So I'm rewatching some of the old Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, and today's gem was "The Naked Time." You know the one: Sulu goes full Three Musketeers, Spock gets weepy, alt-Kirk gets a little rapey, and the crew basically invents space-bourbon-induced mania without the bourbon.

But here's what really got me: the episode opens with the Enterprise orbiting a collapsing planet. The surface is shrinking, and Spock says something like, "As the planet collapses, the surface is moving away from us. We have to adjust our orbit."

Uhh... no. That's not how gravity works. That's not how any of this works.

It's the same mistake they made again in the 2009 Star Trek reboot, where falling into a black hole is treated like tumbling into a canyon, instead of orbiting it because, you know, physics. If a planet collapses, even all the way down to a singularity, its gravitational pull on you doesn't change unless it gains or loses mass. Orbit is determined by total mass and your distance from it. You could crush the planet down to the size of a ping-pong ball and you'd still be right there in orbit... unless the screenwriters have decided to rewrite Newton's laws.

And look, I get it, Star Trek is science fiction, not a science documentary. I'm totally fine with technobabble like warp drive or transporters as long as you sell it as futuristic tech and build it into the story. I can even accept Red Matter as a magical space MacGuffin (1) if it keeps things moving. But when you start breaking known laws of physics just to keep the plot rolling? Even Scotty would protest. "I canna change the laws of physics, cap'n." (2)

We'll forgive them, of course. Because it's Star Trek. And because sometimes space logic takes a backseat to space drama.

But still. The next time you're writing about a collapsing planet, just remember: gravity doesn't care about your screenplay. Mass is mass.

LLAP
RR

(1) A MacGuffin is a plot device in fiction - usually an object, event, or goal - that drives the story forward but is ultimately unimportant to the actual narrative. Think the briefcase in Pulp Fiction or the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. We don't really care what it is - we just care that everyone else does. It's the thing that gets the plot moving, even if it doesn't matter much by the end.

(2) The line "I canna change the laws of physics, Captain!" is one of the most famous phrases associated with Scotty, but he never actually says it exactly that way in the show. In the episode The Naked Time, he says, "I can't change the laws of physics. I've got to have thirty minutes!" - no "canna." The Scottish-flavored version became popular through years of impressions, parodies, and pop culture shorthand, but it's technically a misquote. Scotty does say "canna" in other lines (like "Ye canna mix matter and antimatter cold!"), which likely helped cement the myth. It's sort of like "Beam me up, Scotty" - another line nobody ever actually says that way.