14 Dumbest Things In Star Trek Nemesis

When Data first rescues Picard to prevent him from being bled out by Sinzon’s minions, he produces a heretofore unseen rabbit out of his hat: an itsy bitsy teeny weeny prototype Emergency Transport Unit capable of beaming one person. It’s not used then, but at the end of the film, he slaps this onto Picard and sends him back to the Enterprise while he gets himself blowed up real good.

Why does the Enterprise have such a prototype, and why just one? Is Geordi just so good that he invented something so useful yet Starfleet’s R&D never came up with such a thing? It’s just another tech thing invented to conveniently allow a specific story beat.

The book The Physics of Star Trek posited that the energy necessary to convert a light adult human being into energy would be equivalent to a hundred 1-megaton hydrogen bombs. Sure, we see phasers do this, but those weapons only have to do the disassembly, not project that energy stream to another place along with all the information for reassembling it, and, you know, actually reassemble it.

When Picard arrives on the Enterprise bridge the gizmo is still stuck to his shirt, which means it beamed itself. How? Does it turn itself into energy and while in an energy state still functions to put both itself and Picard back together? It sure wasn’t the Enterprise transporters doing the reassembly, as Geordi said they went down the moment after he beamed Picard to the Scimitar.

The transporter has always been magic, but this is beyond the pale, even for it.