Vortigar said:
Well, colour me surprised. I had thought we'd seen the end of Trek on tv with Enterprise failing like it did.
The Lugz said:
yes, but the doctor is photonic, and light does not activate touch-screens ( thank god )
the only way he could activate even a touch pad is when his forcefield is active, surely?
also, i miss thinking about this madness.. i vote for a new series
Ah, but you're all missing the fact that the ship's computer knows where the doctor is and what he wants to do as he is a program running inside it. So his motions are detected and acted upon accordingly. No physical touch needed.
Also, surely he can turn the touch field on and of locally.
yep, it basically comes down to why didn't the doctor use a voice command to show the audience, ( and anyone in the room, for safety reasons of-course ) what he was doing?
( we know from a previous episode that holograms are not allowed access to their command protocols and the doctor was modified to have such abilities to improve his performance and personal well being )
because let's face it, emulating a touch command panel side, making the doctor walk places and wasting time is hardly an efficient protocol for an emergency hologram to edit his parameters if he has something life threatening to resolve
'doctor picks up hypo-spray'
'computer disable holographic forcefield'
'hypo-spray drops to bio-bed'
'doctor looks smug' ( as if that's a direction )
-scene cut to 3 seconds
efficiency.
unfortunately we don't get to see tom being *****-slapped so for many people it would not be worth it i guess.
the answer is geeks > script writers i guess
if you wanted to be showy of the doctor's true capacity for extreme flexibility you could have him throw objects from one side of the room to the other and disappear from one location and appear in another to catch it, he would never need a nurse to fetch items as that would be pointlessly slow to him
this character was never fully explored in my opinion, same as data, the borg, telepathy, and lots of other blatantly overpowered things in the trek universe
( also, why don't they attach his emitter from the inside, and make him super resistant to hazardous environments )
#edit#
my point here, if i really have one at all would be that this sort of thing is what makes trek popular or unpopular
if you just let the geeks go techno-mad, you wouldn't see anything but a diagram of a borg ship for an entire episode and that would be boring for everyone else.
i think trek has had it's day, and making it popular again would be a hard task
and it would be... damaging.. if it turned into a full on spaceopera for the masses
a new universe entirely with a clean slate would be a better idea by far, even if it still references ( or even has startrek on at movie night in their ship so they can laugh at all the technical bloopers or something ) as a little fan tie in would be perfect
because you have to deal with so many conflicting continuities, and fan hate over change
i don't know if a reboot will even work at the moment
just my 2c.