Hi! After reading opinions for a long time, I’ve realized that some episodes are quite controversial nowadays. For example, Star Trek: Voyager Season 4, Episode 17, “Retrospect,” has been compared to the #MeToo movement, with some people criticizing how it “handles rape culture unevenly” (as one IMDb review puts it).
This got me thinking: What other things do you feel Star Trek make wrong?
edit I misread, these are minor things. My actual answer is Star Trek has never put enough women in decision making positions in the creation of Star Trek and all of Star Trek’s success is despite that.
spoiler
Bicycles, where the fuck are all the bicycles? The last transportation anyone would choose to use when we could teleport everywhere would be bicycles because they are pleasant af, they are also super useful for exploring planets. I get filming people on bicycles “doesn’t look cool” but it annoys me. Also put all the power density of spaceships into an electric bicycle? It would go for years and years and years on a charge…
Where are all the dogs? For the humans but also space dogs should probably be far more common, do you really think humans are alone in domesticating dogs to get an edge?
Spaceships would have lots of board games on them and people would be obsessed with them, far more than the holodecks necessarily. Star Trek sort of does this with the poker table meetups that happen in TNG.
Spaceships, especially long haul ones, would ALL unless they were purely military ships have a garden/park section in them where real native plants were grown from the aliens homeplanet. This would be necessary for mental health as a place crew could go.
Teleporting is too easy without enough costs, so storytelling always has to justify itself around not being able to use teleporting to solve the issue.
I’m sorry, but you need infrastructure or at least somewhat flat ground or you won’t get far on a bike. You would have to carry it over rocks and other terrain. It would slow you down more than it would help.
No, I see more future in heelies than bikes when exploring undeveloped planets.
4 - garden areas were shown in a few places, and any tech Trekkie can tell you that even schematics of early ships had such places.
Page seven showing the botany level
1701-D blueprints had a lot more, being a bigger ship.
Also, Animorphs did it! Andalite Dome Ships
For 3 they sort of did, but the entire show is stuck in a boomer mentality that video games are a kind of a meaningless drug or distraction unless it is chess or heavily chess coded and a symbol for masculine intelligence.
Whatever it is just games are magic because all you need is another human and time to discover new things and unfold a rich experience and both are in abundance on a starship journeying through space.
edit I appreciate the thorough response but if I were to write scifi the garden/small park space would be a part of virtually ever spacefaring civilizations spacecraft, for health (for humans even just seeing pictures of plants improves our health), for cultural and spiritual reasons, for a sense of home and rhythm… There would be a thousand names for these spaces, maybe we humans would use “heart” or something like it to refer to that part of a spaceship but it would not be our idea, it would be highly unusual not to find analogs in other alien spacefaring species within their ships for the same reasons.
Additionally I would include as a scifi author the nuance and ethics around how pirates might board your ship and steal all your valuables but arbitrarily destroying the “heart” or garden even for pirates would be considered especially heinous as no matter who you are in space the thought of not being around plants, even if you are doomed to die or especially if you are, is kind of scarier than almost anything else if you are unfathomably far from home.
I don’t know, call me weird or just a nature lover but I firmly believe having a “heart” to a deep space spaceship is just as important as having a faster than light drive… which leads thematically into a natural justification for why shuttlecraft are capable of FTL travel but people still rely on big ships unlike say Star Wars where smaller ships are used for long distance tansportation just as much as big ones are.
It all ties back into the basic thematic fantasy of scifi that we can “leave earth and expand” is a twisted lie, we can only bring earth with us to new places, if we extract ourselves from earth truly, we die, we are not islands biologically.