What’s up, my know-it-alls? It’s time again for the Know-It-All Files, where Mr. Know-It-All takes the time to prove why he knows it all. I’ve gone across the internet, to Quora, to Reddit, to the comment section right here on YouTube, and I’ve found the questions you’ve been asking about Star Trek. I’m here to answer them.
Computer, first question.
How Many Episodes Are in Each Star Trek Series?
Okay, let’s see. The original series had 79 episodes. Do we count the animated series? You know what, we’ll count the animated series.
The Next Generation I do know. That one had 178 episodes. Deep Space Nine had 176. Voyager I know wasn’t as many as Deep Space Nine. 173? No. 172. Voyager had 172. Enterprise was shorter, and I went back and forth on it, 86, 89, 96. I want to say Enterprise had 98.
The latter stuff has only had shorter seasons, your Discovery and your Strange New Worlds and all of them. So I’m going to say there are 870 episodes across 43-ish series, and that’s including the animated shows and everything we saw up to this year.
Why Was the Transwarp Drive Never Mentioned Again?
You can say it was never mentioned again, but I don’t think that’s what happened to it.
Transwarp was introduced in the original motion pictures, Star Trek II or Star Trek III, whenever they introduced the Excelsior. It was meant to be the top of the line. To see where it went, you have to back out of the series a little bit, because the original movies were supposed to eventually lead to the destruction of the Enterprise and the introduction of a new ship. That ship was going to be the Excelsior, the Excelsior was going to have transwarp, and somehow you were going to get all of our favorite command crew people over there. So you’d have Scotty throwing shade at the Excelsior and eventually coming to love it, because he would’ve made it his own. You get it.
That didn’t happen, because the fan response to another ship was so bad. Nobody wanted it. Nobody wanted to get rid of the Enterprise. Everybody wanted to keep the Enterprise, and that’s why you have to get the Enterprise reveal at the end of Star Trek IV, when they get their ship back. That’s the production reason.
Then you go into The Next Generation, and in The Next Generation the warp scale is changed. It gets a little bigger. I never thought of transwarp as something that failed. My read is that it just became SOP, standard operating procedure. And once it’s SOP, it isn’t anything special anymore, so you don’t talk about it. It’s just the thing it is. Later on you get slip drive and different things like that, but in universe I believe what they were calling transwarp just became warp.
Why Haven’t We Met the Other Hundred Changelings?
The question was why none of the other hundred Changelings the Dominion sent out have been encountered, except for Odo and Laas.
I think you’re looking at this the wrong way, and you need to flip that thought process. Why didn’t we find more Changelings is the question you’re asking. The one I’d ask is this: isn’t it amazing that we found any?
You’ve got to remember, the Gamma Quadrant, where the wormhole went to, is a whole other quadrant. A fourth of our galaxy. In Star Wars you can hop across the galaxy, and the galaxy is an attainable size. The Star Wars galaxy is like the Earth today. Before there was an internet that connected everybody on the planet, the planet felt much bigger. Now that we can all talk to each other from across the world in seconds, it feels much smaller. Same thing. In Star Wars the galaxy is much smaller.
In Star Trek we’re giving the galaxy the respect it deserves. I’m not trying to be all pompous about that. What I mean is they said, okay, our galaxy is this big, and they took a slightly more realistic approach. That’s the difference between a space opera and a space fantasy.
So that being the case, they didn’t send out a lot of them. I think at some point they say a number, and it’s not a lot. The fact that we found any, much less two, is astronomical. I apologize, because that doesn’t answer your question, but I think you need the right perspective to even approach that topic.
Which Characters Did Majel Barrett Play?
The first mom of Star Trek. Majel Barrett, God rest her. She played quite a few characters.
In the original series, Gene Roddenberry had wanted her to play the part of Number One, currently being played on Strange New Worlds by the ever so talented Rebecca Romijn. Formerly Stamos, not Stamos anymore. The network wouldn’t let her. A female first officer was a little too progressive for them at the time. Imagine that. Go figure, right?
So what they did was they really quickly bleached her hair, gave her a dye job, gave her a new name, stuck her in medical, and she became Nurse Chapel. While I was prepping for this show I read somewhere that someone said, oh, and then in Strange New Worlds they gave Nurse Chapel a personality. That’s mean.
Majel Barrett was also Lwaxana Troi. I believe she was another character or two somewhere back in Star Trek lore. But ultimately she’s best known for being the voice of the computer. (No, not you. Sorry.)
What’s great is that before she passed, she recorded all kinds of material. And with the technology they have today, like with Star Wars and Luke’s voice and Darth Vader’s voice, and a little teeny bit of Madmartigan over at Lucasfilm, man, we could have Majel Barrett’s voice. You have electronic voices for everything today. We could get the first lady of Star Trek back as the computer across the board.
She was the voice of the computer in the old series. She was the voice of the computer in The Next Generation. She was the voice of the computer on Starfleet vessels for Deep Space Nine, and the space station itself had a very logical reason to sound different, which was that it was a Cardassian thing and then they made it speak English. I think Voyager actually started using a different voice. Either way, I think we could have that voice back, and that’d be great.
Why Didn’t Anyone in Star Trek Swear Until Recently?
The full question: why didn’t anyone in the Star Trek universe swear at all until just recently? Certainly the movies were a medium where it was permissible, but beyond hell and damn it was never done.
Interesting. By your own admission, I think you have a different definition of swear words. Hell and damn are considered, quote unquote, swear words. So the question is more, when did they start using swear words that make me feel uncomfortable? And that’s fair, by the way.
I think that’s a product of the nature of streaming. Different freedoms. You can do more things. I do feel like it’s a little bit of a departure from what Star Trek had established. Now, they established those things because of the times, the censorship, the whole bit. That doesn’t mean it’s not a valid question. Because remember, Kirk and them aren’t very familiar with those kinds of swear words. Then you fast forward to Discovery and all of a sudden everybody’s effing everything and essing everything. It’s just up and down. Sorry, I’m trying to keep the channel clean.
I’m more interested in why they didn’t go the Farscape route, or the route of some of the other shows. You’re 400 years in the future from today. Wouldn’t you have a different set of swear words? Language changes. Every 200 years a new language emerges. The fact that they speak English on any level we understand is amazing all by itself. So overall, yeah, I feel like they should be cursing in a way that’s a lot stranger to my ear than what we got.
How Can Data Be the Property of Starfleet?
That’s a great question. He both is and he isn’t.
When Starfleet first discovered him, you have to remember, they considered him to be a really advanced form of robot. As he evolved, as he grew up, if you will, and established himself, the moment he expressed a desire to join Starfleet and was given the permission to autonomously make that decision, that’s when everything changed. That’s when things were different for him. I think that’s the important thing to remember.
Later on, of course, you have things like “The Measure of a Man,” the episodes where they try it out. Is Data a consciousness? Is he sentient? And obviously they prove that he is. But I think their first mistake was this: if they wanted to keep him as, quote, “property,” they should never have allowed him to join Starfleet of his own independent mind, to make that decision up for himself.
There you go. Now you know. And if knowing is half the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.
Never forget, everyone loves a know-it-all.
Give me your questions. Star Trek, Doctor Who, anything that has to do with entertainment and pop culture. Ask me directly in the comments on the video above and I’ll field it in a future Know-It-All Files.
