Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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Standardized Profile said:
The robot who couldn't act like a proper human was the most likable person on the crew.
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You know that honestly really sums up a lot of the problems I have with TNG. I don't dislike it, but the characters suck for a large portion of it. Even in some of the really good episodes people just show like no personality at all. I dunno if it was poor direction for the actors or maybe poor scripts or whatever it was, but TNG really had that issue. Come to think of it Enterprise, the Abramsverse, Discovery, and Picard all all have that exact same issue, just magnified.

Even comparing to Voyager which I really didn't enjoy, the characters on that show seemed like they had personality, just too much of it or the wrong kind of personality.
 
L50LasPak said:
You know that honestly really sums up a lot of the problems I have with TNG. I don't dislike it, but the characters suck for a large portion of it. Even in some of the really good episodes people just show like no personality at all. I dunno if it was poor direction for the actors or maybe poor scripts or whatever it was, but TNG really had that issue. Come to think of it Enterprise, the Abramsverse, Discovery, and Picard all all have that exact same issue, just magnified.

Even comparing to Voyager which I really didn't enjoy, the characters on that show seemed like they had personality, just too much of it or the wrong kind of personality.
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The scifi concepts really kept me interested more than the characters. It's not like they were one-dimensional, but more just very guarded; they were the best of the best of what humanity had become. Those kind of people won't be too relatable on a personal level.
I also generally enjoy slow burn characters, where you only find out pieces about them very slowly and all through actions. It's like getting to know real people on a daily basis. I like that kind of character stuff.


In the long run, all I know for sure is, give me overly serious TNG characters over unlikable retards on STD or literal one dimensional stereotypes of once layered people (JJ films) any day of the week.
 
Yeah the issues with all of the newer series including Enterprise has kind of overshadowed why I'm not a huge TNG fan myself. But at that point I'd be stating the obvious.
 
Pulaski wasn't nearly as goody-goody perfect as the rest of the main cast so her presence would stand out, and like Ro she goes from being very abrasive with everyone to connecting to the cast. I think that's part of the reason why some of the secondary cast stand out more and ended up getting pulled into a good amount of episodes. Characters like Ro, O'Brien, Barclay, and Alexander at least had room to grow and expand as characters. With the main cast you have something like Data, Picard, Worf, and Wesley who go through the most character growth, with my meaning being lasting change from episode to episode. Geordi is fine with engineering, Riker is eternally confined to second in command with a less than half baked conflict, Troi feels, and Beverley is lovely.
 
The problem here is that most of Star Trek isn't about the characters developing or growing, it's about a group of explorers from a society that barely has any problem. Even in a fuckup like Avatar you have the two main "villains" being some selfish ambitious bastard and the military dude with a grudge. Humans need to have conflict and all these characters don't really have much of those. Like, Riker wants to be the Captain of the Enterprise, but he doesn't want Picard to die nor he's ambitious enough to try to get him out. He's just too pleased where he is.

basil marceaux.DOTCOM said:
Not saying season 2 wasn't also bad... but at least it had moments. Can't say that for 1.
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Season 2 has a lot of memorable episodes. Measure of a Man is definitely one.
 
L50LasPak said:
You know that honestly really sums up a lot of the problems I have with TNG. I don't dislike it, but the characters suck for a large portion of it. Even in some of the really good episodes people just show like no personality at all. I dunno if it was poor direction for the actors or maybe poor scripts or whatever it was, but TNG really had that issue. Come to think of it Enterprise, the Abramsverse, Discovery, and Picard all all have that exact same issue, just magnified.

Even comparing to Voyager which I really didn't enjoy, the characters on that show seemed like they had personality, just too much of it or the wrong kind of personality.
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I'm a die hard TOS fan. and when TNG came out I just didn't care for it. It was very bland so after a few episodes I just stopped watching. Since then I've caught some episodes that I've liked (it was so long ago though that I couldn't tell you the episode names). And I've never really given any of the ST series a chance. Yeah I'm probably missing out, but I suspect not. Several years ago I caught one of the JJ movies (the one that had Nimoy in it) while I was in the hospital. It was a decent enough sci-fi action movie, but it was nothing like the Star Trek I prefer and has nothing in common with the series characters they were supposedly basing it on.

As for the crap they are pumping out now... I won't give it the time of day to even hate watch it. I've long since grown tired of the Powers That Be needing to inject a barge load of modern day politics into everything they touch. Of course ST had it's own share of contemporary social and political criticism in it, but they used a tack hammer whereas now the politics come first, genuine entertainment be damned. When i was a kid, I could watch a TOS episode and be thoroughly entertained by it while being completely oblivious to any social/political messages in it. As an adult I can appreciate the message while still being entertained.
 
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I was rewatching the episode where Bashir helps that catatonic genetic girl... and then immediately tries to fuck her. Like they said being a genetically enhanced meant all of your characteristics were enhanced like his fucking sex drive. Jesus was Julian a horny one. It's not even the first time he tries to fuck one of his patient there was also that cripple girl. Every time he brushes it off saying "I'm not her doctor anymore" dude, the fact that you both cured them of what were unti now impossible to cure and you've changed their lives drastically, ya think there might be a little bit of an unethical line there?

I mean it's not the worst but it's still funny, the second one with the genetic girl is really creepy I usually spend the whole episode shouting at the screen "No! Nooo! Julian, Don't do it, Nooo!"
 
L50LasPak said:
You know that honestly really sums up a lot of the problems I have with TNG. I don't dislike it, but the characters suck for a large portion of it. Even in some of the really good episodes people just show like no personality at all. I dunno if it was poor direction for the actors or maybe poor scripts or whatever it was, but TNG really had that issue. Come to think of it Enterprise, the Abramsverse, Discovery, and Picard all all have that exact same issue, just magnified.

Even comparing to Voyager which I really didn't enjoy, the characters on that show seemed like they had personality, just too much of it or the wrong kind of personality.
Click to expand...
Standardized Profile said:
The robot who couldn't act like a proper human was the most likable person on the crew.
Click to expand...
Pretty much why I was never that fond of TNG. The fucking android characters were more human than the entire cast. And yeah, Discovery, Picard and the Abramverse all suffer from this problem but magnified tenfold and without any remotely likeable characters, good acting or consistent writing to make up for it. Enterprise is weird though, its like they at least tried to be more "alive" and self-aware but the end result comes off as really awkward. Then there's Voyager which is just an entire crew of idiots who make batshit decisions.
On a side note, I'm going to vent about Q for a bit. Everything about the character just came off as annoying, yet ironically enough he felt more human than most of the cast too, although that may be in part thanks to his actor's natural charm. Another thing that bugged me was how much of a persistent nuisance he was in contrast to TOS where they effectively dealt with these supposed space genies with extreme prejudice if they posed any threat to the crew, so I pretty much loved it when Sisko didn't put up with Q's shit and just suckerpunched the bipolar prick back to TNG. Another thing that bugged me, and this is pretty apocryphal, was how a lot of ST novels and comics after Q's introduction kept retconning other omnipotents, space genies and supernatural entities from the franchise into being members of the Q species or existing because of the original Q's shenanigans. It really shrunk down the size of the setting and removed a lot of the charming mystery of these unexplored cosmos if everything could just be answered with "it was Q all along".
 
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rabo said:
I was rewatching the episode where Bashir helps that catatonic genetic girl... and then immediately tries to fuck her. Like they said being a genetically enhanced meant all of your characteristics were enhanced like his fucking sex drive. Jesus was Julian a horny one. It's not even the first time he tries to fuck one of his patient there was also that cripple girl. Every time he brushes it off saying "I'm not her doctor anymore" dude, the fact that you both cured them of what were unti now impossible to cure and you've changed their lives drastically, ya think there might be a little bit of an unethical line there?

I mean it's not the worst but it's still funny, the second one with the genetic girl is really creepy I usually spend the whole episode shouting at the screen "No! Nooo! Julian, Don't do it, Nooo!"
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Then apparently in the books all the nu shows are ripping off now, they become the fan-preferred couple.
 
Tasty Tatty said:
The problem here is that most of Star Trek isn't about the characters developing or growing, it's about a group of explorers from a society that barely has any problem. Even in a fuckup like Avatar you have the two main "villains" being some selfish ambitious bastard and the military dude with a grudge. Humans need to have conflict and all these characters don't really have much of those. Like, Riker wants to be the Captain of the Enterprise, but he doesn't want Picard to die nor he's ambitious enough to try to get him out. He's just too pleased where he is.
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I think that's because too many people only see it through limited window we're shown and base it on that. enterprise was the flagship, their bridge crew was literally starfleet's finest. it's spelled out more than once. and while it looks like a civilian cruiser, you still had a strict hierarchy in place. picard is talking a lot of decisions out, so when he gave an order (which was usually sensible enough based on overall consensus) no one had a problem with it. you could see the difference when jellico was captain for a while, where his different approach was clashing with the "established rule" was part of the episode.
as for conflict and grudges, you could argue humans in the 24th century humans evolved a bit to not flail around like a retard based on feels, least of all in the military, and again starfleet's cream of the crop. I never assumed the average rank and file behaves like picard and the rest. heck riker still fucks almost everything, implying he's still driven heavily by his urges, so it's not even that "enlightened" if you wanna call it that.

and of course it's based on a made for tv drama series with an established cast. in reality you'd never see the second in command or only android in the whole fleet spearhead possible dangerous away missions. same reason riker never took a promotion and transferred off the enterprise or replaced picard - which in-universe I honestly never had a problem with. peter principle is a thing, which smart people are hopefully aware of at that point, either themselves or others, and if you goal is commanding your own ship it doesn't necessarily mean "omg I gotta do it now ASAP for the rest of my life" (maybe that's the reason for all the grumpy admirals). people already put stuff on hold to do later career-wise, riker deciding to spend more time on the enterprise under picard doesn't seem that unrealistic. it was the flag ship after all with probably more shit going on than his own dinky ship doing some boring shit day in day out without all his mates around.

TLDR: it made more sense than it looked.
 
It is a shame that when they introduced Thomas Riker they didn't take advantage of the opportunity to ship Will off to his own ship finally and let the new Riker find his way on the Enterprise.

Above all else, DS9 should be respected in its willingness to shake things up. What killed Voyager and held TNG back is a refusal to mess with the status quo.

Well... TNG had an excuse as the first 3 seasons were filled with a lot of shake ups and experimentation. When they finally hit upon a winning formula I don't blame them for clinging to it after those growing pains.

Voyager freaking set it up, they should have gone whole hog. Every season kill 2 or 3 people off and bring new folks on. That it became TNG 2.0 is what really hurt its potential.
 
rabo said:
Every time he brushes it off saying "I'm not her doctor anymore" dude, the fact that you both cured them of what were unti now impossible to cure and you've changed their lives drastically, ya think there might be a little bit of an unethical line there?
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Is it? Miles would blow him if he cured him from gingerism.

That one enhanced woman was super creepy too.
 
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