Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

Honestly everytime I rewatch TNG I like Pulaski a little more and I wish they'd have kept her around longer than one season. She was a lot more interesting than Beverly. She added a lot to the briefing room. Beverly adds nothing to most scene except a bit of eye candy, she's not very opinionated, most of what she felt or thought mirrored what Troi would have said anyway.
 
The show bible hyped up Crusher as an Amazon with the body of a "striptease queen" and then what we get is some sad guidance counselor? (Similar to Bashir who was pitched as a sex pest who probably would've talked like a horny GTA rado host, but on screen he’s a dweeby Indian med student.)

So then I think, “maybe Mirror Universe Beverly will be a freaky-deaky evil milf". In the novels, it’s literally the same personality but Picard murders her husband, marries her by force, and then she goes ape during the wedding night and claws his eye out. So he kills her. STO: same Beverly AGAIN, except her spawn Wesley is emperor of the Terran Empire.

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Honestly everytime I rewatch TNG I like Pulaski a little more and I wish they'd have kept her around longer than one season. She was a lot more interesting than Beverly. She added a lot to the briefing room. Beverly adds nothing to most scene except a bit of eye candy, she's not very opinionated, most of what she felt or thought mirrored what Troi would have said anyway.
You know what? I get what you're saying... Beverly is and always has been lacking as a character, but Pulaski had X-Pac heat for me at first. (For all you non-wrestling nerds, it means she's a bitch and nearly any time she was on screen, I wish she wasn't. XD)

Having just re-watched the entirety of Season 2 within the past few weeks, I can say that I still do not really like her... But she definitely put her worst foot forward... I do not feel nearly as negatively about her as I originally did.

I remembered her doubling down after she first antagonized Data (while he was too innocent to even notice she was mocking him, let alone reply in kind) After her first few episodes, she seems to have read the room and kept her shitty opinions about Data to herself. And yeah, she did get better.

I do maintain... I don't think it was because she was actually a good person... She was still clearly a massive bitch.
 
While Tuvix will always be remembered as Janeway's most fucked call basically marching somebody to their death because we need to maintain the status quo and revert this insane change the writers thought of.
I think it's possibly the dumbest moral dilemma episode in Trek because it relies on a totally made-up scenario. It's not a metaphor for anything real and it's not an interesting thought experiment. Everything about how that situation is supposed to work is explained through exposition and you have to take Tuvix's word that splitting him up counts as murder but fusing people doesn't. You can't really form an independent conclusion about it; it works the way the story says it works. Like, Insurrection was retarded, but you can at least grasp what kind of problem the story was attempting to address and what the two points of view are.

Now that I think about it, it's a bit like Principal and Pauper: Janeway is forced to choose between either making a permanent cast change for the worse, or resetting the status quo and pretending it never happened for the good of the show. And this is VOY here so obviously it will be the latter. Furthermore, Tuvix is an abomination who belongs in hell.

But also, if two people who are carrying around Vulcan katras got fused in a transporter, what happens to the katras? Do transporter cloning accidents also clone souls?

Is that the one where Barclay devolves into a spider-monster and Troi devolves into a trout?
That was a good one. Makes you wonder if humans have really come so far from our spider ancestors.
 
Yep. Worf becomes basically a predator-xenomorph hybrid, Riker a neanderthal and some other weird shit. It's a shame they never weaponised that stuff during the Dominion war.
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Worf turning into a venom spitting monster was actually sick. That’s the episode I wanna see.

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Instead, they give us Animorphs.

And then because TV writers think you’re choking on Legos while watching this, they spoil the entire setup by showing the crew mid-mutation before Picard even gets there in his shuttle.
 
Is that the one where Barclay devolves into a spider-monster and Troi devolves into a trout?

Star Trek has nothing to teach about evolution, their idea of evolution is a furry convention.

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And there we have it. The dumbest episode in Voyager. It's a shame because it starts good. Breaking the warp threshold, the weird changes happening in Paris. It feels like it's all going to lead to something interesting and theeeeen.

......yeaaaah. I jus can't imagine all the ramifications this episode would have if you know, they'd ever acknowledge it, which we know ain't happening. Also another case of the doctor curing crazy shit off camera. "B'lana got turned into a human and a klingon?" Fixed off screen! "Janeway and Paris got turned into giant salamanders?" Fixed off screen! "Picard, Ro and Keiko got de-aged?" Fixed off screen! "Geordie got turned into a dark light glowing ape?" Fixed off screen! "The whole crew got turned into retrovolved animals?" Fixed off screen! "Pulaski got super-aged?" Fixed off screen! "Ro and Geordie are phased out of line?" Fixed off screen!

I could keep going, but yeah, the magic of fixing everything off screen in the last few minutes of the episode in order to maintain status quo was the biggest hand-wave of the show.
 
Also another case of the doctor curing crazy shit off camera. "B'lana got turned into a human and a klingon?" Fixed off screen! "Janeway and Paris got turned into giant salamanders?" Fixed off screen!
The worst example has to be Janeway, Tuvok, and B'Elanna willingly getting assimilated by the Borg, and by the end of the episode, they're no worse for wear.
I could keep going, but yeah, the magic of fixing everything off screen in the last few minutes of the episode in order to maintain status quo was the biggest hand-wave of the show.
Say what you will about Tuvix, but at least he wasn't defused offscreen.
 
The worst example has to be Janeway, Tuvok, and B'Elanna willingly getting assimilated by the Borg
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TNG could handwave Picard getting de-Borged in a commerical break, eye ripped out, arm snapped off, cut to his ready room and he’s fine, sipping earl grey.

But when you got half the VOY bridge crew regularly walking in and out of Borg cubes like it’s a 7-Eleven, "I’ll just get assimilated real quick,"... it’s all treated like a minor inconvenience. I never really got why the Borg were seen as this bogeyman in the Delta Quadrant when, apparently, it’s a common procedure to de-assimilate somebody.
 
But when you got half the VOY bridge crew regularly walking in and out of Borg cubes like it’s a 7-Eleven, "I’ll just get assimilated real quick,"... it’s all treated like a minor inconvenience. I never really got why the Borg were seen as this bogeyman in the Delta Quadrant when, apparently, it’s a common procedure to de-assimilate somebody.
All this while at the same time, Seven of Nine, on the other hand, deals with consequences of being a drone for the rest of the show, having constant malfunctions and fuck ups because of her borg physiology just not giving up. Of course some of it can be explained that Anika was assimilated for so long the borg components of her body have been fully assimilated into her biology while the rest of the crew was "freshly" assimilated and maybe it's easier to get somebody out if you get them back in the "golden hour".
 
All this while at the same time, Seven of Nine, on the other hand, deals with consequences of being a drone for the rest of the show, having constant malfunctions and fuck ups because of her borg physiology just not giving up. Of course some of it can be explained that Anika was assimilated for so long the borg components of her body have been fully assimilated into her biology while the rest of the crew was "freshly" assimilated and maybe it's easier to get somebody out if you get them back in the "golden hour".
It reminded me of Morpheus in The Matrix stating don’t unplug the old heads, they’ll go insane and claw at the walls.

Seven is all-in on the Borg philosophy. She knowingly steered her little splinter cell of disconnected drones back into the hive mind when they had a chance to walk away. Janeway had to kidnap, imprison and reeducate her, and even after she’s team Voyager, she’s still quoting Borg scripture verbatim? She’s a cradle-Borg.

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It's always a blast when they let some hostile rep from a rival race into Starfleet and suddenly you’ve got to balance the useful psychopathy of their people with kumbaya Federation. (ENT and STD both tried to do the same thing, but they fell short, probably because writing morally "grey" characters is harder.)
 
Watching TNG with my friend again tonight. She asked me about Gowron, namely if he was a good guy or a bad guy. I told her that he was better than the other options, but he's still a fucking politician... so he's kind of a piece of shit. She said, "So he's like Trump?"
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I laughed.
 
"Geordie got turned into a dark light glowing ape?" Fixed off screen!
They had the whole process of diagnosing and then fixing the other crewmember who was going through the same change. They didn't need to show him being fixed as well.

"Pulaski got super-aged?" Fixed off screen! "Ro and Geordie are phased out of line?" Fixed off screen!
These were explicitly fixed on screen. Pulaski was fed backwards through the transporter with some of her hair to fix her. Ro and Geordi managed to convince Data to flood 10-forward with anion particles so they could phase back into existence in the middle of their wake and finally shut up Riker's endless tromboning.

The worst example has to be Janeway, Tuvok, and B'Elanna willingly getting assimilated by the Borg, and by the end of the episode, they're no worse for wear.
Everyone talks about the salamander episode as the worst one, but it's nothing compared to this. What a fucking piece of idiocy. They'd all be traumatised and catatonic from the unbearable pain of having their guts turned inside and and threaded with pipes. And notice how none of them had ocular implants? Can't let the heroes have their faces scarred!
 
I just re-watched "Darmok". No, their stupid meme language still doesn't make any sense.

Paul Winfield and Stewart were clearly acting their asses off trying to sell it though, and I can respect that.
 
I just re-watched "Darmok". No, their stupid meme language still doesn't make any sense.
It's a little overplayed but totally believable if you try listening to a zoomer nowadays.

Or really any generation just two steps beyond your own. They will have memes and cultural references that will completely baffle you even if you understand the words they are saying. Really Darmok should have been the standard of every first contact even with a universal translator. "We understand your words, but their contexts makes no dang sense to us."
 
It's a little overplayed but totally believable if you try listening to a zoomer nowadays.

Or really any generation just two steps beyond your own. They will have memes and cultural references that will completely baffle you even if you understand the words they are saying. Really Darmok should have been the standard of every first contact even with a universal translator. "We understand your words, but their contexts makes no dang sense to us."
I get it... "Meme language, ahead of it's time." but... Memes are language shorthand. They only work if there is a longer language to work off of. What the fuck does "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" even mean unless you have words for "and" and "at"?
 
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