Understanding Star Trek The Next Generation

Bruce Ediger

Capt Picard

Previous Understanding Star Trek post

I’ve heard wise people say that there are only two plots for episodes of “Star Trek - The Next Generation”

  1. Data Saves the Crew
  2. The Crew Saves Data

Well, here’s a whole new take, orthogonal to that: ST-TNG is the Smurfs.

This Smurfs take is so orthogonal to any other understanding of ST-TNG that I find it analgous to doing 4-D “plane geometry”.

There’s two normals to any given plane if you do 4-D geometry.

If you’ve got W,X,Y,Z axes, all normal to one another, then you’ve got 6 planes defined by those 4 axes:

  • XY - W, Z axes normal
  • XZ - W, Y axes normal
  • YZ - W, X axes normal
  • XW - Y, Z axes normal
  • WY - X, Z axes normal
  • WZ - X, Y axes normal

Each axis helps define 3 planes, and is normal to the other 3 planes in 4-space.

That’s how odd the “ST-TNG is The Smurfs” take is. It’s like the second orthogonal vector in 4-space.