Do so. This thread will go on without you.
The Pegasus: The Riker RetCon
- Thread starter Mojochi
- Start date
And I consider you the same. Augment Bashir for the win.
No hard feelings.
I don't care if you disagree with my opinion. It's all good.
But saying that Bashir's genetic engineering "explains" his desire to be on DS9 was never true, even retroactively.
Can it go on without you? Because you're talking total nonsense.
Yes, its a better explanation than wanting to practice "frontier" medicine because he's racist against Bajorans and thinks they're the butt end of space (and remember they don't know about the wormhole yet).
I mean it did fit with his Season 1 characterization.
He definitely has a kind of patronizing, "colonialist" attitude about the Bajorans, but he's supposed to be shallow and brash and looking for "adventure." Those negatively qualities when we first meet him are literally the point of the character. He starts off as a douche and he grows over the course of the series.
Your imaginary retcon is not a "better" idea at all, it's just another way that the genetic engineering reveal guts the character. Fortunately, that one is at least in your head.
Basically Bashir was a shallow uninterestijng mediocore character who couldn't compete with any of the other characters' epic backstories:
* Kira's resistance fighter days
* Odo as one of the Founders
* Sisko as Jesus
* Quark's weird relationship with the Nangus(es)
All of the characters got developed and better storylines that made them more awesome and gave them hefty arcs. In Bashir's case, it was that he became a spy and that he was Augmented. The ethics of genetically "fixing" a child are inherently interesting by themselves let alone the Federation's reaction to it as a post-abelism society. I grew up with epilepsy and other conditions so it's very interesting to me.
I'm also a huge Bond fan.
So I have yet to hear a single one of your justifications for "why" it was bad and you hate it. You have yet to give one other than you seemingly think being an ordinary human with nothing interesting about him is inherently superior. I'd love to hear your reasons.
In the pilot Riker comes across as a hard charging careerist.The Pegasus incident( while yet unwritten )can’t have happened too much earlier.So given the role models he had encountered so far,Pressman and Kyle Riker I don’t think it’s any surprise that Will came to a screeching halt when he met a genuine hero like Picard.IMO Riker stayed so long on the big E to soak up and yeah enjoy all the good stuff about being around Picard.
Well I enjoy the Pegasus and its definitely on my re-watch list.
I'm not saying the retcon was necessarily bad. But I also feel that they could have improved his character without making him a super-speshul augment baby. Just have him mature over the seasons and develop into a better man and such.
Also you forget the characters who didn't have a dramatic backstory:
O'Brien: Hard working everyman who used to be stationed on the Enterprise, but really didn't do much there.
Jadzia (sans Dax): No backstory whatsoever.
Jadzia (including Dax): Some adventure loving Trill one of who's previous hosts just happened to have known a young Sisko and is really into food that keeps your digestive tract healthy.And is like the one millionth character in 90s Trek who fanbois Klingon culture for no apparent reason.
Rom: A loser Ferengi who works for his brother.
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Eh, Dax is always having some epic Curzon moment due to being a Trill.
* Serial killer past life
* Klingon Blood Oath
* First Scifi lesbian on television backstory
The Trill got explored pretty deeply.
You're right about Miles being the everyman, though.
* Serial killer past life
* Klingon Blood Oath
* First Scifi lesbian on television backstory
The Trill got explored pretty deeply.
You're right about Miles being the everyman, though.
Nothing of which is about Jadzia, who was absolutely blank slate as far as her backstory goes...and really, Klingons were over-done at the time, so I wouldn't call that a plus.
And the Serial Killer past life was just as much a later retcon as Bashir being augmented.
PFFFFFFFFFFT!
A kiss between to perfectly feminine, conventionally beautiful young, heterosexual women who " don't worry, male audience, they aren't really lesbian because of some alien scifi reason"
That wasn't brave or ground breaking or anything, and I wager it happened chiefly for the titillation of their target audience.
Didn’t do much?
O’Brien spent time in engineering,security and at the helm before settling in as transporter chief.
Granted though,standing in transporter room one all day must’ve gotten real old real quick.
Let me rephrase, he didn't do anything dramatic that would compare with, for example, Kira's backstory as a live-long resistance fighter.
And King of the Pocket Protector Dweebs, in their life as Tobin.
Not, that's not a retcon at all, that's just a reveal of a previously unknown fact. The retcon is changing what we knew about a character. Bashir's is a "retcon" since the reveal fundamentally alters the established reality of the character we thought we knew and makes Julian into someone who has been lying to the entire world since long before the series even began.
Yup. The writers thought they were being "brave", but went about it in the safest, blandest, most mealy-mouthed way possible. It was barely a step up after the dreadful "The Outcast."
For the record, the second episode with a cloaked ship (or, more precisely, a ship capable of cloaking that in any case appears out of nowhere) is "The Deadly Years." The first is "Balance of Terror," of course. "The Enterprise Incident" is the third.
By 20's standards, it wasn't all that brave. When we have a married same-sex couple in the cast of "Discovery", a mere kiss is nothing. Things were different in the '80's and '90's, especially with the adolescent and young male demographic Trek was targeting.
But the episode's story is couched in a silly sci-fi metaphor and the episode all but shouts at you, "THIS IS IMPORTANT! WE'RE TAKING A STAND Well, kinda!"
A far "braver" stance would have just been to have gay characters in there as a matter of course like it was NBD.
