No, you can guess the writer's intent. Some guesses are better than others, but they're not the same as something you can objectively determine.Alyeska wrote:When you have incidents of people talking of Rikers inteligence and tactical skill you can tell the writiers intent.
In other words, when faced with an apparent contradiction, you can either say that it's meaningless or that the characters are idiots. If you choose the former, then how can you say that anything is "real" in this universe? It's just a manifestation of a writer's emotional state according to that approach, and need not obey any rules of consistency, which renders the goal of producing rational predictions utterly impossible.The problem is observed examples do not match the claims being made. Either I can't accept SOD and have to write off what the people said in dialogue, or I treat the people who stated the dialogue to be idiots trying to kiss Riker's ass and don't really know what they are talking about and just use the observed incidents of Riker's tactical skill.
If it's impossible to rationalize then you may have no choice but to consider it an outlier, and I think it's not unreasonable to consider real FX mistakes as such (for example, a fucked-up compositing job). The problem is that people then use this as an excuse to dismiss anything that they just don't like. They usually do so by making a half-hearted or nonexistent attempt to rationalize problems (a tactic similar to those used by creationists).Its not always visuals vs dialogue. Some times its mistakes in dialogue (5 examples of them saying this, but 1 example of them saying that) some times its mistakes in visuals (accurate military portrayl 90% of the time). Some times its contradictions in visuals (shows one thing, then shows another). And then as you mention some times there is a wide range of contradictory evidence. Firepower examples jumping all over the spectrum, warp speed constantly shifting, more then 150 faces seen on a ship with a crew of 130. In those cases it gets hard to rationalize and you just ignore that, pretend it didn't exist at all.
