Monday 26 October 2015

30 Days of Trek - Day Twenty-Six


Whaaaaaaaaat?

Let's just get stuck in to this one. Star Trek has brought us a lot of great stuff, influential technology, superb characters, diverse storylines but occasionally there's a slip. Something that shouldn't have happened or shouldn't have been there. We've noted characters who should have been erased from history but what is the one thing, a story, an idea, that wrong-footed the franchise? What was truly pointless in it's nature?

Now while I did come up with this list some time back I only look at the question on the day I post it up but with this one there was only one true contender I could even consider. I believe there are more but I have to look no further than The Next Generation's Force of Nature.

In fact I could just end today's post right there because we all know where I'm going. The most pointless thing in Star Trek has to be the warp five speed limit. One of those good-idea-at-the-time concepts it managed to handicap the final season of The Next Generation to the extreme that whenever there was an urgent mission, Picard had to be given permission to take the speed limiter off and proceed with caution (best example is The Pegasus). In fact such a good idea that turned bad it was neatly forgotten about before the start of Deep Space Nine's third season and all thereafter.

The idea that high warp was damaging the universe was a pretty cool story to attempt but for the sake of storytelling it almost completely trashed the franchise, maybe even more so than that brilliant warp ten story in Voyager. In-universe it was solved thanks to some neat new off-screen warp theory experiments and something to do with those variable geometry pylons we saw on the Intrepid Class and further improvements on ships built and upgraded after that. In any way it was never, fortunately, mentioned ever again....

Check back on all the previous questions HERE and join me for question twenty-seven tomorrow. The review of the latest issues from the Official Starships Collection will be available from 4pm TODAY.

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