Science Station II Is a Lie
The older I get the more alienated I become by the fact that in Star Trek: The Next Generation—in all the TV Treks, really, but I love TNG so it stands out the most—the bridge has way too few stations, and the bridge crew doesn't behave like a bridge crew because none of the extras speak or do anything active so that the action can stay on the hero main cast.
Like, who the fuck do you think you're fooling by furiously manning Science Station II while the bridge is under attack by interdimensional terrorists and your captain is being forcibly abducted? That's all the extras ever do: They furiously man their stations. Enterprise under attack by the Romulans? Hold on for dear life while the ship shakes as you randomly press buttons at the Environmental Control station. What do those buttons even do? Are they call buttons for response teams? Are you regulating all the oxygen tubes on the ship in real-time? GTFO of here.
And there aren't enough damn stations! You can't have one "operations officer" who is responsible for all "operations" aboard a Galaxy Class starship. I don't care how fast his little android fingers are. It's bullshit. The show makes it seem like he is directly controlling the functions of the ship, and not like, say, writing work orders to various operations crew teams.
I know that Roddenberry's conceit for TNG was that it was the future's future, so the mechanical and functional aspects of the ship would be farther-removed than ever before from the daily rhythms of shipboard life. But that's a radical premise that takes radical commitment. You can't just have the ship for all intents and purporses run itself, and, like, four dude on the bridge occasionally doing everything that matters.
As a kid, these conceits never bothered me at all. But it was already troubling me in my late teens and twenties, since the movies do it so much better, especially Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And by my thirties I was actively rebelling against it.
A real crew, with rapport and camaraderie, will always be interacting together. Talking, chatting, joking, collaborating. Bridges should tend toward the noisy and chaotic both in times of crisis and times of ease. The most we ever see of this among the extras in TNG is the mimicry of quiet consultations occurring in the backgrounds of scenes between two or more extras. But even this pale echo of insufficiency is very uncommon. Mostly they're just window-dressing.
It feels less and less real with time, and not in the "this is fiction" way, but in the "this is not believable" way.
