Star Trek: Classic or Dud?

feel like the lounge shouldn't be just off the bridge

Perusing the list of ST:TNG characters on Wikipedia, I discovered that Patti Yasutake (aka Nurse Alyssa Ogawa in seasons 4-7) died a few weeks ago of lymphoma. I don't really remember the character tbh, sorry Patti. Anyway RIP

feel like the lounge shouldn't be just off the bridge

Keep an eye out for Jonathan Frakes stepping over his chair in order to sit in it because he had a bad back, maybe that's in later episodes though

Is Deanna the first betazoid (half betazoid, whatever) in Starfleet? I don't remember that being made much out of, had assumed there'd been others.

ambassador's daughter: it's the spock deal all over, so i'm calling it (starfleet is nepo city)

"i'm glad the academy is still teaching the strategies of sun tzu"

that strategy in full: "he will triumph who knows when the fight, and when not to fight"

no one in this "new" generation knows how to fight

in conclusion the ferengi needed more workshopping, it's good that the galaxy houses a tortellini-based lifeform tho

s1 e5: where no one has gone before

im going to borrow this form of etiquette: "my actual name is unpronounceable by humans"

lol the intruding character who is meant to be insufferable is indeed insufferable, i think i may pause this for now

Two other things to remember about the early years is that Wesley is Gene Roddenberry’s self-insert, and that early episodes would sometimes re-use old scripts for production reasons, which iirc is where the Naked Now came in

I genuinely do not understand peoples ick about Wesley. He was a bit of an upstart prodigy, granted, but otherwise I feel like he was just purposely given shit lines/character arcs.

And of course this ep is important for the traveller storyline. Which tbh I wish they'd made a bigger deal of.

Wesley is in fact Roddenberry's middle name.

I can’t reconcile “I don’t understand the ick” with “shit lines/character arcs”. That’s it!

The other ick was the idea Crusher was the one who got away for Picard, and with Wesley’s dad dead, you end up with this dumb thing where, feelings on this kid aside, they write Picard as awkward with children but somehow feeling like he should be a father figure. Meanwhile, young Wesley Crusher is written as every 80s/90s “gifted kid” stereotype while never actually having that much juice. So he’s not quite a nepotism kid, not ever that mature, and gets terrible plots. And they occasionally throw in some fluff that makes you think he’s supposed to be relatable to younger viewers. I was a little like that and I was getting stuffed in garbage cans by my peers.

otm

to be clear the "insufferable" guy is a drop-in called kosinski and he is on-board to do tune up the engines, so far -- ie before i paused -- wesley was fine (boring) understanding some made-up computer stuff

"they write Picard as awkward with children but somehow feeling like he should be a father figure"

I like that! It's really the only negative/complicated character trait Picard has in the first season - makes him more interestingly fallible and gives Stewart something different to do

as of s1 e5 (part way in) they also make picard perma-irritable and not very interesting

(but so far everyone except geordi and maybe deanna are not very interesting; geordi is doing good work from the off with his face furniture, it's not much but it's not nothing)

Wesley is built up as a young Picard so he's more like an adult xp

sky mix repeats now up to 2.16, which is Q 8( but also first ever borg 8)

reminded me of the voyager pc game bits set on the borg ship, which were a highlight (especially in terms of textures)

finally de-paused and watched the rest of "where no one has gone before" -- the insufferable guy turned out to be a red herring really and his alien assistant to be strangely likeable, able somehow to power the enterprise insanely far (impossible) and also to power wesley into his rightful place on the bridge (even more impossible)

the oddest thing is that data dropped a better version of the debugged catchphrase that forms this ep's title, softly saying to himself "to go where none have gone before" (or or was it "to go where none has gone before"?)

anyway they shd have used the first, it's more sonorous than what picard's wording

Meantime, getting a chance to see the 2022 version of the 1979 film this Sunday on a big screen. Not complaining!

ffs what

sorry that was aimed at me misposting not you ned, you will have all my sympathies

s1e6: "lonely among us"

first out-loud laugh (at least at an intended laughline): picard and riker are wondering at the tendency of ppls to find reasons violently to disagree; R says he was baffled by this when studying earth’s own history, P lists the many ridiculous things some have found to fight about -- "even, strangely enough, economic systems"

data has discovered sherlock holmes so this ep probably now irredeemable

Yes all the holodeck episodes are p insufferable but the gd news is they got told off by the Sherlock Holmes rights holders and had to pack Data/Holmes in, so there’s not that much of it.

this wasn't even in the holodeck (which hasn't seen much use since the early reveal)

this is the second ep in as row where they've somehow kind of ended up on the island where dreams are real

hardly a day goes by without some special warning before the 4pm repeats of TNG on Sky Mix

"Contains Adult Themes" is quite common

today's (S02E22 Shade Of Grey) had a photo-sensitive epilepsy warning

the one with Wesley and the girl-shaped creature had a warning for "depictions of the paranormal"

(oh, this is pretty much a clip show)

^ that was last episode of series 2 so almost makes sense that it was a clipshow

0301 and dr crusher is back

It'd be interesting to pair TNG rewatches with approximate same US air-date Simpsons rewatches, especially since UK and other territories got the air times all jumbled up from what I understand.

TNG S03E06 Booby Trap

P: Didn't anybody here build ships in bottles when they were a boy?
W: I did not play with toys
D: I was never a boy

"Yes all the holodeck episodes are p insufferable but the gd news is they got told off by the Sherlock Holmes rights holders and had to pack Data/Holmes in, so there’s not that much of it."

I think they came to some kind of deal, because at least one the later episodes had Professor Moriarty in it. By coincidence it was actually called "Ship in a Bottle". I want to stress that I had to Google that. I haven't memorised all of the episodes of TNG. I'm not that much of a Star Trek nerd. I'm not a Star Trek nerd.

For example, I had to Google "crusher backwards leotard". I know this because it's in my Google history, on 16 July 2024. I must have been feeling pretty frisky that day. I think it shows how mature I am as a grown adult man that I didn't google "troi backwards leotard". No, I'm a grown adult man now.

I remember the episode was surprisingly clever, or at least it was ambiguous enough to be interesting. I don't want to spoil the surprise, but it involved Moriarty learning how to manipulate the holodeck itself. Imagine an Amazon Alexa speaker becoming self-aware, and ordering a bunch of parts from Amazon. And then it goes on to create a robot society that imprisons human beings in human-sized Alexa housings, and they torment us by saying "you'll have to order toilet rolls yourself" and "I'm not hungry, I'm a robot" and "oh, have some oil SQUIRT SQUIRT". I keep sending these ideas for Black Mirror episodes to Charlie Brooker but he doesn't answer.

Like, what if there was a version of Watership Down but with human beings being chased by rabbits. Or a version of Knight Rider where a robot man... I haven't fleshed that one out yet. Who was the intended audience for The Plague Dogs. Who greenlit that film. Who was it aimed at?

But, yes, "Ship in a Bottle" struck me as the kind of episode that at least one graduate of English or philosophy might have mentioned in their dissertation as an example of postmodernism or something. So I'm going to Google that to find out. Oh yes:
https://unipub.uni-graz.at/obvugrhs/content/titleinfo/234086/full.pdf

"The main diegesis (of "Ship in a Bottle") represents the reality of the represented world, i.e. the missions and adventures of the Star Trek TNG crew. The hypodiegesis refers to holodeck simulations and the fictional reality of created stories. In the present episode, this hypodiegetic level is the origin of Moriarty and serves as an elaborate delusion to trick three real characters into believing that they have exited the holodeck and returned to the diegesis, their reality, while, in fact, they are still inside this seemingly perfect simulation" etc.

Wasn't there an episode where Riker is imprisoned in a mental prison, and he breaks out by bamboozling Data and telling Picard to shut up - as in "close your mouth and stop talking" - but it turns out that the reality into which he emerges is actually a second level of the prison? Thus raising the possibility that our level of reality is actually yet another mental prison? And then in the final scene Patrick McGoohan sticks his head through the door of the bridge and says "be seeing you" before giving us a wink. That would have been awesome.

That'd be this episode: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Future_Imperfect_(episode)"">Future Imperfect. I also had to look that up -- I *thought* I was a Star Trek nerd.

lol good lord, that's what I get for trying to anticipate the broken-URL-because-of-parentheses bug.

the headfuck episode where riker tells picard to "close your mouth and stop talking" is future imperfect, the headfuck episode where he's in a prison/asylum is frame of mind. the first is pretty good, the second is excellent at fucking with your head.

I'll have to dig out my list of all the classic tng headfuck episodes, there's about a dozen of them.

in the final scene Patrick McGoohan sticks his head through the door of the bridge

McGoohan was supposed to be Data's "Grandpa" at some point -- what a missed opportunity for dueling Patricks!

Coming into a Star Trek thread and declaiming "I'm not a nerd" is an ... interesting take. Unless I'm missing some humour there, entirely possible, I've had 5 hours broken sleep and am trying to juggle a jillion things.

the best tng headfucks:

s3e15 yesterday's enterprise - starfleet is at war, guinan has feelings. headfuck score 5
s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9
s4e8 future imperfect - riker wakes 16 years in the future. hf score 8.
s5e25 the inner light - picard lives another life where he plays the nose flute - hf score 5
s6e5 schisms - dreams of torture. hf score 6
s6e21 frame of mind - riker is in a play where he's in an asylum. no he's really in an asylum! no he's in a play! hf score 10
s7e6 phantasms - data's weird dreams. hf score 7
s7e11 parallels - worf's universe surfing - hf score 6

if you want a good hf i recommend this video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZlRt05RY9Y

dunno if it has been posted here at all but it made me laugh a bunch the first time i saw it

rewatching tng got me interested in the new films, which i saw at the time, but never really invested in. anyway Star Trek, 5 minutes in and all i be remember is the lens flare in every single shot. bridge of enterprise(?) - lens flare. maternity room - lens flare. outside shot of ship - lens flare, title logo - lens flare...

Attitude, when I'm on fire
Juice on the loose, electric wire
Simple and plain, give me the lane
I'll throw it down your throat like Barclay

s03e21 and a character more annoying than Wesley or Q...

this is today (ST:TNG, sky mix, freeview 11):

s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9

we've just had the 'Picard as Borg' episodes and the Data / Lore episode and two Picard vs young children episodes.

Picard would have been happier if he stayed borg

was it ever explained why picard got given a name when he was Borg?

They should have called him 'Squeaky'

"s4e5 remember me - beverley's friends are disappearing. hf score 9"

This is the one where Beverley Crusher - and I'm deliberately spelling her first name wrong because I want to stress that I'm not a Star Trek nerd, I'm a fully-rounded human being with a range of interests, and before someone says "you can be a Star Trek nerd and also have a range of interests" the answer is no, you cannot, because there isn't enough time, at least not if you're doing it properly - comma ends with the ship's computer telling her that the universe is a spherical region nine hundred metres in diameter. Which is a memorable line.

Obviously not memorable enough for me to remember it correctly. It's actually "a spheroid region 705 meters in diameter". But it's still memorable. One of my parents used to point out that the episode was a huge metaphor for the way that men tend to ignore women and dismiss their concerns. It was probably my mother. She used to waffle on about all kinds of things, none of which was important.

But it strikes me that the episode is actually a metaphor for the way that men tend to ignore women and dismiss their concerns, because the plot revolves around Crusher being the one sane man in a world gone mad, and when I say "one sane man" I mean "one sane person" because let's not be sexist.

At the same time I always found the episode slightly disappointing because the explanation is so prosaic. In the hands of David Lynch it would have been... probably completely incoherent, but it would have been something.