Star Trek nitpicking

S01E05 "The Last Outpost"

• If the planet has no signs of life, "sentient or otherwise", then why are there bushes on the planet when they beam down?

S01E09 "The Battle"

• In the second intracommercial segment (near the beginning of the episode), Wesley said "Constellation class starship", but the subtitles said "Constitution class."
• They lost contact with Picard on the Stargazer when he raised his shields, but hadn't he already raised his shields? When did Bok beam off?
• They said Picard was a helmsman on the Stargazer, but then they had him in command of it...?
• How did Bok transmit to the second sphere after he left Picard on the Stargazer?

S01E15 "11001001"

• Computers require power to be lowered to free some space???
• Riker said "What should I choose?", but the subtitles said "What should I do?"
• Riker said "around 2:00a.m.", but the subtitles said "around midnight"
• Why does Wesley refer to the noise the binars makes as high pitched? What they're using as their "primary language" sounds more like garbled human language than like any form of transmitting binary data. And seriously, human language is more efficient than any single-channel binary means of transmission of linguistic data by the time you take the effort to make it fast enough to keep up. Human language has tons of channels.

S01E19 "Coming of Age"

• Why are they testing four candidates for entrance to the academy? The testing guy (Chang) said they were all top candidates, but only "one person [would] be accepted for Starfleet Academy". These candidates all seem like obvious picks. Why would they have to test them if they're top candidates? They're all so much better than the Tom Parises the academy normally gets, no? Why not just choose all of them instead of 4 copies of Tom Paris?
• Why are all the tests audio?

S01E15 "The Arsenal of Freedom"

• Oof, so much lame tacky stuff
• Why did Riker freeze when the weapon energy-beamed him?
• How did Yar (or was it Riker? If so, even worse) know that Geordi was in command? How did they know that he was trying to beam them up at that point.
• Why didn't the weapon orbiting the planet disappear when the ones on the planet did after Picard "bought" the weapon system?

S01E22 "Symbiosis"

• How is there a "receiving station" of the distress signal? Especially one that can be detected somehow as being in orbit around the third planet?
• Why did Picard hail the ship as "unidentified freighter"? Their distress call clearly identified them with the ship's name, the Sanction.
• If you think people are infected with a plague, you don't call your top doctor to the same room they're in right away. Though Dr. Crusher does seem to be impervious to most diseases, so I guess she'd be okay. But I definitely wouldn't ever invite Pulaski. Bad idea.
• Why when the Onarans contact the Enterprise, both times when they disconnect, the static remains on the screen view of the planet?

S01E24 "We'll Always Have Paris"

• Why would Data need a countdown from Geordi?
• Why would Troi escort what's-her-name to the holodeck on a date?

S02E03 "Elementary, Dear Data"

• How did Moriarty start noticing stuff before the computer made him became smart?
• Why would the computer report to Worf an "odd power surge", and why would he be unable to investigate it once it was "gone"?
• .. And why would the holodeck create a power surge when remaking the program?
• How did they take the drawing (paper) off the holodeck?
• What does Data mean that Moriarty has access to the computer and might have access to the library files too?
• What does Data mean that Moriarty is still just a fictional character? The Moriarty on the Holodeck is clearly not fictional—he's a holographic character (who's happened to have gained consciousness) *based* on a fictional character.

S02E05 "Loud As A Whisper"

• The inability to communicate with Riva when he used "some sort of gestural language" is the sort of problems they should *always* have. You'd think that the universal translator would be able to deal with non-oral languages too? Linguistics fail.
• Why Riva have learned a signed language secondarily on some other planet if all his family is deaf? So he never would've learned language otherwise? Only his "chorus" echos his thoughts (and language, *and tone*) in English? Linguistics fail.

S02E06 "The Schizoid Man"

• How did their sensors detect the number of people on the Constantinople if they couldn't get a clear read on their transmission or detect whether they actually were having a hull breach?
• Why couldn't the Enterprise come to a full stop to transport them. The 3 seconds Riker wasted in the transporter room before he said "energise" (when they could've probably done it automatically...) surely would've been enough.
• I thought communicators didn't work much more than planet-orbit (without some sort of relay system)... They're talking on their communicators after the Enterprise warps out of their.
• If Graves is the father of Soong's work, what about in Enterprise when they reveal that the Soongs've been at this stuff for generations?
• Why does everyone just hang out away from Graves waiting for his terminal illness to take over?
• "Wrestling with a Klingon Targ"? Wtf Riker? It's not cool to mess with Data like that.

S02E07 "Unnatural Selection"

• Why was the distress signal broken? When they got to the ship, everything was in perfect working order. I guess a distress signal in Star Trek is a method of transmitting a really poor quality signal with high amounts of message loss. It makes sense though—it adds to the urgency.
• Weren't they headed on a mission to some hush-hush federation medical emergency? That's what Picard's log entry said at the beginning. But now they're off tracking things based on the distress signal they got after that.
• Why would the captain be around when they're transporting someone into a quarantine forcefield??
• Why did Worf think it was a trick? The 12yo looked older?
• Why do they need a beacon to find the other ship again? What happened to coordinates, long-range sensors, etc.?
• Didn't they decide that Data couldn't beam up safely from the quarantine?
• How does this "Data to Enterprise, ready to beam up" thing work? Worf responded to the message on a panel, with no audio
• "Genetic problems caused by the disease"? Isn't it just aging? They're reversing that with a transporter filter of her "normal DNA"? Hm...
• If the readout is supposed to say whether it's working, why were they watching the transporter pad?

S02E??

• The Klingon captain said "speak their language" when they were speaking Klingon. Wouldn't Riker's universal translator just translate the Klingon? He didn't seem to understand it (and I thought that's what they were speaking all along..) And since when do the Klingons know English? That one guy was like "this is the first time I've seen someone of your species." How did he learn English so well? And why??? (E.g., Riker doesn't know Klingon..)
• I don't really get this exchange program. How did the Benzoite make ensign in Starfleet but knows little about a Starfleet vesel (and instead only knows Benzoite ship protocol)??
• Why would the Enterprise not know if the Klingon ship had cloaked? Weren't they paying attention to it on sensors or something? (The Klingon ship did go out of its way to monitor the Enterprise only to discover it was following them, but then the Enterprise was looking for / following the Klingon ship)
• How do they know how close the Klingon ship is? Or are the judging distance of the transponder?
• How did they beam through the cloaking shields???

S02E13 "Time Squared"

• Why does Troi walk out of Sick Bay when she's ~done talking with Pulaski? Didn't Picard tell her to stay there and watch the other Picard?
• Wouldn't finding the other Picard have slowed them down some and made them reach the vortex later?
• What are the random forces that make the ship rock?
• Why is Riker reporting about how well the engines can hold?
• How can Troi enter the turbolift right after Picard does? Is there another turbolift pod waiting there? I guess I don't understand how they're supposed to work... Somehow there's always one there and no one ever stands waiting for them.
• How is Troi waiting in Sick Bay when Picard gets there??

S02E15 "Penpals"

• If the universal translator is translating the messages, then why does the audio quality still leave something to be desired? Also, apparently the universal translator preserved voice quality?
• Four word message? Why would "Is anybody out there?" be four words in any other language? Why would Data refer to it this way?
• Conference in the captain's quarters??
• Why are the crystals on all of these planets just now becoming a problem? On all the planets, simultaneously. After billions
• How can the computer know that the transmission wasn't received? ("Unable to complete transmission")
• Signal for immediate beam-out if he sees anyone but Sarjenka? And have them see the beam-out?

S02E22 "Shades of Gray"

• When Data & Geordi return from the planet, why doesn't the transporter system have issues with the thorn like it did with Riker's infection?
• If the memories are producing an endorphine that's "poisonous" (?) to the "microbes" (?), then couldn't the doctor just synthesise more of that endorphine instead of relying on Riker's memories to create it?

S03E01 "Evolution"

• In the opening scene, the subtitles had "I didn't think you'd want to miss this" (presumably said by Riker to Wesley), though there was no corresponding audio.
• Data said "twelve seconds to impact sir", but the subtitles said "ten second to impact"
• There are subtitle discrepancies when the computer starts spouting chess moves.
• Modifying circuitry in the universal translator to communicate with the nanites? Is that really necessary?
• If the nanites took over Data's speech processor, then why did he talk with a weird quality to his voice? Exactly how low a level were they operating on?
• "Stellar blast"? Seriously now... They couldn't think up any better terms than that?

S03E06 "Booby Trap"

• If they were getting the distress signal, then why did they need to activate power cells on the ship that was sending it in order to get it to play back when on board?

S03E07 "The Enemy"

• The Romulan who was transported onto the Enterprise was not told that he was the only one rescued, but when asked if there were other survivors he lied and said that he was alone. That's quite a risk he was taking, huh?
• "Lock onto the nutrino beam"? Why not onto the two life signs??
• Despite what Picard says, the Romulans won't have the opportunity to fire on the Enterprise only when the shields are lowered—they could fire any time. It just wouldn't be as deadly, right?
• How did Picard know that there was a Romulan in addition to Geordi to lock on to?
• If they're escorting the Romulan ship to the Neutral Zone, then why did the two ships leave orbit of Galorndon Core in different directions in the end?

S03E08 "The Price"

• If the Barzans don't have any resources, do they even have space travel? How are they talking with warp civilisations if they're pre-warp themselves?

S03E10 "The Defector"

• Why did the computer report the incoming message to Picard? Doesn't Worf normally do that? And he was at his post, too. (And why *does* Worf normally report messages. He's a security chief, not the ship's e-mail / voicemail dispatcher..)
• If there's a 22hour delay from the message, how did Starfleet know about the Romulan Defector they picked up? And furthermore, how did they know that the Romulans were demanding him back??
• Why would Picard ask Data about the attitude of the crew???
• The replicator can't make Romulan ale due to limited knowledge of Romulus (as Data put it), but the holodeck has a Valley of Chula program??

S03E11 "The Hunted"

• How did they lose the ship? Do the scanners just stop scanning when they go behind an asteroid? (And what's the asteroid doing where a moon should be?)

S03E13 "Déjà Q"

• Why does Data use a tricorder on Q when he's on the bridge? What about internal sensors?
• How would increasing the force fields prevent something from coming in that'd already come in?
• You can transport shuttlecraft???? Why haven't they done this in other episodes??

S03E21 "Hollow Pursuits"

• Why are the sample containment containers or whatever so volatile. The fall over sideways or get transported in the wrong position and start leaking..
• Why doesn't Data know how to pronounce "metathesis"??
• Why did Picard think of the ventral relay solution? Why was so much being one from the bridge instead of engineering?
• If the computer beeped after Barclay asked for all programs filed under his name to be erased, how did the computer not erase program 9 when Barclay said "except program 9"? Must be a trash bin or some other pre-deletion stage. Because the computer isn't like drag and drop where you still have a change to recover before you let go of the button. It's also possible the computer was waiting for Barclay to walk out the door of the holodeck?

S03E25 "Transfigurations"

• How did they know that John Doe had gone to the shuttle bay? Don't they usually track people by communicators (which John didn't have one of)?
• What was Data doing when everyone was suffocating? I only noticed him stand up from next to the captain when everyone was made better (which happened to be right as John and Beverly made it to the bridge??). It didn't look like he was really helping much..
• What's up with the viewer? Why is it that when the camera angle changes, so does the angle on the view screen? And it's always like this..
• Why did Worf have to check to see that Sunad had been transported back to the Zalkonian ship? Wasn't there a channel open on the view screen?
• Why is the ship travelling when John Doe leaves it as a non-corporeal energy form? Picard hadn't set a course (much less engaged it) anywhere yet...

S04E07 "Reunion"

• How did the computer know Worf wasn't aboard the Enterprise if he'd left his communicator in his quarters? In other episodes people have used this as a way to avoid being located. Granted, he used the transporter, but haven't other people tried this?

S04E09 "Final Mission"

• Picard laid in a course for the planet originally, but when he and Wesley left, Riker did it again? Or did I imagine part of that?
• How is the Enterprise going to get radiation poisoning from a garbage scow as Geordi suggests (and later happened)? Don't they constantly avoid radiation from stars and stuff like that?
• Wesley and the captains walk off at least 10° to the right of where the arrow was pointing.
• Why do they think the cave was formed by a river or lava? There's a *doorway* and *steps*.
• Why couldn't they've pulled the ship some of the way, left for a while, and come back and take it the rest of the way through the asteroid belt?
• How many phasers were there? There was that first one that the sentinel got, and then there was Wesley's that it got too, and then there was the other one that the guy was holding when it got him. But which one did Wesley use to make the rocks warm?
• Why did the wall stay on the water after Wesley stopped firing on it? Before it was only there when people shot at it.

S04E14 "Clues"

• If the Paxan stun field renders a state of biostasis (or whatever), keeping the guys' beards from growing, then how did that one ensign's daily cell rhythms get offset by a day? Note that this was the evidence that cleared all doubts for Picard that they'd missed a day.
• Where does the term "Paxan" come from? How did Picard know how to use it?
• Why does Troi's voice change? Isn't the alien just using her mind to communicate? Or did it take over her vocal tract too, moving
• Did Troi remember being possessed by the Paxans? I guess she seemed to..?

S04E24 "In Theory"

• If the Enterprise were three lighthours from the class M planet, then why did they say they'd continue scanning (or something) on the way, and why did they have 11 hours to the planet later in the episode? 3 lighthours is like nothing for the ship to travel.
• And why did it take them like 5 minutes to get clear of the nebula??

S05E05 "Disaster"

• How would an insulator stop the arching electricity? Data didn't completely block its path. And the arch seemed attracted to Data and magically stopped after zapping him. Hmmmm.
• Why is there artificial gravity in the turbo lifts to allow the thing to fall??
• Power can be diverted from the bridge to engineering, but they can't communicate? Hm.

S05E10 "New Ground"

• Why when Worf said "freeze program", the steam on the holodeck continued?
• How did they catch up to the wave if it overtook them so easily?
• Why are they always within 20km or 200km of the wave when it's travelling at warp speeds? That takes some real precision flying..
• How did they release the wave aimed at some colony instead of off into space? I mean, okay, they didn't expect it to keep going, but, just in cases? Srsly?

S05E16 "Ethics"

• Do they not have human subjects boards in the 24th century???

S06E09 "The Quality of Life"

• Why didn't Doctor Farallon not notice that the exocomp had done what several others had in the past?
• Why is Dr. Crusher so bad at defining what makes something alive?
• Data doesn't grow? I thought he said he does in one episode.
• Data says "I have reason to believe that the exocomps are alive", but isn't it just those that've started advancing themselves?
• "Two hours later when it was back aboard the Enterprise"? When had the exocomp been on the Enterprise before that?
• How can the Enterprise beam exocomps onto the station but not beam Geordi and Picard off?
• Why did transporter chief Kelso say he could only get a lock on two of the exocomps? He didn't know that one had gotten fried—why didn't he think he could still just beam that one over?

S06E10 "Chain of Command, Part I"

• How are they going to take the warp coils offline to realign stuff when they're at warp??
• When they're in the underground tunnels, Picard, Worf, and Crusher act like they didn't train repelling...

S06E21 "Timescape"

• Data says "the equipment is no longer functioning" (implying currently not functioning, given that it is presumably because time is "frozen"), but Picard then presses some buttons in finding out that there are security teams sent to transporter room 3, sickbay(?), and engineering.
• Data says there's a power transfer in progress between the two ships, and Troi immediately says "why would we be sending them power?" How did she know who was sending who the power?

S07E06 "Phantasms"

• At the beginning of the episode the Enterprise is shown leaving Starbase 84. Shortly thereafter they begin testing their new warp drive, which they had installed at the starbase. The drive malfunctions, and the Enterprise is adrift. What's puzzling here is how they got far enough from the starbase to not be able to go back or interact with the base at all once they were adrift, seeing as they couldn't've used warp to get there.
• When they link Data's dreaming to the Holodeck so that Geordi and Picard can observe and interpret the symbolism in his dreams (why not Troi too??), Data disappears when the holodeck link is activated, and Picard and Geordi remain.
• Geordi and Picard are supposed to be able to just observe the dream, but then they appear to be able to interact with it. In fact, they take it over while Data just sits there.
• Why would a positronic subprocessor be able to emit an interphasic pulse. And why would they used Data for this? They wire him to the ship and have the pulse emitted everywhere. This seems to suggest that the ship is capable of emitting this pulse. Couldn't they 've just set the ship to emit this pulse?

S07E08 "Attached"

• Crusher says, "Well, we have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow. We should get some sleep." Wait, so why were they camping out for the night? At some point not long before that sequence, in broad daylight, they said they had 2km left until the border. They could cover that in, like, 15 minutes. Maybe days on Kesprytt are an hour long??
• At the end of the episode, how do Picard and Crusher sleep in separate quarters before the implants were removed? On the planet's surface they were unable to get more than even a few metres apart without getting nauseous as a side-effect of being joined.

S07E10 "Inheritance"

• How was Dr. Soong's program, which he left in Juliana to be discovered if it were learned that she were an android, able to tell Data about how Juliana had left him?

S07E12 "The Pegasus"

• How did Worf know that the Romulans had a two-day start?
• Did they restore power to the Pegasus or put their shields around it? If the former, then why weren't the lights on when they beamed in? They had to turn them on manually.
• So if the caverns of the asteroid were to collapse as Data predicted (should they try to cut their way out of it), what would happen? Surely the shields could withstand a little bit of rock flying around. How big could the asteroid be? They were only a few km from the surface, which suggests that it might be small enough to have a reasonably small mass—i.e., not much gravitational pull to bring pieces of rock "down" on the Enterprise.
• No "brace for impact" just in case the cloak didn't work?
• If they're watching the asteroid's rock (which they're inside of) on the view screen, then why aren't they watching it everywhere around them (e.g., on the bridge)? I'm not sure the physics of this cloaking device are internally consistent

S07E17 "Masks"

• What's the bright light at the beginning? I mean, Data says it's sensor feedback, but why is it visible as light on the bridge? If visible light got through to the bridge, what other [potentially harmful] bands of radiation made it onto the bridge? Why don't they worry about this stuff???
• How does Picard know that Masaka is a ‘she’?
• How did the "transformation program" know which deck to make Masaka's temple? Or, alternatively, how did Picard (etc.) know which deck it was going to be made on?
• Troi said, "Like the sun and the moon, only one of them can be in ascendance at any given time." Wait, since when can the sun and moon not be up at the same time?
• So Picard (Kurgano) had to convince Masaka to sleep? She wouldn't have on her own?
• So why exactly did the alien archive create that scenario? And when the sun went to sleep, everything was transformed back? Could they at least attempt to explain like part of this??
• Riker's really quick to explain that everything "looks like" it's back to normal.

S07??? "All Good Things" Part 2

• How did they beam Worf aboard if he's governor of some planet?
• Picard only starts the destruction of humankind because Q allowed him to participate in 3 timelines; it was Picard's curiosity in the future timeline that set the events in motion that started the anomaly.
• There's something strange with the timelines. It's only after Picard starts travelling between the timelines that the anomalies appear in the earlier two ones, which suggests that the timelines are connected somehow. However, they can't be connected with a shared beginning point of departure, since the anomaly wasn't created until near the end of the last anomaly.
• Did the Pasteur seriously only have 3 crew members aside from their new passengers?
• How can the anomaly have an effect on a 3½billion year-old earth? If it occupies the whole quadrant then, then wouldn't it have disrupted the formation of earth / the solar system earlier, when it would've been bigger? Earth shouldn't even exist, right?
• Why does the anomaly form when three tacheon pulses converge? How can they converge across the time periods without the anomaly to join them? How could the same tacheon pulse be present in one spot and then not be? Again, it means the three time periods are joined somehow.