Captain Picard is under a lot of stress. In the last three weeks he had to deal with his second officer Data suddenly having an android daughter, then he helped his tactical officer Worf on the Klingon homeworld to solve a nasty plot against his family and even found himself on the wrong side of a d'k tahg (that's a Klingon dagger).
And finally, he was replaced by a doppelganger on the Enterprise, while he himself found himself in a prison with three dissimilar aliens. Jean-Luc Picard's crew agrees: the man needs a vacation and so they do everything they can to get the busy stoic to take a trip to the lustful planet Risa.
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I myself have a lot on my plate in May 2024, although perhaps not as earth-shattering as the legendary captain of the Enterprise-D. I'm writing a Star Trek article for PC Games (this one!), a historical newspaper research needs to be evaluated, and over eight and a half hours of raw audio material are waiting in the post-production pile to be turned into podcasts.
Apart from my notebook and the legendary research book The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Companion, there are no work utensils on my desk, just a handful of action figures to distract me from time to time while I ponder the next paragraph.
What our two work environments have in common is a pot of black tea – Picard has Earl Grey, and I, who despises bergamot, have Malty Assam.
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Source: Paramount
Villain Ru'afo with a Padd, the tablet of the future
Otherwise, the captain's desk 342 years in the future – as it was imagined in 1990 – looks completely different: Picard's desk is littered with PADs (with two “d's”, which is short for Personal Access Display Device) and yes, these things look pretty much like contemporary tablets and are one of the most popular examples used to demonstrate how clairvoyant and accurate the depiction of the future in Star Trek can sometimes be.
But that's only part of the truth, because everything groundbreaking in Star Trek is always mixed with the naivety of retrofuturism. Accurate representation goes hand in hand with wonderful nonsense, which results from the fact that the colorful space adventures still come from the largely analogue age of the 20th century.
Most people who own a tablet have exactly one. What would you do with several? But Captain Picard's extreme stress is symbolized in the episode Captain's Holiday – the camera lingers on the pads as the episode title appears – by Picard having a veritable mess of tablets in front of him.
Sensor data, presumably, the next personnel evaluation and perhaps even Shakespeare for the lunch break – but wait, that can't be, the boss is on vacation after all, he doesn't allow himself time for such distractions. And yet this symbol of overwork is simultaneously symptomatic of the fact that the authors of the time could only begin to imagine the real-world impact of the technology they had devised.
Nowadays, the contents of hundreds, thousands of such pads are stored in my notebook as a matter of course, and all the data I need comes to me via email, download or from the cloud. But in the 24th century, despite the central computer on every Federation ship, things are very different.
Every file seems to be assigned a padd, and if you request twelve reports, you get twelve tablets on your desk. Data is sometimes sent via the ship's intranet, but often enough it happens that a character says: “Hey, where's the analysis?” And with the words “Here!” a padd is handed to him.
In the Voyager episode Good Shepherd, the cinematic journey of such a Padd on foot and by turbolift across the entire ship to the lowest deck represents how data travels from the ivory tower of the bridge down to the lower ranks in the depths of the ship.
One of my favorite Padd anecdotes occurs in the DS9 episode “Explorers,” where while flirting with a new love interest in the bar, station doctor Dr. Bashir is interrupted by science officer Dax, who discreetly hands her a Padd that says “GO AWAY.”
Three episodes later, ship's hard worker O'Brien gives a lesson to the aspiring Starfleet cadet and Ferengi Nog, holding a padd in his hand – and if you press pause and look closely, you'll see that it says: “GO AWAY”.
Of course, the audience was not supposed to notice how a prop was reused in a hurry, but the questions immediately started in my head: Did O'Brien find the padd in the bar? Or did the padd crash at Dax's work and instead of the “Blue Screen of Death” the two striking words were burned into the screen – and now O'Brien takes over the role of the IT guy and is supposed to fix it?
The fact is: what looks like a tablet in Star Trek is obviously only capable of holding a single file, and receiving or transferring data seems to be impossible. The brave new world of the 24th century.
An excellent hook for conducting a reality check of everyday Star Trek technology today, many decades later. I am expressly not talking about the less realistic devices such as the warp drive or the transporter. These were created so that the characters could quickly get into the story of the week; they have little connection to the gadgets that surround us in the 21st century every day.
Secondly, I am not a physicist, as the Trek fans among academics have already filled countless books and lectures with the possibilities and impossibilities of beaming and faster-than-light speeds. At best, I am an uneducated pocket historian and sociologist with a great love of classic Star Trek.