Voodoo Shark / Star Trek

• The premise for Star Trek: Voyager is that the ship stranded far from any safe port, and the crew has to ration power. It's so bad that there's not enough to power the replicator, and the crew has to revert to more traditional methods involving growing food in hydroponics. The holodeck, however, is kept running as much as anyone wants. The writers Handwave this by saying that the holodeck has its own power system that is incompatible with everything else on the ship. The problems this explanation brought up are:
  • If the holodeck was invented by Starfleet, why would it be built to be incompatible with the rest of the ship on which it's installed? If it was invented by a different species, it's still odd the crew couldn't rejigger the holodeck's power supply to work with the rest of the ship when even Delta Quadrant technology can be integrated just fine. Of course begs the question what fuel that power supply is using and why that can't be used somewhere else.
  • Shouldn't the holodeck be able to make food in a pinch? While most things on the holodeck are, well, holograms, others—notably, most handheld objects—are created by the holodeck's own replicators, which is why people can eat and drink on the holodeck, and how people can leave the holodeck holding props or drenched in water. This suggests they have an entirely separate food supply to work with in the form of holodeck-produced food, and they're wasting that energy on entertainment.
  • It's been suggested that the ship's replicators can work backwards, turning matter into energy. As such, there's seemingly nothing stopping Voyager from grabbing dirt from an uninhabited planet, converting it to energy, and replicating it back into food. It might still use up power, but it should be better than making food purely with the ship's energy.
  • This appears to contradict various other episodes: for instance, a plot point in an episode of The Next Generation: "Booby Trap", the Enterprise is losing all its power and thus cannot use its warp engines to escape. Geordi was using the holodeck to help solve the problem, but Picard switched off everything other than life support. Geordi has to convince Picard to turn it back on, implying the holodeck was using the same power as everything else. It's not impossible Voyager's holodeck functions differently, but it's hard to imagine why this would be the case; given that Voyager was built at a later date, it seems a step backwards.
  • An episode of Star Trek: Picard attempted to rationalize this problem by suggesting that holodeck power cells were intentionally made independent from the rest of the EPS grid to allow them to serve as a place of solace for crews who are in an emergency situation. There are still many problems with this explanation (not the least of which is that a crew might not be in an emergency situation if tapping into holodeck power — which must be substantial — were an option), but at least it makes an attempt to show the reasoning behind the design, however questionable it may be.
• The Star Trek: The Original Series: episode "Miri" was about a disease on a distant planet that wiped out nearly all its inhabitants and is now threatening the Enterprise crew. The problem was that they didn't have the budget to create alien makeup for all the survivors, so they just made the planet an exact duplicate of Earth. The episode furnishes no explanation for why Earth would have an exact copy. As for other options, they all create their own issues:
  • The novelization uses an obvious alternative reason: it's a lost human colony. What was wrong with using that in the show?
  • The Shatnerverse novel Preserver posits that Miri's world was a duplicate of Earth created by the Preservers.
  • The Relaunch-era DTI novel Forgotten History explains that it was an Earth from a parallel universe that passed into "ours" through a Negative Space Wedgie, and was subsequently returned to its native universe. That seems needlessly complicated.
  • Gene Roddenberry's original pitch included a "parallel worlds" theory that would allow for the show's science fiction stories to be tied in with familiar settings in order to keep the budget in check. It was later written into the series as "Hodgkin's Law of Parallel Planetary Development". It explains the 20th-century Roman society of planet 892-IV in "Bread and Circuses", and presumably covers the post-apocalyptic Omega IV of "The Omega Glory", whose Yangs were descended from a parallel United States of America, complete with identical Constitution and flag.^note Like "Miri", a deleted scene to "The Omega Glory" had the main characters suggest it was a lost Earth colony; it was cut to keep the surprise revelation a secret, but made it an infamous Voodoo Shark instead. It still doesn't explain how Miri's world could be so completely identical to Earth.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
  • The writers felt the need to explain why the unaging android Data appeared older. They decided that Dr. Soong had given him an "aging program" so that he would blend in more closely with the humans around him. This raises the question of why for the love of Pete would Soong do such a thing? Data is functionally immortal. What is he going to look like in, say, 500 years if he displays physical aging through that time frame? And if his goal was to help Data blend in better and he had enough time to write up such a program, why does Data still have metallic skin and yellow eyes, especially since the Julia android suggests Soong wasn't far off from perfecting it?
  • In the Season 5 episode Disaster, Troi has to take command but is woefully underqualified, at basic aspects of command of a ship like what to prioritise for damage control, requires extremely simplified explanations for the space phenomena that disabled the ship and for the engineering systems that run the ship. The solution to this is in a later episode is apparently a "Bridge Commander Test" that involves Troi sending a holographic Geordi to his death as well as various high level studies. Ultimately, this makes no sense at all because of the very fact that Troi is forced into command in Disaster, which implies that she should have gone through this kind of training in the first place, and that every officer in Star Trek should have because apparently only position (ie, being appointed to take command by the Captain, or being in the specified chain of command of the ship) takes precedence over rank rather than the Line vs Staff officer distinction like exists in real world militaries.
  • Why do certain ship types, particularly the Klingon bird-of-prey, drastically change size between a few times larger than a shuttle to a few times larger than the Enterprise? In the case of the BoP, because there are three different-sized ships that otherwise look identical. Never mind that there would almost certainly be serious Square-Cube Law issues involved, or the fact that logically the crew have to fit inside and reach all parts of the ship, why would a ship designer build a scaled-up or -down but otherwise-indistinguishable exterior when the interior structure and the way it attaches to the exterior would have to be considerably different to accomodate the fact that the ship has more or fewer decks? For that matter, most of the really wonky scale differences involving the Bird of Prey are from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, which involved a single Bird of Prey throughout all their events.
    • In some cases it seems to have been a pragmatic response to having a finite number of models and types available for shooting. For example, at the end of 'The Defector', the Klingon ships need to look unusually large and menacing relative to the Romulans for the sake of the story.
• Star Trek: Picard addresses the status of the Federation after the Romulan supernova, and how it differs from Expanded Universe material, yet many answers raises another question. If the Borg have Sikarian technology, why haven't they conquered the galaxy with it? Why would an EMH be able to be interrupted during a medical emergency?
  • Similar to the Data issue above, Picard features Guinan (played by an obviously-older Whoopi Goldberg) who explains that, despite El-Aurians living for hundreds of years without visibly aging, apparently they can also just choose to age whenever, which Guinan has done to make the humans around her feel more comfortable without being reminded of their own mortality. This after Guinan has been around humans for centuries (as well as other longer-lived species) without having "chosen to age," and with no real explanation as to why she finally chose this era to look older.
• Star Trek Online had the Iconian War ending with one of the Iconians along with her personal forces still at large and intending to continue to fight, with Word of God indicating this was done to explain the Iconian War PVE queues still being up despite the war being over. The problems: 1) This was not the first arc to end with the threat you were fighting in a queue ceasing to be a threat. Prior it had been easy to keep up suspension of disbelief as the queues remaining up being simply a gameplay element, but with Cryptic having provided a story explanation for some of them (that could only apply to those specific ones)... 2) The Iconian queues still can't happen after the Iconian War, because they either outright make reference to it being ongoing or their premise (such as an invasion of Qo'noS) contradicting the premise of the next arc (peace and switching focus to exploration).
• Star Trek: Discovery explains why nobody has ever heard of the Discovery's historical accomplishments, technological achievements, and Spock's adopted sister by having the Federation make everything about the ship and its crew ultra-top-secret at the end of Season 2. Fans were quick to point out that the Federation would not be able to enforce the order for all the personal connections (family, friends, etc) the 100+ crew would logically have, and even if they were to take draconian measures, they certainly couldn't stop non-Federation citizens from, e.g., writing Klingon operas about it. Season 3 quietly shifted this to the more sensible statement that the Discovery was falsely classified as destroyed with all hands, and the Vulcans were well aware of Michael's connection to Spock.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has the episode "Let He Who Is Without Sin" where Worf has been acting up during his vacation to Risa (to the point of joining a terrorist group) and the writers decide to explain why Worf is generally such a stick in the mud. He accidentally killed a fellow child by headbutting them while playing Soccer. Not only does this not sufficiently explain why Worf wasn't enjoying his holiday, but it was arguably unneccesary. Worf had grown up idolising Klingons as Stoic Warriors, and only found out that most Klingons didn't live up to that ideal after he'd already joined Starfleet.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: Done deliberately and for laughs in the episode "Veritas", when at the end the main characters start poking holes in the episode's events after they were nearly killed, until Captain Freeman gets fed up and yells at them to get out.