The Five: Most common Star Trek plot gimmicks

Amen to that, Miss Emily!

We poke fun but remember we watched them all (and a lot of the repeats!)

Gimmicks or not, TOS and it's offspring are still much better than most of the crap put out now.

This may be a subset of "Holodeck Abuse" because in many cases the consequences were pretty much the same: the influence of an "Omnipotent Being." Of course, Q was the most prominent example, but there were others. Just like a holodeck mishap, an O.B. could transport our heroes to another time or place, put them in mortal jeopardy, or just lock them out of the ship's control functions. (BTW, I assume Mr. Keller is a Buffalo supporter because there certainly was a Giants-Bills Super Bowl, just not one Bills fans care to remember.)

And unless the umbrella category of "another time period" also includes alternate realities, that's an entire gimmick all its own.

Incidentally, the guy who says DS9 managed to avoid all 5 pitfalls with the exception of the Vic Fontaine episodes must have missed about half the series. I can think of examples of all five.

Transporter Troubles & Tricks

It seemed like every 3rd episode there would be people in peril because they were unable to "get a lock" with the damned transporter. Oh, they'd be plenty close enough to beam out those distressed crewmembers under normal circumstances, but something would always interfere at the last minute to potentially "redshirt" the away team. Shields (usually) prevented transporting, as did energy-rich events like ion storms. Thick layers of rock or metal were also problematic. With those high 60's hairdos some of the women on TOS wore, I wouldn't have been surprised if such a coiffure had stopped a transporter lock cold.

Kirk was split into Good Kirk/Bad Kirk because of a transporter glitch, which later in the same episode killed that furry, white unicorndog thing. The opposite happened to Tuvok and Neelix in Voyager. In "ST:The Motion Picture" a couple of potential crewmembers were turned into silly putty very early on. Diseases were cured, dimensional realms were crossed, Scotty stayed fresh for years, Riker was doubled, yada, yada, yada.

For something that started out as a cost-cutting idea, it sure played a frequent role as a plot device. No wonder McCoy wanted nothing to do with the damned thing.

The Enterprise is close to being destroyed by a cloaked Klingon ship. But, look, there are some "gaseous anomalies" that the cloaked ship is emitting every time it fires on them. And... guess what? The Enterprise was already measuring those before the mission went awry.

To be fair (and because I really, really like Undiscovered Country), the whole "charting gaseous anomolies" thing is set up at the beginning of the movie. And when McCoy brings it up during the battle sequence with the cloaked Bird of Prey, his exact words are, "Well, the thing's got to have a tailpipe..." It's almost the opposite of technobable - McCoy puts it in a low-fi, 20th century term (albeit totally in-character for McCoy). If anything, having the anomoly-tracking equipment on board is practically deus ex machina.

It's worth noting that DS9 manages to avoid almost all of the 5 pitfalls mentioned above - the exception, naturally, being the holodeck/holosuite rule, especially after the introduction of James Darren as "Vic Fontaine".

TECHNOBABBLE: Probably the best early example of this was Kirk's bluff with superior alien forces with the "Corbomite Maneuver" (I think it was called) - nothing there but bluff, and it worked! Course, they used it again, but this one really highlighted it.

If I had to do a series of spoofs for a TV show like SNL or MAD TV, I'd do a series of shows entitled:

RED SHIRT

Where the guy IN the red shirt KNOWS he's in it.

(Did they do this on Galaxy Quest? I think so. Can't remember)

Anyway, I'd do a whole thing like it, where sure enough, someone in the red shirt dies, and the Captain does the "Oh My God, You Killed Kenny" routine, etc. Lame concept, but you could work in all sorts of good references before the idea was used up.

If OSHA were around in Star Trek time, the holodecks would have been shut down from the start. Those things put the Enterprise at risk more than the Romulans or Borg combined.

There is a sci fi plot gimmick that is used all the time that was most recently used on Stargate Atlantis, but I am not sure if any of the Star Trek shows used it, so maybe someone would know. It's when you see a character from the show with a bad cold. If you have never seen that gimmick you wonder why they wrote that in the script, until some enemy of some sort attacks and everyone is effected, except, you guessed it, the one with the cold, who goes on to save the day and has chicken soup in the last scene.

My favorite gimmick is the "Something's wrong but nobody notices it but me" plot. It was most used in DS9, O'brian seemed to always be the only one who noticed weird stuff.

Another overworked plot gimmick in the origianl Star Trek was having a cast member fall in love. Kirk fell in love several times plus McCoy and Scott even got in on the act. Spock, btw, got to be a romantic idiot twice: "Amok Time" and "This Side of Paradise."