I’m always bugged more by individual moments than bigger things. So while T’Pol might be wearing an old fun center carpet as a uniform, and the temporal Cold War is both overly complex and excruciatingly boring neither of those things bothers me more than the following.
In season one, there is an episode titled ‘Unexpected’. In this episode Tripp becomes space pregnant from an alien space mama. During his pregnancy he is framed as becoming irrationally overconcerned about the safety of very minor or unlikely hazards.
At one point, he is in engineering and complains that if you hold onto the handrail of the elevator while it moves, your fingers will be sliced off against the scaffolding since there is no gap.
A crew member brushes him off by just saying, essentially, “Lol skill issue, just don’t hold the handguard.”
Again, Tripp is the one being framed as irrational in this discussion. Because he has a problem with a handguard that slices your fingers off.
Space hormones or not, he’s right that it’s a terrible design.
The scariest thing is when escalators malfunction.
At least with an elevator you’ll either drop to your death or the brakes kick in making you just stuck for a few hours.
But an escalator, that’s a cheese grater powered by a motor strong enough to lift dozens of people up a flight of stairs.
Why do we even bother with them?
They’re just elevators with extra steps.
They’re have more throughput. If you’re somewhere high enough traffic they’re pretty clearly the only way to serve it.
If I had to take a guess, its because elevators have to start and stop a lot - whereas escalators operate contiguously. So in an often (well maybe not so much now) crowded place like a mall, you could be waiting a bit if you needed to change floors.
Contiguously and continuously.
Because people don’t want the exertion of actual stairs.
Guys, it is a pun. 😅
I thought you were going to segue into the Mitch Hedberg “the escalator is now stairs, sorry for the convenience” joke.