I call myself Mr. Know-It-All. It’s time I proved it.

So we’re gonna do something a little bit fun this week. These are the Know-It-All Files. What I did was I went on Quora, and across Reddit, and I dug up some really great Star Trek questions. Some of them I feel like are elementary. Other ones are a little more complicated and need a little more conversation.

How Everybody Understands Everybody

How come in Star Trek people from different planets can understand each other perfectly?

That’s actually been discussed in Star Trek canon. It’s called the universal translator. In the early days it was a device, and later on it was built in.

In Enterprise they talked about how it was being developed, and it was a real clunky box thing. Then in the original series, Kirk’s era, there was one episode where Kirk was talking to a being and he was holding what looked almost like a lightsaber. It was a rod of some sort, and that was supposed to be the universal translator. In later days, The Next Generation moving forward, they built it into the combadges. So literally at all given times the combadge is receiving data and it’s translating it.

Now, they use Hollywood shorthand, which is just showing us talking and communicating. But the truth is, when an alien species is talking to us in their own dialect, the universal translator is doing its thing and we get to hear what they’re saying in our language.

If there are other places where the universal translator gets described, let me know. I’m talking primarily about the canon we have, which is the movies and the TV shows, as well as some of the animated projects.

I Didn’t Like Janeway. Then Prodigy Happened.

How is it that I may not be a huge fan of Star Trek: Voyager, but I am a huge fan of Captain Janeway?

This is gonna so bite me in the butt. I was not a big fan of Voyager.

I got into it a little more toward the back half, once Seven of Nine came on, because I was a boy, come on, and she was wearing literally a leotard. But actually, for me, it was when they started doing these really interesting crossovers. There was an episode where wrestling crossed in, with The Rock. The Rock played an alien wrestler, Seven of Nine had to fight him, and that pulled me right back in. From then on I was there till the end of the series.

But still, I didn’t like Janeway. I felt like Janeway was full of contradictions at the time. Voyager itself left me cold in a lot of areas, and other places I loved, I thought they were great. My issue with Janeway on Voyager was the writing. It was hit or miss. One minute it was we have to uphold the Prime Directive, the next minute it was well, what are we gonna do, we gotta survive out here. There were lots of back and forths in that regard.

Funny enough, watching Prodigy now (check out my Prodigy reviews), I’m actually pretty into the character they’re putting out there. The Janeway hologram I’m into. I think she’s really cool, I think she communicates really well, and I like her.

The Kelvin Timeline Was a Contract Problem

Did J.J. Abrams intend on making the Kelvin timeline, or did fan backlash create it?

Yes, J.J. Abrams did intend to create the Kelvin timeline. You can picture him walking into Paramount saying hey, I have this really great idea, we’re gonna create a whole new timeline… but what happened is he was brought in to reboot the Star Trek film franchise, and he was given strictures.

Because of some very complicated corporate machinations at the time, Viacom had been split. You had CBS and you had Viacom, the television arm and the film arm, and at the time Star Trek was owned by the television arm. They had licensed it, and through some really poor contract writing, they licensed it in a way that got complicated. It’s actually Les Moonves’s fault. Anybody who knows anything about Hollywood and the entertainment industry knows he was one of those guys who liked to hold on to things. He was of the mind that hey, if they want it, they can pay for it. It didn’t matter that these two companies came from the same roots. They’d been split, and that whole thing got really complicated, quick.

So my understanding is that J.J. Abrams went into it with the knowledge that he was going to have to figure something out, because he wasn’t going to be able to use all the toys exactly the way they were. Which was fine, because they were looking to update this anyway. Essentially do what Strange New Worlds has finally done, which is tell the Star Trek stories with the current production value and all those good things. Maybe not so many lens flares, J.J.

If you’ve read something different, link me to it. I don’t remember any interviews where he’s talked about it differently.

Why Every Alien Has Two Arms and Two Legs

In Star Trek, are there as many parallel Vulcans as parallel Earths? Based on parallel Earths, does every planet in Star Trek have dozens of duplicates?

I’m gonna parse this question and assume you’re not talking about parallel universes, like the Mirror Universe or the alternate Earth history in Picard season 2. I’m going to say you’re talking about the duplicate species theory.

It says that in order for life to survive, this is the perfect template: two eyes, a mouth, two ears, that whole idea. It helped for budgetary reasons, but this is what Gene Roddenberry latched on to in the early days of developing Star Trek. Another species evolves, and it has different things that evolve with it. Vulcans have the ears, and the strength based on their gravity, and all those other items.

So does every planet in Star Trek have dozens of duplicates? No. It isn’t so much that they have duplicates. Species evolve on a similar track. I’d cite some original series episodes, where there are a few times they said it’s an Earth-type humanoid species and they’re developing like humans did. Those were a product of the budgets of the era. It really had nothing to do with actual scientific theory. The scientific theory is, if life evolves and this is the perfect template for it, then most life will be in some way, shape or form this way: bipedal, two arms, mostly the whole bit.

Romulans are not duplicates of Vulcans. Romulans and Vulcans have a shared heritage, and at some point they split off from each other. A colony ship went somewhere else, did something else, didn’t want to follow the Vulcans in their logic, and became Vulcans 2.0, or Romulans. So not everybody has duplicates. Life evolves in the Star Trek universe like this.

Chekov and the Civilian Hospital

In Star Trek IV, how did an injured Chekov wind up in a civilian hospital when he was injured in the Alameda Naval Shipyard? Doesn’t a naval base of that size have its own hospital facilities?

A naval base of that size absolutely has its own hospital facilities. Generally speaking, however, they don’t have specialized surgeons on hand, ready to go. So Chekov would’ve most likely been taken immediately to the hospital there on base, and the minute they realized it was a brain hemorrhage or something along those lines, he would’ve been transferred to a civilian hospital with a specialist on duty.

Remember, he was there for brain surgery, because they had to alleviate the pressure in his head. Dealing with medievalism, drilling holes in his head’s not the answer. McCoy says all these things.

Lore Woke Up and Chose Violence

In Star Trek, was Lore being honest when he told Data that he loved him, right before Data deactivated and dismantled him forever?

Yes, he was lying. I mean, no, he was not being honest. He was lying.

Lore is by nature the worst possible version of what Data wants to be. Lore woke up that morning and chose violence. Data lacked the emotions to have that kind of ambition, so what he did was acclimatize to our culture and the way we do things. Lore was a troubled kid from the start. He was a greedy child, the one who wanted to feel more love and affection and everything else he never got.

So I believe 100 percent it was a manipulative tactic. I don’t know that you can really trust anything Lore has to say.

The Warp Speed Limit Nobody Kept

In TNG season 7, episode 9, “Force of Nature,” it’s stated that warp speed was damaging warp space, to keep warp speed 7 or below. If warp space was damaged, there could be no more faster-than-light travel, and interstellar civilizations would collapse. How did they overcome this issue?

They didn’t. Okay, we’re kidding.

I think maybe two episodes later or so there’s an emergency, and we find out the Federation has set a speed limit of warp 5 as the base maximum warp. With special reasoning or special instructions you were able to push it a little further, and I think in that episode they said okay, we’re gonna waive the speed limit, go maximum warp.

That’s the complicated answer. The simple answer is these kinds of storylines were usually set up by very creative writers who wanted to establish certain things and move the needle forward for Star Trek and its universe. But like a lot of other plot threads, because the show was episodic, they weren’t held on to very tightly. So what you ended up with was all these really great ideas that went by the wayside and, as the show progressed, were lost. Or as one answer on Quora said in that thread, it was forgotten the next week.

Because syndication, and Star Trek.

Now It’s Your Turn

There you go, now you know, and if knowing is half the battle, you’re halfway to being a know-it-all yourself.

I’d love to start answering the questions you have for me about Star Trek. I’ve held panels at MegaCon and WonderCon (not Comic Con yet, but I’d love to someday) where it was just me with the crowd, and it was engaging and it was fun. So throw me your questions. I’d love to have a debate.

Got a Star Trek question you want answered in a future Files? Disagree with one of these answers? The conversation lives in the comments on the video above.