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If you love [Star Trek] you must hate [Star Trek]
Posts
TNG
DS9
LD
TOS
SNW
VOY
ENT
SNW might creep past TOS eventually, but it's got a battle on its hands with LD.
one of the reasons why I feel it’s a terrible episode
It’s written backwards; it has a small handful of conflicts it wants to showcase and works backwards to make them happen, and it’s just insane the wild contrivances that get stacked atop each other to get to that point. Absolutely bottom of the barrel for me with TNG, or any show.
Ronny Cox giving 110% is about 35% more than that role needed
He doesn’t come off as tough or authoritative or statesmanlike, he comes off like a violent nursing home patient who thinks his roommate stole his ribbon candy
TNG
DS9
SNW
Disco
LD
TOS
VOY
ENT
Also SNW recent episode
I'm sorry, SNW started out episode 1 with the beard already in place.
Meh, it’s fine, I’m used to it and I have an incredible yen for criticality
My wife came in during that episode and asked me "Why is Star Trek talking to Siri?" It definitely made me giggle: inter-dimensional customer service comedy for the win.
I'll have to disagree with you there--we've got plenty of post-beard Riker episodes where Frakes got to do interesting things and the character had focus. Think stuff like Best of Both Worlds, Future Imperfect, First Contact, The Outcast, Frame of Mind, Second Chances, and The Pegasus. Those are all good to great episodes, though The Outcast hasn't aged well, being a half-hearted discussion of queer rights from a very 90s point of view.
It's more than Geordi got.
Yeah, I think making the Riker/Jellico conflict so personal was a mistake. It'd be better if Jellico was focused entirely on the negotiations with the Cardassians and Riker on saving Picard—there's plenty of conflict to mine there, you don't need to add ego on top of it.
If they had to go personal, make it about the fact the TNG mains never fought in the Cardassian Wars.* That always struck me as a weird detail. TNG starts off with Picard, Crusher, and Riker already considered among the best officers in Starfleet—and yet they little to no involvement in a conflict that had lasted twenty years? I know the writers hadn't come up with the Cardassians when they started TNG, but in-universe it implies Starfleet didn't take the conflict that seriously. If you have Jellico as someone who's spent all or most of his career fighting the Cardassians, then there's potential for conflict. You can imagine Jellico resenting what he sees as a bunch of pampered greenhorns riding in on Starfleet's most advanced ship (that never fought) after the smoke has cleared to tell him what to do. On Riker's end, you can imagine that he wouldn't trust someone he believed to have forgotten Starfleet's purpose—especially when they tell him to sacrifice Picard.
That's a way more interesting conflict than two grown-ass adults whining about duty shifts.
For my money, it’s the worst episode in TNG because all it wants is these major upending conflicts and doesn’t do any work to get there. It forces everything, which undercuts all immersion.
I wonder how he dealt with the Dominion War.
I figure either he got blown to hell in the first battle, or made it through the entire thing without a scratch.
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Well, he made it through, as he appears in Prodigy ~10 years after the war.
I know the books went a different route, but if you ask me to do a Dominion War series with TNG characters:
-Riker and Data get temporarily promoted to captain—Starfleet absolutely has more ships than qualified commanders. It's also a bad idea to load all your best talent into one unit when that unit might be destroyed. While they're happy to return to the Enterprise after the war, this plants the seeds for both wanting a chair permanently—Riker taking the Titan and Data intending to be Picard's XO until a spot opens up.
-Picard runs into bitter Stargazer survivors who are leery of serving with him in a combat situation. He does his best to keep Starfleet ideals alive despite the war, as a counterpoint to Sisko's willingness to compromise for the greater good.
-Riker gets put under Jellico's command. They still despise each other, but the stakes are higher and there's no room for pettiness. Teeth-clenched teamwork at its finest.
-Crusher is reassigned to a major hospital behind the line, providing long-term care to the wounded and displaced. Geordi gets sent to Earth, where he's involved in organizing civilian shipwrights to build/repair Starfleet ships as fast as possible. This is how we see the homefront and develop Geordi as a leader.
-Lots of character development for Troi and Lwaxana. Troi becomes Picard's first officer—she's a full commander and the most senior after Riker and Data. Lwaxana becomes something like the Unsinkable Molly Brown, but for keeping Betazed in the fight and helping war refugees. This is where Riker and Troi start to reignite their relationship permanently as opposed to the friends-with-benefits thing they had in late-TNG.
-Big focus on the Fall and subsequent Liberation of Betazed, with a detour for the Breen attack on Earth and its aftermath. Show the parts of the war DS9 mentioned or hinted at in passing.
-While most of the story would intentionally avoid DS9 (it was a big war, it's like the difference between a WW2 set in the Pacific and one set in Europe), the TNG characters are part of the final push to Cardassia and involved in the immediate post-war relief efforts.
(and more recently, a series of dad joke memes.)
As a more long term thing the concept of having your crew work shorter shifts could mean people are better rested and more able to deal with a crisis, but insisting that the heads of all your departments split off a third of each shift to go into a brand new shift you just made, and expecting those crew who potentially might not have even interacted with the others in their new shift rotation to function even close to their normal capability when they have potentially only days before getting into a shooting war was really not a wise move. Although the episode did give Troi one of the very few occasions to make use of her empathic abilities to state anything other than that the guys currently shooting at them were feeling aggression, when Riker comments on how confident Jellico is only for him to rebuff that he's not. Dude was shitting himself at the thought that Picard's mission might go so far south the Cardassians would start shooting again and throwing his weight around on the flagship to give himself the feeling of being in control of the situation.
It's astonishing, well maybe more depressing than astonishing, just how long the notion that a female character had to be put into some skintight catsuit to keep the viewers' attention lasted in Star Trek. On every occasion when they finally let the character, be it Troi, Seven or T'Pol, wear actual people clothes, they actually looked better in them than whatever onesie they'd been stitched into up until that point.
Needs a picture of LCARS.
Troi is just....odd. I can't remember if she went through academy but surely her background is counseling - again not command.
I get why they did it - Crusher was just totally irrelevant after Wesley left so McFadden was bored and Sirtis was probably frustrated at the sexy suits. But it was silly.
Hes Janeway's boss to boot.
4 shifts on the dauntless for sure
At least until like a year later when everyone showed up in inconsistent uniforms and got trounced by an antique ship. Hey wait a minute...
God DAMNIT, Jellico!
"Yes but it'll take a half hour."
"Well we're out of options here, do it!"
"You could just keep -
"Out. Of. Options. Lieutenant. Do the thing!"
I'm betting he also ordered the new uniforms. "Ok there's me... Picard.... Me and Troi... Troi... Me... Worf. That's ten people, three uniforms each so yeah, I'll take fifteen of the new uniforms."
"Your crew complement is 1,024."
"I don't recognize any of these names. La... Forge... I don't think any of these people work here any more. Fifteen, ensign."
Worse than Shades of Gray, a got damned clip show?
Obviously I’m not talking about clip shows
🤷♀️
I think the performances are awful and the dialogue stinks and those combined with the heavily contrived script add up to make the drama facile and childish
Wait, I thought you liked Disco?
Yeah. I've come to the conclusion that the vast majority of the problem is bad communication top to bottom. Jellico seems to think he's there to do one thing while the crew are on a completely opposite tack, nobody seems to be completely informed on either side of the table.
Jellico's changes are not bad in a vacuum, but zoomed out they're needlessly disruptive and a little cruel. Picard for his part shrugs his shoulders over the whole thing, offering up only the most tepid of compliments for Riker. It's really quite a bizarre change. And Riker fucks up and doesn't institute the changes, though arguably even if he had Jellico would have found something to hold him over the fire for - dude never had a chance.
It can all be explained by the script being written from the endpoint of a handful of conflicts and everything written in reverse to get the characters to that point
Nobody in that whole episode acts like themselves