Last night, we had a family movie night upstairs and finally watched the latest Star Trek movie, Into Darkness.

First, I was a little confused, when the final credits rolled, as to what darkness we were talking about.

Second, well, spoilers. Click on the thingie below.

Well heck, the thingie to hide this unless you click on it isn’t working. Sorry.

SPOILERS!!!

All
right, I was willing to suspend disbelief right up to the point where
the Enterprise falls out of warp, 20 minutes by shuttle from Kronos, and
they weren’t greeted by flotillas of bloodthirsty Klingons.

Let me say that again: the Enterprise fell out of warp 20 minutes at impulse speed from Kronos and the Klingons didn’t notice.

Hello?
What’s wrong with this picture? The movie made a point of telling us
that the Klingon Empire and the Federation were on the verge of war.
Everyone was on a hair trigger. And the Klingons didn’t notice when a
Federation ship randomly dropped out of warp 20 minutes away from their
homeworld?

Puh-lease. Do you really think we humans would fail to notice a Klingon Warbird drop out of warp 20 minutes from Earth?

Oh wait. Scottie just hops right up to the Super Sekrit Supership Dock near Jupiter and no one notices. Not only do they not notice there’s this shuttle hanging around where it shouldn’t be, but they don’t notice when he joins in with the line of shuttles that are supposed to be there. Or that he snuck on board.

By this time, I was really blown out of my bubble of willful disbelief. I had been willing to give the Klingon thing a pass for the sake of plot. But then
whoever wrote this thing did it again. There’s a space battle going on inside our moon’s orbit,
and no one came over to investigate. Which begs the question: if the
Federation is on the eve of war with the Klingon Empire, where were the
ships guarding Earth? How could two ships, even Federation ships, slug
it out between the Earth and the moon and no one popped over to see what was going on? Seriously?

By this time, I’m laughing. They get Khan’s ship to stop firing. Yay! But then it fires again, and suddenly — suddenly — the Enterprise can’t maintain its position 237,000 km up and starts falling. Straight down. Like a stone.

Um, no.

But
wait, there’s more. Enterprise loses its gravity control, and every
time it spins, people go falling all over the place. Hello? 200,000+
kilometers up? MICROGRAVITY. You lose your artificial gravity, you’re going to float. Hello? They’re falling, fast. Even IF they were near the Earth’s surface, they’d be in freefall, not hanging from the catwalks and falling out of holes in the ship.

I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was
a child. I watched the original airings of the original series. Captain
Kirk was my hero when I was a little girl. But that was a simpler time. We’re past that now. This — this is painful.
It’s like Galaxy Quest, except it’s pretending to be serious. Was it
really so hard to pick up a phone and run some of this stuff past an
aerospace engineer? I’m willing to bet that a huge percentage of the
folks who work at NASA are Star Trek fans who would have been delighted
to tell them anything they wanted to know about how things really work in orbit.

/sigh