plot items so bad they destroy the series in hindsight

[TheNewTeddy]

There are a few famous ones that I think we are familiar with. Plinkett thinks TNG episode Parallels kills all of Trek. The sit com Dallas had an entire season that was a dream.

I'm more interested in the ones that get overlooked, and that are, in hindsight, even more devastating to the fictional universe than the examples listed.

Mine is from the TNG episode Emergence. The one where the Ship comes to life, and with the Train headed to New Vertiform City.

I'll quote from Memory Alpha

Later on, La Forge rounds up his investigation with Data on the bridge, finding only more mysteries. It shows that a theta flux distortion had been building up around the ship. The sensors were never designed to detect such distortions, yet there was a record of the distortion in the sensor log. Data reports that "one fact is clear however. The distortion was growing in strength. If we had remained at our original position 1.7 seconds longer, the distortion would have ruptured our warp core." La Forge tells Picard that if the ship had not entered warp when it did, the Enterprise would have been "blown to pieces."

What this means is that at any time, in any place, without any warning, a starfleet ship can just explode.

Just suddenly, without warning or seeming reason, go boom.

This episode is very near the end of the run of TNG.

Lets instead go to the middle. Season 4. Now due to run times, commercial breaks, extra or fewer episodes, finding the exact episode in the "middle" of TNG would be hard to do. I'm going to pluck out Data's Day as my example as it is close enough to the dead middle of TNG for my purposes.

I'm going to use the script of that episode but make one minor edit.

CRUSHER: What?
DATA: I would like to learn how to dance.
CRUSHER: Why me?
DATA: It was in your service record. Awarded first prize tap and jazz competition, Saint Louis Academy.
CRUSHER: Okay, okay.
DATA: Have I said something to upset you?
CRUSHER: It's just that, that was a long time ago, and I don't want to be known as the dancing doctor. Again.
DATA: Then your answer is no.
CRUSHER: All right. But let's keep this between

SUDDENLY THE ENTERPRISE EXPLODES AND STAR TREK IS OVER NOW.

I think you can see my point.

[TGLS]

Counter-argument: If the odds are sufficiently long (i.e. odds of you personally being hit by a meteor), it isn't worth worrying about. If you say that there's a chance of a 1 in 20 trillion odds of being owned by a theta flux distortion a month, and there are a million ships in Federation space, on average no ships will be destroyed by theta flux distortions over a 25 year period. If there are (on average) 10 billion ships in the Alpha Quadrant, over 250 years, on average 0.15 ships would have been destroyed by theta flux distortions.

[LittleRaven]

I'm usually pretty forgiving when it comes to the suspension of disbelief, but season 1 of Voyager had me pushed to the brink. Then they found Amelia Earhart's truck floating in space. Then it somehow STARTED after being left in vacuum for god knows how long. At this point, I'm at my wit's end.

But the breaking point was Elogium. Hey, Kes wrestles with puberty! This should be fun. First it's revealed that the females of her species can only be fertilized once in their life. Wait...really? ONCE? Wow...that is a truly miserable evolutionary trait. Even PANDAS aren't shackled with that burden. I mean, I realize her people don't live very long, but neither do bunnies or mice, and they have no problems with multiple pregnancies. But whatever...alien. This DEFINITELY raises the stakes. If you only have ONE SHOT at reproduction, sexual reproduction at that, so it takes two parents, you can't afford any mixups. And it serves as a nice shoehorn into a topic that Voyager should probably be thinking about by now, although there's going to be a limited amount they can do with genetic diversity they have on board. But whatever...it's Star Trek. I'm not expecting great things science wise.

Finally, Kes turns dramatically towards the camera and says something like "But this will be my only chance to have a baby!"

15 seconds later my family is rushing into that family room to see why I'm screaming "BABIES!!! BABIES!!! -EEEEEEES!! PLURAL! YOU BETTER HAVE A LITTER! AT LEAST 3! PREFERABLY 5 OR 7!!!!" My mother looks at me like I'm crazy. I decide then and there that I had better stop watching Voyager and just stick to Deep Space Nine.

Never did finish that series.

edit - Holy shit! Chuck has reviewed Elogium! This I have got to see....

[CharlesPhipps]

I think vacuum sealing means that if you did want to preserve something completely and it wasn't alive or affected by radiation, space is probably the best place to put it. So, bizarrely enough, the truck thing might actually be true.

As for Kes' people?

Yeah, they have some bizarre alien biology.

[LittleRaven]

I think vacuum sealing means that if you did want to preserve something completely and it wasn't alive or affected by radiation, space is probably the best place to put it. So, bizarrely enough, the truck thing might actually be true.

I don't think so. I suspect the vacuum would quickly boil off any fluids, so all the gas/oil/lubrication would be gone within a few years at most, and depending on how long it was out there, vacuum welding would probably cause the mechanics to seize up entirely anyway.

But I'm not an expert in these things.

[CharlesPhipps]

Fair enough. I know very little about the subject.

For one in reverse, I'm going to say, "Warp drive destroys space." This is one which seems like a big deal except in addition to making the people involved terrorists, they also fail to account for the fact SPACE IS VERY BIG. It strikes me as something they could easily fix by not going in the same exact tiny tiny path every time.

Which is hard to believe they were doing in the first place.

[Winter]

The Crucible from Mass Effect 3. Everything about this plot device breaks everything from the first two games without rhyme or reason. The Reapers being self aware creatures that were each independent of one another, nope they're all drones controlled by a A.I. Blue Troll that the Crucible made passive. There being no means of making peace with the Reapers, the Crucible can make them obedient slaves or hippies who are like, totally one with the green light. A Mass Relay exploding that can cause the destruction of an entire solar system, not a problem, with the new Crucible that mass relay will only be a mild inconvenience that just needs a patch job.

Nothing about the Crucible makes any sense and raises more questions then it answers. Actually it comes with a whole slew of questions that have little to nothing to do with the Reapers like who the Bloody Hell made the damn thing. And worst of all, besides it existing in the first place, is how we learn about it at the start of ME3. Liara just happens to find the blue prints for how to make it that are lost in the archives on Mars which we might have missed had Liara not been looking for it other wise it would have been lost completely... So how the Hell did it survive for thousands of years if the Reapers kept erasing all traces of their existence cycle after cycle. Ilos made sense it was on a plant that the Reapers had never actually been to and all records of it's existence were destroyed when the Reapers first attacked and while many Protean devices survived most of them weren't intact and the few that were still had a number of issues.

But the plans for the Crucible were only located in the Mars archives and were so small that it was almost missed. So what these plans just happened to survive centuries of never really being destroyed by the Reapers over and over again?

[CharlesPhipps]

I think the Crucible could easily work as a concept without the Star Child/Deus Ex Elements.

The Protheans have created an anti-Reaper weapon which basically releases a pulse that destroys every Reaper in a solar system. If you get your War Assets up to X, it will result in the destruction of all the Reapers in the Solar System (maybe a couple of hundred) but not destroy Geth and EDI. If you don't get the resources up to X, it will wipe out your robot buddies based on Reaper technology as well as kill you. The Reapers, in the face of a weapon that can actually take away their immortality, flee.

The end.

Sometimes less is more.

Next - I have a HUGE post about how Halo was ruined.

[Winter]

I think the Crucible could easily work as a concept without the Star Child/Deus Ex Elements.

The Protheans have created an anti-Reaper weapon which basically releases a pulse that destroys every Reaper in a solar system. If you get your War Assets up to X, it will result in the destruction of all the Reapers in the Solar System (maybe a couple of hundred) but not destroy Geth and EDI. If you don't get the resources up to X, it will wipe out your robot buddies based on Reaper technology as well as kill you. The Reapers, in the face of a weapon that can actually take away their immortality, flee.

The end.

Sometimes less is more.

Next - I have a HUGE post about how Halo was ruined.

Personally I think they should have just dropped the whole Crucible altogether. Last year I wrote a fan fix of ME3 and while it was also flawed I do think I had a few good ideas in there. The first of which is the nature of the information Liara finds on Mars which instead of weapons for a plan that just happen to be there it's instead information on what she thinks is a record of a dead Reaper the Protheans found but didn't kill themselves.

Turns out that Liara, and the Shadow Broker before her, has been investigating the Leviathan of Dis and similar cases to try and figure out what killed these Reapers thus making the main Deus Ex Machina about finding Leviathan which, like locating the Collectors in ME2, takes a while with Shepard looking in on the matter when a real lead is found.

The story of Leviathan is more or less the same just with no mention of the Crucible or the Little Blue Troll. But in the end Leviathan is just one part of the puzzle in kill the Reapers mission as it's up to Shepard to unite every race you can and the only way to get a 100% victory is to get everyone plus Leviathan to finish the Reapers off once and for all.

If you want I can put a link to my fan fix of ME3 and you can tell me if it's better or worse then the real game.

[clearspira]

I'm usually pretty forgiving when it comes to the suspension of disbelief, but season 1 of Voyager had me pushed to the brink. Then they found Amelia Earhart's truck floating in space. Then it somehow STARTED after being left in vacuum for god knows how long. At this point, I'm at my wit's end.

But the breaking point was Elogium. Hey, Kes wrestles with puberty! This should be fun. First it's revealed that the females of her species can only be fertilized once in their life. Wait...really? ONCE? Wow...that is a truly miserable evolutionary trait. Even PANDAS aren't shackled with that burden. I mean, I realize her people don't live very long, but neither do bunnies or mice, and they have no problems with multiple pregnancies. But whatever...alien. This DEFINITELY raises the stakes. If you only have ONE SHOT at reproduction, sexual reproduction at that, so it takes two parents, you can't afford any mixups. And it serves as a nice shoehorn into a topic that Voyager should probably be thinking about by now, although there's going to be a limited amount they can do with genetic diversity they have on board. But whatever...it's Star Trek. I'm not expecting great things science wise.

Finally, Kes turns dramatically towards the camera and says something like "But this will be my only chance to have a baby!"

15 seconds later my family is rushing into that family room to see why I'm screaming "BABIES!!! BABIES!!! -EEEEEEES!! PLURAL! YOU BETTER HAVE A LITTER! AT LEAST 3! PREFERABLY 5 OR 7!!!!" My mother looks at me like I'm crazy. I decide then and there that I had better stop watching Voyager and just stick to Deep Space Nine.

Never did finish that series.

edit - Holy shit! Chuck has reviewed Elogium! This I have got to see....

It seems to me that realistically Ocampan women would be rape magnets. If they can only reproduce once in their lives, then they are going to REALLY picky in what man they choose to settle with. There are going to be a lot of Ocampan Incels.

For me though, the amusing part is that Kes reproduces out of a sack on her back after being inseminated through the male's hands. In other words, she does not have a vagina and I am certain that the Voyager writers did not think of that.