With all the movies and TV series out there, it’s no surprise that over the years, there
have been plenty of mistakes in Star Trek productions.
But the mistakes in this list are so big that they’re difficult — nay, impossible! — to
ignore.
TV shows introduce minor characters without clear backstories all the time, and sometimes
those characters prove too popular or useful to just discard.
That means the character needs more detail, and sometimes it arrives too fast.
Such is the story of Miles O'Brien, who appeared in the first episode of The Next Generation
as a nameless crew member working the transporters.
According to the collaborative fan site Memory Alpha, O'Brien's rank has at different times
been "crewman," "lieutenant," "warrant officer," and "ensign junior grade."
Eventually his rank was stabilized as "chief petty officer," but even that was never actually
mentioned onscreen and is just sort of accepted by everyone as canon.
O'Brien wasn't initially intended to be a major character.
He didn't even get a last name until the second season, and no serious effort was put into
his backstory until season four.
He was just a background character, and the writers never had any designs on making him
a bigger deal, so they had to make up for it later.
While this makes perfect sense in terms of the logistics of producing a television series,
sci-fi needs a certain level of authenticity to work — and having a military organization
treat a crew member's rank like a random afterthought is almost unforgivable.
Picking on production errors isn't always fair.
Television shows have to grind out episodes on schedule and on budget, after all, and
sometimes mistakes just have to be included in the final product.
That's especially true when it comes to action scenes.
Everyone knows that stunt doubles do a lot of the heavy lifting in action scenes, and
nitpicking continuity mistakes that don't really impact the quality of the story or
performances seems petty when you consider the decades of entertainment a franchise like
Star Trek has given us.
But sometimes there are mistakes so violently obvious and terrible that they're enraging.
Sure, you can't afford to reshoot every fight scene that doesn't turn out great.
But you should probably reshoot a fight scene that turns out as awful as the one between
William Riker and Rear Admiral Quinn in the otherwise classic Next Generation episode
"Conspiracy."
In this infamous scene, you can see the stunt doubles pretty clearly for several agonizing
seconds.
It's as if two entirely new actors were hired for the scene midway through filming, with
only minimal effort put into making the stunt professionals look anything like the actors
they're subbing for.
The 2009 reboot of Star Trek brought into the world by J.J. Abrams is essentially set
in an alternate universe.
While it's arguably a smart narrative choice, some sci-fi magic had to be woven into the
story involving a black hole and some time travel in order to get us there.
The villain of the film, a Romulan named Nero, blames Spock and the Federation itself for
the destruction of his planet, Romulus.
As a result, he won't stop his quest for revenge even when his ship is sucked through a black
hole which sends him back in time.
He almost immediately manages to kill Captain Kirk's father, George ... and then does absolutely
nothing, apparently, for a few decades while George's son, James Tiberius, grows up to
be the cocky future captain we all know and love.
"Nero and his crew spent the next 25 years awaiting my arrival."
Considering he's on a mission of vengeance and in a universe where Romulus hasn't been
destroyed yet, you might imagine he could find better uses for his time.
As it is, audiences are left questioning what exactly he's been up to for all that time.
Apparently some deleted scenes originally showed Nero captured by Klingons, but we never
got to see them.
You can choose to include those scenes as canon in your head, but the fact remains that
the official story leaves Nero hanging out in deep space, sulking, for 20 years or so.
It's almost comically common for New Zealand to be left off of maps.
So you'd think that the producers of a major motion picture predicated on the idea that
mankind has expanded civilization into space would be very careful in choosing the maps
used in special effects shots.
But you'd be wrong.
In the film First Contact, Captain Jean-Luc Picard takes a character named Lily to an
airlock and shows her Earth from the ship's location in space.
Australia is clearly shown ... but in the spot where New Zealand should be, it's just
blue ocean.
Obviously, someone in the effects department picked up a crummy map image to create the
effect.
You might be tempted to explain it away as future climate change or some other disaster,
except that New Zealand is referenced many times in the Trek universe, so that doesn't
work.
It's just a mistake that, once seen, can't be unseen.
While Star Trek isn't above inventing things like dilithium crystals or playing fast and
loose with the laws of physics, it tends towards reasonably realistic depictions of space travel
and life on board massive ships.
No one's watching Star Trek for the science education, though it usually doesn't outright
offend.
The exception is one sequence in 2009's Star Trek which boasts science so bad that even
the most forgiving fan has to wince and squint their way through it.
The scene has Spock standing on the planet Delta Vega watching as his home planet Vulcan
is consumed by a black hole.
That's essentially the same as if you were standing in your backyard watching as Mars
got consumed by a black hole, meaning you wouldn't really see an up-close view — and
that's ignoring what would happen to Delta Vega itself if it was really that close to
the formation of a black hole.
Spock simply wouldn't be able to see what he's seeing in the film.
Captain Christopher Pike is only slightly less iconic to fans than the famous Star Trek
captains Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Janeway.
He was the first captain of the U.S.S.
Enterprise in the original pilot episode, returned in the classic two-part episode "The
Menagerie" late in the first season, and has been rebooted as a character several times.
The 2009 Star Trek reboot imagined Pike as a veteran officer who inspires James T. Kirk
to enter Starfleet Academy.
Portrayed by Bruce Greenwood, this version of Pike is sort of an ideal Starfleet officer
— calm, ethical, and smart.
So it's especially upsetting when Pike says the following while trying to convince Kirk
to follow in his father's heroic footsteps:
"You understand what the Federation is, don't you?
It's important.
It's a peacekeeping and humanitarian armada."
The problem?
That's not actually what the Federation is!
That's what Starfleet is.
The Federation is an interplanetary governing body.
So yeah, it kind of ruins the moment and undermines the gravitas that Captain Pike's character
had been earning.
It makes you wonder how in the world Pike passed his entrance exams if he can't even
get the fundamental definitions right.
Star Trek established several technologies in its universe that are potentially problematic.
The replicators can make just about anything, the Holodeck can create immersive illusions
and characters that can achieve sentience and affect reality.
But the biggest problem is the transporter.
The transporter is shown to have the ability to re-write people's DNA in the Next Generation
episode "Unnatural Selection.".
In 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, a horrific transporter accident shows the flip
side of this capability.
And yet this power, which could be used in an infinite number of ways, is never mentioned
again.
It's possible the implications of what the transporter can do to human bodies discouraged
the writers from exploring it further.
Just as likely is the fact that having a magic machine that can reset anyone to yesterday's
version was simply too powerful to have lying around.
In the original series episode "The Squire of Gothos," the otherworldly character of
Trelane tells the crew of the Enterprise that he's been observing Earth.
They do some back-of-the-envelope calculations regarding the distance between the planets
and conclude that Trelane is about 900 years behind Earth history.
In other words, because it takes time for light to travel, Trelane is essentially seeing
Earth's past.
That's all well and good, but the original series canonically takes place in the 23rd
century, and the first season of the original series takes place in the year 2265 specifically.
That would mean Trelane is observing 14th-century Earth, but he's explicitly aware of Napoleon
and the American Revolution, so he must be watching the early 1800s.
So these Starfleet officers are either absolute trash at basic math, absolute trash at basic
physics, or absolute trash at Earth history.
The Wrath of Khan rescued the Star Trek film franchise after The Motion Picture failed
to get people terribly excited.
A sequel to a classic original series episode "Space Seed," it delivered a thrilling story
that addressed the crew's oncoming middle age and offered some iconic backstory for
Captain Kirk.
Plus, there's some absolutely incredible scenery-chewing from Ricardo Montalban.
But it also has a mistake you just can't ignore and maintain your sanity.
When Pavel Chekov meets Khan Noonien Singh on Ceti Alpha V, Khan and Chekov clearly recognize
each other from the Enterprise's earlier interactions with the late 20th-century superman.
The problem?
Chekov wasn't even a character on the show yet when "Space Seed" aired, and thus he never
met Khan onscreen.
While you can imagine that Chekov was a crew member and interacted with Khan offscreen
if you want, it's simply a mistake the writers either didn't notice or chose to ignore for
dramatic effect.
One of the most iconic aspects of the future imagined by Gene Roddenberry is the ship's
computer, which has the ability to talk to the crew.
One of the reasons the computer on the Enterprise was such an iconic part of the show is thanks
to the voice work of Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, Gene Roddenberry's wife, who provided the
voice of the ship's computer for decades.
Her voice work was fantastic, managing to give the computer some personality while still
sounding very computer-like.
However, there was one huge problem with the computer's voice, especially during The Next
Generation.
Sometimes production forgot to edit out the sounds of the very human actor doing things
like breathing, something a computer would probably not do.
For example, in one scene in the pilot episode of Star Trek: Voyager, Lieutenant Tom Paris
asks a replicator to list the varieties of tomato soup it can produce, and you can clearly
hear the computer take a breath while rattling off the menu.
"Varieties of tomato soup available from this replicator, with rice, vegetables"
The currently accepted model of the universe pegs the speed of light as the upper limit
when it comes to zooming around in space.
Of course, you can forgive a sci-fi franchise like Star Trek for hand-waving the laws of
physics a bit.
No one wants the Enterprise to take 60 years just to get to its first mission, after all,
and so they came up with the warp drive.
"The ship's space warp ability, gone.
Earth bases which were only days away are now years in the distance."
While warp speed has never been precisely defined, scientist James O'Donoghue did some
calculating and concluded that warp one is essentially light speed, and warps two through
ten are just ... faster, somehow.
That's all well and good, but the real problem is in the details.
For example, if the Enterprise is chasing another ship, and that ship drops out of warp
one second earlier, the Enterprise is suddenly tens of thousands of miles away from it.
Just one second of warp time means vast distances, which doesn't make for an exciting space battle.
One of the pleasures of Star Trek is its thoughtful explorations of sci-fi tropes, and the android
Data is one of the most successful such ruminations in its history.
Data allows the franchise to explore questions of sentience, free will, and spirituality
in intelligent and unexpected ways, while also allowing for a lot of really bad robot
jokes.
However, one of the worst mistakes The Next Generation writers made was establishing that
Data, as an android, couldn't use contractions due to programming limitations.
It's something they waited 12 episodes, until "Datalore," to bring up.
On the one hand, this lent Data a slightly off-center formality that underscored his
inhumanity.
On the other hand, according to co-star Wil Wheaton, this was a new idea the writers introduced
in order to distinguish Data from Lore, the other android who looked just like Data.
Actor Brent Spiner was apparently upset at the sloppy way it was being introduced, especially
since Data had used contractions in previous episodes.
Later in the series, the writers dropped the idea that Data couldn't use contractions,
and there are, of course, plenty of possible explanations for the shift.
But in the early going, this was an obvious and grating mistake born out of a nifty concept
that no one really committed to.
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