| Series : | The Original Series | The Next Generation | Deep Space Nine | Voyager | Enterprise | Discovery | Films |
| Y.A.T.I. | Episode |
| When Q's energy field appears, Picard orders full stop. A moment later Torres reports "Controls to full stop, sir... now reading full stop, sir." And a moment after that we cut to an exterior view... and the ship is still drifting towards the force field. That Torres isn't too good at his job, is he? When he is enthusing about how wonderful the Enterprise is, Wesley lists the "low gravity gymnasium" as one of the highlights. Um... doesn't a low gravity field defeat the main purpose of using a gym? If you're lifting weights or running or doing pushups or whatever, isn't it all rather easy and pointless if you have the gravity turned down low? When Riker meets Data he says "When the captain suggested you, I looked up your record." Data comments that this is wise of him, and Riker says "Then your rank of Lieutenant Commander is honorary?" and Data corrects him, pointing out that he graduated "Starfleet class of '78; honours in probability mechanics and exobiology." Okay, for one... if Riker looked up Data's Starfleet records, wouldn't it actually say that in it? It seems like it would be the exact kind of information one would expect in a person's record, yes? And for another thing, wouldn't Data pretty much be expected to graduate with honours in every subject? Or at least, in every subject where performance was purely a matter of intellect, scientific ability, stuff like that? And for a third thing, Data himself will later establish (In "The Neutral Zone") that this season takes place in 2364. So how exactly can he be "class of 78"? 2278 was 86 years ago! I suspect time travel... When Picard fires an energy beam at Farpoint to feed the creature, he orders Yar to use the main phasers. However, the beam comes from the middle of the Captain's Yacht. This nit is fixed in the remastered blu-ray versions. |
TNG : Encounter at Farpoint |
| The episode opens with a shot of the ship flying through space whilst Picard records a log entry saying that the ship is running at Warp 7. However, throughout the scene there are no "warp streaks" visible, just regular stars. This indicates that the ship is actually at sublight speed. Near the start of the episode the transmissions from the Tsiolkovsky are cut off by a loud bang. Data reports that "What we just heard is... impossible," and goes on to report that it was the sound of the bridge emergency hatch being blown open. So... what's so impossible about that? There's a hatch, it's designed to be blown open, and somebody blew it open. Anybody else might say "That's impossible!" as an exclamation of incredulity, but Data is Mr Literal - something he demonstrates himself in the very next scene. So no, Data, it's not impossible. Not at all. It's simply unpleasant. Speaking of the hatch, when Riker says that the crew were sucked out, Data corrects him by saying "That's blown out." Later episodes will, of course, make a big deal of the fact that Data cannot use contractions in his speech. This is far from the first or only episode to do this, but Yar reports that somebody in engineering "just let all the heat bleed away into space." Space is a vacuum (more or less), and as such it's an extremely good insulator. It's actually far more likely that the ship would overheat than freeze, and this is especially true since it's sitting quite close to a star. Why is everybody so impressed with Wesley's saving the ship from the stellar fragment? They wouldn't have been in any danger in the first place if it wasn't for him taking over engineering! And although the Enterprise escaped, the Tsilkovsky was destroyed - by Wesley, without any orders to do so. If I was Starfleet I'd be pretty miffed at the kid. When he becomes infected, Data declares "if you prick me, do I not leak?" Well, no actually. We've seen Data impaled with arrows, shot with bullets, seen an arm ripped off, even seen him decapitated, and he's never once been seen to leak. And how can Data become infected anyway? He declares that he has systems analogous to human biological functions, and claims "we are more alike than unalike", but it's just left at that. Are we to believe Data is so pseudo-biological in nature that he can actually be infected by diseases? And if that is so, why did everybody assume that as an android he could not possibly catch the ageing disease in "Evolution"? |
TNG : The Naked Now |
| I find it very hard to believe that Yar would actually assault one of the Ligonians for trying to give Picard a gift before she checked it. As it turned out Lutan was impressed by Yar's action, but this could have caused a major diplomatic incident! Not strictly a YATI, but when Yareena is beamed up to the Enterprise Dr. Crusher is wearing a wrist watch. Take a look at the planet Ligon in the remastered and updated version of the episode. The clouds are visibly moving across the surface in just a few seconds! Assuming Ligon is even close to the size of the Earth, that equates to a wind speed in the region of 300,000 miles per hour - that's one windy planet they have there! When asked about the metal poles in the yard, Data states that "joined together, they would make a rectangle or square enclosing one hundred twenty one square metres. If put end to end vertically they would make a pole 44 metres high. Or two of twenty two." Now, the area Data gives for a square is correct - there is 44 metres of pole, so they would make a square with four sides of 11 metres each, for an area of 121 square metres. Great! But... he states that a rectangle would also have the same area. And that's not true. In fact, the area of a rectangle depends not only on the total length of the perimeter but on the ratio of the lengths. To illustrate, consider if the 44 metres of pole were split into two sides of 15 metres each and two sides of 7 metres each. That would make a rectangle 15x7, or 105 square metres. Or if they were split into two sides of 20 metres and two sides of two metres, that's a rectangle 20x2, or 40 square metres. In fact, the only rectangle that gives an area of 121 square metres is that special case where the sides of the rectangle happen to be equal - the square. NO other rectangular shape would give that area, so Data should simply have said "a square enclosing..." with no mention of rectangles at all. Bad show, Data! As an intro to the fight, Hagon announces "I speak for Lutan. The rules are known. Let combat continue until there is a victor. It will not be interrupted!" Yet when Yareena loses her glove thingie, Lutan calls "Combatants, hold your positions! Return the weapon!" And the two women must wait until it is recovered and returned before they resume fighting. In what way is this not an interruption?! |
TNG : Code of Honor |
| When Data mentions the "red white and blue" of the US flag, Yar asks what primary colours have to do with it. Unfortunately, white is not a primary colour. | TNG : The Last Outpost |
| I find it interesting to contrast Picard's actions in this episode with "Q Who?". Here, the Enterprise is stranded far from home. Picard is assured that they can return easily, yet he makes no effort to explore the area before setting off. In "Q Who?" the Enterprise is flung far from home, has no clear way of returning, and Picard's most trusted friend tells him to return at once. Instead he goes off to investigate a nearby star system. Why the change? Did Picard come to be more blase about being thrown about the universe after the first few times or something? | TNG : Where No One Has Gone Before |
| How is it that Picard is able to simply order Riker and Crusher to leave him alone when they question his command abilities? We have ample evidence that either one of these officers can relieve the captain if they feel his command judgement is impaired, and Crusher at least has the right to demand both that the captain explain his actions to her and that he submit himself for a medical exam. Yet they both back down when challenged. | TNG : Lonely Among Us |
| Yar tells Picard at the start of the episode that she has fully reviewed the local laws. Yet Wesley didn't seem to know he wasn't allowed to go into the flowerbed, and nobody knew what the punishments for breaking a law were. Yar comments later on that "they listed nothing about punishment" as a justification for why she didn't know they had a death penalty for breaking any law. Okay, fair enough, they didn't include that in the information they gave her... but we're seriously to believe that she didn't think to ask how the laws were enforced or what the penalties for breaking any of them were? Why are the Enterprise crew even contacting the Edo at all? They are a pre-warp civilisation, yes? Doesn't the Federation take a very "hands off" approach to those? |
TNG : Justice |
| Picard claims Data is the ship's second in Command in this episode. In fact, Riker is second in command - Data is third. | TNG : The Battle |
| When Riker makes Wesley a few years older, Geordi whistles and comments "hey Wes, not bad!". When Riker gives Geordi his eyes back he looks at Yar and comments that she is even more beautiful than he imagined. So, can Geordi tell what people look like via his VISOR, or can't he? If he can, then he already knows what Yar looks like. If he can't, he has no way to tell what the grown up Wesely looks like. And now that Wil Wheaton is indeed ten years older, why doesn't he look anything like the guy in this episode? I know, there was nothing they could have done about this one. But it's still a valid nit! |
TNG : Hide and Q |
| I find it strange that Wyatt has been dreaming about this woman for many years. There is no indication that he is telepathic, and even if he is then surely the ship would have been well out of range? | TNG : Haven |
| We are assured that even the slightest slip in the welcome given to the Jarada will bring disaster. Yet Picard keeps them waiting for a good hour or two, and Riker tries to talk to them to explain the problem, and all they do is make a nasty noise. So I guess they aren't that big on ritual after all. This is the first "holodeck gone bad" episode in Trek, and as it's one of the more egregious examples it's a sensible place to address the issue. Let's take a look at what happens here : the ship is scanned. Not shot at, not damaged, just scanned. Something that must happen to it on a very regular basis. As a result, the holodeck doors are sealed. All communication in or out is cut off. The safety systems are compromised to the extent that the characters are able to shoot people and mortally wound them. And the design of the system is such that it's next to impossible to shut it down, and an imprecise attempt to do so can kill everybody inside. Can you imagine something like this being put into use today? Whoever had a hand in designing, building and installing the thing would find themselves sued into oblivion, and quite possibly jailed on a charge of negligent homicide! |
TNG : The Big Goodbye |
| Okay, we can only speculate about how the Soong type androids are programmed but I've always presumed that they must take in input, process it, and then determine the appropriate output. So if you ask Data how he is, he may decide that the best way to respond is to perform a systems check and report on his functional status. But given that, how is it possible for Lore to say something accidentally, without meaning to? When Riker starts to state Pythagoras' theorem Lore begins to complete it and then thinks better of it. Can his program really run away with itself like that without him being aware of it? Also regarding that scene, Data points out that Lore shouldn't be on the bridge. But Riker is standing right there! So either Riker never thought to chuck him off the bridge, in which case bad screw up on his part! Or alternatively, Riker has chosen to allow Lore onto the bridge despite orders, in which case why is Data correcting his superior officer? Picard sends Wesley to check on Data and Lore. So when Wesley later reports back that there's something wrong, why doesn't Picard want to listen to him? Did he just give him the job to get him out from underfoot or something? Riker gives the Stardate as 4124.5, dropping a digit before the decimal point. |
TNG : Datalore |
| This episode claims that the Prime Directive applies only to Starfleet personnel. So the Federation doesn't mind at all if its citizens go out and interfere with other cultures, so long as its official representitives don't do so. Does this really sound right to anybody? What's to stop somebody like Vash from going and conquering some primitive planet with advanced technology so she could strip the place, like the Ferengi did in Voyager's "False Profits"? Also, how come Beverly won't let the Odin survivors be beamed up? Sure, they might die on board the ship because of the disease. But as far as anybody knew, they would definitely die on the planet! What would you rather do, take your chances with the virus or get disintergrated? |
TNG : Angel One |
| When the antimatter pods started to lose containment, the crew spent some time evacuating the ship. Why bother, when they could just separate the saucer section? This would have got most of the civilian population away from the danger in under a minute, and saved half the ship's structure when it eventually destroyed itself. | TNG : 11001001 |
| When Yar and Worf cut through the steel door, you can see the outline of the stuff that is actually burning the hole. At one point Admiral Jameson confesses that he has committed a major violation of the Prime Directive. He then confesses that he falsified his reports to Starfleet. Surely Picard is obligated to place him under arrest for these crimes, yet not only does he not throw Jameson in the brig, he lets him continue in command of the mission! |
TNG : Too Short a Season |
| Just how many children are there on board the Enterprise-D? After all, the Aldeans are trying to repopulate their entire species here - yet they only kidnap seven children! Logically, they should have taken all the kids on the ship. After all, they won't get another chance - if their actions had succeeded, surely the Federation would avoid the area and warn other species to do the same. And if seven is all that was available, surely it would be better to wait until a better candidate vessel came along? Also, the damage being done to the Aldeans is supposed to be due to the destruction of their ozone layer, which is letting in harmful light from the sun. But we're specifically told that their cloaking device bends the light around the planet, so there should be nothing hitting the planet to harm them! And if the cloak doesn't bend non-visible light around the planet, then it would be easily detectable. |
TNG : When the Bough Breaks |
| The law of the conservation of energy is one of the most basic principles of physics. This principle would indicate that the amount of energy the microbrain has available cannot be more than it can draw from the lights in sickbay. Yet the thing is breaking through forcefields and threatening the entire ship! Can it really do this on the power it is drawing from a few lightbulbs? Or has the conservation of energy been overcome in the 24th century? (Actually this would explain more than a few things about Trek, but it's hard to believe.) | TNG : Home Soil |
| When Mordock wins the spot at the academy, Chang informs him that he is the first Benzite ever to serve. So how is it that in the following season we meet Mendon, a Benzite who has already been through the Academy and graduated at the rank of Ensign? In this episode, Jake steals a shuttle. Flitting lightly over the fact that once again the crew are unable to prevent this from happening, Jake is supposed to be an expert shuttle pilot. So why does he immediately plunge the shuttle into extreme danger? |
TNG : Coming of Age |
| Worf claims that Klingons do not take hostages. Tell that to Kor, the revered Klingon dahar master who took hundreds of Organians hostage and had them all shot in "Errand of Mercy". On the freighter, why does Data ask Geordi and Riker for help? They have to expose themselves to the damaged warp core to get to the problem, and once they do get there Data is the one who does all the work while they just stand around. Korris refers to "the traitors of Kling!" This implies that the Klingon home world was intended to be called Kling, yet that name will never be used again - from now on the Klingon home planet will simply be called "Homeworld" or Qo'noS (pronounced Kronos). To be forgiving, one might compare this to how our planet can variously be referred to as Earth, Terra, or Sol III. So the upper deck of main engineering has glass floors that shatter if an adult person falls over on them? Health and Safety in the workplace, dudes! |
TNG : Heart of Glory |
| When Worf tries to target the cloaked vessel in orbit, it fires on the ship from almost directly behind. In reply, he fires directly ahead. | TNG : The Arsenal of Freedom |
| As Picard leaves the cargo bay for his talk with Beverly, Yar gives him a big wave. Why? (Actually, it's because this is the last episode Denise Crosby filmed, but there's no on-camera reason for it.) | TNG : Symbiosis |
| Worf says they are going to do a parallel transport of Picard and Troi. What exacty does he mean by this? Picard beams up several seconds after Troi, so it can't be the same as a simultaneous transport. | TNG : Skin of Evil |
| Picard states that it rained all day on the day he was due to meet Jenice. Yet when he orders the computer to recreate that specific day on the holodeck, it's not raining. Wouldn't the computer have weather reports for the day? Despite many claims about not being able to use contractions, Data famously reveals that he is the correct version of himself in the time loop sequence by claiming "It's me!" At the end of the episode Mannheim declares that he must go back and resume his experiments, and Picard comments that the Federation will likely want to help. Um, what? It's just been demonstrated that 1) This technology has the capacity to shatter time across a region thousands of light years across, minimum, and 2) Mannheim has an imperfect understanding of it and an imperfect ability to contain it. In what universe is anybody going to let him go back and restart his experiments? The fact that he even wants to means that he should be locked up somewhere for the good of the galaxy! |
TNG : We'll Always Have Paris |
| When he orders the Enterprise-D to divert to Dytallix B, Riker asks Picard if they should let Pacifica know they will be late, and Picard says "Negative. Nothing goes out without specific orders from me." A few (screen) minutes later, they arrive and find three other starships in orbit. Worf says "Attempts at communication have been ignored by all three vessels." So... why has Worf made attempts to communicate with the three ships when Picard has already expressly stated that they are to send no messages out to anybody without his specific orders? Bad Worf! These alien parasites make you immune to phasers by flooding your body with adrenaline. How does adrenaline stop you getting a hole drilled in your chest? I have to say, it's so common in science fiction that it's practically a cliche, but why the hell does killing the queen alien kill all the others? Even assuming some sort of telepathic link between them that made such a thing even possible, can you imagine such a bizzare weakness evolving in a species in the first place? Admittedly given the non-canon explanation for the creature's origins this becomes a bit more plausible, but taking the episode at face value it is a serious weak spot, an obvious way to try and wrap up the whole conspiracy in a line or two of dialogue. In his closing log, Picard notes that Quinn is recovering since his parasite died when the Queen was killed. He states that they may never know how far the infestation went. Um, what? Won't everyone who was infested now wake up and tell everyone what they did whilst under control? Or even if we assume that you don't remember anything that happened whilst you were controlled, you'd still have a list of every infected person. So you'd quickly know exactly how far the infection had gone, right? |
TNG : Conspiracy |
| When Picard orders security to get Offenhouse off the bridge, they start to escort him out, then stop when the Warbird appears and spend the next few minutes gawking at it while their prisoner further disrupts the proceedings. This seems like a serious lack of professionalism to me. | TNG : The Neutral Zone |
| Pulaski claims that the child's DNA is exactly the same as Troi's... so why is the child a boy when Troi is a woman? Surely the child should have grown up to look like Troi's identical twin sister. When Troi is about to give birth, Pulaski offers her a painkiller and then claims that it will in no way diminish the experience of childbirth. Isn't this rather a sweeping and subjective viewpoint? Some women consider enduring the pain a significant part of the experience, what right does Pulaski have to simply dismiss this viewpoint out of hand? |
TNG : The Child |
| Data claims there is no record of a ship finding an area of darkness like this one. Yet Kirk and the original Enterprise found something similar in "The immunity Syndrome". Since Data is supposed to be a repository of virtually all Federation knowledge, shouldn't he know this? Riker gives the Yamato's registry number as NCC-1305-E, which is incorrect according to the ship's later appearence in TNG. Apparently Mike Okuda never corrected the line in the script because the scene was deleted - but the scene was then reinserted without his knowledge, and he didn't know about it until he saw the finished episode on television. When Picard and Riker order autodestruct, the computer asks them what time interval they would like. Yet the first time this was used in "11001001", Picard commented that they had no choice about the time, it was a fixed 5 minute countdown. This episode opens with Picard apparently genuinely worried that Worf might 'snap' and go berserk on Riker during a holodeck training exercise. Really? Worf has gone through a four year academy training program and served long enough to be the tactical officer on the Federation flagship... and everyone is so unsure of his mental stability that they think he might attack a shipmate over a little exercise? And even more absurd... he actually comes very close to doing exactly that! Okay, this is reeeeealy nitpicky, but... when he's confronted with a duplicate of the main bridge on the Yamato, Worf declares angrily that "A ship has one bridge! One bridge!" Well... actually no, the Galaxy class has two bridges - the main one on the saucer section, and the battle bridge in the engineering hull. Yes, I know Worf meant one main bridge, but he's still technically wrong! When they first try to get out of the hole, the Enterprise goes to impulse. After a minute or two they go to Warp 2. We watch them sit at warp 2 for an continuous, uncut 18 seconds, at which point Picard asks Data how far they have travelled and he replies 1.4 parsecs. A parsec is 3.26 light years, so they have covered 4.564 light years in 18 seconds - which would make Warp 2 an impressive 8,000,000 times the speed of light! |
TNG : Where Silence Has Lease |
| Data claims that Holmes could only defeat Moriarty at the cost of his own life. Well I've read every Holmes story and novel written and this isn't true. I assume Data was referring to Holmes' apparent death on the Reichenbach falls, but in fact Holmes survived this and went on to live to a ripe old age. This episode is one in a long running series that claim that holodeck matter cannot leave the grid. Yet Data walks off the holodeck holding a piece of paper that Moriarty gives him! And to recap, in "Angel One" Picard was hit by snow flying out of the holodeck, which them made a mess on the floor, and in "The Big Goodbye" Picard is kissed by a holographic woman, and walks out of the grid with her lipstick still on his face. |
TNG : Elementary, Dear Data |
| When the comic mentions a briefcase shaped like a fish, Data refers to it as an 'amphibian' briefcase. Fish are not amphibians. | TNG : The Outrageous Okona |
| So this Riva guy is one of the most famous negotiators in history... and the Enterprise-D crew don't know he's deaf, or have any idea how to talk to him via the chorus? Even assuming that nobody knew about him as a matter of course, doesn't it seem strange that they didn't take a moment to find out a single thing about this very important person before meeting him? | TNG : Loud as a Whisper |
| The whole concept of the long range, near warp transport is an odd one. Is the situation on the Constantinople really that desperate that the Enterprise can't afford to drop out of warp within normal transporter range and do a proper transport? Bear in mind that the former would add mere milliseconds to their journey, the latter five or ten seconds at most. Yet in order to save this few seconds, they risked beaming the away team into a wall! | TNG : The Schizoid Man |
| When Pulaski is infected, Picard declared that saving her is now the ship's top priority. Huh? There are many people on the planet below, all infected. Shouldn't these take priority over a single person? | TNG : Unnatural Selection |
| When Mendon comes aboard Wesley mistakes him for Mordock, wondering how he could have graduated from the academy to become an Ensign so quickly. But in "Coming of Age", we're told that Mordock is the first Benzite ever to join Starfleet. So how is it possible that Mendon has been in Starfleet long enough to have gone through the academy and graduated? Kargan tells his officers to speak in Riker's language when he arrives on the ship. Doesn't Riker's universal translator let him understand and speak in Klingon? A Klingon reveals that his father has lost his honour due to being captured in battle. He says that his father is on their planet, waiting to die of old age or disease, and that he will not speak to him. Riker is aghast at this, incredulous that the Klingon will not talk to his own father. He lectures the man about how he should get in touch with him, etc. This is a nice little scene, very touching and all... and loses all credibility when we learn in "The Icarus Factor" that Riker in fact has not talked to his own father for literally decades, and that he harbours such animosity towards him that he's practically ready to punch the man in the face when they meet. |
TNG : A Matter of Honor |
| Just how old is Maddox? He says he assessed Data on his entry into Starfleet, but other episodes establish that this was some 25 years ago. That would put Maddox well into his late forties at the least, and probably well into his fifties. He sure doesn't look that old to me. You ever notice that whilst people will constantly talk about how Guinan is a "listener", and that her people are a "race of listeners", that what she actually does most of the time is talk rather than listen? |
TNG : The Measure of a Man |
| Security puts in an unbelievably good showing in this episode. When Anya transforms into a monster in sickbay, Pulaski calls for help. A security team, accompanied by no less than the captain of the ship, arrives some three seconds later! That's quite some response time they have there! | TNG : The Dauphin |
| The Yamato's entire complement was killed in the warp core breach - why didn't Varley separate its saucer section before going into the Neutral Zone so he could leave the civilians behind? Isn't this kind of thing exactly what the separation capability is for? | TNG : Contagion |
| La Forge claims that the surface of the planet is at a temperature of -291 celsius. At -273 celsius, the motion of the atoms and molecules in a substance stops. You can't go lower than this, because you can't make a particle go any slower than a dead stop. So unless they have for some reason redefined the celsius scale in the TNG era, La Forge messed up and nobody - including the ever pedantic Data - noticed it. When they are playing craps, Data notes that their aim after rolling a six is to roll a duplicate six before hitting seven. Riker then says that the probability of rolling a six is no greater than that of rolling a seven. He doesn't quite say that the odds of rolling either one are the same as such, but he does seem to be implying it. In fact, the odds of rolling a six are actually less than those of rolling a seven. Using two dice there are five ways of rolling a six, a 13.889% chance, but there are six ways of rolling a seven, a 16.667% chance. |
TNG : The Royale |
| I suspect Riker isn't as good at this cooking thing as he claims. He says he is making omlettes at the beginning of the episode. Strangely, what he actually produces looks remarkably like scrambled eggs. At one point Picard walks out of the shuttlebay and into a turbolift. The label on the door clearly says the lift is on Deck 6. However, the small shuttlebays are well below this on deck 12/13. |
TNG : Time Squared |
| The E-D's engines are generating some odd sensor readings in this episode. Data suggests that rather than find and correct any problem, they should just reprogram the sensors to fix the readouts! What kind of practice is this - they just want to ignore it and hope it will go away! | TNG : The Icarus Factor |
| I don't know if it could be called a YATI as such, but I find the behaviour of the senior staff in this episode horrendous. Considering how much they are always going on about how right and necessary the prime directive is, their blatant violation of it in this episode is hard to understand. Not only that, but there are several occasions on which officers violate Picard's orders, sometimes right in front of him, and he does nothing about it. When discussing the prospect of Wesley taking command of a geological survey, Pulaski says "Are we talking about a young officer on the fast track to the Academy, or are we talking about a young man that we are guiding through adolescence and into adulthood?" Excuse me lady, but YOU are not guiding anybody through adolescence - the staff agreed to split that role between themselves before Pulaski ever arrived on the ship, and nobody ever gave any indication that Wesley's mother asked or authorised Pulaski to have a thing to do with it. |
TNG : Pen Pals |
| When Q zaps Picard off to the shuttle, the Captain protests that Q promised he would leave the Enterprise alone from now on, and Q says he has gotten around this by removing Picard from the Enterprise. But that's not what Q promised at all - the wager he had with Picard in Hide and Q was his "keeping out of humanity's path for ever". He shouldn't be able to interact with Picard or any Human in any way. Q claims that the Borg is "not a he, not a she". Yet later episodes have always shown us male and female drones - the one that captured Picard in "Best of Both Worlds" looked female, and Seven of Nine is about as female as it's possible for a Human to get! |
TNG : Q Who |
| The Enterprise crew make several comments about how the Pakled are advancing faster than they should. Hmm... when Q made this statement about Humanity to Picard, his reaction was along the lines that no species had the right to decide how fast another should advance. | TNG : Samaritan Snare |
| The whole idea of "replicative fading" being a threat to the Mariposans is nonsense. Apparently the problem arises because the Mariposans are cloning each new generation from the cells of the last. Yet even a single Human has literally trillions of cells within his or her body, and freezing them can let you store them indefinitely. When the problem became apparent, all they had to do is take a few billion cells from that generation and store them - then they could clone a million new people per generation, for a thousand generations, without any further degradation. | TNG : Up The Long Ladder |
| Near the end of the episode, Lwaxana fails to realise that Rex is a hologram. How can this be? She's a full Betazoid, wouldn't the lack of thoughts and emotion coming from him make it clear that he wasn't a real person? | TNG : Manhunt |
| In "Yesterday's Enterprise", Captain Garret indicated that 22 years had led to such advances that the Enterprise-D's weapons were quite capable of handling four Romulan warbirds of her era. Here the T'Ong is 75 years out of date, yet it's still supposed to represent a big threat to the area? True, the E-D Garret was talking about was a battleship version from an alternate universe, but it's still hard to believe that this relic would be a serious threat to anybody. So what was all that secrecy about at the start of the episode? Admiral Gromek says that when the Emissary tells them about the mission, they will understand. Well, the mission was to intercept a 75 year old Klingon ship. So... I can see that they wouldn't want to start a panic amongst the colonies in the area, but wouldn't a secure coded transmission to the Enterprise be sufficient to avoid the civilians finding out what was happening? Or are Starfleet codes so awful that using them is akin to just broadcasting in the clear? |
TNG : The Emissary |
| Is Wesley really allowed to use antimatter in his science projects? I know he's meant to be a genius, but if even one milligram of the stuff escapes the explosion would be the equivalent of many tons of normal explosive. That's a risk I'd be awful reluctant to take. So Riker's ploy to trick the Enterprise depends on Worf knowing their access codes, which he uses to fool the computer into thinking an enemy ship is coming in. But then at the end, they use the same trick on the Ferengi. How? They don't know the Ferengi access codes, surely? |
TNG : Peak Performance |
| Riker is having all these dreams of things that have happened to him in the past. So how come several of the scenes he dreams about were events he wasn't actually there for? And lest we say that his imagination was "filling in the gaps", those scenes match exactly to what actually happened at those times! What are the odds of that? | TNG : Shades of Gray |
| Isn't it a crime to kill a sentient life form in the Federation? Stubbs killed countless numbers of the nanites, yet as soon as they accept his apology Picard apparently considers the matter closed. Surely Stubbs should be arrested and tried for his crimes? I mean, suppose I shot somebody and then apologized, and the rest of his family said "Okay, we forgive you." Would we seriously expect the law to forgo a prosecution because of that? Actually this is a pretty prevalent issue in Star Trek. Almost every single problem is treated at the dramatic or philosophical level, and so long as a solution is found that most of the people involved think is nice, or at least okay, then that's the end of it. Prime Directive aside, the behaviour of Federation or Starfleet people very rarely seems to be constrained by actual laws to which they are answerable regardless of whether it feels fair or not. |
TNG : Evolution |
| As the Enterprise-D is approaching the Sheliak ship, Picard orders Riker to block it's path. Riker responds by punching some buttons on the panel on his chair. Is the helm officer on his break or something? We've been told many times that the combadges people wear act as universal translators, automatically and perfectly translating all foreign languages into English. So when Troi said "S'smarith" to Picard as an example of an alien word, why didn't the translator just translate it into English? |
TNG : The Ensigns of Command |
| Near the end of the episode, Uxbridge teleports himself off the bridge into the turbolift to go to Deanna's quarters. Why bother with the turbolift? Why not just teleport direct to her room? Kevin's power of perception must extend far beyond the planet - he was able to sense the location of all the Husnock in other star systems in order to destroy them, after all. Given this, he really should have known that the Enterprise was waiting in orbit for him to recreate his house rather than being fooled by it. |
TNG : The Survivors |
| Dr. Crusher pulls off an amazing job of swift-fingered surgery in this episode. When Riker escapes from the Mintakans by beaming back to the ship, he goes to the bridge to see what's going on down below. The action makes it clear that only seconds have passed, a minute or two at the most - yet Riker's proto Vulcan surgery is completely reversed when he arrives on the bridge! | TNG : Who Watches The Watchers? |
| Early in the episode, Troi recommends that Jeremy must not be left alone in the aftermath of his mother's death. Just minutes later we see Jeremy sitting in his quarters all alone, surrounded by mementos of his dead mother! | TNG : The Bonding |
| The effectiveness of the artificial gravity systems in the Star Trek universe truly is awesome. After all, the Promellian battleship has been adrift for one thousand years, but her gravity systems still work perfectly! I thought the point of the booby trap assimilator things was that you couldn't destroy them because they just absorbed the energy and radiated it back at you. So how come they can just shoot torpedoes and blow them up at the end? Why couldn't they do that earlier? Beverly states that 26 minutes of radiation exposure is a lethal dose. Radiation really doesn't work this way. Trek frequently behaves as if there is some particular dose of radiation that is fatal, but anything below that is perfectly fine. Rather, it's a progression; low doses will give you an increased chance of cancer, higher doses cause radiation burns, lost hair and teeth, etc, up to a fatal dose. Worse, the levels at which all that happen vary considerably from person to person. |
TNG : Booby Trap |
| After her amazing surgical prowess was revealed just a few episodes back, Dr. Crusher's competence takes a knock in this episode. She scans the Romulan and proclaims he has no head trauma. Oh, really? What about the huge gash on the side of his head? What about the fact that Worf knocked him unconscious just minutes earlier by smashing his head into a rock face? Don't these count as head traumas? When the Enterprise first receives Tomalak's message to his missing crewmen, Picard answers him and informs him that they have a badly injured crewmember aboard. Tomalak demands that they come to the Neutral Zone to return him and Picard declines, stating that he wants to remain at the planet to search for his missing Engineer. This enrages Tomalak, causing him to cross the neutral zone into Federation territory. It delays treatment for the injured Romulan, which leads to his death. It thus almost provokes at least a serious incident with the Romulans, possibly even a war. So my question is... why didn't Picard detach the saucer section and leave it in orbit of Galornden Core? The saucer has transporters, shuttles, sensor arrays, a sickbay - everything needed for a planetary rescue mission, right? Whilst the Stardrive section could have taken the injured Romulan straight back to Tomalak, avoiding all the unpleasantness of the episode. Picard tells Tomalak that the Enterprise-D will escort the Warbird to the edge of the Neutral Zone. But when we see the ships departing, they head off in opposite directions. |
TNG : The Enemy |
| At one point, Riker states that La Forge has been in continuous visual contact with the wormhole since the ship arrived. As seen in "Justice", La Forge has to leave the bridge and go to a window to get a good look at something. Has he really been stood at a window somewhere ever since the ship arrived? A key scene at the end features Troi stating that neither Ral nor Goss were tense during the Ferengi's attempt to destroy the wormhole. However, we will later learn that Betazoid empathy doesn't work on Ferengi. Did she really base what she said on tone of voice and body language? Ral claims that part of how negotiation works is "I don't know what the other side is offering, and they don't know what I am offering." But Riker made the Federation's bid for the wormhole public knowledge - he even put it up there on the screen for Ral to see in the conference room. So what's Ral talking about? |
TNG : The Price |
| Crusher asks the computer if any of the Acamarian delegation are from the Tralesta clan, and it replies that clan affiliation is not in the records. Odd, since it just gave her the clan affiliation of three other people a moment ago. At the end of the episode, Picard states that their next assignment is to go to Starbase 343 to pick up medical supplies and transport them to the Alpha Leonis system. I know Starfleet likes their ships to be multi-purpose, but really, is this a proper use for the Federation flagship? Surely some kind of cargo vessel would be called for instead? In the present day large warships are sometimes used to transport supplies for disaster relief efforts, but that is not the case here - it's specifically stated that this is a routine mission and Picard states that he's going to allow everyone who wants it some shore leave. They're literally using the most important ship in the fleet to run supplies! |
TNG : The Vengeance Factor |
| Picard has a big conversation with Data about the morale of the crew in this episode. This is, Data the scientist, operations officer and machine who does not posess or understand emotions. As opposed to Troi, the trained counsellor and empath who is constantly aware of the emotional state of the crew. Does this make sense? When Admiral Jarok asks Data if the replicators could make him a Romulan Ale, Data says they would need the molecular structure of the drink, and Federation knowledge of Romulan culture is limited. But it's been established many times that the Federation not only knows about Romulan Ale, it's entirely possible to obtain it within the Federation - the issue is that it's illegal. I could certainly understand if Data had said that the pattern isn't on file because it would be illegal for the replicators to produce it. After all, whilst individuals might be willing to break the law (apparently it's considered about like buying Cuban cigars), having it available on an official basis would be a different thing. But to say that it's not available because the Federation doesn't know about it? That seems very improbable. |
TNG : The Defector |
| Are next generation phasers vastly less powerful than those of the original series? When Kirk had a phaser on overload in "The Conscience of the King" he said it would blow out an entire deck. Yet Danar overloads a phaser here and it produces an explosion about as big as a small firework. Maybe next generation phasers have some sort of safety feature that makes them harder to blow up or something? | TNG : The Hunted |
| So when the terrorist bomb goes off, Crusher insists on staying at the scene to treat a wounded victim. She refuses to beam back up to the ship, saying "I am trying to put life back into a wounded body with sleight of hand!" So... why not beam the away team and the wounded straight up to the Enterprise-D sickbay? It would get the Enterprise personnel out of danger (at least somewhat), and surely the wounded would have a better chance of survival if Crusher had all her fancy equipment and drugs to rely on instead of 'sleight of hand', right? This episode shows Riker to be a hypocrite. All through the show he has moaned and grumbled every time Picard wanted to go on an away mission, saying that the Captain's place is on the ship. Well, with Picard gone Riker is in command and what does he do - immediately leads a dangerous away mission into the heart of the terrorist stronghold. |
TNG : The High Ground |
| When Q is in sickbay, Picard tells the security guard to follow him. Yet for the entire remainder of the episode, the guard is nowhere to be seen. | TNG : Deja Q |
| On a couple of occasions, Picard calls Krag "Chief Inspector" instead of "Chief Investigator". Picard refuses to let Riker in on the discussion with Apgar or discuss the situation with him, telling him it is "not appropriate". The is an excellent move on his part - Picard has to serve as Riker's judge to an extent, so it's correct that he not have improper discussions about the issue with him. However, he asks Geordi to create the holodeck program that they use to decide the case. Geordi isn't accused of the crime, but he was a witness to much of what happened on the station; how is it that a witness with sympathies for the accused is allowed to be such a major part of the investigation? Indeed, you have to ask... how hard would it really be for Geordi to have reprogrammed the simulation to stage the whole end sequence 'proving' Riker's innocence? |
TNG : A Matter of Perspective |
| Yar tells Castillo that the Enterprise-D was the first Galaxy class warship built for the alternate Federation. If that is so, then why aren't they called Enterprise class warships? Look at the final scene with Geordi and Guinan on the Enterprise-D after the timeline has been restored; Geordi's uniform still has the modified cuffs of the other timeline on. |
TNG : Yesterday's Enterprise |
| Just how can Admiral Haftel come in and try to confiscate Lal? It's already been decided in "The Measure of a Man" that androids have the right to choose their fate. When Data is showing Troi the final four options for Lal's appearance, one of them is a Klingon male. Troi comments that this would be "a friend for Worf." Huh? Why would Troi assume that Worf would automatically become friends with somebody because they appeared Klingon? Almost every friend Worf has is a Human, and frankly Worf rarely seems to get along with other Klingons. Simply assuming that Worf would like anybody who looked Klingon seems a bit racist! |
TNG : The Offspring |
| When Picard accepts Worf's offer to become his cha'DIch, Picard accepts by speaking in Klingon, then translates it into English. Who is he translating it for, exactly? Not Worf, not himself... it's as if he thinks somebody is watching or something! It's a minor thing, but Picard orders the ship to head for "the first city of the Klingon Imperial Empire." Isn't "Imperial Empire" rather redundant? Kahlest declared that "Mogh was loyal to the Emperor!" What Emperor would that be? We've since discovered in the episode "Rightful Heir" that there is no Emperor in the Klingon Empire, and hasn't been for centuries. Rather, it is governed by the Chancellor. I know the intention is to show that the crew is used to a more relaxed atmosphere, but still... both Wesley and Data think that it's acceptable to have a little chat whilst the first officer is giving a speech to the bridge crew? Really? Shutting up and listening whilst a senior officer speaks is basic politeness even in Starfleet! So when Duras has a couple of thugs try to murder Kurn, they stab him in the stomach and then just leave him lying there. We've been told over and over that Klingons have amazing powers to recover from physical injury, which is just what Kurn does here. Why on Earth wouldn't a Klingon assassin stab him a bunch more times to make sure the job was done? |
TNG : Sins of the Father |
| When Picard orders "Ales for everyone!", everyone responds with a cheer. Why is this? After all, it's not like anybody ever actually pays for anything in ten forward! Are just sucking up to the boss? One of the indicators that Picard is acting unusually comes when he asks Beverly if she would like to dance, and she responds "I thought you didn't dance?" But in the movie "Insurrection", when Picard is expected to dance at a formal dinner Beverly states that "The Captain used to cut quite a rug!" So which is it? So here's a question... what language is Esoqq speaking? I mean, I assume he is not speaking English. I assume he is speaking Chalnoth, or whatever the Chalnoth call their language, and that Picard understands him because of the universal translator built into his combadge... right? I ask because when he introduces himself he says "My given name is Esoqq. It means fighter." But if the translator is translating what he says, then why doesn't it translate his name? Why don't we hear "My given name is Fighter. It means fighter." For that matter, lots of human names have meanings. Why doesn't the UT translate ALL of them? |
TNG : Allegiance |
| Early on in the episode, there's a scene in the turbolift in which the doors change from orange to grey between shots. Just why would a transporter that's designed to transport people have a "blow up the thing you're transporting" setting? Surely transporters would designed to make this next to impossible to do? Imagine designing a car with a button that detonates a kilo of plastic explosive underneath your seat! |
TNG : Captain's Holiday |
| This episode catches Geordi out disobeying orders and lying to a senior officer. When the Enterprise gets crippled by Tin Man, Riker orders Geordi to give the shields top priority. A little later we see La Forge busy fixing the sensors, after which he reports back to Riker that the shields are still down and he is doing everything he can to fix them. Data claims that the sensor signal behind them must be a sensor malfunction or a ship because there is "no known natural phenomenon capable of travel at warp velocities". What about the Crystalline Entity they met in "Silicon Avatar"? That could travel at warp speeds. So could the Dikironium Cloud Creature in the TOS episode "Obsession". And so could the neutronic wavefront seen in ENT "The Catwalk". |
TNG : Tin Man |
| Twice in this episode people walk in on Barclay playing in the holodeck, embarrasing him immensely. I don't know about you, but I would really, REALLY want to lock the door if I was on a holodeck. Yet there is no indication that anybody over rides a lock in order to get into the holodeck, they just walk in. | TNG : Hollow Pursuits |
| Okay, so Data can't get too close to Fajo without the forcefield zapping him. But this forcefield is specific to Data - normal objects pass straight through it, so Fajo can touch objects or other people. So what stops Data from clubbing Fajo over the head with something? Or just throwing a heavy object at him for that matter? Fajo claims that Data has no sense of modesty. According to "Inheritance", Data actually does have a "modesty subroutine". I suppose we might believe that Fajo wasn't aware of that and simply assumed that Data had no modesty. But then, why didn't Data correct him? |
TNG : The Most Toys |
| The music Data plays in his Mozart concert is actually a piece by Brahms. | TNG : Sarek |
| I guess this can't be classified as a real nit as such, because there's nothing inherently impossible about it - but I find it really hard to believe that Riker reads Ferengi fluently enough to use the computer systems without any difficulty. In Star Trek: Insurrection, Deanna claims that she has never kissed Riker with a beard before. This is one of the episodes in which she does just that. Reittan Grax says "Betazeds" instead of "Betazoids" in the first scene. This episode claims that Ferengi cannot be sensed empathically or telepathically by Bajorans. Except that they have been, in the prior episodes. "The Last Outpost", "The Battle" and "The Price". Nevertheless, it would be reinforced in several future episodes that Betazoids cannot read Ferengi minds. Data states that the energy being expended by the Gamma Erandi nebula is 5.34x10^41 Watts. This is more than the combined energy output of every sun in our galaxy. About ten thousand times more, actually. |
TNG : Menage a Troi |
| When the away team beams down at the beginning of the episode, Data pulls out his tricorder and notes that the radiation levels are safe. Is it really wise to check on this kind of thing after you beam down? | TNG : Transfigurations |
| When Riker checks that their beam down co-ordinates are right during the trailer, O'Brien tells him he is in the 'centre of town'. Yet the away team is standing on the edge of the crater - so shouldn't more than half the town still be there behind them? Additionally, are we really supposed to believe that the Enterprise arrived and beamed down this away team without noticing that there was a huge crater where the colony used to be? | TNG : The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1 |
| Beverly claims that the Borg cannot cut off their link to Locutus, comparing it to a Human cutting off an arm or a leg. Ignoring for a moment the fact that some Humans have done just this in an emergency, the Borg tried to destroy the shuttle carrying Locutus away from their cube in the first place. So it looks like they had no problem cutting the link after all. Also, both the Borg and the Enterprise drop out of warp whilst still many light hours from Earth and do a leisurely impulse cruise to the planet. Wouldn't this have been a good time for the Federation ship to warp right into orbit, like they did in "The Schizoid Man"? | TNG : The Best of Both Worlds, Part 2 |
| When Wesley starts up the message from his father, there is no communicator pin on his uniform. Yet a few moments later one magically appears between changes of shot. Why would Crusher have edited the pin from some parts of the program? We see the constellation of Orion in the sky at the end of the episode, but the three stars in the belt are in a straight line. In the real Orion, one of the stars is offset from the others. Perhaps the T'Kon Empire moved the star! |
TNG : Family |
| When Data locks up the computer, he issues a very long access code to it. Unfortunately, we see the code on the screen quite clearly - and it doesn't match exactly to what Spiner said. | TNG : Brothers |
| In the briefing room scene, the stars in the window constantly drift by in all the close up shots but remain motionless in the wide shots. | TNG : Suddenly Human |
| Beverly has to go to engineering to find the way out of the warp bubble at the end of the episode. Yet every time an attempt was made to extract her previously, the apeture appeared wherever she was at the time. Also, La Forge claims that the bubble is collapsing at 15 metres per second and that it will vanish in four minutes. At this point the bubble has already grown small enough to cut off parts of the ship. Is the ship really 3,600 metres long? At one point Data reports that there are 114 people on the Enterprise and Beverly responds emphatically that there are now "over 900 people" missing. At the end of the episode Data reports that there are 1,014 people aboard and Beverly responds that that is "exact number there should be". If the latter number is correct then there are exactly 900 missing earlier on, not over 900. |
TNG : Remember Me |
| When the Enterprise crew first beam down, Worf worries about Crusher's safety and Riker counters that the hostages may need instant medical attention. So when they actually get around to rescuing the hostages near the end of the episode, why does Crusher stay behind on the ship? Surely the same reason for taking her would still apply? | TNG : Legacy |
| When Riker asks the computer where Worf is, it replies that he has beamed over to the Klingon ship. Yet Worf removed his combadge before leaving, and we've seen many times (eg "Power Play") that the computer tracks people purely by where their badge is. The computer should have said that Worf was in his quarters. | TNG : Reunion |
| When Riker wakes up in sickbay, he's told that he's been in a coma for ten days. So why is he still wearing a uniform? Fake-Crusher blames the computer problems on a 'processing attenuator'. Later, Riker says it is the fault of a 'processing accelerator'. |
TNG : Future Imperfect |
| La Forge claims to have given the shuttle a full safety inspection, which it passed. So why after the crash do we find that it carried no emergency rations or supplies? Picard claims that the water-cave is natural in origin. So natural processes carved that nice, smooth, regular rock staircase? |
TNG : Final Mission |
| Near the end of the episode, Data claims that the evidence supports the idea that it is gravity that is pulling the ship and the 2-D lifeforms into the string. Yet all the way through we are told that the ship is drifting at a constant speed towards the string. If gravity is pulling at the ship, then it would be accelerating rather than moving at a constant speed. | TNG : The Loss |
| Although Spiner does a good imitation of McFadden's tap dancing, there are a few steps that she does which he can't manage to duplicate. As an android, of course, Data should be able to replicate Crusher's dancing pretty much perfectly. | TNG : Data's Day |
| In this episode Ardra claims she has many names, including the Human devil and Klingon Fek'lhr. Yet in "Day of the Dove" Kang claims that the Klingons have no devil. | TNG : Devil's Due |
| The entire premise of this episode makes no sense. The ship's crew spends more than two whole days dealing with the Paxans, and then carefully setting the ship up so that it seems that only thirty seconds have passed. So what happens when the Enterprise reaches its next destination two days late? The people there are bound to ask what caused the delay, Picard will reply with astonishment that as far as he is concerned the ship is on time - and the whole can of worms will be opened again. The problem could have been avoided by claiming that the wormhole had thrown the ship forward in time, but neither Data nor anybody else makes this claim. Picard at one point states that if Data is shown to be lying with no explanation, he will likely be court martialled and then adds "you would most likely be stripped down to your wires to find out what the hell has gone wrong". Um... really? Data has been found to have the right to make his own personal choices specifically so that he cannot be treated as simply another machine. Picard was the advocate who won the case for him! Can you imagine when Picard had Riker thrown in the brig in "The Pegasus", if he had added "And Commander, Starfleet is likely to have your brain dissected to find out what went wrong with you!" |
TNG : Clues |
| At one point calls a Malcorian a Marconian. Durken asks Picard what would happen if he demanded that the Federation leave his planet and never return, and Picard states that they will do so. Hmmm. Durken may be the current leader of the planet, but does he really have the right to speak for it for the rest of time? What if his successor has a different view? What if the society on the planet changes drastically over time? Surely the thing to do would be to leave... then return when Durken left office, and make the same offer to whomever replaced him. |
TNG : First Contact |
| Brahms claims that the space baby is partially covering shuttlebay two. But in fact, the bay it is covering has been established several times before as shuttlebay three. | TNG : Galaxy's Child |
| How fast is subspace radio compared to ship speeds? In this episode Picard claims that it will take over two weeks to get any reply from Starfleet - which would be a week for the message to get there and a week for a reply to get back. Yet the ship was at a Federation Starbase just 16.6 stardate units ago - which should be about six days ago. So the ship is actually faster than its own subspace radio? Also there is considerable confusion about the name of the ship in the rift. The name on the hull is "Brittain", yet most backstage sources claim that it is called the Brattain - and this is indeed what the characters in the episode call it. So did Starfleet really paint the wrong name on the hull of one of its ships? | TNG : Night Terrors |
| This episode features a nit common to all stories involving an invisible character - how can Geordi see while he is invisible? Even assuming that the alien transmogrification of his body has repaired his eyes, light must hit your retina and be absorbed in order to allow your brain to percieve things around you. If you are invisible, then the light is passing around or through your retina so you should be blind. Also, if Geordi is invisible to the ship's internal sensor systems then how come the transporter system can lock onto him in order to beam him down? When the shuttle is approaching the planet, Picard asks for options and the helm officer reports that it's out of tractor beam range. But the tractor beam is controlled from the tactical station. Shouldn't Worf be saying this? |
TNG : Identity Crisis |
| When La Forge is messing about in one of the ship's Jeffries tubes, he gets a torch out and uses it to let him see into a junction box. A torch? Mister 'I can see across the whole electromagnetic spectrum and have a built in telescope and microscope' needs to use a torch? | TNG : The N'th Degree |
| We get a minor demonstration of Q's amazing abilities in this episode. When he opens Vash's letter, he reads it upside down. Obviously this isn't on the scale of moving planets around or anything, but I find it interesting that the Q can read stuff any way up. Also, the creators really need to be more consistent about Data's physical speed and robustness. In 'We'll Always Have Paris' he was fast enough to dodge laser blasts. In 'First Contact' we find that he is bullet proof. In "The Naked Now" he claims that 'if you prick me, do I not leak?'. Well, in this episode Troi fires an arrow at Data. Not only does he fail to dodge it, the arrow comfortably pierces his bullet proof chest and completely fails to cause any leak. | TNG : Qpid |
| So, as far as anybody knows at the start of this episode, the Enterprise's warp core has been sabotaged and is disabled. This means the ship lacks warp drive, and possibly that it lacks other high energy systems like shields and weapons (the show seems to go back and forth on whether the warp core powers these things or not). So Starfleet's response is to send the USS Cochrane, an Oberth-class ship, to deliver Admiral Satie to conduct an investigation. After dropping her off, the Cochrane leaves. So... why didn't it stick around to defend the Enterprise? They suspect sabotage, surely they must suspect that the sabotage was intended to leave the ship crippled so that it could be attacked! Of course an Oberth isn't much of a platform to defend anything, but that raises the question of why wasn't something like an Excelsior or even a Nebula around to help? A Nebula could defend against most threats, even tow the Enterprise back to a Starbase for repairs, yes? One of Starfleet's most valuable asssets is crippled, and they are leaving it to just sit there! Admiral Satie's court reporter dutifully records all the answers people give in the hearings. Strangely, she doesn't bother to write down any of the actual questions! In TOS, we several times saw people questioned in official hearings whilst being monitored by the computer. The computer, we were told, could act as a lie detector so accurate that it could tell a lie even if you believed that what you were saying was true! How come this device is not used in this episode? Even if we assume that the defendant would have the option to decline so as to avoid self-incrimination - something they apparently could not do in TOS - surely Simon Tarses would jump at the chance to prove he was not in fact a traitor once and for all? |
TNG : The Drumhead |
| In discussing her outfit, Lwaxana says "I am a woman dressing for a man. Something you might try now and then, dear." Um, honey, have you seen how Deanna dresses? Half the time she's about one step shy of walking around in her underwear! When trying to reignite the star, Geordi refers to the temperature approaching "sixty million degrees Kelvin." The Kelvin scale doesn't use "degrees"; you would simply say "sixty million Kelvin." |
TNG : Half a Life |
| The Trill in this episode are totally different from the way they appear in DS9. These Trill have no spots, a built up forehead, and when the symbiont joins with the host it takes over the host personality completely. So, does the planet Trill have two different races as different from one another as Earth's different types of dogs? Or are there two completely different planets that both happen to be called Trill and have joined species? And while we're on the subject, why would anybody ever agree to be a permanent host for this version of the Trill? The hosts are clearly shown as sentient beings, yet their entire personality is completely overwritten by the symbiont. Do the symbionts hold the hosts in some kind of slavery? When the shuttle is intercepted, Worf reports that "they are loading their phaser banks". One charges phasers. One loads torpedo tubes. |
TNG : The Host |
| Geordi and Data test out a phaser rifle in this episode. In order to do this they set up the weapon in the middle of main engineering. They fire it into a small target apparatus directly in front of the master situation display, and don't even go to the trouble of putting up a warning sign or rope barrier to stop people walking into the beam. I don't know what kind of safety regulations there are for firing phaser beams aboard ship, but surely they can do better than this! One of the things that makes Data suspicious of Geordi is the fact that a scan of Geordi's shuttle shows that it has been subjected to a tractor beam. But we've seen before that shuttles are often landed by tractor beams on the Enterprise - see Time Squared for an example. So shouldn't ALL the shuttles display signs of having been subject to a tractor beam? Whilst we're on that subject, another thing that makes Data suspicious is that he scans the memory chips in the shuttle Geordi used, and finds anomalies in the molecular structure. The computer reports that these were caused by replication. But... isn't replication how they would usually make computer chips? I mean, if you can just push a button and replicate functional chips, why would anybody use a more primitive method of building them? |
TNG : The Mind's Eye |
| At one point a female crewemember walks past Geordi, goes around a corner and then screams a few moments later. Geordi runs back to see what is wrong and finds her half buried in the floor as a result of an encounter with a bit of dark matter. The thing is, she is facing him as he goes around the corner - yet she was walking in the opposite direction so she should have her back to him. Data uses contractions three different times when he is comes home to Jenna. He says "Honey, I'm home!" as he enters, "I'll join you", when she has a drink, and "You're not my mother!" when they fight. It's possible that these are stock phrases that he has learned in order to simulate being romantic or argumentative, rather than dialogue made up on the fly, as it were, and so contractions can make it through - notably he says "You are not my mother" in a more normal tone of voice when Jenna questions what he said. But... if that's so, then we are assuming that data has two modes of speaking. A normal mode in which his program determines what to say, but has a deliberate limiter which prevents him from using contractions. And a stock-phrase mode, in which predetermined responses can be spoken without limitation as to content. So if that's the case, then why can't data create a set of stock phrases consisting purely of contractions, which he then inserts into his normal conversation program at the appropriate moments? So a response he gives might go : (program says to say)I will give that issue my full consideration, and then (insert stock phrase)I'll (program says to say)get back to you later. Let's face it, the data contradictions thing was a silly idea to begin with, and probably would have been best if quickly forgotten. |
TNG : In Theory |
| Gowron claims that women cannot serve on the high council. Yet in Star Trek VI, Gorkon's daughter Azetbur replaced him as the leader of the council after his death. Also, we see in this episode that Worf has red blood. Why isn't it purple, like all the blood in ST VI was? Does Klingon blood only become purple when they are in zero gee for a few minutes? |
TNG : Redemption, Part 1 |
| Picard tells the Admirals he meets that they should send a "freet" to the Romulan border. What the hell is a "freet"? | TNG : Redemption, Part 2 |
| When they are trying to disable the Tamarian ship, the Enterprise fires a phaser beam out of the torpedo tube! Thankfully this has been corrected in the remastered BluRay edition. | TNG : Darmok |
| Why does Ro wear her earring on the left ear when every other Bajoran in history wears theirs on the right? And why don't regulations allow an earring when they do allow Worf's big sash? | TNG : Ensign Ro |
| Even assuming that there really was no way to shut down the transmitter Marr used to destroy the crystalline entity, why did Picard not simply warp away from the creature? Also, if the crystalline entity destroys planets in a matter of hours as shown here, how come the children of Data's colony had time to draw pictures of it? | TNG : Silicon Avatar |
| Geordi claims that opening the cargo bay doors will cause the drums of chemicals to be sucked out into space. Surely he means they will be blown out? And while we're on the subject of Geordi, when Crusher leans against the wall and tells him that it's hot, he looks up and says "where?" But his VISOR can see infa red light, so he should have seen the heat trace on the wall long before they went anywhere near it. When Picard cheers up the children during their climb by singing "Frere Jacques", why doesn't his Universal Translator convert it into English for us? When Data suggests putting himself into the electrical arcs, Riker notes that he would never ask anybody to take such a risk. But a few episodes later, when Troi is struggling with the Bridge officer's test, Riker points out that the correct solution to the test is to order Geordi to his certain death. He makes the point that any individual crew member is expendable if the survival of the ship is at stake. So... which is it? How is it that the controls to open and close the doors and raise and lower the forcefield are across the room from the controls that repressurise the cargo bay? Crusher and La Forge almost die because they have to cross the large room to reach the atmosphere controls. Shouldn't these be on the same panel? |
TNG : Disaster |
| Crusher calls Data to sickbay in order to incapacitate him, then covers by claiming that he came in complaining of a malfunction before shutting down. Yet Geordi was right next to Data when Crusher called him, so why doesn't he object to this cover story? Also, the torpedo launcher which fired a phaser beam in Darmok can now emit tractor beams! | TNG : The Game |
| In this episode Crusher asks Data if his ears are removable and he says no. Yet in Datalore we saw that his ears are in fact removable. | TNG : Unification, Part 1 |
| Troi suggests that there could be a cloaked Romulan base on Galornden Core in this episode. Yet in "The Defector" Data says that a cloaked base on the surface would be visible due to the distortion of the background, and in "The Enemy" we find that the magnetic fields on Galornden Core would rapidly become fatal for Humans and Romulans. Guess Troi should stick to the day job. Also, it was nice of Sela to lock Data, Spock and Picard in her office without any kind of guard so that they could plan their escape and use her computer system to foil her entire plan, wasn't it? And finally, the job descriptions get all mixed up towards the end of this one. Crusher announces that she has recieved a distress call from a nearby colony, and Riker responds by ordering La Forge to set a course for it. Since when do Doctors handle communications and Engineers handle the helm? |
TNG : Unification, Part 2 |
| Picard claims that he has inspected Rasmussen's credentials and that they seem to be in order. Huh? Does Rasmussen really have an "Official Federation Time Traveller" card, and how would Picard know it was genuine if he did? The Enterprise crew use the computer to disable a phaser by remote control in this episode. What a fabulously useful function for the computer to have! One wonders why they didn't bother to use it in "Power Play", "The Hunted", "The Game", "Datalore", "First Contact"... At the climax of the episode, Picard must face a tough decision - he might be able to save the planet, but only by risking the destruction of the Enterprise. Wouldn't this be a good time to separate the ship and evacuate the civilians on the saucer section? At one point Riker asks when historians of the future started using time travel to investigate the past. Well it happened a century ago, Will! The Enterprise was doing it in "Assignment : Earth" Silly Riker should have known this. Speaking of things Riker should have known, Rasmussen asks him what he thinks is the most important example of progress in the last 200 years. Riker responds "The warp coil. Before there was warp drive, human were confined to a single sector of the galaxy." But First Contact shows us that humans invented warp drive in 2063, three hundred and five years before this episode. And in First Contact, Riker and everyone else talks about that event as something that is extremely common knowledge - how could he possibly not know this date? |
TNG : A Matter of Time |
| Since Worf's last name is Rozhenko, why is he continually called Worf even by junior officers? In this episode, Alexander's classmates go on a trip to see models of extinct animals. Why wouldn't their teacher take them to the holodeck so they could see living versions of these creatures? Worf gets paged by various people during his meeting with the captain. Does this seem right? I know Picard doesn't have a secretary, but surely the computer can be set to hold all but emergency pages from the comm system during meetings? |
TNG : New Ground |
| Data gets Geordi's rank wrong in this episode; he calls him "Lieutenant", when Lieutenant Commanders are normally called "Commander". | TNG : Hero Worship |
| Riker claims that he does not know if Troi can hear him whilst in a coma in this episode. Even today you can tell if a person can hear a sound by examining their brain wave patterns - this is how they diagnose deafness in very young children. Has Starfleet lost this ability? Or does it just not work on Betazoid women? | TNG : Violations |
| Watch Riker when he goes to meet Hannah Bates; head down, striding manfully forwards, he almost walks into a wall! At one point Geordi complains that he's been without sleep for so long that his eyelids "feel like they have lead weights attached". Well why doesn't he just close them for a while then? He doesn't actually see out of his eyes, remember, so it makes no difference to him if he wants to walk around with them shut. |
TNG : The Masterpiece Society |
| Why didn't the Satarran MacDuff make himself Captain instead of First Officer? For that matter, why didn't he have a few of his friends along on the mission in other key places? When Riker says there is no voice interface to the computer, La Forge says that there is no interface, period. He then goes on to use the work station behind him to use the computer. Doesn't this count as an interface? And I don't mean to be nasty, but does anybody else find it hard to believe that Troi beats Data at chess? |
TNG : Conundrum |
| Gee, it sure would have been useful to use the computer to disable the terrorist's phasers in this episode the way it did in "A Matter of Time", wouldn't it? Riker tells Picard that Data, O'Brien and Troi are trying to take over the ship. But Riker was unconcious when Troi did her bit of the taking over, so how did he know about her? |
TNG : Power Play |
| This episode makes it clear just how hard it is to kill a Klingon - they even have a backup brain that can bring them back from death! So how come Worf has at least twice threatened to kill himself with a knife (Night Terrors and this episode)? Surely he would recover from this fairly easily? The number of times that the Enterprise gets banged around enough to - almost - throw a person off their feet is so great it is one of the best known cliches of the entire Trek legend. Yet not only do they never have seatbelts, they never make any effort to tie down their cargo containers! |
TNG : Ethics |
| My, Worf seems to have recovered quickly. Last episode he was struggling to take more than a step or two, yet here only 33.1 Stardate units later - 12 days in real time - he is not only walking normally, he is beating people up! | TNG : The Outcast |
| This whole episode hinges on whether to use the tractor beam or the explosive decompression of the shuttlebay to avoid the collision with the Bozeman. Why not do both together? | TNG : Cause and Effect |
| Data claims to have graduated in the "class of 78." Since it is now 2368, as dated from "The Neutral Zone" in which Data says it is 2364, did Data really graduate ninety years ago? Riker claims that the Vulcan superintendant made being at the academy like "being with your parents". Riker's mother died when he was very young and his father was hardly ever around, so how would he know what being with your parents is like? |
TNG : The First Duty |
| We're told that there are intermittent failures in the IDF system, and Picard's first reaction is to order the ship to halt. Risky! The IDF is all that stops the crew getting smeared over the bulkheads by the huge accelerations of the ship, so ordering it to slow down while the system is failing is not a good idea. Ideally, you would hold the exact same speed whilst fixing the problem. | TNG : Cost of Living |
| It's not a real YATI as such, but it's odd that Kamala looks exactly like a Trill. | TNG : The Perfect Mate |
| Troi reports that Clara had a good time at pottery class. In fact Isabella smashed Alexander's sculpture and threw pottery at him, Worf blamed Clara, and she ran out of the room crying. Doesn't sound like a good time to me. | TNG : Imaginary Friend |
| When beaming down, Riker orders Crusher to beam down and he asks her to bring a medical team, but she doesn't. Also, Picard is amazed when Hugh gives up his "we" and "us" speech and finally says "I". Yet one of the first thing Hugh says after coming aboard is "Do I have a name?" |
TNG : I, Borg |
| The whole premise of this episode makes no sense. Light and matter passes through Ro and Geordi so they are invisible and walk through walls... yet they can still see, still breathe the air and talk to one another, still stand on the floor and sit on a chair. | TNG : The Next Phase |
| Why doesn't Troi appear in this episode? Surely it would be useful to have her monitoring Picard's mind while he is unconcious, like she did with Riker in "Shades of Grey". | TNG : The Inner Light |
| Data pawns his communicator for three dollars, and gets three coins. He throws one coin into the pot as his ante for the first game. But the ante was said to be "four bits", or fifty cents. Data identifies the 1873 Colt .45 cavalry revolver as being double action. In fact that particular weapon was a single action pistol. |
TNG : Time's Arrow, Part 1 |
| In "The Child", Guinan tells Wesley that she never met Picard before coming aboard the Enterprise. Yet this episode establishes that she met Picard centuries before her arrival on the ship. While Guinan would undoubtedly want to protect the timeline by not revealing details of this meeting, it doesn't seem like her to tell such a direct lie. Also, why does Geordi openly wear his VISOR whilst wandering the 19th century hospital where locals can see him? |
TNG : Time's Arrow, Part 2 |
| At one point in this episode, Troi releives Barclay of duty. Yet soon afterwards he goes to the transporter room and starts ordering O'Brien around. Now while it's entirely believable that Barclay would disobey orders, wouldn't O'Brien know that Barclay had been relieved and thus refuse to do as he ordered? Barclay asks Geordi if anything strange ever happened to him during transport, anything "out of the ordinary", and Geordi says "No, not really." I guess Geordi must have a really high bar for things he considered to be strange. I mean, he could have said "Well there was that time last year when Ro Laren and I were transported, and there was an accident, and we woke up on the Enterprise, only we were invisible and intangible, and Ro thought we had been killed and were ghosts or something, but it turned out that we'd been thrown out of phase with normal matter. Oh, and also there was a phased Romulan that tried to kill us." But I guess he didn't consider that to be out of the ordinary. |
TNG : Realm of Fear |
| Troi has stated several times that her empathic sense allows her to tell when a person is lying to her. So when Alkar asked her to participate in his little ceremony, why didn't she sense that there was something amiss? When Ensign Blondie McHandsome was about to leave Deanna's quarters, she told him she knew where to find him if she needed anything more. He answered "Yes Ma'am," and walked out. But isn't this the genderless future, where female officers are called "Sir"? (As a minor aside; it's always amused me that when sci-fi shows attempt to depict 'genderless' future forms of address, they always, always do it by referring to women as men. Because who gives a damn how silly women feel, so long as we can avoid the ultimate humiliation of calling a male 'Ma'am'?) |
TNG : Man of the People |
| Just where is the Dyson sphere? Scotty was on his way from Earth, or at least somewhere near to Earth, to the Norpin colony. Presumably the sphere lies somewhere on a more or less straight line between the two. Presumably there is at least semi-regular traffic between the Federation and its colony world. So Federation exploratory ships have been this way, and transports have been passing through the area for at least seventy five years, yet in all that time nobody has noticed the sphere? Also, in a classic nit the Enterprise-D beams Geordi and Scotty off the Jenolen whilst its shields are still raised. Presumably they were able to use the kind of transporter window that O'Brien used to board the Sutherland in "The Wounded". |
TNG : Relics |
| Geordi claims that cargo bay 4 is on deck 4. Yet the big schematic display of the ship shows it on deck 10, and in "Power Play" when Worf, Troi and O'Brien head for cargo bay 4 they get off the turbolifts on deck 18. | TNG : Schisms |
| Why, if they are rushing to assist Tagra IV, does the Enterprise-D appear to be at impulse speed every time we see an external shot? At one point Riker comes into sickbay and tells Amanda he was looking for Crusher to ask her what nutrients she wanted to send to the planet. Amanda tells him she will relay the message, and he leaves. A moment later Crusher walks in. So... if Riker wants to ask this question why not just tap his combadge and say "Riker to Crusher"? Or if he wants to do it face to face for some reason, why not say "Computer, locate Doctor Crusher"? Both of these things are absolutely routine. |
TNG : True-Q |
| Skipping lightly over the fact that the younger Picard has a different accent, no dimple in his chin and different eye colour, what happened to his artificial heart? A full sized adult heart wouldn't fit the chest of a child, after all. At one point a pair of automatic doors slide open and a little robot comes through to distract a Ferengi. As Data says in "In Theory", "the door sensor is programmed to recognise only Humanoid forms for entrance and egress." |
TNG : Rascals |
| When Troi shoots Eli Hollander's hat off, he turns to look at her before dropping his weapon. Yet Troi is using a lever-action rifle; she didn't cock it after firing, so Hollander would easily be able to turn and shoot her before she could do anything more to him. | TNG : A Fistful of Datas |
| Data and Crusher really put up a poor showing in their discussion of life. First she claims it is "what enables plants and animals to consume food, derive energy from it, grow, adapt themselves to their surroundings and reproduce". Data quickly points out that fire meets these criteria but is not alive. Crusher says that it does not count because it is a chemical reaction, and says that you could use the same argument for growing crystals. Data then asks about himself, claiming he does not grow or reproduce yet is considered to be alive. On a strictly factual point, both have made mistakes. Data claims that he does not reproduce - yet in "The Offspring", he clearly considered Lal to be his offspring. Crusher claims that crystals are not alive, yet both the crystal from "Home Soil" and the Crystalline entity from "Datalore" and "Silicon Avatar" are (or were) alive. Crusher's ruling out of chemical reactions as being alive makes little sense also - what is a person if not a collection of chemical reactions? And whilst Data has been declared to have sentience and equal rights to others, I don't know that he has ever been stated to be alive as such. Currently, in order to be considered alive something must grow, consume food, excrete waste, respire, reproduce, move all or part of itself and respond to stimuli. Fire does indeed meet some of these criteria, but does not respond to stimuli and so is not alive. It's unclear how the crystal life forms in Trek would fare under this definition, but Data would probably not be considered alive. |
TNG : The Quality of Life |
| When Picard's team goes to Torman V, there is a Tamarian in the background of the bar. Have the Tamarians learned conventional language well enough to order drinks? Or did he sit down and say something like 'Alkazar, long in the desert'? | TNG : Chain of Command, Part 1 |
| Why does Gul Madred's daughter wear a military uniform? Isn't she a little young to be in the military, or is there some sort of youngster's cadet force on Cardassia? | TNG : Chain of Command, Part 2 |
| Picard and Data conclude at one point that Moriarty has set the computers to respond only to his voice. So what's the problem? Data can imitate voices perfectly, as seen in "Brothers", so he can still give the computer orders. | TNG : Ship in a Bottle |
| When the dog/alien attacks Geordi, the Engineer does an excellent job of dodging about and then grabs a phaser from one of his draws and vapourises it. I find it interesting that Geordi keeps a phaser in his quarters, but more importantly - why does he never once call for help from security? | TNG : Aquiel |
| Mister DeSeve defected to the Romulans nearly twenty years ago because he was so impressed by their single-mindedness. Yet in "The Neutral Zone", it is claimed that there has been no contact with the Romulans for fifty three years! What could DeSeve have found so impressively single minded about several decades of total silence? | TNG : Face of the Enemy |
| Picard claims to have graduated in the class of 27, and that the incident with the Nausicaans occurred thirty years ago. In first season episode "The Neutral Zone", Data claimed that the current date was 2364. So at the time of this episode in season six, it should be 2369. Which dates the incident on the station to 2339. So either Picard rounded his "thirty years" an awful lot - "forty years" would have been closer - or he waited twelve years between graduating and getting his first deep space assignment! | TNG : Tapestry |
| When Data is painting in his quarters, he stops and steps back to admire his work. You can still hear the brush against the canvas in the background. | TNG : Birthright, Part 1 |
| Worf is disgusted that the Klingons allow themselves to be captured alive. Yet he allows himself to be captured alive, both here and several times in the future. When Worf is telling everyone the story about Kahless, he says "Kahless looked into the sea and wept, for the sword is all he had left of his father." But according to Spock in Star Trek VI, Klingons have no tear ducts and cannot cry. |
TNG : Birthright, Part 2 |
| Picard tries to escape the Enterprise after disabling Tuvo- er, a terrorist. He fails because the power goes out. Why not use a shuttle? The transporter on a shuttle? The Captain's yacht? An escape pod? When the terrorists take over on the station base, one of them stuns Geordi and then points his weapon at Data, who freezes in place. But in "Power Play" when somebody fires a phaser stun at him and he is completely unaffected by it. So if Data is immune to stun settings, why doesn't he just charge the bad guy and knock him out? Speaking of Data, when he tries out his small talk skills on Beverly and Riker, he asks if they have noticed that the temperature on the planet is slightly higher than normal for human comfort levels. He goes on to note that "I have found that humans prefer a body temperature of 21 Celsius in order to operate most efficiently." Um, no. Humans may prefer an atmospheric temperature of 21C, but if your body temperature is 21C then you're not operating efficiently at all, because you're dead! He even goes on to continue this theme by saying that some species prefer their body temperature to be the same as the temperature of the room. Data seems to think that your body temperature is something that varies significantly. In reality your temperature does vary, but only very slightly - if your body temperature goes more than a degree or so up or down you're in pretty serious trouble, and your body will do everything it can to get the temperature back to normal. Now this is true for humans, of course, and it is possible that there are alien species whose body temperature can indeed vary widely. So maybe Data was talking about those. But the way he described it, he really appears to think that everyone's body temperature wanders waaaay up and down according to how hot or cold it is, and the only result is that they feel a little warm or cold. The Enterprise-D is the most famous Starship in the Federation, and Captain Picard is a famous person - remember he was credited with saving Earth from the Borg, after all. And these terrorists have presumably put a fair bit of effort into planning this mission... but they have no idea what the Captain of their target ship looks like? |
TNG : Starship Mine |
| When Picard and Darren ride the turbolift together, a crewmember enters and rides it with them. I guess she just assumed that it was going her way, because she never gives it any kind of instruction or asks its destination. | TNG : Lessons |
| I have to wonder where dinosaurs figure into the Progenitor species plans. The dinosaurs were the dominant lifeform on Earth for over a hundred million years, and it was largely due to a fluke asteroid impact that they died out and mamals became the dominant life form, and that primates and then Huanoids subsequently developed. How does this square with the idea that the Progenitor DNA code has been directing evolution towards humanoids all along? | TNG : The Chase |
| La Forge brings an injured man to sickbay at one point. Isn't it a big no-no to move a badly injured person around like this? Isn't that why normal procedure is to call an emergency medical team to go to your location rather than vice versa? Of course, Riker is imagining it all so maybe he just imagined this part wrong. | TNG : Frame of Mind |
| Jo'brill took an awful chance, pretending to be dead like that. It's a good thing Crusher didn't autopsy him. | TNG : Suspicions |
| One of the ways Kahless tries to convince Worf that he is real is to talk about a vision of Kahless Worf had as a child. So since Kahless turns out to be a fake, how did he know about Worf's vision? And if Worf had told people about it, then why wouldn't he object that Kahless knowing about it was no proof that he was real? | TNG : Rightful Heir |
| Surely Lieutenant Riker should get the same promotion as Commander Riker did for his actions on Nervala IV. They were both the same person then, after all. | TNG : Second Chances |
| When Picard puts his hand into a time distortion, it ages sufficiently that the nails grow considerably. So... that's at least weeks if not months. And for all that time the rest of his body, outside the time distortion, would not have been supplying the hand with blood. Picard should have pulled out something a lot more unpleasant looking than a hand with long fingernails... | TNG : Timescape |
| Okay, I can accept that Picard wanted the maximum number of people on the planet's surface to search for Data. But it still makes no sense that he be one of those searching! For example, suppose Picard switched places with the young man on the bridge. There would be just as many people searching for Data, yet the Captain would be on the bridge where he belongs. | TNG : Descent, Part 1 |
| When Data brings Geordi back from the experiments, Troi asks him if he is in pain. That is, Troi the empath, who should be able to feel his pain from down the hallway. So at the end of the episode, Data deactivates Lore and then advises that he be disassembled. Um, what? Starfleet has judged Soong-style androids to be conscious beings with fundamental rights. Lore gets no trial, no opportunity to defend himself... he's simply captured, turned off, and destroyed! |
TNG : Descent, Part 2 |
| How long are these aliens on the ship for? Worf says he is showing them around for three days, but the ambassador says he is looking forward to an enjoyable seven days. | TNG : Liaisons |
| When Geordi is exploring the Raman, he says that there are some poisonous gases in the corridor. Then he arrives at a bay door and says that the crew are probably took refuge behind it. Then he opens the door! Great idea La Forge, what if there had been fifty survivors behind that door who are now exposed to the poison gases? | TNG : Interface |
| The crew do a horrible job of working undercover in the bar. They do manage to wear civilian clothes, but they wave Starfleet phasers and tricorders around, talk about finding Starfleet fabric traces, and basically do everything short of waving big signs saying "WE ARE STARFLEET" around. | TNG : Gambit, Part 1 |
| I'm a bit confused about how Baran died. I get that Picard switched the codes so that when Baran tried to activate Picard's implant and kill him, it activated Baran's implant instead. But... why the hell does Baran have an implant? | TNG : Gambit, Part 2 |
| Not a nit as such... but wouldn't replacing a warp core be something that you would go into spacedock for? It's a pretty major bit of equipment, after all. If it doesn't work, the ship is stranded years away from anywhere unless somebody comes and tows them back home. Also, why does Data go and consult a holodeck character about his dream? After all, there is a real live counsellor on board - one whose knowledge of psychology isn't four or five centuries out of date, at that. Shouldn't he go talk to Troi herself? |
TNG : Phantasms |
| In "Haven", Lwaxana claimed that Betazoids prided themselves on "complete honesty". Well judging by this episode I guess they don't actually do any such thing. So the Cairn don't have any concept of spoken language, since they are telepaths with no need for such a thing. So then why did they evolve vocal cords? One can excuse their having mouths, since mouths are also used for eating and breathing. But vocal cords are evolved specifically to allow vocalisation. If the Cairn have never had vocalisation and language, they should never have evolved vocal cords in the first place. I get that they use "vocal enhancers", but the name suggests that those simply improve on their vocalisations - without vocal chords what would there be to enhance at all? Nothing, that's what. |
TNG : Dark Page |
| While having one of their heart to heart talks, Picard and Crusher confess that they do not 'feel that way' about each other any more. So why do we then have this big 'will they won't they' scene at the end? | TNG : Attached |
| So the Enterprise is going to get a "kick" out of its warp engine and cruise out of the rift at warp speed, beaming the crew off the Flemming as they pass. I thought you had to exactly match warp speeds to use transporters, as O'Brien's dialogue in "Best of Both Worlds, Part I" indicates? | TNG : Force of Nature |
| So why don't Troi and Geordi know instantly that Juliana is an android? Troi's empathic sense should give the game away, and Geordi should see the glow around her as he did Data in "Heart of Glory". Tainer claims that the solidification of the core has affected the gravity of the planet. This is nonsensical; the only things affecting the gravity of a planet are the mass and diameter. Unless the solidification is actually changing the mass of the planet, or making it shrink or balloon up, then there would be no effect at all on gravity. |
TNG : Inheritance |
| I'm a bit confused about the Cardassian's plan to use the telescope thingie as a spy device against the Federation. I mean, it's a Federation installation. It presumably sends data to Starfleet all the time. Do the Cardassians really think that when it stops sending information, Starfleet will just shrug its shoulders and forget about it? Of course not! They'll send a ship to investigate, and the Cardassians will be caught in the act - which is exactly what happened. It would make much more sense for the Cardassians to just blow the thing up and make a hasty exit, then deny all knowledge afterwards. | TNG : Parallels |
| Pressman claims that the Romulans have found a piece of the Pegasus. Okay... but it turns out that the Pegasus never exploded. So either bits just fell off the ship for no good reason, or the Admiral is lying. Admittedly the latter possibility is not wholly unlikely... Just out of curiosity, isn't Picard also guilty of violating the treaty when he uses the Pegasus phase cloak device to escape the asteroid? I wonder what he would have done if the Romulan captain he declared that he was under arrest and asked him to come aboard their ship for return to Romulus to stand trial? |
TNG : The Pegasus |
| I have to say, I think the Prime Directive is a pretty good idea most of the time... protecting the primitives from exploitation, harmful interference and all that. But I mean, these people were all going to die. Just how bad could any degree of interference be compared to that? | TNG : Homeward |
| Okay, what about marriage and names in the 24th century? Beverly Howard became Beverly Crusher when she married Jack Crusher. So apparently the whole thing about women taking the man's surname still applies. Yet the alien dude says that his first host was Jessel Howard, hundreds of years previously. Shouldn't Jessel have had a different surname? Or did all of Beverly's ancestors keep their surname, and she broke with the tradition and decided to adopt her husbands? Beverly claims that her grandmother Felisa was a hundred years old at the time of her death. But her gravestone displays her year of birth as 2291, which actually makes her 79 at the time of death. Interestingly, this is close to the age of the actress who played Felisa, Ellen Albertini Dow - and she went on to live to be over one hundred before she died. |
TNG : Sub Rosa |
| Do Troi and Riker really have to do evaluations on the entire crew? I mean, they know each of the several hundred officers on the ship well enough to judge them? Surely it would be more sensible for each officer's direct superior to evaluate them? This is how it's done where I work, and I'm told it's what happens in the present day military. And even if we assume that they actually do the evaluations, surely the department heads should at least have input? They spend a chunk of the episode trying to pick a new night watch operations manager, but at no point does anybody ask Data - the Chief of Operations - for any input into this decision. Ben sure is an incredible bluffer. In the junior officer's poker game he has a king, jack, ten and eight. Lavelle has two sixes and two sevens. It is impossible for Ben to win, no matter what his hole card is. Yet Lavelle folds in the face of Ben's self confidence. Riker suggests to Sito that she let the phaser locking relay "float" whilst the ship maneuvers so that she doesn't have to re-lock them after the maneuver. He notes that they don't teach that trick at the academy, "but it works". So... if it works, why don't they teach it at the academy? Sito says that the events she was involved in at the academy, as seen in "The First Duty", took place three years ago. In actuality, it was two years ago. A stellar display of phaser safety here - Geordi asks Taurik to fire a phaser rifle on the shuttle - on a setting high enough to significantly damage the metal skin, no less - whilst Geordi himself stands almost directly in front of the phaser, perhaps four feet to one side of the aim point. Yikes! On that subject, Geordi claims that they are firing phasers at the shuttle to evaluate "hull resiliency". In other words, to see how much damage the phaser does to the hull. Taurik then suggests that he could reconfigure the phaser to fire a low intensity burst that would not harm the shuttle's hull... and states that the test procedure would not be affected. If the point of the test is to establish how well the shuttle hull resists phaser damage, how can it possibly be true that turning the phaser setting down to the point where it won't damage it will not affect the test?! That's like having a test to see how well a car door panel resists a hammer, then claiming that if you use a foam hammer instead it will not affect the test! Okay, not to harp on about this test, but... Geordi asks Taurik to fire a burst of "about four seconds". Yet when Taurik actually fires, the burst he fires is maybe half a second to a second at most. |
TNG : Lower Decks |
| If Troi isn't qualified for command because she hasn't taken the bridge officer's test, why was she in command during "Disaster" just because of her rank? | TNG : Thine Own Self |
| At one point Troi declares that the two alien characters are like the sun and the moon - only one can be in ascension at any given time. Which means that despite passing the bridge officer's test last episode, she still isn't exactly the sharpest tool in the box. It's perfectly possible for the sun and moon to be up at once - think about it, how could you have an eclipse of the sun otherwise? Just keep an eye on the sky for the next couple of weeks, you'll see the moon up there during the daytime along with the sun. | TNG : Masks |
| When Troi first goes up into the nacelle, she is startled when the female officer comes up behind her. Shouldn't Troi's empathic sense tell her that somebody is there? At one point Troi is on the bridge searching through personnel files for the man she recognised in her 'vision'. Worf suggests that she limit the search parameters and she says she has, she is only looking at people who served at Utopia Planitia and on the ship itself. Not to be rude, but since she's looking for a man, might it not be a good idea to limit the search to males as well? Several of the people she brings up on the screen are women! |
TNG : Eye of the Beholder |
| This syndrome works by activating bits of DNA leftover from your distant ancestors. So... is Barclay a Human? The de-evolving effect turns him into a spider-like creature, yet Humans are not descended from spiders. Nor did cats evolve from Iguanas. And why does Picard begin to change into a Lemur, while Riker turned into a caveman? | TNG : Genesis |
| Crusher claims that the Traveller is from Tau Ceti. Nope, he's actually from Tau Alpha C as stated in both "Where No One Has Gone Before" and "Remember Me". | TNG : Journey's End |
| Alexander says that he was three years old when his mother died. Are these Klingon years or something? He was actually about one year old when she died, at least in Earth years. | TNG : Firstborn |
| When Jason is beamed aboard, he is in a "climbing the rock-face" position with his hands up in the air. He assumes the same position and asks to be beamed back. Does he really expect the transporter to put him back into handholds and footholds? I mean, missing even by a few millimetres could send him plummeting to certain death! | TNG : Bloodlines |
| Worf asks the folks on the train if they have finished the jigsaw puzzle. But when we see his point of view, the puzzle is in plain sight and it's perfectly obvious that it is nowhere near finished. So the Enterprise has become self-aware, enough that it can design and build offspring and actually out-think the crew in many respects. So, why does it suddenly stop thinking for itself at the end of the episode? |
TNG : Emergence |
| When Worf and Data go into the bar to "search" for Ro in order to give her rebel credibility, Worf declares that if they discover she has been there the bar will be closed down. Interestingly, somebody immediately pipes up to say that she was there but left a few minutes ago. Worf and Data then leave. So, why don't they close the bar down? And why doesn't the bartender go pummel the guy who took that chance? | TNG : Preemptive Strike |
| Data claims that all three Tachyon beams are coming from the Enterprise - but the future timeline beam was from the USS Pasteur, not the Enterprise. When Picard wants to go into the Neutral Zone, Tomalak agrees so long as a Romulan ship can go as well. That's the last we see of Romulans in this episode. What happened to their ship? When the Pasteur and the Enterprise-D reach the site of the anomaly in the future, nothing is there. Yet when the E-D returns some time later, the anomaly is there. If the anomaly gets bigger in the past, then it should have already been there when the Pasteur first arrived. Or is there an eruption of time which gets bigger in the future to match the eruption of anti-time which gets bigger in the past? |
TNG : All Good Things |
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