Keith&Co.
Contributor
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2006
- Messages
- 22,444
- Location
- Far Western Mass
- Gender
- Here.
- Basic Beliefs
- I'm here...
Certain themes seem to be popular with writers for the various six Trek series. I imagine that we could predict certain episodes, or sub-plots within episodes, if they were to add a Lilliputian character to the bridge crew of the Enterprise.
- Transporter accident: bridge crew reduced to 1/12th scale. "Welcome to my world."
- Transporter accident: She becomes 12x scale. "Man, you people have tiny, tiny staterooms."
- Bad guys underestimate Lilliputian due to her size, she escapes and manages to release the crew and they recapture the ship.
- Bad guys overlook Lilliputian in the away party, she tracks them back, infiltrates the fortress and releases the away team who overcome the bad guys.
- Same crew member who kicked ass against professional mercenaries twice is helpless when she gets lost in a cargo bay and has to wait for someone to notice she's missing, find her, rescue her. The director says it was to show her vulnerabilities.
- Once every three episodes, station display failures prevent her from using her specially programmed interface, and force her to jump back and forth on a giant display to do her job. Usually within arm's reach of another officer who doesn't appear to be doing much of anything on his station.
- She is crucial in a first-contact with a race of beings so small that they don't even recognize the humans as a life form, but were about to open up the warp core for technobabble reasons. She talks them out of it.
- She is crucial in a first-contact with a race of giant beings, who are going to exterminate the crew as vermin, but come to understand from her example that there is a wide spectrum in sentient beings in the universe and come to adopt the Federation's basic fondness for the Vulcan philosophy of Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations (IDIC).
- As a sub-plot, the engineer will keep trying for an entire season to perfect a robotic or hologramic 'contact suit' that allows the Lilliputian to travel among and interact "normally" with her human and human-sized shipmates. No one on the production crew notices how terribly sizist this is, or how offensive to anyone that isn't human 'normal.' After the fans finally point out how this is poking IDIC one right in the eye, they quietly drop the subplot and no one ever mentions it again, even in episodes where the character could be expected to use such a suit to resolve the plot nearly instantly.
- The episode where the Counselor makes a big deal about how the thoughts and emotions of the Lilliputian are 'just the same' to her as anyone else. Which seemingly contradicts the episode where telepathic aliens notice the Lilliputian only because her brain waves are at a drastically different frequency and allow them to communicate with her, thus saving the day. Convention fans spend a great deal of time justifying the two episodes as if they were real, not just written by two different writers during two different seasons.
Last edited: