house cats evolved from iguanas who were affected by nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll 🤷
A plot point so inane that writers quickly contrived a new "environmentally friendly warp drive" to nullify this.
When you have change the nature of your universe for a single episode plot that is a something that should be thought out. Clearly this was not. I remember how in Stargate when they started having starships with transporters and the writers bitching how they had to start writing around the transporters which they had just introduced...
Gotta love, too, how the solution was just to have the nacelles move a little. I mean... what? I guess that's the reason they never actually stated that onscreen. The original idea was dumb, the solution was even dumber, and they knew it.
@@Swiftbow I love the solution with the Intrepid-class. Of course the nacelles on ALL previous ships had the same angle, so that's what caused the problem ... or maybe not. Just a stupid gimmick, like the warp nacelles not being connected to the ships in the 32nd century ...
My dad presented a theory when this episode aird that they lost most of the footage for the main plot and had to pad out the air time with b-roll.
I always thought his last name was Soong, and Entry was his middle name
According to Jeri Taylor, the episode's B plot originally involved Geordi's sister coming on-board the Enterprise to help him adjust to the death of his mother in the earlier Season 7 episode "Interface". But she ordered it removed out of concern that the viewers who hadn't seen that episode wouldn't understand what happened.
Surely there would have been a way to weave that in naturally. A story about a dead parent can be done without it having been an episode. Like with Riker’s mother.
@@danielyeshe They introduced us to Kurn without having to constantly remind us about Mogh. They gave/cursed us with Alexander despite K'ehleyr only showing up once before. I swear, Pillar and Behr were the only showrunners who had any idea what they were doing.
@@andrewklang809 First thought that came to mind was Behr and DS9. How dare the plot of one episode affect another one!
@@andrewklang809 Yeah exactly!
If true thats insulting to trek fans, they could follow completed plots and themes but they wouldn't understand something that could easily be waved into to a few lines of dialog?
If we do the fan theory stuff: It could be that starfleet was experimenting with variable geometry nacelles on the Intrepid, and after this event a fleet wide search went out to find data on ships that did less damage to subspace, the Intrepid's data showed it's unique design was better, and that pushed more into production after this event.
Last time I was this early the USS Yamato hadn't been destroyed yet
You know, the whole "warp travel is destroying subspace" was an interesting idea in TNG. But unfortunately, I remember it coming up like two times after it was introduced, and each time it was in relation to how the ship got a permit to disregard that speed limit...
"Swept under the rug" and "only referenced when we've got an exception to ignore it" are sadly the most realistic analogies this episode ended up providing.
The workaround I remember is that writers confined it only to this small section of the Galaxy for some reason, and so it got ignored by most scripts and such.
It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but it doesn’t work for this series. An episodic show with the scope being half of the galaxy is not the right place for it. It would work in a series that was planned out, but you can’t just dig up a script from the fan mail vault and dump “the basis for this series being possible is actually destroying the universe” in the final season of a show that is mostly supposed to be viewed as a series of self contained episodes.
@@hariman7727 No, they said the speed-limit was going to be introduced everywhere. It's like TP said: it was mentioned again, but the Enterprise was allowed to go beyond it thanks to emergencies. And then Voyager claimed the problem was fixed with the Intrepid-class - and from the looks of it all the older ships were retrofitted.
But i think it would have worked way better if it just happened in that region. If this applies to the whole galaxy then it seems really weird nobody noticed something elsewhere - and also warp-travel has been a thing for a long time, so ...
There are so many plots, I could plotz!
Why is it the first scene of these aliens instantly makes me think of just stop oil craptavists.
It's probably the full-frontal cranial rectitis on display.
The warp drive speed limit was one of the dumbest concepts Star Trek writers ever came up with.
All the TNG actors were under the impression they would be coming back for a season 8 at this point in the show's run. Since it was painfully evident they ran out of ideas in season 7, I can only imagine they would have been scraping the bottom of the barrel in that season 8.
I remember Marina Sirtis saying she felt the show should have kept going, but I'm assuming she was more focused on having fun with her castmates and just staying working. I remember even at the time, it was clear the series was in decline. The episode that made that unavoidable was, appropriately, The Descent. Good thing we still got The Pegasus.
Well, season one of Voyager was essentially TNG season 8...I think we can draw conclusions from that.
Episodes like this are a good argument against having a set episode count for a season. Because really, it feels like season 7 would've been better served trimming its episode count a bit so they could focus on trying to better refine the ones that were good ideas.
For a lot of complaints towards the new shows having less episodes per season, and less seasons on top of that, I wonder if theyre even aware of how all three TNG era shows were running on fumes by their 7th seasons with just as many mixed/bad as good.
@@myriadmediamusingsI think the issue is that even the six or eight episode series are stretched thin by that point now.
There's series that are obviously half of what the plot intended and the other half is just filler because it's a movie that got six or eight episodes.
@@hariman7727 Exactly. It didn't fix this problem, it just made sure we don't get the standalone gems. We still get the bad filler (look at most of Season 4 Discovery, or Season 1 Picard) in the middle of a stretched-too-thin feature film plot.
It was a different time. Not so many channels, not so many other options for things to do. You were expected to air the same show, every week, all year long. And half of them were supposed to be new, as reruns always got worse ratings. 100 episodes was the magic number for syndication and years of continued profits, and every producer wanted to get to it ASAP.
@@hariman7727 That's because our standards for TV shows are so much higher now (and rightfully so). You don't make filler episodes these days unless you have a really, really good idea for a standalone.
As a fan of TECH drama on TNG increasing sensor efficiency and being immediately notified by the bridge that something was picked up on sensors was pretty cool.
The worst thing about this episode is it was used as the excuse for Voyager to have moving nacelles
Which I don't recall ever even coming up in the show itself. Ironically, because Voyager was under special circumstances trying to get home fast, and never traversing the same space more than once, it doesn't even matter.
I'm going to give this episode's message an A+. An environmentalist making things worse because they are so fixated on one problem that their shoddy science makes things worse for everyone, sounds a hell of a lot like the response to nuclear power getting us into this climate change hellhole.
The USS Intrepid may not have those nacelles. Voyager was likely being built during this time, so in theory the hey could have whipped the bendy nacelles up and slapped em onto this ship that was already being built to test them out.
The thing is that if one of these rifts happened close enough to the planet, it is an extinction event.
So she didn't cause what she was trying to prevent. That makes a huge difference IMO.
Warp drive shouldn't be useable near planets or any large gravitational mass. The object's gravity would disrupt the warp field. But warp is usually treated as nearly magical in Star Trek, rather than using the actual scientific theory.
It sure would b crazy if environmental activists started doing pointless and harmful things that at best negatively disposed the public to their cause and at worst harmed others needlessly. Its good such things only exist in the realm of fiction.
Damn you really tore this episode a new subspace-rift! Not unjustified though. That "scientist" witch was more a religious fanatic. Is it wrong that I liked the Spot sub-plot, a bit of slice-of-life on the Enterprise? Warp-drives causing environmental damage could have been an interesting idea to use later, but it just got handwaved away.
Nothing wrong with enjoying a little slice-of-life antics. Some of the best Dragon Ball content to come out of Super was stuff showing the characters between the main sagas after all.
It doesn't make sense, though. Warp is a gravitational bubble. If warp damages subspace, then every single star and planet would be doing the same damage. And black holes would rip everything asunder.
@@Swiftbow The only way it can make sense would be if subspace was weak in that system. Of course, this is just me playing devil's advocate for the contrived message episode and if it was really this one system the more logical way to fix this would be evacuating the planet instead of imposing a speed limit on shups that would never pass through it anyway.
Ah, the warp speed limit. As Linkara put it, it’s an example of “destroying your own storytelling engine”. (Somewhat literally in this case). It’s a lesson more creators should take to heart. Before you make a huge change to your setting, consider how you might be hampering future writers. In a story about exploring space, nerfing the space ships is like finally getting Gilligan and his friends off the island. Once you do that, what is the show about?
And the other end of the spectrum is the spore drive from discovery.
@@nitePhyyre And Discovery even had an episode that did this exact same plot, where the Spore Drive was destroying everything. *Everything*.
And then they forgot about it and pretended it's fine. Even when they moved to the future where everyone blew up due to bad warp drive.
@@nitePhyyre And curing death in Into Darkness.
@@JosephDaviesYet another example of the endless stupidity of STD. The first example was the fact that they gave the show the initials STD.
I have similar contempt to Solo trying to establish hyperdrives as needed a separate fuel, and there only being few planets that can provide it. Because if you treat that as canonical going forward, then it completely screws up Star Wars FTL to resemble Dune.
And the Hyperdrive ram of Episode 8 is also setting breaking with the vast numbers of hyperdrives allowing for the potential of mass weaponization of prolific technology to cause such warfare that even 40k would be telling you to tone it down.
The thing I never hear anyone talk about in relation to this episode is that she actually didn't prove anything. The research confirmed that a massive burst would have caused a problem, but they weren't convinced that it accumulated over time. So she went out and... Created a massive burst.
I think you missed the point of the conversion rate "game" Geordi had going on. It's a link to the main plot on the warp drive, that he and other engineers are clowning around trying to win benchmark contests, while being blissfully ignorant the piece of equipment they're faffing with is doing all this damage to subspace. Akin to pimping your ride, pre the times knowing your vehicle contributes to climate change.
Fair enough. It still doesn't make it very entertaining to watch
Audio: the clips have a weird audio issue, like it's out of phase or something, including the intro sequence.
Welcome to greenpeace IN SPACE!
Me, trying to read waaay too much into the cat plot: Does Spot represent Nature, which can be studied and understood, but never tamed? Or does Spot represent us, and our habits, which resist training even when it's for our own good??
Yes!
Seriously, I think that might be what they thought they were doing with it. But it never coalesces.
The end does not justify the means
Am I the only one who really liked the music in this episode? I'm curious.
This episode would be much better if they made it into a holodeck episode. For example Data and Geordi decide to use holodeck to get help with Spot, so they request cat expert, but due to negative subspace wedgie they end up with cat expert, thousand misbehaving holographic cats, not enough litter boxes and safety protocols disabled...
I thought this when I first this episode in the 1990's and I'll say it again... Paint Drying: The Next Generation... I never got the warp destroying the environment back when I first watched it because I was too goddamn bored. I only watched it all the way through years later to find out what someone was referencing.
Ah, while this episode pretty much was a hard sit even back in the 90s, I really don't think the working title "Season they ran out of ideas" is completly fair. They had some very good ones in this season too. I found the quality loss in the last season of DS9 more noteable when they pushed their war back for more spiritual ghoststories and a singing hologram, but I never hear Chuck damn the whole season as "Season they forgot what their plot was" for that either. I mean that one also had some good stuff in between, so I'm a little confused why Season 7 of TNG gets a way rougher treatment.
Taken as a whole it’s quite clear the show had begun to decline in the last two seasons. They were not inclined to advance these characters any further and these characters are largely the same as they were in season 2. Geordi career might have advanced 12 years in one season but he’s still the same person. They all are.
That means the writers look for message shows. Or start fleshing out characters families which doesn’t work this late in the show.
Introducing a new character in the last season of DS9 was such a dumb move. It derailed the momentum of the show since several episodes were focused on Ezri. The war plot was practically put on hold so we can learn about this uninteresting character to replace Dax who already largely receded into the background by season 6 anyway. Many guest stars were brought to the fore who played pivotal roles and felt like main characters, so there was no need to even replace Dax, imo. Anyway, I guess my point is season 7 of DS9 had a very different problem from TNG's season 7 and it was completely avoidable. TNG just ran out of steam.
@@rc8937 Having Ezri as a replacement Dax was an odd choice for sure, maybe they should just have been Daxless for that last Season, I didn’t dislike Ezri, she just didn’t have any room to grow. A bigger problem was the whole Pah Wraith story combined with a Dukat who needed something to do after Waltz, that was imo worse than Dax since he somehow was like a new character at this point, so a similar issue, episodes were needed to present the new him. While DS9 spiraled downwards starting mid season 6, TNG just had more mediocre episodes in that last season (no doubt about that). It just seems like DS9 gets less flak for it, guess SFdebris is more of a DS9 person in the end.
One of the few episodes of TNG I retconned out of existence of my mind. I'm so glad they eventually just ignored this stupid crap.
Didn't Lower Decks retcon this episode?
In all fairness, Data and Spot were hilarious, due to data not understanding cats and also due to Brent Spiner being able to play something so with a straight face.
A completely forgot the engineering and ferengi parts of this episode.
And the environmentalism part of the episode is typically preachy and pointless because it's a contrived lesson instead of a discussion on how to protect the environment without reducing us to horse and buggy days/killing half the planet at minimum due to the inability to produce food because the environmentalists are also against modern food production.
There's certain Central African countries that implemented full-on environmentalist food production and within a year or two their government was deposed because the people were starving due to low food production.
But that country's environmentalism score was through the roof!... Based on the blood of the people who starved and suffered.
I think this episode got one thring right and that the activists in it, which remind me of modern groups like just stop oil who basically go about blocking traffic and actively try to ruin everyday's people's lives and demand we all stop living lives and just return to just surviving. A good example is the people who think we should live under the same conditions as we did during lockdowns as they were good for the environment.
Historically protests don't work unless you are making yourself a pain in the general publics ass. We have seen recently that low key protests are ineffective and easily dismissed. Kneeling at a football game is as gentle a protest as one could hope for and he still caught shit for it and nothing changed, so, as Data points out, terrorism is an effective tool for social change. And it's entirely the fault of people like you that choose to dismiss less radical protests.
Thank you. Chuck. An excellent review of a very forgettable episode.
I like the fact Chuck brings up the Voyager connection. Even at the time being a dumb kid when this came out I found the whole warp speed limit thing odd. But I guess considering the double nickels wasn't that old to someone in 1993 by from my point of view as a kid the speed limit was always 55 it just was a thing. But star ships already have natural speed limits because of how fast they can go and that isa much bigger factor to most ship captains than some random subspace damage.
16:55 "And a reminder to us all of the important environmental message: "Be careful when using faster than life technology""
Wut?
I don't get what they wanted to do, assuming they had actually kept the warp-drive limitation going forward. Is it all warp drives or would we just see a switch to like, the type the Romulans use? Was this about limiting how far the show could explore?
It seems pretty clear they weren't thinking about anything but their *message.* The _Enterprise_ D spent most of its time as a courier, a fire truck, or a consulate. Very little actual exploring.
Is this episode the reason we have moronic plots in later shows (which aer shit on their own right but include stupid modifications because of this *looks at floating engines of STD* )
I mean...there was a year or two between this episode and Voyager to decommission one Intrepid and launch another...
When it comes to the interpid that gordi is competing with its probably just a different ship named intrepid this episode takes place a couple of years before voyager starts so it's possible to have new ship built by then
If that is the case, then what would have happened was the ship must have been destroyed/lost/retired and then pretty quickly decided to reuse the name.
And I find it being retired unlikely if it must be new enough for it's engine conversion ratio could compete with the flagship. So that leaves them being destroyed/lost and then no one had any problem with quickly replacing them. Which I suppose matches with Gene's "There is no need for mourning in the future."
@@takeru3159I think it could be the Intrepid D or something because the Intrepid shows up on the Original Series. It could've been rebuilt/refitted like the Enterprise has been.
@@takeru3159 Ships have been lost in real life with no one killed but the ship beyond repair. It could have been an old ship that got a refit as a technology demonstrator. An energy being could have turned it into a pumpkin and transported the crew to medieval Europe. There are infinite explanations.
@takeru3159 it doesn't necessarily need to compete with the Enterprise in absolute terms, Jeordie is talking percentages, the Intrepid could be a 50 year old Excelsior class with refits bringing it up close to current standards, from that point on the engineer is looking to improve things incrementally from ita slightly trailing position. So Geordie and they go by percentages over baseline.
Also, all the work discussed is specifically the reaction chamber of the warp core, it's plausible that an older or lesser ship would have an all but identical warp core even if on the whole the ships systems ate lacking compared to the new and well integrated ship.
Think of an old car with a primitive suspension a floppy chassis and poor aerodynamics, but with a late model engine swapped in, something that's very common. This owner challenges a friend who owns a brand new car with the same engine in it to see who can tune to the greatest brake specific fuel consumption. Since this is entirely an engine related process the shortfalls of the older platform don't really play a part.
Regarding the Intrepid issue: I completely agree with your assessment of the Voyager writing team; however, I can make a case that works around their incompetence...which means I have to do their homework for them. To be honest, I'd rather do homework for Berman's team than do any for Kurtzman's Hacks.
There are two possibilities:
1. The Intrepid mentioned in this episode is not an Intrepid Class ship, likely an Excelsior, Ambassador or an old Constellation Class ship. Considering the timetable of TNG's final season and Voyager's first episode, The Intrepid Class was likely already a work in progress due to the threat of the Borg and was nearing the final stages of completion when that DumbA$$ Scientist martyred her way into an idiotic death to prove her TARD point. A FAR MORE BRILLIANT Scientist quickly solved this issue, and it was quickly fast-tracked into the class's design, it was THAT easy of a fix to this Stupidity in Sub-Space. The old Intrepid was decommissioned sometime before season 7 ended and first Intrepid class ship was launched with Voyager being completed sometime afterwards.
Or...
2. Everything I said above is still the same, except the Intrepid Class wasn't the original name for the class. The U.S.S. Intrepid was still decommissioned as planned and some Starfleet admiral thought the "Kurtzman Class" sounded extremely lame, and had it changed to the Intrepid.
Both are plausible.
Considering that the Federation seems to go for the US/British method of naming the ships when they order them, it seems likely something spectacularly destructive happened to the _Intrepid_ if the name was both unexpectedly free _and_ commemorating it was a big enough deal that something like the next ship out of the shipyards was regifted its name.
I honestly forgot the Spot/Data/Geordi episode is the same episode as the Terrorists/Warp Drive Bad episode. They don't go together and both were p*ss poorly handled.
Edit: I really don't like this episode. If it's not being a slog to get through, it's being preachy and insufferable.
Far be it from me to defend *FREAKING VOYAGER,* of all shows, but... here we are.
The existence of USS _Intrepid_ at the time of this episode does not break continuity with USS _Voyager,_ an _Intrepid_-class ship, being built with modified propulsion arrangements based on information derived from this episode. it's not at all unusual for different members of a given class of ship to differ in their details; on the contrary, it is entirely ordinary and expected, especially for larger vessels which are slower to build. This is why, for example, people who really know ships can often identify which specific ship from a given class appears in a photograph, even if the photo doesn't show the ship's name or hull number. Furthermore, those differences can be quite substantial, resulting in significant differences in performance across members of the same class (see the US Navy's battleships of the early Dreadnought era, which were generally ordered in pairs - one of each pair propelled by the brand-new geared steam turbines, and the other with the older, tried-and-tested (but less powerful) Vertical Triple Expansion engines).
That said - given the general level of knowledge of matters naval on display throughout the run of the show(s), I'm pretty confident that this is an example of the writers hitting the mark by accident. It's entirely possible that none of them even noticed that they'd already used the name Intrepid in TNG; and even if they did, it's nearly certain they simply thought re-using a ship name was a bit of clever continuity, with no idea what it actually meant for USS _Voyager_ to be an _"Intrepid_-class" ship.
A more simple explanation is the writers used the name Intrepid to mirror TOS, in which the Enterprise had a sister ship of that name which got destroyed. A quick way to hint the Intrepid is another Galaxy class ship in this episode.
History nit-pick: the only time the USN did the mixed propulsion thing was the _Delaware_ class, in part because the Navy (justifiably) didn't believe the US industrial base was quite 'there' with making battleship turbines.
That said, it's a valid point that different ships of the same class are by no means identical; creations at that scale are almost always artisinal creations, with the official blueprints more suggestions for how they're supposed to go rather than an exact representation. Some of the French pre-dreadnought classes illustrate this far better than the differences within the _Delawares,_ though, where if the ships were built in different shipyards you probably couldn't tell they were 'sisters.'
Really? FTL travel can be DANGEROUS?! Shocking!
The thing is, other species in Trek have had warp travel for millenia before humans even built spaceships. For example the Vulcans: Romulus was colonized from Vulcan millenia before. If all warp tracel constantly damaged subspace, you would imagine something had been noticed long before by various space empires? So it's more likely that subspace was "damaged" by something unknown in that specific area near the planet.
With climate chance due to humans releasing massive amounts of CO2 and Methane from burning fossile fuels (for the past 220 years) and cutting down forests (for the past 5000 years since the Bronze age) and the side effect of acidification of the oceans, we have comparisons (for example the Permian Extinction) and can directly observe the effects worldwide.
They think Spot is uncontrollable, try taming my cat. He's a fur covered asshole!😸
Happy in Paraguay.
Spot thing could work if it was more a metaphor for some other issue of controlling someone. But they didn't do that, it was just padding.
As for the environmental message, why not something like a trial or stumbling onto a long dead civilization, and show an embittered, despairing scientist who watched their people descend into ruin by something they spent decades trying to warn about. Make it a tragedy and a contrast to ST idealism by reminding the Enterprise crew that sometimes people screw up, and when they do it's not always WW3 and humanity gets a second chance. Sometimes you just die.
To be fair, not all starship classes are named after their lead ship. Starfleet's first starships were called the NX class, not the Enterprise class, the Parliament class ships are named after cities that serve as the seats of parliamentary democracies (such as the USS Vancouver) but I don't believe there's a USS Parliament. The California class ships are named after places in California but I don't believe that there's a USS California.
I suspect that you'd find that those ships are _also_ referred to by their lead ship. The British R-class battleships are also known as the _Revenge_ class, Flower class corvettes are sometimes called _Gladiolus_ class, and so on.
NX is the designation for prototypes. Hence the Defiant's designation started with NX.
@@km_icebear After the foundation of the Federation, yes. From that point on, NX is used to denote prototypes/testbed ships. But before that, NX was the name of the NX class of starships, the first ships in Starfleet. But either way, that doesn't invalidate the point that not all starship classes are named after their lead ship.
Was that Christian Bale!?
Cats do pretty much whatever they want anyway
One for the dumpster.
Get rid of one of the plots, and this could be a pretty good Lower Decks episode.
People criticise Discovery episodes for all sorts of dialogue and emotion that seem inappropriate to the tense scenes that they’re in, amongst numerous other alleged issues. But it really can’t be as bad as these attempts at “slice of life” scenes, with Data & Geordi just doing the most yawn-worthy parts of their jobs, whilst doing nothing to further the story.
I must have seen this episode two or three times, but only remembered the failed environmental message. Then again there's nothing rememberable about all the padding.
Yeah, it really didn't work. And the interesting point is that the problems caused by the warp-drive are only seen in this part of space - yet they say they need a speed-limit everywhere. Even though warp-travel has been a thing for a pretty long time. Of course you can say that maybe this region is more vulnerable thanks to subspace-anomalies that have always been around and this will eventually happen elsewhere too. But it still seems weird.
No wonder this was ignored in the future - with only Voyager remarking that the Intrepid-class has an upgraded warp-drive that doesn't cause damage like this. Problem solved!
DS9 Season 2 > TNG Season 7
This episode would've been better if it led to a follow up episode but it didn't.
So the danger of warp drive is that it MIGHT cause a problem. Maybe. Rather like mankind doing stuff might lead to climate change. And this idiot episode led onto to ridiculous restrictions on warp speed in other episodes until the producers got tired of the idea.
A big problem of trying to make an allegory about climate change, is the fact the actual science is indeed neuanced and more complicated than an 1 hour story. Trying to condense environmental activists conflict with general society who doesn't want to change behavior, became too ham fisted, and failed to show the point... Unless the point was environmental activists are nuts, which seems doubtful based on how progressive Trek ends to be.
USS Ho-Daddy!!
That lady m8ght have been wrong, but you arr way to hard on her. It's brushing up against hysteria. She reminds me a lot of Lois Gibbs, one of the great unsung American heroes. Of course everyone always leaves out the part about how she ultimately won her battle, but I digress.
I like this episode because it draws a parallel with global warming today. 30 years later many people still reject that global warming is real. The evidence of it is everywhere.
Yeah, I hated this episode.
It's also worth noting that recently research has shown that vitamin d deficiency from a lack of sun exposure causes for more problems for the human body, including a greater risk of heart attack, stroke, and many other things.
It is also worth noting that the same research pointed out that most skin cancers are benign and if everybody is aware of the risk of skin cancer and catches it early it is very easy to remove safely.
But when the current doctors are confronted by this their reply is "oh, we would never raise our patients risk of skin cancer, that would be unethical!"
But continuing the current standing wisdom and raising the risk of so many other problems (actually almost guaranteeing various other problems) is ethical to them.
Because they say so.
This isn't isolated either.
The same effect has happened with salt intake, which actually guarantees repeat heart attacks if you decrease a person's salt intake after a heart attack.
Butter was considered evil McKillar until margarine was proven worse, but butter and fats are still considered evil by many, even though you need fat in your diet to process your vitamins and risk malnutrition on a low fat diet.
Soy can actually throw a body out of balance by either increasing estrogen-like chemicals too much in women, which actually causes breast cancer to develop far faster in the presence of soy, but can also screw up a male body, causing various issues and sometimes what is called estrogen dominance syndrome.
Oh, and Einstein's theories weren't fully adopted until the generation after he introduced them, because the generation at the time refused to consider them because they had their modern wisdom.
So it actually doesn't surprise me if the researchers in this episode did try proper channels, and got rebuffed because Starfleet had their research and they didn't care what anybody else said.
I still condemn the researchers for being terrorists by the end of the episode, and for the plot line of the warp drives destroying the universe being stupid.
But the scientific community and governments ignoring evidence of them being wrong?
Utterly and completely believable because I've seen it dozens of times.
And that's without considering things like the Tuskegee experiments and other events caused by government malfeasance or idiocy which killed people.
If you look up Ruby ridge and you dig into it, the wife of the man in that standoff was killed because a sniper shot through a door against orders because the orders were to not shoot through a door if the target behind was not 100% sure.
But the sniper shot through the door anyway and then got cleared because he was following orders, despite the shot that killed wife disobeying orders.
So yeah, Starfleet ignoring evidence of a problem doesn't surprise me.
Starfleet actually causing a lot of the problems wouldn't surprise me either.
I'm glad I'm not the only person on TH-cam who can go on a rant about known examples of scientific and governmental malfeasance while making sense and not coming across like a crazy person who just learned English yesterday.
Also, Ruby Ridge was WAAAAY worse than just that. The entire opp against the Weavers was illegal and retaliation for Randy not taking entrapment bait, and Viki Weaver was pregnant and almost at full term when her and her baby were murdered by a government sniper, who's manslaughter charges (even though the homicide was intentional ) were later dropped.
Massive Vitamin D deficiency causes health problems, yes, for example osteoporosis. HEART ATTACKS AND STROKES ARE NOT AMONG THEM. Also, your dumb conspiracy theory ass seems to be unaware that humans can also get sufficient Vitamin D from specific foods; there are lists, look it up. How do you think people in the arctic circle (i.e. the Inuit) have survived for millenia? Reduced skin pigmentation in populations living at higher latitudes is also an evolutionary adaptation to lack of sunlight in long winter months. And finally, modern technology has graced us with UV lamps.
But you would rather get skin cancer. and for people living in countries without a proper health care (like the USA), visits to hospitals, surgery and cancer treatment can quickly become financially ruinous.
Gah this one was so terrible. Envirowacko propaganda.
Given both its historical isolationism and how that isolationism was forcibly ended, Japan might possibly be the least apropos country on Earth for the metaphor here, but there could also be a strong parallel. A better episode might have explored that, but the writers also liked cats.