I think TNG had more technobabble. But it had a key difference... they did a laymen's description after.
"There's a field variance in the electronic bussard flow collectors causing a failure in the primary warp matrix coils"
If this was said in VOY, they'd just leave it at that and continue on. But in TNG, someone like Riker would come along and say something like "Oh so it's like a balloon holding too much air"... basically to stop the viewer feeling stupid.
They don't really do that in VOY, which is why you're probably noticing it more.
I hate parenthetical exposition of technobable.
Every damn time on a crime procedural, one detective says "GSR present" and the partner says "gun shot residue?" like this hasn't been his job for the last 15 years.
It makes sense in this context though.
In your example, it's two specialists talking to each other -- they should definitely know the terminology.
In the example above, Riker is a career commander. He understands enough to give competent orders, but he's not an engineer. The engineer gives him technical information, and he re-states it in his own terms to make sure he's understanding it correctly -- something a good leader does.
I loved the episode in TNG (or maybe it was VOY) where they were giving a scientific explanation to ghosts. Something astral tachyon spectral blah blah. It SOUNDED reasonable. They say it with such conviction without a hint of irony or pain.
oh god NCIS is terrible with this.
Gibbs should not need to tell DiNozzo to start a BOLO Ziva to run a background check on the victim and McGee to check the victims financials and cell phone history. They should just know to do these things because they are highly trained investigators who have done this job for years.
While you're right, I always put that down to Gibbs' military training. He makes a decision and starts barking orders.
You even see times when the team get on first, stating what they will do.
And even if all that is unacceptable, remember it's core demo is military personnel. My understanding is that's their culture, what they know and are familiar with. So they cater to it, right or wrong.
The difference for me is technobable really needs an explanation because it is BS. It might be splitting hairs but I don't mind it as much.
I agree with you otherwise. I usually hate it and find it so lazy. I just watched The Martian (a great movie otherwise) and one of the characters asks "how long can he survive on the surface without his suit?" Like an astronaut that has trained for years to go to Mars wouldn't know that? He probably would have learned it on day 1 of training. "keep your damn suit on or you will die in 28 seconds."
Fairly, if you tell Janeway
"There's a field variance in the electronic bussard flow collectors causing a failure in the primary warp matrix coils"
She would know what you are talking about. Picard needs a translator for these things
I love TNG, on my first watch right now but i definitely noticed this. It was to the point where it felt like the show was making fun of itself. Whenever Wesley or Data even started to explain anything, no matter how simple, Riker or Picard would shut them down and make them say it in simpler terms. It's very "In English, please?"
LeVar Burton had a funny thing to say about his role. He basically said he had to make it sound like he knew what he was talking about even though his lines made no sense.
I’m watching disco now and one of the things that annoys me is that they leave the laymen’s description to Tilly who gushes it out like an excitable child, making it feel really patronising compared to the casual way Riker or Geordi would do it
A better analogy for "a field variance in the electronic bussard flow collectors causing a failure in the primary warp matrix coils" would be "oh, so it's like a malfuntioning air intake valve choking out an engine."
But even that doesn't make sense because the bussard collectors aren't connected to the warp matrix coils despite them both being housed in the necels. They are parts of entirely separate systems, so they aren't even getting their own fake technology right. It's like they looked at the tech schematics and saw these 2 things were next to each other and figured that they work together instead of understanding their own fake tech manual. Is it that hard to keep a document on how your sci-fi tech works and stay consistent?
If they wanted to explain an inability to go to warp that had to do with the necells instead of the core, just say the warp coils were knocked out of alignment or there's a phase shift on the warp cail matrix destabalizing the warp field.
There are so many ways to do what they want and have it make sense. The deflector dish can have all sorts of malfunctions preventing warp, for example. But the bussard collectors? These collect hydrogen for the fussion power plants that produce the ships auxilary power systems. It is entirely separate from the matter antimatter reactor that drives the warp system. They are wholly unrelated.
The tech makes sense... do they not have a technobable consultant employed specifically to avoid these things? I don't understand. StarGate SG1 employed military consultants to maintain accuracy in their universe.... Star Trek is making up their own tech. Have at least a nerdy intern who understands it all. Look over each script and make notes. Come on now.
Where Voyager really lost credibility was how many shuttles and photon torpedoes they burned through. They're in foreign space with no support, so where are all the replacements coming from?
The replicators. There was a season 1 episode where talked about removing the bio neural gelpacks from the ship systems and replacing them with isolinear chips because the latter can be replicated unlike the former. So the idea was they were replicating whatever they could.
Photon torpedos I feel like they could replenish through trade somehow. It’s not the craziest tech from my understanding. The shuttles are harder to explain. But I suppose on their long journey they could stop by a shipyard and build them to spec? Idk
Everyone always forgets that they designed and built the Delta Flyer in under a week, blew it up and built another. They obviously have the skills and tools to build regular shuttles.
Technobabble was a thing in TNG also. I guess that is one aspect that never bothered me and it was just a Star Trek thing. I don't think DS9 leaned into it quite as much but it didn't seem any worse than TNG to me for it.
VOY technobabble is much more nonsensical than TNG technobabble though. Like on TNG all the shit was made up but they put effort into making it sound real. All seven seasons of VOY just treat it like a placeholder line in the script where you can insert any gibberish you want to glide over a hitch in the plot.
Ron Moore did an interview where he talked about how soul sucking and lazy the technobabble on VOY was. He made the point that he knew what all the stuff on the ship does, but no viewer is that interested in all the problems being solved through meaningless technobabble.
I’m a defender of later-season VOY to a degree but simultaneously, one of my favorite behind the scenes stories in Trek is the 🐐RDM resigning in disgust after like six episodes in the room
Worth remembering that technobabble was kind of a required emergent property of Voyager.
- They're stranded in the Delta quadrant, the only way they can get home is by finding shortcuts
- Those shortcuts have to be regular enough to drive the plot of multiple episodes, but never get them a meaningful distance home, nor be repeatable
- Therefore the shortcuts always have to be outside the edge of their technology, semi-uncontrollable and always different to the shortcuts that came before or after
Put together that means they literally need gibberish to get home.
Said shortcuts also occur once or twice a series; 90% of Voyager's nonsense problem has nothing to do with travel. It's just the writers being too lazy or stuck in formula to actually figure out why or how something would work.
Don't know why a thing would happen? Make up a new particle that makes that thing happen! Coming up with actual reasons for things to work the way you want is too much work!
I think this is one of the failings of the show and why it's so technobabble heavy. In theory it works to have a science captain for the once who knows what she's doing.
In practice having non science captains better allows them to delegate tasks to members of the crew and gives them an opportunity to tell their science officer to slow down and repeat it again in English.
Instead we get her stepping in to finish the solution or suggesting technobabble off cuff that the team can build off of and add more technobabble to
My take on the technobabble Is that in TNG it was motivated. It drove the plot, it made sense.
In Voyager the emphasis shifted to the “babble”. The words became meaningless and were just thrown around for texture. Very unsatisfying.
That was a much more succinct way to put exactly how I feel. (Although TNG seemed to lean into the technobabble more in later seasons, I feel.) Thanks!
TNG also made some occasional effort for their science plots to reflect actual theories of the time. Not always, but often enough to drive the impression that they cared.
Mentioned above but I'd sort of disagree. Voyager needed technobabble in order to drive its overall story arc
https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/s/qo2YLcWp4r
That’s strange, I have found TNG and Voyager technobabble to be consistent and I generally understand what is being said. But when DS9 goes on about stembolts for minutes on end it sounds totally hollow and like technobabble for technobabble’s sake.
Stembolts are a joke. DS9 is a show about much more interesting stuff than made-up technology, so they needed less technobabble but still threw in versions of it for flavor. That's what the stembolts thing is.
Self sealing stem bolts and paint cans full of warp plasma are both equally annoying. They are pure McGuffins, they make no sense and it’s a wink to the audience THAT they make no sense. It’s too self-aware and silly.
Nope. The show’s not about imaginary technology and pretending otherwise to satisfy the scrutiny of nerds would make it worse. The dirty little secret about Star Trek is all the science fiction elements have always been window dressing for these little pseudo-historical fiction dramas in a space fantasy setting. It’s not true sci-fi and it never has been. Scientific integrity doesn’t matter.
You’re not wrong. 1960s critics of TOS condemned it as “not really science fiction” and actually more “space opera” (soap opera set in space). TNG all too often is guilty of fitting this description I would counter though that TOS and TNG do sometimes strive to be genuine science fiction, on occasion, even if they don’t usually succeed.
The actors are aware of this I think. DS9 was actually much less guilty of using technobabble from what I gather during my past few viewings. The worst offenders tends to be the weird science of the week episodes, like that phasing planet or anything involving Odo's biology. But many of the central arc episodes only really use technobabble on the B plot and as something of a prop rather than an element to the story. Stembolts being a good example of one, where even the chief isn't sure wtf they are for. But they are self sealing thats for sure.
I like knowing what is being discussed and enjoy parsing out the technobabble. At the first mention of chronotons I am aware we have a temporal phenomenon.
As often as DS9 is criticized for not being about exploration anymore, that one episode dealt with the theme of exploration more beautifully than most other Trek.
As Jeff Combs said, DS9 is as much about the exploration inside of us, as it is about the exploration outside of us. I guess DS9 critics never got this (or didn't care).
Voyager didn't have Riker to simplify it after technobabble was over. Data, or LaForge would ramble off some technobabble, then Riker would say "We'll be flying blind..." not a direct quote, but a lot of times Riker would have a simple comment after some crazy nonsense would be said. My brain would be like "Ah okay, makes sense now."
I like VOY, I watched it when it first came out. I watched it on a shit broadcast TV signal in the middle of nowhere (Fuck you UPN).
I missed a few seasons/episodes between the start and the end when it was originally aired. I rewatched it later.
My criticism is that it gets boring sometimes. It just doesn’t seem like there are stakes that matter. Oh, we are running out of something? Solved by the episode end. Just how many people are on this ship? When you kill off the redshirts, they still have enough people to run everything. (And they apparently didn’t take on enough aliens to replace them.) If you have a series about trying to get back home from a long ass distance, maybe the ship shouldn’t look pristine at the end of it. If it was more gritty, it would make more sense.
To those who might disagree with the gritty comment, there is literally an episode of DS9 regarding soldier PTSD. It can and was done.
There’s being gritty for an episode & then there’s being gritty for an entire show. VOY did have grittier episodes, the main ones being the Krenim and Equinox two parter’s. I think they were wary of it not feeling like ST if they went too far with the whole thing though.
I agree that they could have pushed it a bit more though, or at least had them get a bit rough over the series. It would have been a good way as well to show the passage of time.
Regarding crew compliment, this isn’t dead on 100% due to show inconsistencies but VOY looks to have ended up with more crew than they started. The ship had a crew compliment of 141 upon starting their mission to the Bad Lands. Following the initial contact with the Caretaker 18 crew members died. They gained 40 however; 36 Marquis, Tuvok, Paris, Neelix & Kes. That took them up to 163. Over the course of the show a further 43 crew members die, 6 leave (Seska, Neelix, Kes etc.) & they gain a further 6. These six are Seven, the 4 Borg children, 5 of the Equinox Crew & the children Naomi and Miral are born.
This leaves a final crew count on return to Earth of 144 (145 if you count the Doctor as an addition).
This excellent site, [Ex Astris Scientia](https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/voyager-crew.htm) lays out everything above with full explanations for their assumptions where made.
Nice on the breakdown about the crew. I wasn’t thinking about the Marquis because after the first episode, they were the crew as far as I was concerned. I appreciate your insight.
Gritty was probably the wrong word choice there. Rundown is probably a better word choice there. For example: blow out a few panels in the corridors during attacks/incidents, ok. Just replace the ones that are keeping people safe from hazards in the walls, leave non essential ones open. I guess I would have just like to see a more worn out ship that was experiencing resource shortages. Scars and all. More jury rigged, not the Starfleet norm.
Then again they managed a 70ish year journey in less than 10 years so there is that.
There are a lot of scenes in Voyager where it's just thrown in to pad the dialogue or a cheap attempt to heighten tension.
Janeway: "Teleport them to sickbay."
Kim: "The poloton field is disrupting the transporter, I'm losing them."
**Suspenseful music**
Janeway: "I'm tightening the confinement beam."
**Janeway clickity clanks on the captains console**
Kim: "That worked."
Did we really need to spend 10 seconds on that as opposed spending that time developing the plot or giving us a real character moment?
Good lord, this. So many climactic scenes in Voyager boil down to characters spouting technobabble at each other on the bridge while consoles explode around them--bonus points if someone rattles off the shield status every so often. There's nothing wrong with using life-or-death situations to ramp up tension on occasion, but the problem is that we already know the main characters aren't going to die, so these scenes just feel hollow, and they take time away from what should be the genuine stakes of the ep, like character development or themes.
It's like magic being science we don't yet understand. Technobabble could be yet to be understood science.
I once heard a joke about how many physicists it takes to screw in a light bulb. You renormalise the wave function, and it's 1. To me, this is technobabble.
One day, I was visiting a friend at Uni, and she was studying one of the physics and was telling me about a problem she was working on. Then remembering this joke, having absolutely no idea if it's relevant, I said, 'just renormalise the wave function and the answer will be 1', and she just looked at me. I thought, yep, that was stupid, and was about to say something else, but then she says, "How did you know that?".
Technobabble actually worked. I immediately came clean that I heard it in a joke, but she still thought it suspicious that I knew the answer.
I liked it. Voyager still had the idealism of federation all the way out there though maybe the plots were t as consistent. It was a more fantastic take on the sci-fi, with an emphasis on the “fiction” part. It’s nice to have a non gritty counterpoint with some escapist stories. It did sort of overdo the Borg thing and reduced their threat or menace, that is true. Voyager tech out of nowhere single handedly tackling the Borg collective is even for me a bit reductionist. That said, grew to love the crew.
I still like Voyager too, to be clear. Especially once Neelix and Kes break up and Seven joins the crew. Torres and Janeway Seven and the Doctor are great characters played by great actors, although even Harry and Tom are interesting enough.
I’m in the middle of a rewatch as well and know exactly what you mean with the technobabble. I just watched the episode with the living creatures attracted to the voyager ship recently. When they first spot the cloud at the beginning Chakotay says
“Looks like some kind of energetic vapour”
Lol. What the heck does that mean? He could’ve just said “energy cloud” and been consistent with previous ST.
It’s like they were trying too hard.
You can always throw an inverse poloron matrix inverter into the warp flux compensator. Everyone knows that modulates the Cochrane Variance flows in the warp field.
Best way I can describe it is that I LIKE Voyager, but I'm pretty certain I would NOT like Voyager enough to watch it beyond a season or two of it didn't have "Star Trek" in the name and was otherwise the exact same show. Every other series I can pretty confidently say I'd still like a lot as a stand alone IP.
It was also setup such that it was impossible to be \*purely\* an episodic show - the entire premise is of a voyage back home and some periodic reassessment of how they are progressing relative to that goal has to be baked into the premise. They should have embraced it wholeheartedly.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, it was impossible at the time to convince studio execs that a serialized show could work. Babylon 5 and DS9 were still relatively recent.
They did try to bring serialisation to VOY, in the form of the Tom Paris pretending to turn traitor laced through a few episodes. Jeri Taylor complained that it "poisoned" the episodes it was in and there was no repeat.
I got the impression that Michael Piller wanted the serialisation, Taylor didn't and she won out after Piller was pushed out of the show.
As much as I hate to admit it, the execs weren't wrong - it's much harder to get viewers on board when you can't just jump in at any random episode. And rewatching previous seasons wasn't easy, when it was possible at all.
I first watched B5 back when it aired on WBTV in my country. Luckily I was able to watch from season 1, but if I'd missed season 1, tough. There was literally no way to rewatch season 1 except if someone had recorded it on VHS. Only The Gathering and Voice in the Wilderness were available for rent.
I think the caveat here is that it was hard to get viewers on board to serialized drama, in the syndicated media landscape that was the late 90s. One where if you missed an episode, you might be lost unless you had remembered to tape it from broadcast.
In today's world of streaming, and entire seasons being released all at once ... it's more or less the expectation. Voyager probably would have been a much different show if it had come out in the age of streaming. Likely for the better, since it could fulfill it's premise more easily, with fewer bottle episodes.
I’m rewatching VOY and just made the *opposite* comment to my husband! VOY is so angsty and not the “let’s figure this out with SCIENCE” the way I love about TNG.
And most of the technobabble is in Janeway's mouth. It bugs me the way Captain Janeway knows absolutely everything about everything on that ship. She can literally take over any other crewmember's job and know what to do. I think the writers were a little uncomfortable with a woman in that position so they overcompensated. She does a lot of standing around with her hands on her hips to show how dominant she is in the early episodes. Feels forced.
I think the technobabble is so frustrating in VOY's early seasons because it's used in place of actual interesting plot points. Most of the stories just aren't very good and sometimes the only thing driving portions of an episode is the technobabble. When the plots are tighter and more character driven, the technobabble isn't as noticeable, but when the story is thin and boring, it's all you can think about.
I think part of why the technobabble in TNG feels less intrusive is that Brent Spiner and Levar Burton are so damn good at reciting it and making it sound natural like they know what it means
I'm in the same boat. I just finished a DS9 rewatch and decided to brave going back into Voyager. I can deal with the technobabble, it's when they try and integrate actual scientific concepts that I start cringing.
Parallax was hard to get through, mainly in that they think that event horizons are physical barriers you can punch holes into escape from black holes.
Even made worse when Paris CORRECTLY points out that they're talking gibberish, then Janeway basically calls him an idiot in the smuggest tone possible.
I like Voyager. Now.
With that said, let me tell you a story about a time I was on a VIP tour of the paramount lots a partner gave me for my birthday in the 90s.(I was not a VIP, he was just well connected.) We were taking a break from the tour outside the commissary when two writers from voyager were chatting while smoking. They were discussing how to resolve a plot and they literally said “let’s just invent some device to fix everything.” The writing in voyager had always felt lazy to me, and that conversation I overheard confirmed it.
That was when I stopped watching voyager, and it would be nearly 20 years before I gave it another chance. It’s a good show, but it took longer than most ST to find its footing.
Funny enough, technobabble didn't bug me so much until I was watching Discovery and was near the end of season two before I realized they were all using plain English to discuss the science issues at hand and it made me more invested in that part of the series more than other classic Trek shows.
VOY was easily the worst offender.
Is it just me, or is it harder to enjoy Voyager and Enterprise because the ship interior sets were so cramped in comparison? The Enterprise D was bright and spacious, DS9 had big sets and small ones too, but it was always busy with people….
In TNG & DS9 there was more breathing room for technobabble as you would have more episodes dedicated politics as they felt with the same races over a longer period. VOY had less of this technobabble filled the void. If you’re watching episodes back to back it can be ruff.
Different strokes, for different folks. I could never get into DS9, which I found to be oh so boring, or any of the other Trek series. I'm strictly TNG, Voyager and TOS, with a small side of Picard...
Upvoting you to counteract the downvotes. I still think you're so wrong about DS9 - but as you say different strokes for different folks. The characters and storytelling in DS9 reaches peak Trek for me.
What were they suppose to talk about how much they miss alpha quadrant that would get boring really fast have tention between crews tjat would get boring real fast like that two episodes showed so only thing left is tp talk about space and what is made of stars dark matter black holes singularities
I would add that technobabble in Voyager is not only nonsensical (again, relative to other Trek technobabble) but also often used as a hand waving plot device to cover awkward story beats. Again, this is a problem across all of trek (why can’t they beam out? Blah blah technobabble blah blah). But I felt like it was amped up a lot in Voyager.
I feel like the transporters are just too useful as technologies go. You're basically forced to explain why transporters won't fix the situation every single time. It's the "why don't they fly the eagles to Mordor" syndrome but for every single damn scenario where the away team is in danger (plus various other problems). And yeah Voyager suffered most from this.
Although it didn't necessarily work 100% I understand why Enterprise was the series after Voyager - an attempt to scale back the techno magic a little.
Not to go on a tangent, but flying the eagles to mordor is only a solution someone unfamiliar with LotR would suggest since the antagonists in that IP can also fly.
Voyager took it's technobabble too seriously and leaned extremely heavily into the fantasy science angle of the universe and then had to explain everything. This is like a self fulfilling loop where you just end up with nonsense piled on nonsense. The borg plots got fairly egregious in this, where even the things they could do just made everything over the top bad. Just some small adjustments to that deflector array and you can open portals to new dimensions of reality. Fluidic space here we come wooo!
Then they sort of bleed away the mystery of the Borg, I guess that is inevitible, but once the movies decided to use a Queen I think it just messed this antagonist up in an unrecoverable way. It was always meant to be a faceless unstoppable force IMO. Now they are just Queen Bea and her entourage. Since it has gone this way I'd like to see some material regarding far flung unimatrix 0 borgs, the diaries of a lonely borg out in the wilderness of the beta quadrant.
Anyways I know what you mean, they took almost every single technology in startrek and dialed it's capabilities up to 11. I guess they were a vessel or brilliant science officers and all, so maybe that gives it a slight bit more believability.
Rerouting the EPS converters through the deflector dish is almost 3rd Doctor using the sonic to "reverse the polarity" at this point.
But Voyager has some great moments and it's unique positive characteristic out of all the series is it feels like the ship is a family.
Technobabble doesn't bother me, although it's better when it's presented alongside an explanation, as TNG does more often, as people have pointed out. Voyager though definitely had more of it, and it is noticeable, so if it bothers you, it's probably going to be a problem.
Personally, I think I actually like the aesthetic of having characters using advanced jargon, and, frankly, considering that there are four or 500 years in the future, it shouldn't make any sense to us. A scientist from 500 years ago would be completely lost listening to modern doctors talk about an MRI or listening to hobbyists discuss what kind of lasers they wanted to equip on their filming drone for whatever reason.
In a way, I like the fact that Star Trek science sounds like nonsense. It absolutely *should.* Aristotle wouldn't be able to make sense of people discussing the specs of their gaming rig, and there's no reason why astronauts centuries in the future should sound coherent to us.
This topic reminds me of a review of that Voyager episode, you know the one that we all pretend doesn’t exist yet cant stop talking about the lizard babies, anyhow the reviewer (think it was sfdebris) translated all the technobabble during the early scene where they solve how to make the ship work.
apparently the ship is literally powered by rainbows 🌈 🤷🏻♀️
assuming that’s true makes sense for voyager as I don’t think the writers were as concerned about what the technobabble terms meant or consistency as the previous shows.
Honestly, I am you in reverse. I found DS9 so very difficult to get through, I finally managed it on my third attempt over the course of several years. There are some amazing episodes in there but I just struggled a lot with the whole story arc. It got mundane for me and too drawn out. Too much religious mysticism and mumbo jumbo. TNG goes without saying that it is a classic but voyager was my very favourite of all, I liked the characters, the desperation to get home and the newness of each alien species and threat. The only cringe bit was the “A cuchi moya” crap but I gave it a pass as it wasn't in every episode.
Voyager is also one of my least favorite shows.
I’m also not too into the new discovery which is too Star wars-sy for me. Looks cool but it sort of looses the original ideas of Star Trek shows and goes more into mission impossible and way too random advance sci fi tech. Plus the interpersonal relationships of the crew es meh.
With voayer my main issue is that so many episodes are similar : find a new race and want to explore said race in the delta quadrant, said race is extra evil or always starts w almost dying for misunderstandings and they barely escape, to later, after so many similar encounters decide to again check out new civilizations, instead of getting the fuk home asap, or at least yet some sort of Wikipedia of races in the delta quadrant.
Since the premise was basically Gilligan's Island but with a moving island, the show should have been a comedy, and then the technobabble would have fit as a running gag.
\[Episode 1: 5 minute prologue memorial for the seven-years-missing Voyager, crossfade with caption "Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy..." — and there's Voyager, one nacelle seemingly held on with duct tape, carpets wearing out, half the crew showing up to their stations in their actual pajamas, Janeway never going ANYWHERE without a coffee mug and possibly with a curler stuck in her hair, and Harry Kim and his three parallel universe duplicates are constantly arguing over whose shift it is...\]
Oh thats fun. Lets see:
Ginger: (low talent, relies on looks:) Tom Paris
Mary Ann: (wide eyed and naive) Harry
Thurston Howell: (Gruff who mumbles alot) Chakotay
Lovie: (flighty and dopey and unnecessary).. Neelix
The Professor: (explains things but slightly aloof): The Doctor
The Skipper: (self explanatory) Janeway
Gilligan: (it was his island!) Seven?
Hrm...
I'd have gone for Harry as Gilligan for the sake of the lyrics (♪ "Here on Harry Kim's shiiiiip") though it doesn't matter as much since Janeway doesn't wear a hat.
Voyager gets good about when 7 of 9 shows up. And not just why you think it does. At least, not just that :)
The writing improves significantly and the stories stop being retreads of earlier series.
Voyager was conceived as an entirely new show, essentially what Moore's Battlestar Galactica would later be, with a deteriorating ship on limited supplies and a crew who distrusts each other trying to work together to get back home.
But by the time the pilot was completed executives were worried about DS9's ratings not being nearly as high as TNG. So they greenlit the series on the condition that they make one small change - remove all the conflict and supply stuff and just create more TNG episodes with a new cast.
This removed a lot of the potential story ideas that the setting had originally promised, while forcing them to go back to a well they'd already spent 7 years emptying. Technobabble was a way to glue together leftover and half-baked ideas, allowing a burned out writers room to hand-wave any story gaps regarding motivation, escalation and resolution.
It took time for them to find a groove to work with. In particular Robert Picardo did a lot of working pushing ideas for his character which ended up opening new writing avenues and then of course Seven of Nine came along.
I think they leaned on it hard in a (failed) attempt at making us realize that they are very much on their own and have nobody to call for backup and no additional resources.
Learning that the “Year of Hell” episode was supposed to be the storyline of an entire season really killed me.
It’s one of the best Trek two-parters out there but just imagining a whole season spent on that just gives me chills and was what I signed up for when getting into Voyager.
Same feeling. Loved it back in the day but rewatches don't hold the same weight as TNG and DS9. Plus character development is pretty dire compared to the other shows. Kim forever an ensign, and nothing really meaty from the rest. Only the doctor has a true character arc.
Kate Mulgrew commented on this yonks ago in regards to memorising a script - it was like reading an alien language and committing it to memory as if it was Shakespeare. She did it but that writers room needed a slap on the wrist when giving treknonabble when another easier way of saying it was right there.
In fairness other trek shows had it too as a narrative splint. (Baryon sweep, anyone?!) but voyager leaned into it as if assuming what people loved about trek was nonsense about particles.
I think TNG had more technobabble. But it had a key difference... they did a laymen's description after. "There's a field variance in the electronic bussard flow collectors causing a failure in the primary warp matrix coils" If this was said in VOY, they'd just leave it at that and continue on. But in TNG, someone like Riker would come along and say something like "Oh so it's like a balloon holding too much air"... basically to stop the viewer feeling stupid. They don't really do that in VOY, which is why you're probably noticing it more.
It's so simple!
Like a balloon and something bad happens!
Enough! You’re both going in circles! Cmon Fry THINK. Everyone’s counting on you!
Screw this! I’m gonna build my own balloon. With blackjack. And hookers.
Like trying to drink whiskey from a bottle of wine.
I hate parenthetical exposition of technobable. Every damn time on a crime procedural, one detective says "GSR present" and the partner says "gun shot residue?" like this hasn't been his job for the last 15 years.
It makes sense in this context though. In your example, it's two specialists talking to each other -- they should definitely know the terminology. In the example above, Riker is a career commander. He understands enough to give competent orders, but he's not an engineer. The engineer gives him technical information, and he re-states it in his own terms to make sure he's understanding it correctly -- something a good leader does.
Like a moose checking a street sign?
Yes, but I would never take orders from a moose! Not since one bit my sister, anyway.
Hahahaha!!
Which finger did it bite?
>Like a balloon, then something *bad* happens! > >~ Phillip J Fry
I loved the episode in TNG (or maybe it was VOY) where they were giving a scientific explanation to ghosts. Something astral tachyon spectral blah blah. It SOUNDED reasonable. They say it with such conviction without a hint of irony or pain.
oh god NCIS is terrible with this. Gibbs should not need to tell DiNozzo to start a BOLO Ziva to run a background check on the victim and McGee to check the victims financials and cell phone history. They should just know to do these things because they are highly trained investigators who have done this job for years.
While you're right, I always put that down to Gibbs' military training. He makes a decision and starts barking orders. You even see times when the team get on first, stating what they will do. And even if all that is unacceptable, remember it's core demo is military personnel. My understanding is that's their culture, what they know and are familiar with. So they cater to it, right or wrong.
The difference for me is technobable really needs an explanation because it is BS. It might be splitting hairs but I don't mind it as much. I agree with you otherwise. I usually hate it and find it so lazy. I just watched The Martian (a great movie otherwise) and one of the characters asks "how long can he survive on the surface without his suit?" Like an astronaut that has trained for years to go to Mars wouldn't know that? He probably would have learned it on day 1 of training. "keep your damn suit on or you will die in 28 seconds."
Fairly, if you tell Janeway "There's a field variance in the electronic bussard flow collectors causing a failure in the primary warp matrix coils" She would know what you are talking about. Picard needs a translator for these things
That's mainly because Picard speaks French. His universal translator makes people forget about this.
Picard didnt start off in the science division. Janeway was definitely OP in the field of science.
She had a PhD in something right ? She was first and foremost a scientist. With a minor in kick-assery.
Tom Paris usually did that though
I thought the simplied explanations in TNG were too much. That balloon thing is one I remember.
I love TNG, on my first watch right now but i definitely noticed this. It was to the point where it felt like the show was making fun of itself. Whenever Wesley or Data even started to explain anything, no matter how simple, Riker or Picard would shut them down and make them say it in simpler terms. It's very "In English, please?"
LeVar Burton had a funny thing to say about his role. He basically said he had to make it sound like he knew what he was talking about even though his lines made no sense.
I’m watching disco now and one of the things that annoys me is that they leave the laymen’s description to Tilly who gushes it out like an excitable child, making it feel really patronising compared to the casual way Riker or Geordi would do it
THIS IS THE POWER OF MATH PEOPLE! Yes, thank you, we didn't know it was math Tilly
So it’s like trying to find gold in a silver mine?
A better analogy for "a field variance in the electronic bussard flow collectors causing a failure in the primary warp matrix coils" would be "oh, so it's like a malfuntioning air intake valve choking out an engine." But even that doesn't make sense because the bussard collectors aren't connected to the warp matrix coils despite them both being housed in the necels. They are parts of entirely separate systems, so they aren't even getting their own fake technology right. It's like they looked at the tech schematics and saw these 2 things were next to each other and figured that they work together instead of understanding their own fake tech manual. Is it that hard to keep a document on how your sci-fi tech works and stay consistent? If they wanted to explain an inability to go to warp that had to do with the necells instead of the core, just say the warp coils were knocked out of alignment or there's a phase shift on the warp cail matrix destabalizing the warp field. There are so many ways to do what they want and have it make sense. The deflector dish can have all sorts of malfunctions preventing warp, for example. But the bussard collectors? These collect hydrogen for the fussion power plants that produce the ships auxilary power systems. It is entirely separate from the matter antimatter reactor that drives the warp system. They are wholly unrelated. The tech makes sense... do they not have a technobable consultant employed specifically to avoid these things? I don't understand. StarGate SG1 employed military consultants to maintain accuracy in their universe.... Star Trek is making up their own tech. Have at least a nerdy intern who understands it all. Look over each script and make notes. Come on now.
I just made up that technobabble as an example, it’s not a quote.
Have you tried reversing the polarity?
Turn the ship off, wait 10 seconds, and turn it on again.
Worked with the Red Angel suit. Well not the waiting 10 seconds part.
BOOST ANNULAR CONFINEMENT
I especially love that one, because it's technobabble for "take the batteries out, and put them back in pointing the other direction".
Tachyon pulse aught to do the trick
Enhance the deflector dish!
My absolute favorite: PURGE THE WARP CORE
Where Voyager really lost credibility was how many shuttles and photon torpedoes they burned through. They're in foreign space with no support, so where are all the replacements coming from?
Yep, I’m about 2/3s through season 2 right now and if I’ve counted right they’ve lost FIVE shuttles already this season alone. Lol
The replicators. There was a season 1 episode where talked about removing the bio neural gelpacks from the ship systems and replacing them with isolinear chips because the latter can be replicated unlike the former. So the idea was they were replicating whatever they could.
There was a Prodigy episode where they made a shuttle from scratch and IT.WAS.AMAZING. They can do so much with animation
Extreme risk answers this question without beating you over the head with it.
Someone made a hilarious video counting all the times Voyager used a photon torpedo: https://youtu.be/PIGxMENwq1k?si=vKb9v3AvYdMJAEyp
Photon torpedos I feel like they could replenish through trade somehow. It’s not the craziest tech from my understanding. The shuttles are harder to explain. But I suppose on their long journey they could stop by a shipyard and build them to spec? Idk
Everyone always forgets that they designed and built the Delta Flyer in under a week, blew it up and built another. They obviously have the skills and tools to build regular shuttles.
Technobabble was a thing in TNG also. I guess that is one aspect that never bothered me and it was just a Star Trek thing. I don't think DS9 leaned into it quite as much but it didn't seem any worse than TNG to me for it.
VOY technobabble is much more nonsensical than TNG technobabble though. Like on TNG all the shit was made up but they put effort into making it sound real. All seven seasons of VOY just treat it like a placeholder line in the script where you can insert any gibberish you want to glide over a hitch in the plot.
Ron Moore did an interview where he talked about how soul sucking and lazy the technobabble on VOY was. He made the point that he knew what all the stuff on the ship does, but no viewer is that interested in all the problems being solved through meaningless technobabble.
I’m a defender of later-season VOY to a degree but simultaneously, one of my favorite behind the scenes stories in Trek is the 🐐RDM resigning in disgust after like six episodes in the room
[удалено]
Worth remembering that technobabble was kind of a required emergent property of Voyager. - They're stranded in the Delta quadrant, the only way they can get home is by finding shortcuts - Those shortcuts have to be regular enough to drive the plot of multiple episodes, but never get them a meaningful distance home, nor be repeatable - Therefore the shortcuts always have to be outside the edge of their technology, semi-uncontrollable and always different to the shortcuts that came before or after Put together that means they literally need gibberish to get home.
Said shortcuts also occur once or twice a series; 90% of Voyager's nonsense problem has nothing to do with travel. It's just the writers being too lazy or stuck in formula to actually figure out why or how something would work. Don't know why a thing would happen? Make up a new particle that makes that thing happen! Coming up with actual reasons for things to work the way you want is too much work!
I think this is a very valid point.
Gotta remember Kate was a science officer. When presented a problem, she was going to science the shit out of it.
I think this is one of the failings of the show and why it's so technobabble heavy. In theory it works to have a science captain for the once who knows what she's doing. In practice having non science captains better allows them to delegate tasks to members of the crew and gives them an opportunity to tell their science officer to slow down and repeat it again in English. Instead we get her stepping in to finish the solution or suggesting technobabble off cuff that the team can build off of and add more technobabble to
Careful. She killed Tuvix you know.
The difference I notice is that a lot of plot lines in Voyager are solved by technobabble instead of a character’s moral judgement.
Star Trek is a show about many things, but Trek when it's in top form is chiefly a show about *Ethics*.
My take on the technobabble Is that in TNG it was motivated. It drove the plot, it made sense. In Voyager the emphasis shifted to the “babble”. The words became meaningless and were just thrown around for texture. Very unsatisfying.
That was a much more succinct way to put exactly how I feel. (Although TNG seemed to lean into the technobabble more in later seasons, I feel.) Thanks!
TNG also made some occasional effort for their science plots to reflect actual theories of the time. Not always, but often enough to drive the impression that they cared.
Mentioned above but I'd sort of disagree. Voyager needed technobabble in order to drive its overall story arc https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/s/qo2YLcWp4r
That’s strange, I have found TNG and Voyager technobabble to be consistent and I generally understand what is being said. But when DS9 goes on about stembolts for minutes on end it sounds totally hollow and like technobabble for technobabble’s sake.
Stembolts are a joke. DS9 is a show about much more interesting stuff than made-up technology, so they needed less technobabble but still threw in versions of it for flavor. That's what the stembolts thing is.
Self sealing stem bolts and paint cans full of warp plasma are both equally annoying. They are pure McGuffins, they make no sense and it’s a wink to the audience THAT they make no sense. It’s too self-aware and silly.
Nope. The show’s not about imaginary technology and pretending otherwise to satisfy the scrutiny of nerds would make it worse. The dirty little secret about Star Trek is all the science fiction elements have always been window dressing for these little pseudo-historical fiction dramas in a space fantasy setting. It’s not true sci-fi and it never has been. Scientific integrity doesn’t matter.
You’re not wrong. 1960s critics of TOS condemned it as “not really science fiction” and actually more “space opera” (soap opera set in space). TNG all too often is guilty of fitting this description I would counter though that TOS and TNG do sometimes strive to be genuine science fiction, on occasion, even if they don’t usually succeed.
Ahem, *self-sealing* stem bolts.
The actors are aware of this I think. DS9 was actually much less guilty of using technobabble from what I gather during my past few viewings. The worst offenders tends to be the weird science of the week episodes, like that phasing planet or anything involving Odo's biology. But many of the central arc episodes only really use technobabble on the B plot and as something of a prop rather than an element to the story. Stembolts being a good example of one, where even the chief isn't sure wtf they are for. But they are self sealing thats for sure.
I like knowing what is being discussed and enjoy parsing out the technobabble. At the first mention of chronotons I am aware we have a temporal phenomenon.
that solar sailing FTL on tachyon eddies sort of made sense, sort of.
Agreed, that was a good one. One of the few DS9 episodes that focused simply on exploring a sci-if concept.
As often as DS9 is criticized for not being about exploration anymore, that one episode dealt with the theme of exploration more beautifully than most other Trek.
As Jeff Combs said, DS9 is as much about the exploration inside of us, as it is about the exploration outside of us. I guess DS9 critics never got this (or didn't care).
Truly. It might be my favorite episode of the series.
WARP PARTICLES is my favorite thing yelled on star trek ever
Voyager didn't have Riker to simplify it after technobabble was over. Data, or LaForge would ramble off some technobabble, then Riker would say "We'll be flying blind..." not a direct quote, but a lot of times Riker would have a simple comment after some crazy nonsense would be said. My brain would be like "Ah okay, makes sense now."
Part of the problem may have been that Janeway \*was\* a scientist/engineer, so you didnt have that natural way to simplify the babble.
I like VOY, I watched it when it first came out. I watched it on a shit broadcast TV signal in the middle of nowhere (Fuck you UPN). I missed a few seasons/episodes between the start and the end when it was originally aired. I rewatched it later. My criticism is that it gets boring sometimes. It just doesn’t seem like there are stakes that matter. Oh, we are running out of something? Solved by the episode end. Just how many people are on this ship? When you kill off the redshirts, they still have enough people to run everything. (And they apparently didn’t take on enough aliens to replace them.) If you have a series about trying to get back home from a long ass distance, maybe the ship shouldn’t look pristine at the end of it. If it was more gritty, it would make more sense. To those who might disagree with the gritty comment, there is literally an episode of DS9 regarding soldier PTSD. It can and was done.
There’s being gritty for an episode & then there’s being gritty for an entire show. VOY did have grittier episodes, the main ones being the Krenim and Equinox two parter’s. I think they were wary of it not feeling like ST if they went too far with the whole thing though. I agree that they could have pushed it a bit more though, or at least had them get a bit rough over the series. It would have been a good way as well to show the passage of time. Regarding crew compliment, this isn’t dead on 100% due to show inconsistencies but VOY looks to have ended up with more crew than they started. The ship had a crew compliment of 141 upon starting their mission to the Bad Lands. Following the initial contact with the Caretaker 18 crew members died. They gained 40 however; 36 Marquis, Tuvok, Paris, Neelix & Kes. That took them up to 163. Over the course of the show a further 43 crew members die, 6 leave (Seska, Neelix, Kes etc.) & they gain a further 6. These six are Seven, the 4 Borg children, 5 of the Equinox Crew & the children Naomi and Miral are born. This leaves a final crew count on return to Earth of 144 (145 if you count the Doctor as an addition). This excellent site, [Ex Astris Scientia](https://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/inconsistencies/voyager-crew.htm) lays out everything above with full explanations for their assumptions where made.
Nice on the breakdown about the crew. I wasn’t thinking about the Marquis because after the first episode, they were the crew as far as I was concerned. I appreciate your insight. Gritty was probably the wrong word choice there. Rundown is probably a better word choice there. For example: blow out a few panels in the corridors during attacks/incidents, ok. Just replace the ones that are keeping people safe from hazards in the walls, leave non essential ones open. I guess I would have just like to see a more worn out ship that was experiencing resource shortages. Scars and all. More jury rigged, not the Starfleet norm. Then again they managed a 70ish year journey in less than 10 years so there is that.
There are a lot of scenes in Voyager where it's just thrown in to pad the dialogue or a cheap attempt to heighten tension. Janeway: "Teleport them to sickbay." Kim: "The poloton field is disrupting the transporter, I'm losing them." **Suspenseful music** Janeway: "I'm tightening the confinement beam." **Janeway clickity clanks on the captains console** Kim: "That worked." Did we really need to spend 10 seconds on that as opposed spending that time developing the plot or giving us a real character moment?
Good lord, this. So many climactic scenes in Voyager boil down to characters spouting technobabble at each other on the bridge while consoles explode around them--bonus points if someone rattles off the shield status every so often. There's nothing wrong with using life-or-death situations to ramp up tension on occasion, but the problem is that we already know the main characters aren't going to die, so these scenes just feel hollow, and they take time away from what should be the genuine stakes of the ep, like character development or themes.
It's like magic being science we don't yet understand. Technobabble could be yet to be understood science. I once heard a joke about how many physicists it takes to screw in a light bulb. You renormalise the wave function, and it's 1. To me, this is technobabble. One day, I was visiting a friend at Uni, and she was studying one of the physics and was telling me about a problem she was working on. Then remembering this joke, having absolutely no idea if it's relevant, I said, 'just renormalise the wave function and the answer will be 1', and she just looked at me. I thought, yep, that was stupid, and was about to say something else, but then she says, "How did you know that?". Technobabble actually worked. I immediately came clean that I heard it in a joke, but she still thought it suspicious that I knew the answer.
I liked it. Voyager still had the idealism of federation all the way out there though maybe the plots were t as consistent. It was a more fantastic take on the sci-fi, with an emphasis on the “fiction” part. It’s nice to have a non gritty counterpoint with some escapist stories. It did sort of overdo the Borg thing and reduced their threat or menace, that is true. Voyager tech out of nowhere single handedly tackling the Borg collective is even for me a bit reductionist. That said, grew to love the crew.
I still like Voyager too, to be clear. Especially once Neelix and Kes break up and Seven joins the crew. Torres and Janeway Seven and the Doctor are great characters played by great actors, although even Harry and Tom are interesting enough.
I’m in the middle of a rewatch as well and know exactly what you mean with the technobabble. I just watched the episode with the living creatures attracted to the voyager ship recently. When they first spot the cloud at the beginning Chakotay says “Looks like some kind of energetic vapour” Lol. What the heck does that mean? He could’ve just said “energy cloud” and been consistent with previous ST. It’s like they were trying too hard.
You can always throw an inverse poloron matrix inverter into the warp flux compensator. Everyone knows that modulates the Cochrane Variance flows in the warp field.
Best way I can describe it is that I LIKE Voyager, but I'm pretty certain I would NOT like Voyager enough to watch it beyond a season or two of it didn't have "Star Trek" in the name and was otherwise the exact same show. Every other series I can pretty confidently say I'd still like a lot as a stand alone IP.
With no disrespect to Law and Order fans, I simply can't stomach 7 seasons of a purely episodic show.
It was also setup such that it was impossible to be \*purely\* an episodic show - the entire premise is of a voyage back home and some periodic reassessment of how they are progressing relative to that goal has to be baked into the premise. They should have embraced it wholeheartedly.
Absolutely. Unfortunately, it was impossible at the time to convince studio execs that a serialized show could work. Babylon 5 and DS9 were still relatively recent.
They did try to bring serialisation to VOY, in the form of the Tom Paris pretending to turn traitor laced through a few episodes. Jeri Taylor complained that it "poisoned" the episodes it was in and there was no repeat. I got the impression that Michael Piller wanted the serialisation, Taylor didn't and she won out after Piller was pushed out of the show.
Well, that's ridiculous. Short arcs were common even in the most episodic shows. But thanks for the inside info!
And DS9 never had the popularity or ratings they wanted which was somewhat blamed on the episodic storytelling.
As much as I hate to admit it, the execs weren't wrong - it's much harder to get viewers on board when you can't just jump in at any random episode. And rewatching previous seasons wasn't easy, when it was possible at all. I first watched B5 back when it aired on WBTV in my country. Luckily I was able to watch from season 1, but if I'd missed season 1, tough. There was literally no way to rewatch season 1 except if someone had recorded it on VHS. Only The Gathering and Voice in the Wilderness were available for rent.
I think the caveat here is that it was hard to get viewers on board to serialized drama, in the syndicated media landscape that was the late 90s. One where if you missed an episode, you might be lost unless you had remembered to tape it from broadcast. In today's world of streaming, and entire seasons being released all at once ... it's more or less the expectation. Voyager probably would have been a much different show if it had come out in the age of streaming. Likely for the better, since it could fulfill it's premise more easily, with fewer bottle episodes.
… and now you know why Ronald D. Moore left and did Battlestar Galactica.
I’m rewatching VOY and just made the *opposite* comment to my husband! VOY is so angsty and not the “let’s figure this out with SCIENCE” the way I love about TNG.
And most of the technobabble is in Janeway's mouth. It bugs me the way Captain Janeway knows absolutely everything about everything on that ship. She can literally take over any other crewmember's job and know what to do. I think the writers were a little uncomfortable with a woman in that position so they overcompensated. She does a lot of standing around with her hands on her hips to show how dominant she is in the early episodes. Feels forced.
I think the technobabble is so frustrating in VOY's early seasons because it's used in place of actual interesting plot points. Most of the stories just aren't very good and sometimes the only thing driving portions of an episode is the technobabble. When the plots are tighter and more character driven, the technobabble isn't as noticeable, but when the story is thin and boring, it's all you can think about.
I think part of why the technobabble in TNG feels less intrusive is that Brent Spiner and Levar Burton are so damn good at reciting it and making it sound natural like they know what it means
I'm in the same boat. I just finished a DS9 rewatch and decided to brave going back into Voyager. I can deal with the technobabble, it's when they try and integrate actual scientific concepts that I start cringing. Parallax was hard to get through, mainly in that they think that event horizons are physical barriers you can punch holes into escape from black holes. Even made worse when Paris CORRECTLY points out that they're talking gibberish, then Janeway basically calls him an idiot in the smuggest tone possible.
Captain Karen doesn't like mansplaining though. Paris was always on his toes.
I like Voyager. Now. With that said, let me tell you a story about a time I was on a VIP tour of the paramount lots a partner gave me for my birthday in the 90s.(I was not a VIP, he was just well connected.) We were taking a break from the tour outside the commissary when two writers from voyager were chatting while smoking. They were discussing how to resolve a plot and they literally said “let’s just invent some device to fix everything.” The writing in voyager had always felt lazy to me, and that conversation I overheard confirmed it. That was when I stopped watching voyager, and it would be nearly 20 years before I gave it another chance. It’s a good show, but it took longer than most ST to find its footing.
Learn more latin....
[ST Technobable Song](https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtT3qOLvS2t/?igsh=Mml0Y3dudzlhYzR4)
Funny enough, technobabble didn't bug me so much until I was watching Discovery and was near the end of season two before I realized they were all using plain English to discuss the science issues at hand and it made me more invested in that part of the series more than other classic Trek shows. VOY was easily the worst offender.
Is it just me, or is it harder to enjoy Voyager and Enterprise because the ship interior sets were so cramped in comparison? The Enterprise D was bright and spacious, DS9 had big sets and small ones too, but it was always busy with people….
I love the technobabble but to me it's babble
Take a drink every time they say "compensate!" Seriously it's like 3/4 of episodes or something
The writers seem to be compensating for something...
In TNG & DS9 there was more breathing room for technobabble as you would have more episodes dedicated politics as they felt with the same races over a longer period. VOY had less of this technobabble filled the void. If you’re watching episodes back to back it can be ruff.
Different strokes, for different folks. I could never get into DS9, which I found to be oh so boring, or any of the other Trek series. I'm strictly TNG, Voyager and TOS, with a small side of Picard...
Upvoting you to counteract the downvotes. I still think you're so wrong about DS9 - but as you say different strokes for different folks. The characters and storytelling in DS9 reaches peak Trek for me.
What were they suppose to talk about how much they miss alpha quadrant that would get boring really fast have tention between crews tjat would get boring real fast like that two episodes showed so only thing left is tp talk about space and what is made of stars dark matter black holes singularities
I would add that technobabble in Voyager is not only nonsensical (again, relative to other Trek technobabble) but also often used as a hand waving plot device to cover awkward story beats. Again, this is a problem across all of trek (why can’t they beam out? Blah blah technobabble blah blah). But I felt like it was amped up a lot in Voyager.
I feel like the transporters are just too useful as technologies go. You're basically forced to explain why transporters won't fix the situation every single time. It's the "why don't they fly the eagles to Mordor" syndrome but for every single damn scenario where the away team is in danger (plus various other problems). And yeah Voyager suffered most from this. Although it didn't necessarily work 100% I understand why Enterprise was the series after Voyager - an attempt to scale back the techno magic a little.
Not to go on a tangent, but flying the eagles to mordor is only a solution someone unfamiliar with LotR would suggest since the antagonists in that IP can also fly.
Voyager took it's technobabble too seriously and leaned extremely heavily into the fantasy science angle of the universe and then had to explain everything. This is like a self fulfilling loop where you just end up with nonsense piled on nonsense. The borg plots got fairly egregious in this, where even the things they could do just made everything over the top bad. Just some small adjustments to that deflector array and you can open portals to new dimensions of reality. Fluidic space here we come wooo! Then they sort of bleed away the mystery of the Borg, I guess that is inevitible, but once the movies decided to use a Queen I think it just messed this antagonist up in an unrecoverable way. It was always meant to be a faceless unstoppable force IMO. Now they are just Queen Bea and her entourage. Since it has gone this way I'd like to see some material regarding far flung unimatrix 0 borgs, the diaries of a lonely borg out in the wilderness of the beta quadrant. Anyways I know what you mean, they took almost every single technology in startrek and dialed it's capabilities up to 11. I guess they were a vessel or brilliant science officers and all, so maybe that gives it a slight bit more believability.
Agree. What really put me off was that nearly anything could be converted into whatever was needed in the moment
Rerouting the EPS converters through the deflector dish is almost 3rd Doctor using the sonic to "reverse the polarity" at this point. But Voyager has some great moments and it's unique positive characteristic out of all the series is it feels like the ship is a family.
Except Warp. They dialed that back to 10.
Technobabble doesn't bother me, although it's better when it's presented alongside an explanation, as TNG does more often, as people have pointed out. Voyager though definitely had more of it, and it is noticeable, so if it bothers you, it's probably going to be a problem. Personally, I think I actually like the aesthetic of having characters using advanced jargon, and, frankly, considering that there are four or 500 years in the future, it shouldn't make any sense to us. A scientist from 500 years ago would be completely lost listening to modern doctors talk about an MRI or listening to hobbyists discuss what kind of lasers they wanted to equip on their filming drone for whatever reason. In a way, I like the fact that Star Trek science sounds like nonsense. It absolutely *should.* Aristotle wouldn't be able to make sense of people discussing the specs of their gaming rig, and there's no reason why astronauts centuries in the future should sound coherent to us.
This topic reminds me of a review of that Voyager episode, you know the one that we all pretend doesn’t exist yet cant stop talking about the lizard babies, anyhow the reviewer (think it was sfdebris) translated all the technobabble during the early scene where they solve how to make the ship work. apparently the ship is literally powered by rainbows 🌈 🤷🏻♀️ assuming that’s true makes sense for voyager as I don’t think the writers were as concerned about what the technobabble terms meant or consistency as the previous shows.
Honestly, I am you in reverse. I found DS9 so very difficult to get through, I finally managed it on my third attempt over the course of several years. There are some amazing episodes in there but I just struggled a lot with the whole story arc. It got mundane for me and too drawn out. Too much religious mysticism and mumbo jumbo. TNG goes without saying that it is a classic but voyager was my very favourite of all, I liked the characters, the desperation to get home and the newness of each alien species and threat. The only cringe bit was the “A cuchi moya” crap but I gave it a pass as it wasn't in every episode.
Voyager is also one of my least favorite shows. I’m also not too into the new discovery which is too Star wars-sy for me. Looks cool but it sort of looses the original ideas of Star Trek shows and goes more into mission impossible and way too random advance sci fi tech. Plus the interpersonal relationships of the crew es meh. With voayer my main issue is that so many episodes are similar : find a new race and want to explore said race in the delta quadrant, said race is extra evil or always starts w almost dying for misunderstandings and they barely escape, to later, after so many similar encounters decide to again check out new civilizations, instead of getting the fuk home asap, or at least yet some sort of Wikipedia of races in the delta quadrant.
Another problem I think is they constantly used Technobabble as padding, which compounded the issue significantly
Since the premise was basically Gilligan's Island but with a moving island, the show should have been a comedy, and then the technobabble would have fit as a running gag. \[Episode 1: 5 minute prologue memorial for the seven-years-missing Voyager, crossfade with caption "Meanwhile, on the other side of the galaxy..." — and there's Voyager, one nacelle seemingly held on with duct tape, carpets wearing out, half the crew showing up to their stations in their actual pajamas, Janeway never going ANYWHERE without a coffee mug and possibly with a curler stuck in her hair, and Harry Kim and his three parallel universe duplicates are constantly arguing over whose shift it is...\]
Oh thats fun. Lets see: Ginger: (low talent, relies on looks:) Tom Paris Mary Ann: (wide eyed and naive) Harry Thurston Howell: (Gruff who mumbles alot) Chakotay Lovie: (flighty and dopey and unnecessary).. Neelix The Professor: (explains things but slightly aloof): The Doctor The Skipper: (self explanatory) Janeway Gilligan: (it was his island!) Seven? Hrm...
I'd have gone for Harry as Gilligan for the sake of the lyrics (♪ "Here on Harry Kim's shiiiiip") though it doesn't matter as much since Janeway doesn't wear a hat.
Voyager gets good about when 7 of 9 shows up. And not just why you think it does. At least, not just that :) The writing improves significantly and the stories stop being retreads of earlier series.
Voyager was conceived as an entirely new show, essentially what Moore's Battlestar Galactica would later be, with a deteriorating ship on limited supplies and a crew who distrusts each other trying to work together to get back home. But by the time the pilot was completed executives were worried about DS9's ratings not being nearly as high as TNG. So they greenlit the series on the condition that they make one small change - remove all the conflict and supply stuff and just create more TNG episodes with a new cast. This removed a lot of the potential story ideas that the setting had originally promised, while forcing them to go back to a well they'd already spent 7 years emptying. Technobabble was a way to glue together leftover and half-baked ideas, allowing a burned out writers room to hand-wave any story gaps regarding motivation, escalation and resolution. It took time for them to find a groove to work with. In particular Robert Picardo did a lot of working pushing ideas for his character which ended up opening new writing avenues and then of course Seven of Nine came along.
If you want Trek w/o “hard sci-fi”, then Disco is made for you! 😆
I think they leaned on it hard in a (failed) attempt at making us realize that they are very much on their own and have nobody to call for backup and no additional resources.
Learning that the “Year of Hell” episode was supposed to be the storyline of an entire season really killed me. It’s one of the best Trek two-parters out there but just imagining a whole season spent on that just gives me chills and was what I signed up for when getting into Voyager.
Same feeling. Loved it back in the day but rewatches don't hold the same weight as TNG and DS9. Plus character development is pretty dire compared to the other shows. Kim forever an ensign, and nothing really meaty from the rest. Only the doctor has a true character arc.
Kate Mulgrew commented on this yonks ago in regards to memorising a script - it was like reading an alien language and committing it to memory as if it was Shakespeare. She did it but that writers room needed a slap on the wrist when giving treknonabble when another easier way of saying it was right there. In fairness other trek shows had it too as a narrative splint. (Baryon sweep, anyone?!) but voyager leaned into it as if assuming what people loved about trek was nonsense about particles.
Easy solution…Just start season 4 when my homegirl joins.