Missed Connections

Recently I was rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation on Amazon Prime.  Like when I rewatched Earth Final Conflict they had been showing it on Pluto TV but it's more expedient to watch it on Amazon without the commercials.

Anyway, there were a couple of times when there was stuff that didn't really add up with stuff that had happened earlier.  The first time I thought that was in an early 6th season episode when the neurotic Lieutenant Barclay thinks he sees some kind of monster in the transporter beam.  At one point when Barclay is nervous about transporting, Geordi LaForge tells him about how transporter accidents hardly ever happen.

The thing about that is only 4 episodes earlier (though admittedly it was in the previous season) LaForge and Ensign Ro were believed to be dead when a transporter accident put them out of phase with the rest of the universe.  So it's like, wait, why are you saying how safe these are when just a few episodes ago you had a transporter accident?  You of all people should know how dangerous transporters can be.  It would have been nice to have referenced that.

A couple of episodes later a girl named Amanda Rogers comes on the Enterprise as an intern.  But soon it's found out her parents were part of the Q Continuum and as a result she has pretty much god-like powers.  She gets a crush on Commander Riker and at one point beams him into a romantic fantasy.

The thing about what happens between them is that back in the first season, Q gave Riker powers like his, or like Amanda Rogers's.  So he of all people could relate to what she was going through.  But there's no mention of that at all.

In the seventh season there's a planet with a primitive culture where Worf's human brother is stationed as a hidden observer.  The planet's atmosphere is disappearing and Picard is going to just let all the people die because the "Prime Directive" says they can't interfere.  Worf's brother uses a holodeck simulation though to convince the people they're still on the planet when they're actually on the ship.  They go through a "Journey" to a new home, which is actually an uninhabited planet.

The thing is, there was a second season episode where they found a colony that had been started long ago by humans who left Earth in the 21st or 22nd Century.  The culture had regressed to about 17th Century technology.  Their planet was dying so without any crap about the "Prime Directive" Picard beamed them up into the cargo bay and wound up taking them to another planet from that same expedition that had a more advanced civilization populated by clones in dire need of new DNA.  So why was it OK in one episode to move primitive people off a planet and not another?  It didn't make much sense to me.

That's not to say the show has sloppy writing all the time; they are plenty of times when they do reference stuff that happened before.  But when you have a show like that, there are plenty of different writers and so they might not all know every aspect of the continuity.  And it's really a lot easier to notice these things when you're binge watching than when you're watching these episodes weeks, months, or even years apart.

This same thing happens sometimes in stories.  Especially stories that are longer and I might have started writing weeks or months ago.  A recent case in Swapp:  Jailbreak was near the beginning I referenced some guns the good guys had in their headquarters.  But near the end when the good guys are taken captive in their headquarters there's no mention of the guns.  Why?  Because I'd forgotten about them.  So when I was editing (basically binge reading) I saw that first part and thought, Wait, what happened to that?  I eliminated the reference to the guns because that was easier than rewriting an entire scene to work them in.

In extreme examples you can have entire characters or plot lines that just get forgotten.  That's why it's always good to edit so maybe you can see some of these things that you missed.  Nobody's perfect.