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Comment by sliverstorm | Hacker News Reader

I've never really understood why it matters. I appreciate accuracy in a movie or show based on something very closely tied to technology (for example, in a movie titled "Hackers" I'd expect at least a little accuracy on the subject), but Star Trek is obviously not a technical show. It's about the people.

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Accuracy never really bothered me. They're just hollywood-types. It can be fun to see technology through their myopic eyes. Its the inconsistency that gets me. The transporters have wildly different operating modes and capabilities depending on the week, problems that nearly destroy the ship in some episodes are solved by three keypresses, rerouting this to that (often by their 15 year old boy-mascot) in others.

Dammit Jim, pick some damn rules and stick to them. Constraints make good drama. I doesn't count if the plot can be resolved at any time by some idiot in a Jefferies tube.

I used to hold up Star Wars as an example of good consistency. Then Ep. 1 came out. My wife asked me (5 minutes into the damn movie) why the Jedi bothered to swing their light sabers at the robots if they could just wave their hands at all of them and knock them over in groups. Gah. I sensed a great disturbance, as if a thousand sharks surfaced and were suddenly jumped...

TV series have a lot of trouble with consistency unless they have a tight team of in-house writers who are all on the same page. Freelancers with incomplete background information or people who disagree on various points cause inconsistencies. And sometimes they just happen under the best of circumstances.

In non-geek genres, most people don't much notice inconsistencies, whether they're pedantic things like "someone goes the wrong way to get to his bedroom" or bigger things like, "When did this character become afraid of dogs? He had a Great Dane back in first season!"

ETA: Try trawling the TV Tropes wiki for eight zillion examples of how TV writers of contemporary sitcoms and dramas can't even be consistent with the real world the stories are set in. :)

Accuracy matters when you're smart enough (or pedantic enough) that technical details break your suspension of disbelief (assuming it is not intended to be campy).

I cannot second this enough. Suspension of disbelief isn't some accidental aspect of fiction, it is essential to enjoying it. When even a casual viewing (as opposed to rigorous pseudo-scientific analysis) can't maintain suspension of disblief, then you have a problem if your target audience is geeks.

Suspension of disbelief is an active choice- an agreement even, not a state of mind created and maintained by the movie producer. With the exception of glaring violations (like the time I watched some character penetrate a firewall (a wall of fire) by cutting through it with a sword), any geek who elects not to ignore the strange idiosyncrasies is simply missing out by his own volition.

There's plenty of movies full of huge technical flaws I could point out an enumerate in an instant during only the first run through. They jump out at me, I see they are there, but I ignore them. This is what Suspension of Disbelief is. The only time it breaks, at least for me, is when the flaw is so bad as to be comical, and so comical as to make me loose my composure.

Look at the conclusion of the piece. He agrees: it should be about the stories. His beef is with the writers lazily resorting to retarded engineering time after time.

Perhaps this stems from the fact that few writers also have an engineering background, and as such don't look at the plots they assemble the same way we might?

They're also under alot of time pressure to produce scripts so the filming, and retake after retake, can get done. IANAE but I imagine for a weekly show that's not easy. Having tried to both a regular blog and a book, it's harder than it seems.

If they toned down the technobabble, Star Trek would be nearly watchable.

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