What's with 'captain's log' when stuff is happening?

[slug]

It happened all the time in Tos and a lot in TNG

 

What the hell is supposed to be going on when the captain makes a log entry mid scene or when he's tied to a wall or something?

 

Is he just drafting it in his head?

 

Is he using 'the captain's telepathic logbook'?

[TetsuoShima]

Drafting I presume. :p

[Arktis]

Sometimes you can accept it as a narration of events happening in the show being overlayed from the log back onto past events the log is desrcibing, but sometimes the actual contents of the log entry are such that this explanation does not fit and you can't see where the person doing the log would have had the time to make it during the events being described, which leads to the so-called "telepathic log entry" problem I think you're talking about, slug.

 

So yeah I'd have to say it's a pretty noticable flaw sometimes. If I were anal about it, I would probably watch some episodes to provide examples of when it works and when it doesn't, but I think you get the jist of what I am saying.

[slug]

Yeh, I was watching Star Trek TNG - 2x11 - Contagion and Picard was making a log entry about how the Yamato had just blown up but he didn't have time to grieve or what have you because the Romulans had just shown up, all mid scene, and I remembered how this was always a recurring thing in TOS, they probably phased it out in later seasons of TNG for being so crummy and absurd.

 

I think a lot of it has to do with commercial breaks, requiring a recap after them, except the writers seem to forget that the characters have not taken a few minutes out to be enticed to buy things or urinate or make toast or something else, such as make little logs about the problems they are facing.

 

I think there was a joke about this in Futurama, with Branagan randomly dictating the plot to a shot of the ship flying by, the shot cuts to the bridge and Kif asks him who he's talking to and Branagan is dismayed that no-one is writing down his monologue.