Ron Moore of Battlestar Galactica’s take on technobabble:
A deeper truth is, I was never interested in coming up with an explanation for Why? Never. I mean, I suppose I could’ve come up with a sufficiently important-sounding bit of technobabble that would’ve made sense (you see, the Cylon double-talk sensors tracking the Olympic Carrier’s nonsense drive signature needed 15 minutes to relay the made-up data wave through the pretend continuum, then the Cylon navigational hyper silly system needed another 10 minutes to recalculate the flux capacitor, etc.) but what would that have really added to the drama?
– Ron Moore’s Blog
I'm a 30-year-old 
I dunno. To me, it adds something–it means that when somebody is explaining something, they are clever and we should probably listen to them about that particular topic. Or at least, trust them to do it properly. This is how real people behave.
I’m not big into unnecessary detail, but sometimes it’s a character/plot element. For instance, in Firefly, the engineer knows everything about the ship’s innards. The captain, virtually nothing. It’s amusing to me. He doesn’t care about the minutae, only that she understands it and can make the big spinny motor thingy in the back make their ship move fast. But it’s important that the audience know that she is geeky and absorbed in her work, because that’s part of her character. It’s enough to know that the technobabble exists, so we don’t have to hear a lot of it.
February 24th, 2005 at 6:48 pm
I’m with you. My point (and Ron’s, I suspect) is that technobabble for the sake of technobabble adds nothing to the story.
Used properly (as in your example of showing the audience that there is advanced technology, and that someone has thought about it in the script) it’s useful and helpful.
But if done for no real reason, or if over-used, as Next Generation was notorious for, it’s lame.
There was another bit (which I didn’t quote) where Ron explains that he also didn’t want to explain this particular situation because the characters wouldn’t have had the explanation, so it kept us closer to their situation and allowed us to relate to their confusion.
March 6th, 2005 at 11:55 pm