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?
Change.
Star Trek seems to be allergic to any deviation from the status quo. Everything forward must be recognisable to the past, whereas reality is not like that. Everything has to look recognisable, and be recognisable, even when it doesn’t make sense.
Everything has to have impulse, warp drive, for example, or engines that make it behave much the same. All the alien ships work like that, even centuries into the future, when that makes no sense at all. There has to be a Federation.
There’s very rarely any sort of major lasting change that we see on-screen, and I think what Star Trek needs is that growth.
Star Trek’s biology also tends to be infamously awful. It’s always played fast and loose with it, arguably more so than a lot of the other scientific disciplines it covers.
Barclay’s Cold Virus cure causing Worf to devolve into a precursor species, and several of the crew to evolve into hybrid creatures just because it altered the introns and exons. Doing that doesn’t automatically turn you into something else, or else radiation would be far worse than it is.
Same for the Klingon redundant organs. It’s still the same system, so the Klingon redundancies wouldn’t do much good, unless they had something on their planet that meant they needed it, that isn’t just being a fighter planet.
And it doesn’t really address the physiological differences very well. A human and a Klingon hit the same, and have much of the same vulnerabilities. Worf has slight super-strength, but that’s about it.