| Series : | The Original Series | The Next Generation | Deep Space Nine | Voyager | Enterprise | Discovery | Films |
| Y.A.T.I. | Episode |
| Zefram Cochrane's dedication of the warp 5 complex came two years after he vanished in space forever, according to Kirk in "Metamorphosis". According to Archer, it takes four days to reach Kronos. That puts the Klingon home world only about one light year away from Earth, which is four times closer than the nearest star. So Tucker and T'Pol smear decontamination gel over one another because they were exposed to a protocystian spore whilst on an alien planet. Fair enough. But... why do they only cover a small part of their bodies with the gel, whilst wearing their clothing throughout? Surely the proper procedure here would be to strip naked and discard the clothing as biohazard material, and then smear your entire bodies with the gel? (No, not because I want to see Jolene Blalock naked. Well alright, not just because of that.) For that matter, they have to do one another's backs - what if only one person is contaminated? Does somebody else have to come in and potentially expose themselves just to do the contaminated person's back? So better still, discard your clothing and then take a shower using a watered-down version of that gel. That way one person can completely decontaminate themselves, head to toe. And hey, given that the whole idea of the decontamination room was meant for lascivious interest in the first place, wouldn't being naked in a shower (with appropriate-for-TV camera angles) be even better anyway? |
ENT : Broken Bow |
| The aliens modus operandi seems a little strange in this episode. If they wanted to collect triglobulin from the bodies, why leave them behind on the ship at all? Surely it would make more sense to take them with you, precisely to avoid having somebody stumble across them and interfere, as Archer does in this episode. Also, when Archer asks Hoshi if she transmitted his message on a rotated frequency, she says she will "try it again". But she only waits a grand total of four seconds before reporting no response. Archer's message was much longer than that, so Hoshi apparently gave up after the first couple of sentances. | ENT : Fight or Flight |
| Dr. Phlox talks of "tropolysine atoms" saying that they have an extra neutron which breaks down into a toxic substance inside the body. Presumably tropolysine is an element as yet unknown to us. If an atom gains an extra neutron it simply becomes an isotope of the same element. It might be unstable and undergo radioactive decay, thus damaging the body, but it shouldn't really be able to produce a poison by this method. | ENT : Strange New World |
| Although not strictly a YATI, the presence of a movie-era Klingon cruiser in Enterprise is a serious credibility strain. So is the idea of Klingons having holodeck technology on their ships over two hundred years before the Federation did in TNG. Also, Trip has to go through decompression to get on board the alien ship, and then decompresses again in order to get back to Enterprise. He should decompress going one way and recompress going the other. At one point, "comedy" is derived from having Tucker become all overanxious about ship safety. He calls an engineer over and complains about the little elevator in engineering, demonstrating how if you leave your hand on the handrail, as the lift goes up, a rail above can sever your fingers. The man responds "why would someone put their hands there, sir?" as if it was the dumbest thing in the world you could do. Yeah... because I can't possibly imagine why somebody might put their hand on... the handrail. Totally unbelievable. |
ENT : Unexpected |
| When describing Terra Nova to Trip and T'Pol, he claims it was "nine years there, nine years back". But later, he claims that the ship was designed to be broken up to make the colony and it was purely a one way journey. Also, Archer claims that Earth had already established the Utopia Planitia colony before establishing Terra Nova, more than 70 years before. Yet in Voyager's "The 37s", Harry Kim said that Mars was not colonised until 2103. And a very minor one - watch the bicycle wheel that Reed spins very carefully. He spins it counter clockwise, we cut away and it is still spinning counter clockwise when we cut back to it, but then we cut away and back to it again and now it is spinning the other way! In the 'not a nit, just an observation' category, those original Terra Nova colonists sure were a territorial bunch. According to Archer, the cause of the initial problems was that the Novans did not want "another two hundred people arriving". This indicates that the original colony was also two hundred strong. And yet these two hundred people, all living in a single settlement, objected to a follow on wave of another two hundred? Really? Put this in context; say Earth is a newly discovered uninhabited planet. You arrive and found what's essentially a small village, say in France. Just how upset could you really be to find that another two hundred people are going to settle in a village in China? Planets are BIG places, you could drop ten thousand such settlements randomly all over the map and never have any one of them within seventy miles of another one! It makes the colonists look rather selfish and arrogant to me. |
ENT : Terra Nova |
| Why did Archer take a beating from the Andorians in order to throw the little statue through the mask? It seemed like the idea was to see if it really led to the passage Trip found, but if so then why not just climb up from below and look through the holes? | ENT : The Andorian Incident |
| It's virtually impossible for a comet to have an Earth-like gravity, as the one in this episode does. It would have to be at least a hundred times denser than iron to have such a high gravity field, and if it was so dense then it would naturally form a sphere rather than the irregular shape we see. | ENT : Breaking the Ice |
| When Trip is picking the lock to the shop door, Archer claims that they have come 78 light years only to engage in breaking and entering. At the end of the episode we find that the date is now 31st July 2151, which puts it 106 days after the date given in "Broken Bow". But Enterprise should take more than double this time to cover 78 light years, even going at the maximum Warp 5 all the way. Also, having T'Pol just hang hair over her ears strikes me as a pretty poor disguise. Okay so maybe they don't have the plastic surgery tech to give her ears like the locals, but surely some sort of hat would be in order? |
ENT : Civilization |
| Trip claims that a warp 3 engine would cut a five year trip for the warp 1.8 capable freighter down to six months. Warp 1.8 is 5.832 x c, warp 3 is 27 x c - 4.63 times faster. So the five year trip would only be cut down to thirteen months. This is the third speed glitch Enterprise has managed in only ten episodes. I know they work to time and money constraints on this show, but would it really have been so terrible to have said "a year" instead of "six months"? Does nobody on this show have the ability to use a calculator? |
ENT : Fortunate Son |
| When the bay opened, the wind buffeting Archer was far too wimpy. Air rushing into a vacuum moves at something like a thousand miles per hour, but this stuff was barely ruffling his hair! | ENT : Cold Front |
| Talking about the phase cannon, Reed claims that their power is 500 Gigajoules. He should more properly have said this was their energy output, as the Joule is a unit of energy not power. | ENT : Silent Enemy |
| Star Trek has a long history of abusing evolution, and this episode continues that tradition. It is impossible to predict that one species is going to out-evolve another, as Phlox does here. | ENT : Dear Doctor |
| When the Klingon demands Archer's surrender, Archer points out that the Klingon ship is no match for Enterprise and makes him back down. But surely every Klingon dreams of a glorious death in battle? Surely the Klingon captain would jump at the chance of attacking Archer and being destroyed? And since Archer has supposedly just spent time reading up on the Klingon culture, shouldn't he know better than to make a threat like this in the first place? | ENT : Sleeping Dogs |
| Take a close look at the cargo containers in the compound during the raid - they're the same ones used on board the Enterprise-D some two hundred years later! | ENT : Shadows of P'Jem |
| When Hoshi was researching Reed's favourite food a few weeks back, one of his friends said he didn't like fish. So why did he choose the Sea Bass meal in this episode? Reed and Trip propogate a common rumour in this episode - your hair and nails do not really continue to grow significantly once you are dead. |
ENT : Shuttlepod One |
| This isn't a mistake as such, more an observation - why does Archer keep getting beaten up? Kirk virtually never lost a fistfight, but Archer is constantly being pummelled! It's no wonder the guy has started keeping a pistol handy while on board his own ship... | ENT : Fusion |
| Why is the hull of Enterprise always so dark during this episode? We've seen the ship in deep space loads of times, and it has always been quite well lit before. Also, if this planet has been in the dark of deep space for countless millennia - which it would have to be in order to be so far from a sun - then why have all the plants still got leaves on them? In our plantlife leaves are used as a sort of natural solar panel for photosynthesis, something these plants have no light for - do the leaves serve some other function? |
ENT : Rogue Planet |
| Okay, I know that only a few people saw them, and I know that the word "Ferengi" was never used in the presence of a Human... but it's just wrong for the Ferengi to show up this early. If they are anywhere near Human space at this point in history, they should be a well known species by the time of TNG! And at the very least Archer and co. would have made drawings of the new aliens for Starfleet, drawings that Data at least would have known about and commented upon when the Enterprise-D finally met the Ferengi. Also, in DS9's "Body Parts" the first Ferengi Grand Nagus claimed that he had written the Rules of Acquisition. Yet while there were 285 rules in DS9 - stated in "Rules of Acquisition" - it is claimed that there are only 173 rules in this episode. If the rules have been added to over time, how can Gint claim authorship? Was he just lying? |
ENT : Acquisition |
| I didn't really spot any obvious mistakes in this one, but you have to wonder about how Enterprise is treating this holographic technology. In TNG everybody was constantly surprised by how great the Enterprise holodecks were. Now that we're to believe such tech is pretty common amongst alien races, you have to wonder why everybody was always so amazed by it a couple of centuries later. | ENT : Oasis |
| Although the shuttle strafing the prison is a nice scene, what weapons is is using to do it? Previously the armament of the shuttles has been described as plasma cannon, but this time it fires a continuous beam that looks just like the phase pistol beam. Have they fitted phase cannon to the shuttles? Another speed nit - when Enterprise locates Archer, they say they are 5.2 light years away. After the ship arrives, a Suliban says that Danik has only known Archer for three days. But at warp 5 it should have taken the ship at least 15 days to reach the planet. Also, in "Broken Bow" the female Suliban Sarin showed us a face with Human-style skin and claimed that this is what the unaltered Suliban look like; the mottled skin effect is part of their camoflage ability. So why do all the Suliban in this episode claim to be unaltered when they have the mottled skin? |
ENT : Detained |
| When undocking from Enterprise, the alien ship detached before the airlock outer door was closed. This is a pretty bad idea, for obvious reasons. Even stranger, how did the alien monster get from the airlock to the interior of the ship? Airlocks have to be airtight by their very nature, so the alien should have been trapped, unless it could somehow open the inner door? Also, this creature was said to be very sensitive to EM radiation. Yet on its home planet, it clearly lives on the surface - and stays there during the day, as evidenced by the shot of the shuttle taking off. Wouldn't all the light from the sun count as EM radiation? Is the creature in pain all day, every day? |
ENT : Vox Sola |
| Alas, the bad guys in this episode fall prey to a rather convinient bit of stupidity. After chasing their target all this way and finally getting access to her, they shoot the sickbay imaging chamber full of holes and then start to walk away without even bothering to check that she was really inside. Even worse, once he knows he is safe Archer then deliberately reveals his "clever" ploy to the Mizarians. Why can he possibly gain from this? Surely it would have been far better to simply let them go on their way believing that V'Lar is dead. The way this was written it looked like Archer threw away an advantage just so he could rub the bad guys noses in their failure. When the ship reaches warp 5, T'Pol says it will take 53 minutes to reach the Vulcan ship. She then calculates that the Vulcan ship could head for them at warp 7, and reduce this to 12 minutes. In fact the true time would be 14.15 minutes. Technically T'Pol was wrong, and she really should have gotten an exact answer because she used the computer to work the answer out. But after so many speed nits in Enterprise the writers came veryclose to getting a tricky speed calculation right this time. |
ENT : Fallen Hero |
| After apparently sprouting a phase cannon in "Detained", the Enterprise shuttle-pod is now back to using plasma cannon again. Maybe they tried fitting a phase cannon to one shuttle but not the other? Or maybe they tried it on both, and it just didn't work out for some reason? You have to wonder what happened to the shuttle that Archer and Trip abandon in this episode. Was it recovered somehow? Contrary to popular belief it's perfectly plausible that Voyager could manufacture replacement shuttles, but Enterprise should have no such ability. The ship only has two shuttles, if they're going to start trashing them on a regular basis then it's going to look very silly. |
ENT : Desert Crossing |
| At the start of the episode Archer is concerned that only half the crew are getting shore leave. Since everybody is going for two days and two nights, doesn't a rather obvious solution present itself? Send one half down for one day and night, and the other half down for the next day and night. | ENT : Two Days and Two Nights |
| In planning their escape from the Suliban, everybody makes a big deal of how small the conduits on Enterprise are - only a child or maybe Hoshi can possibly fit through them, we are told. But when we see them, Hoshi has a good foot or so of clearence above and to the sides. Tucker or Reed could easily crawl through there! | ENT : Shockwave, Part 2 |
| Although it is done deliberately, this episode repeats a common fault of movies and television - although there can be family similarities in appearence, its exceptionally unlikely that you have an ancestor who looks exactly like you do. Why are the Vulcans interested in investigating the launch of Sputnik? They thought Humans of more than a century later too primitive to be of any interest in "Star Trek : First Contact", at least until they found that Cochrane had invented warp drive. In this episode T'Mir sells velcro technology for money. However, this episode takes place after the 1957 Sputnik launch; velcro was actually invented in 1955. |
ENT : Carbon Creek |
| Archer tells Reed that he heard England made it to the finals of the world cup. But the world cup is held every 4 years, with the last one in 2014, so while there should be one in 2150 and 2154 there shouldn't be one in 2152. Why do the Enterprise space suits shine huge blue lights into your face? Surely this would make it very difficult to see anything! Of course the real reason is that it lets us see the actor's faces without having to shine studio lights into the reflective faceplates, but reality doesn't enter into this... That self sealing mechanism on the space suits sure is handy. You have to wonder why Worf's suit in First Contact didn't have it, given that his was over two hundred years more advanced than Reed's. How come the Romulans have cloaking devices? Kirk and Spock were amazed at the technology in "Balance of Terror", clearly implying that the Romulans didn't have it in the Earth-Romulan war which lies just a few years in the future to Enterprise. Why do the Romulans call themselves Romulans? I had always thought that this was just what Humans called them, based on the old legend about Romulus and Remus founding the Roman Empire. Yet the Romulans call themselves by that name to Hoshi. And clearly Hoshi wasn't translating it from some Romulan word, because she initially mispronounced it and T'Pol corrected her. Reed mentions here that his family expected him to follow tradition and join the Royal Navy. Since Earth has been at peace under one unified government for something like fifty years, why does the Royal Navy still even exist? Why would ANY national-level military force still exist? For that matter, in a time when a handful of starships or orbital weapons platforms could blast anything on the entire surface of a planet with energy weapons, how could naval warships still exist at all, even in theory? |
ENT : Minefield |
| Trip states in this episode that a really powerful and sophisticated computer would probably be very large. But look back on the history of computers, and you will see that in fact the more sophisticated they are the smaller they get. | ENT : Dead Stop |
| There seems to be an oddly high level of compatibility in spare parts in the Trek universe. For instance, here Enterprise is trying to buy a new plasma injector for its warp drive. There's no indication that they have given the Kreetassians a set of plans to build a new unit from, they seem to be just buying an off the shelf unit. It seems incredibly unlikely that the Kreetassian plasma injectors would just happen to fit Enterprise - it's like taking your car to China, buying a spare carburetor at random from a shop, and expecting it to fit into your engine. Also, wasn't the whole point of last week's episode that the alien repair station repaired their ship to a "good as new" status, even going so far as to fix the scratch where the travel pod bumped into it in the pilot episode? So why do they suddenly need new plasma injectors here in the very next episode? Surely they should have been able to go a good long while without needing any further outside help after that big repair job last week, right? |
ENT : A Night In Sickbay |
| Well, after their terrible treatment of deuterium in "Demon" the Voyager writers learned their lesson and talked about it sensibly in "The Void". Now they're back to abusing it again. For the record; deuterium is a type of Hydrogen. You can scoop it directly out of space itself - that's just what the glowing red things on the front of Starship nacelles are for. If you want easy access to large amounts you can scoop it out of a gas giant atmosphere, or get it from the ice of a Europa-like moon or a comet. In other words there is plenty of the stuff drifting around out there, entirely free for the taking. Under Earth-like conditions it is a very light gas, much like ordinary Hydrogen. So you can't mine "strata" of it from under the ground like it was coal or oil. And even if you could, it's not exactly going to be terribly valuable. When T'Pol pulled all her fancy Vulcan karate, I couldn't help but wonder why she didn't simply neck-pinch the Klingon? It would have been much quicker and more efficient, I think. Did anybody else think the Klingons gave up far too easily? After being made to look like fools by the locals, the head of the colony demands that they leave and never come back - and they do! I was waiting for them to beam back down behind the defenders and open fire, or blast the camp from orbit. |
ENT : Marauders |
| When T'Pol tells Archer about the Vulcan agents sent to Agaron almost thirty years ago, he asks if she was one of them and she replies "I'm not that old." Well it turns out in Zero Hour that T'Pol is 65 at that point, which is only a year or so after this episode. So in point of fact she's easily old enough to have been an operative for the Vulcans almost thirty years ago. | ENT : The Seventh |
| Wouldn't it be a good idea to put a little bit of explosive into the equipment carried on these kinds of missions? Something you could detonate from the ship, just big enough to wreck the internal mechanisms without hurting anybody nearby. I'm confused as to how the Suliban cell ship cloaking device works. On the one hand you have to run power through it all the time to keep the ship cloaked. But on the other hand objects like Trip's arm can be cloaked and stay cloaked, without any further input of power. |
ENT : The Communicator |
| Not a nit, just an observation. This is, of course, one in a long line of similar episodes dating all the way back to TOS's "The Naked Time". The reason that Trek likes to do these episodes is that by relaxing the character's inhibitions they give us a peek into the desires that drive them. It's a fast way of telling us more about the characters. But in this episode the characters focus on whatever they were doing when they were affected. As a result, we really learn nothing new about them. A more minor but more nit-like point; Trip mentions that the inertial microdampers in Archer's chair will keep him sitting safely even if the ship is shaking itself apart. Okay... so why have these never been used in chairs in Trek? |
ENT : Singularity |
| Like TNG's "The Next Phase", this episode shows an invisible character that can pass through solid surfaces, without any consideration of the problems that would generate. How can Hoshi see if the light is passing through her retinas? How can she stand on the floor if she can pass through solid objects? Of course, it is all just a dream. Trip claims that the human body is made up of "a few trillion" cells. In fact it's made of about 37 trillion, which is far more than "a few". |
ENT : Vanishing Point |
| At one point Archer offers to bring the cargo ship into his shuttle bay and take it to its destination. But look at the ship in the exterior visuals - it's far too big to get into Enterprise. This isn't really a nit as such... but when Archer plays his con about the tribuneral on the Retellian guy, he angrily declares "I'm not subject to your laws!" Huh? Why would he think that? Granted I have no idea how the 22nd century Retellians looked at law, but the NX-01 is clearly Earth territory. When you are on Earth territory, you are subject to Earth law. We've seen many times that Starfleet in all its various incarnations follows the policy that officers on foreign territory are subject to the laws of that territory. While I grant that it's possible that the Retellians believe otherwise, does it really seem likely that they honestly think they can go onto another species' territory, violate their laws, and then just shrug it off and walk away because the aren't citizens? |
ENT : Precious Cargo |
| T'Pol claims that a Vulcan ship was "nearly" destroyed by a storm some time ago, and Archer discovers that the ship was actually destroyed. I thought Vulcans couldn't lie? Also, this storm goes at warp speed. Yet in TNG, Data once claimed there is no known natural phenomenon that could go at warp speed. And if the storm was going at warp speed, how could Archer see it before it arrived? It would have been outrunning the light it emitted! |
ENT : The Catwalk |
| This is one of those "not a nit, more an observation" ones - but in all other Trek series, the transporter has always been a very finnicky device, prone to failure whenever conditions were not just right. The crew would then fall back on the much more reliable shuttles. Enterprise is reversing that trend - nowdays it seems that there are all kinds of atmospheric storms or radiation which stop shuttles being used, yet the transporter just keeps on going fine. Since this transporter is a very primitive model, it really should be more unreliable than the shuttles. | ENT : Dawn |
| I'm really getting sick and tired of the way Enterprise is abusing Vulcans. Now we find that the supposedly logical species that values "infinite diversity in infinite combinations" above all else practices widespread discrimination, to the point that they are apparently willing to let a whole section of their society die out. How can you claim to value diversity and practice eugenics at the same time? And if you want to claim that the IDIC philosophy hasn't evolved at this point, sorry - the IDIC symbol has been seen several times on Enterprise, including in this episode. | ENT : Stigma |
| One of the things that Trek has done a couple of times now is have some kind of repeating time loop in which people gradually become aware that they are doing the same thing over and over. But this is nonsensical - if time "resets" itself then your memory would reset also, leaving you with no memory of what had happened even if you had done it a million times before. And if it is just that you have been sent back in time, then your memories of what you had done before would be just as good as ever. Either way this gradual sense of deja-vu could not happen. | ENT : Future Tense |
| When we see the damaged shuttlepod, an inside shot shows us a PADD floating around within. T'Pol then states that the gravity plating is offline. Unfortunately, the shuttle is tumbling end over end as it floats through space. Rotation like this would create something like a low level gravity effect, which would tend to make any loose items collect in the nose or tail of the shuttle. | ENT : Canamar |
| When the alien ship first captures Enterprise, it disables all of the starship's weaponry. Yet at the end, Enterprise is able to use two torpedoes to destroy the alien ship. Why the difference? If the alien could disable Enterprise at the start, why not at the end as well? | ENT : The Crossing |
| Yet another speed nit - Enterprise is supposed to turn back to investigate this planet, and Archer claims it is only thirty light years behind them. Even at warp 5 that's a trip of nearly three months, hardly a small detour. Also, they pass by Mayweather's old ship on the way to the planet. But in "Future Tense", the ship was said to be far beyond the previous limit of exploration and a good thirty light years beyond any trade route. It's just possible that Enterprise has not gone any further from home since "Future Tense", and so the thirty light year backtrack took Enterprise to that trade route. But... before Enterprise, ships could only do warp 2 (8 x c) at the most. And Mayweather left his family 4 years ago... so the ship must have been at least 58 light years away from Earth at that point. That's at least a seven year trip. So how come Mayweather was back home for the start of season one, eighteen months ago? |
ENT : Horizon |
| I know the Denobulans are a bit flaky, but it really strains credibility that they would refuse to leave even when their lives are threatened. | ENT : The Breach |
| The one failing of this episode is the attitude of Captain Archer towards Trip. Archer is furious with his engineer, angrily denying Trip's claim that he was only doing what Archer would have done. Well, in fact Archer has interfered in other cultures - who asked him to reveal the Vulcan observation post to the Andorians? Or to free the Suliban in "Detained"? Or to help the miners in "Marauders"? And let's remember that Archer is constantly ranting that the Vulcans don't help Earth enough... now he turns around and attacks Trip for helping at all. As Archer himself puts it "You did exactly what I'd do? If that's true then I've done a pretty lousy job setting an example around here." Well frankly yes, Archer, you have done a pretty lousy job of that. The episode would have been a bit more believable if Archer had made his decision based on politics and against his own feelings, then shared in Trip's guilt at the conclusion rather than ranting at him. | ENT : Cogenitor |
| The transport is said to have increased its speed to Warp 3.9 as it left Earth. Since Enterprise is some 100 light years away at this point, then even if they headed back at warp 5 it should take the two at least six months before they could intercept. We could argue that the transport did a small transwarp hop somewhere... but Archer expected to be able to intercept them, and never questioned the timeframe in which he actually did so. In DS9 we see Tarkaleans and they look nothing whatever like the ones we see here. So are there two or more different sub-groups of the Tarkaleans with very different appearences? Not unprecedented, given the Xindi, but it's rather odd. |
ENT : Regeneration |
| The destruction caused by the probe seemed awful slight for the number of casualties caused. It blasted a trench in the ground maybe a couple of hundred yards across - with virutally no visible blast or thermal damage to the structures on either side. I have a hard time believing that this killed millions of people, even if it went right through a couple of cities. Future Guy claims that the Xindi were only testing their weapon design this time, and that a much more powerful version is being prepared. By doing this the Xindi have allowed Earth a chance to beef up its defences and prepare a retaliation mission. And suppose the weapon hadn't worked? Then Earth would have captured both the intact weapon and the pilot. Whereas if they had tested it on some uninhabited planet somewhere, then waited until the big version was ready to attack Earth, they would have been able to inflict far more damage. The writers are a little cagey about the timeframe of this episode, having characters talk about it being a long trip back to Earth without being specific. It's also been a while since we got a good reference as to how far the ship is from Earth - 90 light years in "Dead Stop". But to make this episode work, we would either have to assume that the ship has been heading back towards Earth at close to top speed ever since then, or that something like a year passed offscreen as they headed back. It will be interesting to see what the next date they give us is. |
ENT : The Expanse |
| There is much talk of platinum "in it's liquified state". The only way to liquify platinum is to heat it up so that it melts, and keep it hot. | ENT : The Xindi |
| It is highly difficult to believe that a virus could actually convert you into an alien species, certainly not in a matter of a few minutes. It's even harder to believe it could give you a full alien language capability and memories. | ENT : Extinction |
| Reed mentions "the smaller" Xindi ship – but we see them both, and they are identical! Like with the Platinum last week, we have people talk about a material in its "liquid form". The ONLY difference between a solid and a liquid is the temperature. Heat a solid, you get a liquid. You could maybe say that the process to make Trellium-D has to take place with the reactants dissolved in a solvent, but this is actually true of most chemical reactions and is hardly anything to get worked up about. |
ENT : Rajiin |
| This ship has been lost in the Expanse for months at the very least. Even assuming it only drifted into the asteroid field right before the episode, it would have been in there for a matter of hours. Given the frequency of collisions that we observed in the field, the ship should have been bashed to bits in no time – yet as far as we could see, not a single asteroid ever hit it. Also, once again we have an asteroid with Earth-normal gravity. Unless these asteroids are massively dense - like a thousand times denser than the densest known element - this is simply impossible. |
ENT : Impulse |
| The "escaping shuttle" sequence is really silly. Even granting that fiddling with the sensors could fire a thruster, how stupid is it not to secure these things to a surface? Plus the motion of the shuttle looks really wrong – I can't be specific, but the motion just doesn't look like what you would expect from a thruster in that position firing. | ENT : Exile |
| Well, Phlox's attitude sure has changed. Back in Vox Sola he refused an order to perform invasive tests on a severed tentacle for ethical reasons. Now he has no problem at all doing the same thing to the living components of the Xindi rifle. | ENT : The Shipment |
| A major point of this episode is that when the parasites are killed, they vanish from history and so the past is altered - things like medical scans appear as if the parasites had never existed. But that would mean that the memories people had of those medical scans would also be re-written, so T'Pol and Phlox would never know anything had happened. In fact, Phlox could never even know his treatment had worked at all! In fact an interesting thing should have happened here. Phlox picked a parasite to test his treatment on. When it worked and the parasite was erased from history, in the new reality Phlox would have picked another parasite instead. So that one would then vanish from history and make another new timeline. In this one Phlox would pick yet another parasite... and so on. The upshot is, as soon as Phlox did his first treatment ALL the parasites should have vanished and the episode would be over! But if the parasites had never been there, why would Phlox invent the treatment in the first place... time travel makes no sense at all, does it? |
ENT : Twilight |
| It makes no sense that the Humans here are stuck in the old west after all this time. They obviously have the capacity to manufacture guns, which means that they have factories, metallurgy, chemistry, and engineers and scientists to make it all work. If so, then there is no reason why their technology shouldn't improve over time. Okay with a small population base maybe they wouldn't have advanced to the point of building Starships or anything, but they certainly should have got well beyond the whole western thing. Also, where did Archer and Trip get their guns from? Can Enterprise manufacture stuff like this without replicator technology? Or does Reed have an ancient weapon collection like Worf did? |
ENT : North Star |
| It took weapons fire to get that metal stuff off the hull through most of the episode. Why then does it all just fall off as soon as the ship gets clear of the cloud? | ENT : Similitude |
| It makes little sense for Daniels to send T'Pol and Archer. Archer makes an attempt to justify this by saying he is in a hurry and it takes time to get clearences and such, but as T'Pol points out, Daniels can take as long as he likes! Even if he takes the next ten years to get his clearences, he can go back in time to the exact same point Archer and T'Pol arrived at. Also, Daniels claims that the changes in the past haven't reached the future yet. But every single time we've seen the past changed, the present/future (which word you use depends on your viewpoint) changes instantly. This includes the episodes Daniels has been involved with, so we can't claim he is using some different type of technology or anything. |
ENT : Carpenter Street |
| It seemed to take the crew an extremely long time to stop the fighting after they regained control of the ship - I would have thought hailing the other ships and arranging a cease fire would be top priority, but they take their own sweet time about it - and Reed even keeps firing at them after he gets weapons back! Also, these human bomb things take quite a while to work. You would think they could have flooded the ship with tranquiliser gas and recaptured it that way quite easily. |
ENT : Chosen Realm |
| Not necessarily a nit, but the Xindi prototype seems awfully small. This thing fitted into Shran's ship, and was expected to fit into Enterprise's launch bay. Yet the full weapon we saw in Twilight was huge, much larger than the Xindi ships accompanying it. Isn't a prototype supposed to be a close match to the final product? | ENT : Proving Ground |
| When you first see the outside of the shuttle simulator, take a look at the screen which is projecting the starfield. It's way too small - given the size of the window it's facing, from inside you would easily be able to see past the edges. | ENT : Stratagem |
| I really have to complain about the FX used for the super-anomaly. Enterprise is usually top notch for this kind of thing, but this anomaly looked exactly like a close up shot of some sort of bubbling foam. It was like something out of a cheesy 50s sci-fi flick. Also, we have yet another example of an alien who can walk through walls, but doesn’t fall through the floor. |
ENT : Harbinger |
| It's very hard to nitpick this one, because many things that we see could be dismissed as Phlox imagining things. I'm going to treat anything that wasn't obviously a delusion as real... Early on in the episode we are told it will take less than an hour to cross the anomaly at warp 4. Warp 4 is 64 times lightspeed, so the anomaly is about 64 light hours across. We are then told that at impulse, it will take four days - 96 hours - to cross the distance. So that means full impulse speed is 64/96 = 0.666 xc, exactly two thirds of light speed. So far so good. However, when they find that they are still inside the anomaly T'Pol says they are nearly a quarter of a lightyear from the edge. She then says it will take ten weeks to get clear. At 0.666 xc, it should actually take 19.5 weeks. In fact to get out of the anomaly in ten weeks the ship would have to be travelling faster than the speed of light on impulse drive, which is both a mismatch with what was said earlier and is supposed to be impossible. On another front, when Phlox talks about waking everybody up he says he is going to wake his medical staff before most of the crew. Does Phlox have a medical staff? I don't think I've ever seen or heard of another doctor, nurse or even orderly anywhere near sickbay! |
ENT : Doctor's Orders |
| When they first enter the hatchery a door seals behind them and the atmosphere changes to become breathable, prompting everybody to take off their helmets. But when they call Archer he opens the door again and walks in. Everybody inside is still not wearing helmets - hasn't Archer just let a big cloud of unbreathable air into the room? Or did the atmosphere become breathable all over the ship when the door closed, in which case why did Archer keep his helmet on all this time? | ENT : Hatchery |
| Take a close look at the ships in the future battle. Daniels tells us that this is happening 400 years from Archer's time, i.e. 2554. Yet one of the ships we see flying past the window is a Prometheus class first seen in Voyager's "Message in a Bottle", set in 2374. So Starfleet is using ship designs that are 180 years old? I guess the war must have taken a pretty heavy toll. Worse still, just as Daniels is telling Archer what the name of the battle is, we see the Dauntless from Voyager's "Hope and Fear" fly past! The Dauntless, remember, was a fake Starfleet ship built by Arturis. I guess Starfleet must be so desperate that they're using ships that don't even exist! | ENT : Azati Prime |
| Not strictly a YATI as such, but the warp coils of a ship are supposed to be a series of large ring-shaped devices which sit in line along the inside of each nacelle. There shouldn't really be any such thing as a "primary" warp coil, it shouldn't really be possible to take a warp coil from one ship and stick it in another, and if you could then it should be a lot larger than the thing we see in this episode, given the size of Enterprise's nacelles. Of course we could always argue that Enterprise's warp drive operates on slightly different principles than later ships. We get another speed nit - the meeting is three days from now, four light years away, and the ship is said to need to be able to reach warp 3 to reach it. That would make warp 3 equal to 487 times lightspeed, which is way faster than the ship is stated to be in "Broken Bow". |
ENT : Damage |
| In this episode Archer tries to prove what is going on to the Xindi by showing them the bodies of the Reptilians he killed in Earth's past. The Xindi-Arboreal claims that Archer may just as easily have captured them in the present so this is no proof at all. However, in "Damage" the female sphere builder openly admitted that she sent those Reptillians into the past to make the bio-weapon. So what's the Xindi on about? | ENT : The Forgotten |
| T'Pol uses the transporter to beam out engine parts from the other NX-01. We're talking about working components with an awful lot of energy going through them. We're talking about using a transporter in one fast-moving ship to beam out something from another fast-moving ship. Yet not only was the transport a complete success, their removal caused no apparent damage at either end - no explosions from leaking plasma, etc. Okay so this isn't impossible, but how likely does it sound? The writers have been careful to hide T'Pol's exact age from us, but we do know that whilst she is probably the oldest person on Enterprise, she is not excessively old - she's certainly far less than a hundred if "The Seventh" is anything to go by. Yet in this episode we see her 100 years older, and she looks ancient! Sarek looked like a Human in his 30s when he was over a hundred, and only looked in his 50s or so more than a century after that. Do Vulcan females live shorter lives than the males, or is there some reason T'Pol ages faster than normal - the Trellium maybe? The aliens in the nebula are using the same type of ship which attacked Enterprise in "Silent Enemy". Yet they name the aliens as Corvallens, which we have seen in TNG and which look nothing like the "Silent Enemy" aliens. |
ENT : E2 |
| That defence system in the spheres seems really poor, doesn't it? I mean, great big mechanical arms that grab people? Surely some sort of energy weapon on a swivel mount would be better, or fill the sphere with poison gas or something. And if that was some sort of repair machine with a secondary defence function - well, if the builders think the spheres need defending then why not put in a decent defence system as well? Since when do Xindi have transporter technology? They have ALWAYS had to hard dock to get from ship to ship before, even when attacking Enterprise in "Rajin". Now they suddenly have transporters so they can kidnap Hoshi? The basic premise of this arc is that the Sphere Builders were being defeated in the future, so they went back in time to get the Xindi to attack Earth before the Federation was created. So the Sphere Builders have time travel, obviously. So you have to wonder, why pick this particular time for their attack? The NX-01 is the only ship Earth had with any hope of stopping them, yes? But if they put this whole plan into operation ten years earlier, the NX-01 wouldn't exist and Earth wouldn't have any defence at all. It's almost like they wanted to give Earth a sporting chance to ruin all their plans or something. |
ENT : The Council |
| Archer takes the injured and possibly brain damaged Hoshi along for her knowledge of the weapon systems and codes. Huh? Why doesn't he just ask the Xindi for the information he needs? They built the thing! | ENT : Countdown |
| I keep wondering why they don't just beam a photon torpedo into this weapon and detonate it on full yield. According to Reed in The Expanse, a torpedo "can put a three kilometre crater into an asteroid". An explosion that large should blow a sphere a few hundred metres wide to bits! Well, that space station sure looked familiar didn't it? (It's the Midas array from Voyager.) |
ENT : Zero Hour |
| The shuttlepod takes considerable damage from being shot up by the P-51 fighters. Yet in "Minefield", we find that the shuttlepods can withstand small nuclear explosions from close range. I find it hard to believe they would be vulnerable to machine guns. | ENT : Storm Front, Part 1 |
| Enterprise is greeted by a huge fleet of Human and Vulcan ships when she arrives back at Earth. Where were all these when the Xindi weapon was approaching unopposed? | ENT : Storm Front, Part 2 |
| When the "Augments" are taking over the Klingon ship, one of them kicks a Klingon in the chest and sends him flying down the corridor twenty feet or so. No matter how strong we assume the Augment to be, simple laws of action and reaction would dictate that he would go flying off in the other direction. | ENT : Borderland |
| When Persis is beating up the guards to get into CS-12, the first punch she throws is an uppercut that actually lifts the guy off the floor and flips him completely 360 degrees. A punch like that would almost certainly kill you. At the very least, it would shatter your jaw. Yet this guy stands up within seconds and comes back at her again! It was nice of Archer to tell Soong that Enterprise was going to initiate the station's self-destruct sequence. It gave the Augments that extra few vital seconds to shut the thing down and foil his plan. Always good to see somebody show such consideration to their enemies that way. |
ENT : Cold Station 12 |
| There's no way Archer would freeze that quickly in space. In fact, he wouldn't freeze at all - if anything the vacuum of space would tend to insulate him. | ENT : The Augments |
| Why doesn't T'Pau talk anything like she did in TOS? Then she was all "art thou Human, Spock?" Now she talks perfectly normal English. Soval says that Vulcans are worried about how fast Humans are advancing because it took his people 1,500 years to recover and travel to the stars after their wars. Later on they say Surak lived 1,800 years ago. So Vulcan made it into space about 300 years ago. So... how did they found the P'Jem monastery 3,000 years ago, as claimed in "The Andorian Incident"? |
ENT : The Forge |
| If the Forge stops technology from working, why doesn't it stop photonic warheads from detonating? For that matter, why doesn't it stop chemical rockets from firing? In "Fusion", we saw the Vahklas type of ship and it was stated that "they have not been in use for a long time". Well, two of them take part in the battle with Enterprise in this episode. In a way it can kinda make sense though - if Vulcan is gearing up for a war maybe they have dusted off some mothballed ships to do planetary defence and free newer units for the front lines? |
ENT : Awakening |
| How come the Romulan agent was wearing one of the uniforms from "Star Trek : Nemesis"? Are we meant to believe that the Nemesis Romulans were all in some kind of ancient ceremonial garb or something? I've complained that Archer is way too wimpy when it comes to fighting before, but here I think the writers went a little over the top in making him the hero. Vulcans are meant to be three times stronger than Humans - just look at the occasions when Spock fought against a Human in TOS. Archer should have been toast in that fight, but he did better than either T'Pol or T'Pau. |
ENT : Kir'Shara |
| So the inventor of transporters was badly injured by one; his son was "killed" testing one; and he says that several other people were killed testing them. Call me a coward, but I'd want to know that they had sent a few monkeys through the transporter at least ten thousand times each before I went anywhere near it. Don't they do animal testing in the future? Emory says his sub-quantum transporter is a completely flawed concept. So how come it worked on the probe? And if we say that he just did a normal transport on the probe, why would it end up 40,000 kilometres away? Previous episodes have indicated that the Enterprise transporter range is a few thousand kilometres, tops, so this was extended by at least tenfold! And even if we assume that Emory came up with some upgrade to the normal transporter to allow this, what was all that about "maybe you can extend your range a few hundred kilometres" at the end - he'd already beaten that by a long way! New fact about Archer - he was one of those child prodigies! In this episode he talks about a heart-to-heart chat he had with his father the day before he went to flight school. In "Cold Station 12", we are told that Archer's father died when he was only twelve years old. So Archer must have gone to flight school when he wasn't even a teenager! |
ENT : Daedalus |
| So this episode centres around the fact that Trip and Hoshi are infected with a silicon based virus. Um, how exactly does that work? Viruses are essentially just a hunk of DNA coated in protein. They can't reproduce on their own like bacteria can - they work by invading the cells of whoever catches them, and sticking their own DNA in to take control of the cell and turn it into a factory for making more copies of the virus, which invade more of your cells and so on. So how does that work if the virus is based on an entirely different chemical? Both protein and the nucleic acids that make up DNA are based on carbon chemistry. Whilst it's conceivable that you could have silicon based versions of these things, how in the hell could a silicon virus infect one of your carbon-based cells and turn it into a factory for making more silicon viruses? All the chemistry in your cells would be completely wrong for the job! If we ever do discover silicon life forms, we can pretty much guarantee that you would be utterly immune to their diseases, and they to ours. At one point the two Organians want to have a private conversation. They decide to jump into Trip and Hoshi's bodies and chat in the decontamination room. Why do they have to be inside bodies to talk to one another? We know the Organians are non-corporeal, surely they must have some way of talking to one another whilst they are in their natural state - telepathy or something. At the end, we see Phlox declare Hoshi and Trip free of the virus. Shouldn't he have gone into the sickbay in a pressure suit to make this determination? |
ENT : Observer Effect |
| When one of the hoses gets knocked out of Reed's suit, he loses most of his oxygen supply. For one thing, I would think that suits like this would be designed to be pretty rugged precisely to avoid this kind of thing. For another, surely it is possible to design the fitting of hose to tank so that if the hose pulls loose it seals the tank? I'm no expert on diving, but I seem to recall that the tanks divers use today have features like this! Additionally, they refill Reed's tank by connecting it to the oxygen tank of a chemically fuelled manoeuvring thruster. Do these suits really supply pure oxygen to their wearers? Normal air is a mix of about 20% oxygen and about 80% nitrogen. When the Romulan ship does heavy manoeuvring, Reed and Tucker hold themselves in place with their magnetic boots. Just how strong are these? After all, in order to be able to walk with them you have to be able to pull them free of the deck with relative ease. There's no dialogue indicating that they turned the power up to make them really strong or anything, yet now the boots can hold them in place against all these big accelerations? |
ENT : Babel One |
| I hate the way Star Trek treats radiation. Over and over we are shown that radiation does absolutely nothing to a person right up until a particular threshold is reached, then it makes them feel a bit sick, then they die. Radiation doesn’t behave anything like this! This episode is a particularly bad offender – Trip receives a big enough radiation dose that he’s actually falling down unconscious on the floor. Yet he’s not losing his hair or teeth, there’s no sign of skin damage, there’s no talk of cancer. When he gets back to Enterprise he seems to feel no ill effects whatsoever! And we can’t really say that advanced future medicines make these less of a problem because Trip is clearly feeling perfectly fine in the scene where he is taking off his space suit, which must surely happen as soon as he gets back and before any medical treatment. When the drone ship is found, four of the ships in the fleet detect it. None of them is Enterprise herself. The ships in the fleet are Vulcan, Tellarite and Andorian. Vulcan and Andorian ships are faster than Enterprise – so how come Enterprise is the first one to intercept the drone? Talas dies because the phase pistol she was shot with was set to kill, causing "phase pulse infection". How on Earth can an energy pulse "infect" you? And in any case, she wasn't shot with a phase pistol, she was shot with one of the MACO's plasma pistols. |
ENT : United |
| If all the Aenar are born blind, how come their city is so well lit? I could buy them installing temporary lighting in a few rooms especially for their guests, but in every exterior shot of the city we are shown, there are hundreds of brightly lit windows all over the city! | ENT : The Aenar |
| What the hell is the point of those massive glowing lights on the Columbia’s bridge? Does it double up as the ship’s disco or something? | ENT : Affliction |
| Much tension is generated by the fact that Enterprise and Columbia have trouble staying really close together, so the line between them gets stretched and eventually breaks free. Wouldn't it have been far simpler to shoot the line across from Columbia, have Trip tie onto his end of it, then just release his end and have Enterprise winch him in? That way Columbia could have pulled away as soon as the line was released and Enterprise could have winched Trip in at their leisure. T'Pol orders all power to the armour when she puts the NX-01 in between the D-5 and the planet. A few moments later she orders the ship to keep firing on the cruiser. How can it do that if all power is being routed to the armour? How was Phlox able to beam his cannister of virus up to the cruiser? Surely the shields on both the colony and the cruiser would be up during a battle? |
ENT : Divergence |
| Why are Archer's quarters on E deck? I would think he should be stationed as close as possible to the bridge so he could get there fast in an emergency. Even if we assume that the design of the ship makes it absolutely positively impossible to have quarters on B deck, surely he could be on D since most crew quarters are there? Archer refers to Hoshi as his "protocol officer". Since when? She's always been described as his communications officer. I suspect he invented a new job and gave it to her so he could give her this task... Phlox claims that the Orion women are having an effect on the females aboard Enterprise, causing headaches and listlessness. He claims this might be the pheromones acting as a defence mechanism against competition. But if this is a natural property of the Orion women, wouldn't the whole point of it be to eliminate competition for males from other Orion women? Which means that the Orion women should be affecting one another far more than they do any of the Human women, surely? |
ENT : Bound |
| Trip says that the cloak has to have everything except auxiliary power sent to it to cloak the ship. But they keep running at warp speed after engaging it. Can you really run the warp drive on auxiliary power? Later he says he can't decloak and free up power for weapons and armour because the cloak is not responding. So what? Surely you can just unplug the thing whether it's responding or not? So there's an Orion woman on the bridge of the Mirror NX-01. Since Bound has established that Orion women constantly emit pheromones that make men crazy for them whilst women become listless and lazy, why isn't this woman running the ship? (In fairness, the Empire probably has some way to neutralise the pheromones. I bet it's an really evil way, too.) |
ENT : In A Mirror, Darkly |
| When the Defiant loses shields the Avenger blasts away at the primary hull, causing several explosions. Yet when we see the area clearly later on, there's not a single sign of damage. | ENT : In A Mirror, Darkly, Part 2 |
| I go with using Tucker and T'Pol for undercover work. Two of the most famous faces on Earth, trying to covertly infiltrate an organisation that has target them specifically to create their child. Yeah, that makes sense. Plus - everybody is so amazed that Paxton is willing to go to warp within a solar system. The idea that this is dangerous crops up every once in a while in Trek. But just look at Borderland for instance, the NX-01 goes to warp within literally seconds of pulling out of Spacedock in Earth orbit! Why is it suddenly surprising that Paxton can do something similar? |
ENT : Demons |
| When we see the comet, the tail is pointing in the wrong direction. It's a common mistake - people tend to think that the tail streams out behind the comet because of its forward motion, much as a contrail is left behind an aircraft. In fact the material is pushed away from the head by the pressure of the sunlight (or solar wind), so the tail always points away from the sun. Given how Mars is lit in the shot of the shuttle approaching, the tail should be streaming away roughly to the left of the frame. | ENT : Terra Prime |
| Troi says the ceremony will lead to the formation of the Federation. This IS the formation of the Federation. | ENT : These Are The Voyages... |
| Series : | The Original Series | The Next Generation | Deep Space Nine | Voyager | Enterprise | Discovery | Films |
| Canon source | Backstage source | Novel source | DITL speculation |
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