flipper wrote:

The characters having more than a dozen brain cells between them is
one reason *why* I liked the original Star Trek.

Spock would walk over the computer and tell it to "compute to the last digit
the value of pi", and then explained his actions in a few words. When they
did anything similar on The Dumbed-Down Generation they would take a few
minutes and a lot of BS to explain what they were doing.

"Phase variance". It's called JITTER guys.


One of my favorite lines is a small one, perhaps unnoticed by some, in
Balance of Terror where Kirk has been sending quarter hour reports to
the nearest command base and in the middle of things Uhura reports
"Approximately three hours before receiving a reply to our first
message."

That highlights their isolation and his 'command' position. They're
essentially 'alone' with everything resting on his skill and
judgement. Of course, he might be excoriated later but, in the heat of
battle, he's 'it'.

That paradigm made it fun. On TNG they almost never explored anything
unknown. They were always on an assignment, usually diplomatic, where they
had specific orders already. Way to make a boring show.

Voyager had some good episodes because they had the original paradigm again.
Of course it was even dumber at other times.


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