The 14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek First Contact
7. Watch That First Step...
The first two Next Gen movies are full of window dumbness. In Generations the dome atop the Enterprise -D bridge gets shattered, despite being two hundred meters from the leading edge, where all the windows seen are intact. But First Contact appears to invert the too-easily-broken glass paradigm by having Picard demonstrate that what passes for a window on this ship substitutes a forcefield for glass (or transparent aluminum or whatever). How is something which must be actively powered preferable to the safer alternative of actually having a passive, stable physical barrier between the crew and the vacuum of space?
To be fair, the shooting script describes this set as an “umbilical docking port” and what Picard opens as “a huge, circular portal,” not a window per se. Perhaps the idea was that this was supposed to be a docking port of the sort we saw travel pods using in The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan. A port of that sort having a forcefield to keep the air in when the hatch is open, sure, I buy that.
Whatever the intention, this “portal” is shaped just like windows seen on the ship’s hull. So, taking the movie on its own terms: the windows on this ship are forcefields.
What’s worse, these energetic windows have nothing to do with anything. Why establish something like this if you’re not going to use it as a story point?