To me, The Pegasus is Picard at his absolute worst in this regard: decloaking the ENT and causing a major diplomatic incident when he had no reason to do so, while simultaneously acting all self-righteous towards Riker for fucking up a decade prior.
TBF, that cloak was risky as fuck because using it for too long could blow up the power supply.
Well Troi and Rikerdid sneak off to the holodeck for a couple of days in the middle of a crises to netflix and chill (and gorge on triple chocolate fudge sundaes)
It was absolutely bizarre why they wrote these characters in the way that they did. First, they pick a TNG season instead of a post Nemesis time, which requires recreating a TNG set, finding Sirtis a proper wig, and finding TNG-era uniforms when it's been about ten years later IRL. Had they picked a post Nemesis timeline, they could have just redressed an ENT set for the Titan setting. Then, they pick Pegasus of all episodes where Riker in particular is in a high-stress situation caused by divided loyalties and would not be dicking around on the holodeck. Thirdly, watching Archer's inauguration isn't really inspiration to violate a lawfully given gag order. Remember that Picard didn't have the legal right to find classified documents, but called a bunch of personal favors to do so. Thus Riker was legally correct to not reveal information without Pressman's authorization.
Poorly, I might add.
Picard's career should have come to a screeching halt over that. Even if it was against Picard's sensibilities, and possibly against the law (treaty and all), the project had been approved by TPTB. There was a reason someone well above Picard's paygrade wanted a cloaking devise and it was not up to Picard to unilaterally tell the Romulans about it, especially after the Romulans attacked the Enterprise (melted an asteroid around them so they would die counts in my book). As soon as his report was written he should have been relieved of his command and quietly retired and told to shut up, he's done enough damage to the Federation, and if he so much as gets a parking ticket in the future he can expect to die in prison.
My feeling, which is admittedly headcanon, is that the more “military”-inclined line officers get sent to captain the combatant vessels involved actively in the border wars during this time period while guys like Picard, who have no real temperament to engage in warfare, are put into roles more fitting the exploratory and diplomatic role of Starfleet. I imagine that there are more than enough ships and officers in Starfleet by TNG’s time that these two career paths can exist without ever really overlapping.
I can see that, but at the same time it just seems odd to me that Starfleet would even go to the bother of using a shell of a ship (USS Hathaway) to use in a wargame against the flagship of the Federation when you have Picard saying stuff like "we need to practice battles again because it's been so long since we've had to" and then having someone like Maxwell going on about this bloody war against the Cardassians. And why bother doing any of it when the crews could just holodeck the bridge (or engineering or sickbay or wherever) and do wargames or other training there? We should have seen crewmembers using the holodeck to train for a mission so much that they can't get it wrong the same way NASA used simulators on their Mercury/Gemini/Apollo crews over and over and over again.
That's one of the few times we see Columbo lose his cool.
that was one of the Did You Know that I heard a lot when Nimoy passed was "sure you know Spock, might know Transformers, but did you know he was so evil he made Columbo lose his cool?"
For most irl naval history and especially in the Age of Sail the ships used for exploration and diplomacy were usually armed military ships. As the natives would be less inclined to oogle-bonga the explorers and/or diplomats if the probability of success is dramatically cut down by the volume of lead and/or steel fired at them. The Federation ship design philosophy still followed that line of thinking, albeit with phasers and photon torpedos, prior to Battle of Wolf 359.
The Galaxy-class can be outfitted into one mean motherfucker once you get rid of all the civilians and supporting infrastructure or at least thats my head canon.
Also, Shatner got roles after Trek. Weirdly, as lawyers, like in Matlock and Boston Legal. And his role in Boston Legal was possibly his best acting role.
That was from season 7, so that wasn't Roddenberry's fault since he was dead for years at that point. Blame that on late TNG starting to run out of ideas and filming whatever came to mind. Roddenberry was definitely a weird sex pervert, but you can't blame all the weird sex perversion in Trek on him.
