1y ago

Behind the Scenes: Treknobabble

58 comments

[off topic?]
I read a story about TOS. A company was building automatic doors. Someone wrote to the production asking how they got their doors to work so flawlessly.
Two Union workers was not the answer the company was hoping for.
- Amazing how much technology since the 60s has just been trying to make star trek props real
  
  I like in old science fiction when the 'future' tech is behind what we have. 'The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress' has a sentient computer struggling to invent CGI.
- I hope they were sent the outtakes where the doors don't open.
  
  https://youtu.be/FMX9ZAD_h3g
  Wish granted.
- I'm a union man!
  
  https://youtu.be/wI7ONJ60DIc
  Know your history!
- They worked smoothly but never silently, once you know to look for the breaks in dialogue for the door audio to be easily removed you never stop noticing it
  
  There are so many little details like that. From the 'swoosh' noise in the intro to the way every ship in the Galaxy flies in the same orientation.

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN ME
- I would also like to be manhandled by Terry Farrell

This was when they realized she was the right person to marry Worf

I don't get this reaction, is technobable really that difficult to recite for actors?
- Yes. Like high octane laughter fuel. It's ridiculous and everyone is just trying not to crack.
  
  There's also a reason that the "legitimate nerds" in show business become such cult favorites. The overlap of (1) "people who look like professional actors" and (2) "people who are believable while acting" and (3) "people who legitimately get into the fake logic of technobabble" is vanishingly small. If you are on a Trek show and not in that intersection, pretending to be a 3 is going to be one of the biggest challenges in pulling off 2 to your expected standards.
  To cross franchises for a moment, "you can write this shit George, but you can't say it."
  
  There was that one scene in TNG where Riker is actually making up a bunch of technobabble to distract a ferengi who had taken over the ship... and to this day I'm not sure how they got a take where he managed to go through it with a straight face.
- A scene that lasts 30 seconds on screen might take an entire morning to shoot. The actors have to repeat their lines exactly the same, every time. Imagine having to say the technobabble fifty times or more, without messing it up.
  
  It's like filling up a balloon with air, then something bad happens!
- I can easily imagine it. You have words that the actor has never seen before, which have literally zero emotional resonance for them so they can't draw on any personal or cultural connections to use them, and they're tasked with spitting them out in a scene that calls for both intimate familiarity and stressful high stakes.

Dax was 6 feet tall?
- One of them.
- IMDB lists her height as 5'11¾".
  
  ...without heels, like she'd be wearing at a wrap party.
- Cpt Sisko [Avery Brook] is 1.85 m, apx 6 feet. They were usually eye to eye.
- I used to have such a crush on her. Beautiful woman.

Wrap party?
Not warp party? C'mon..
- filming ends
  "Alright people, that's a warp!"

I hate when people try to write technobabble like that. It has a logic and if you have watched enough star trek it starts to make sense.
Then JJ Abrams comes a long and has Butterbeer Crampleslice tell us life support system is behind the aft nacelles. Even the first few seasons of the new Trek shows did this crap until they brought on science and Canon consultants
- Do you have any examples of the new Trek shows doing this?
  Edit: No. The answer is no he doesn't. The same as everyone who makes this complaint. I openly challenge you find a single example. I will admit I am wrong if you can find a piece of treknobabble in NuTrek that breaks canon or doesn't line up with the explanations already provided in lore.
  I am waiting. My skeleton will be waiting. Simply because the above complaint isn't true.
  Edit 2: Yep. I was right. It wasn't true. Check below for the receipts.
  
  There is nothing technochron blorbinator in the Trek lexicon - I'm saying that writing example technobabble like that shows a lack of understanding of the source.
  I don't have any specific examples, but I remember the first 2 seasons of discovery and a little in the first season of Picard getting Trek particles wrong and not knowing systems. It got better once they hired Erin MacDonald and brought on David Mack and a few other novelists to consult on prodigy and I think Picard iirc
  edit: Hey look I can play the edit game too - I provided a poorly researched example and explained that technology use not well used in early discovery - I acknowledged that being critical of technology use can be hand waived because its fictitious and apparently that's not good enough for our combative OP. I also provided sources on the franchise now using specialists to keep track of technology and technobabble, and advised that I am not a "nutrek hater" as our contentious colleague here had to go and attack me personally - check below for the receipts and tax returns!