6. Technobabble
I've tried to keep this a moderated discussion. For this bullet point, I'm taking the gloves off. The line must be drawn here - this far, no further. I'm just going to say it: I hate technobabble. Look, I get it - it's science fiction. I'm all for time-travel, an attack of some clone or other, or giant robots punching giant aliens right in the kisser ... wherever said kisser may be. I prefer something plausible, but I don't care how a sci-fi/fantasy story kicks off. There's a Delorean, inside the Delorean is a flux capacitor, a flux capacitor needs to run at 88 miles an hour to make flashy lights, flashy lights around a Deloraen creates time travel. I'm down with that. Take an old Star Trek episode like
Tomorrow Is Yesterday. The Enterprise has to fly around the sun to make time travel happen. Bad science, maybe. Clear dramatic stakes, yes. After all, four out of five sunologists agree that flying around the sun just isn't something you want to do. The Next Generation ushered in an era of storytelling where all a character had to do was spout some vaguely science-y dialog to make everyone's problems go away. Since then, too many Trek episodes climax with someone doing something that doesn't make sense to create a phenomena that barely makes sense, in order to solve a story hook that didn't make sense to start with, which turned half of the Enterprise's crew into puppies. Using fake science to make something unbelievable happen is a fine way to start off a story. Using that same trick to end one is lousy, even lazy. It's the narrative equivalent of two boys playing in the backyard, yelling "I have a bullet-proof vest!, "I have armor-piercing bullets!", or "Now I have force-field!" at each other. Whether you're in the backyard or writing Star Trek, reversing the polarity on the shields is just lame. Deep Space Nine is as guilty of technobabble as its sister shows, but Deep Space did a better job of keeping the dramatic stakes clear when the dialog wasn't. Few things have turned off casual Star Trek fans like technobabble. It's turned off a lot would-be fans, too. Trust me, if you're going to try to get your girlfriend into Trek, don't show an episode where anything gets re-phased, reversed, or re-modulated. No "re" anything! Show her
The Inner Light, instead - or that one episode where everyone gets turned into puppies.