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What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

You can find one of those? Even Nickleback has fans.

I like some Nickelback songs tbh. Never understood the immense hate they got. Same with Coldplay.

And of course you don't find any opinion 100% of the population will agree with, but I was more making a commentary about how some people on the internet already think their opinion is "controversial" when a couple of people disagree or that a show/game/character is "controversial" when a handful of people don't said show/game/character.
 
I like Nickleback.

I know, I know, wrong controversial thread.

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I guess my big misty eyed moments are...
* Spock's self sacrifice in "Wrath of Khan". Live long and prosper indeed.
* Jake dies in Sisko's arms in "The Visitor". It is a testament to Avery Brooks's sheer brilliance as an actor that he can say "Jake, my sweet boy" about a guy in his 80's... and I didn't laugh at all.
* Janeway defends her decision to stay with Voyager and says goodbye to Tuvok in "Year of Hell". When I watch her stand alone on the bridge and adjust the watch on her hip, it's usually... blurry.
* Picard and Data in "Et in Arcadia Ego". Nuff said.

I've teared up at other times (Belle, Sim, Lal I think), but not as reliably.
 
Yes, the rescue fleet warping away from Veridian III and leaving behind both the remains of the Enterprise-D and the body of James T. Kirk can make me misty-eyed. Dennis McCarthy's glorious score helps sell that film's best moments.
 
The opening of ST 09 will never not make me cry.

I can’t believe I didn’t mention this one. 100% And I’ve seen that movie 25 times easily.

Yes, the rescue fleet warping away from Veridian III and leaving behind both the remains of the Enterprise-D and the body of James T. Kirk can make me misty-eyed. Dennis McCarthy's glorious score helps sell that film's best moments.

You are correct sir.

And GEN has a criminally underrated score.
 
When Lal dies.
When the EMH's daughter dies.

Me = :wah:

I'm with you on Lal, but the Doctor's "daughter" was just a regular, non-sapient, non-living holodeck character. That episode always just made me roll my eyes. It was like watching some one take a video game way too seriously.
 
Yeah, I'm going to disagree. "Real Life" is one of the best VOY episodes, and one of the best holodeck episodes of the franchise. It's an in-your-face deconstruction of tropes that rendered a lot of Berman era episodes emotionally flat and banal.

It was like watching some one take a video game way too seriously.
That would only be the case if the Doctor didn't have genuine emotions. But he does. B'Elanna has reprogrammed the scenario with the aim of helping him better understand the human condition. This is a growing experience for the Doctor, as he discovers that he does indeed feel for others.
 
Yeah, I'm going to disagree. "Real Life" is one of the best VOY episodes, and one of the best holodeck episodes of the franchise. It's an in-your-face deconstruction of tropes that rendered a lot of Berman era episodes emotionally flat and banal.


That would only be the case if the Doctor didn't have genuine emotions. But he does. B'Elanna has reprogrammed the scenario with the aim of helping him better understand the human condition. This is a growing experience for the Doctor, as he discovers that he does indeed feel for others.

O'Brien, Bashir, Worf and Picard all have real emotions as well, but they're regularly killing holodeck characters because they're not real. The EMH's, Vic, Moriarty and the Duchess are - either by design or absurd accident - sapient beings. Baseline holograms are video game NPCs. The Doctor crying over his fictional daughter hits me about the same as watching some one crying at a sappy phone commercial.
 
O'Brien, Bashir, Worf and Picard all have real emotions as well, but they're regularly killing holodeck characters because they're not real. The EMH's, Vic, Moriarty and the Duchess are - either by design or absurd accident - sapient beings. Baseline holograms are video game NPCs. The Doctor crying over his fictional daughter hits me about the same as watching some one crying at a sappy phone commercial.
You just admitted that you're with @1001001 regarding Lal's death, but she's just as real as a video game, too.

I'm with you on Lal
 
No, she was obviously a living, sapient being. Holodeck characters are designed to be video game characters. The sapient, sentient ones are the exception to the rule.
I mean, last time I checked, it's all fiction, is what I meant. Picard and Lal are equally real as the Doctor's family. They're all completely unreal fictional characters. My point was you were affected by someone just as real as video game; that's what a fictional character is. It happens to all of us who have emotional reactions watching TV.
 
Obviously, but I'm talking about in-universe fictional characters. He may as well be crying over Flotter.
Again, so may all of us whose faces got moist when Lal died, or Kirk's father. To us, they are no more real than Flotter, yet we cry. Do we demand that fictional characters behave according to standards that we ourselves routinely do not live up to?

Well, some of clearly do, and in many ways.* I really try not to. YMMV.

* One example I get from my father all the time is the observation that characters are speaking with bad grammar. :sigh: That's a whole other tomato.
 
Again, so may all of us whose faces got moist when Lal died, or Kirk's father. To us, they are no more real than Flotter, yet we cry. Do we demand that fictional characters behave according to standards that we ourselves routinely do not live up to?

It's been a long time since I've seen the episode, but I remember his reaction as solidly "My daughter's dying!", not "A fictional character I like is dying."
 
It's been a long time since I've seen the episode, but I remember his reaction as solidly "My daughter's dying!", not "A fictional character I like is dying."
Well, there weren't really that many other holograms on the ship for him to interact with, you know (I mean, of course, other holograms like him). He'd bonded with them and basically adopted them, holograms that could conceivably become just as self aware and "sentient" as he was, if they were left on and had similar levels of resources allocated to them.

If we were talking about, say, Barclay, a human who became over-immersed in the holodeck, it would make sense to critique the character interaction. But these were programs more like of the Doctor's own kind. He had no "real" family, because he himself wasn't even a "real" person. He was just an Emergency Medical Holographic program that had been left continuously running. This was an experiment that he had elected to participate in, to explore human familial relations. It would have been self-defeating not to adopt them and become invested in the relationships. Torres's stroke was to give him something that he might learn from, to better understand the emotions that his patients might have when they face the loss of a loved one. That was far more useful for the purpose of improving his bedside manner than just hanging out with the "lollipops" he had programmed for himself.
 
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My second thought about Belle is that it's hard to sell the true tragedy of her death when it's neither essential nor inevitable. The Doctor could simply tell the holodeck: "Computer, change Belle's condition to make her injuries survivable." He's still experiencing family life, just skipping out on every parent's worst nightmare.

He can still deal with the difficulty of Jeffrey's friends, his wife's work, and helping with Belle's convalescence. Plenty of real life, I think.

As for my main thought... it would inevitably drag us off-topic.
 
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