why, when something weird is happening to only one crewperson, do the characters not just assume something jacked up has happened? picard in "the battle", crusher in "remember me", riker in "future imperfect", barclay in "realm of fear", etc. you'd think after this happening 7 or 8 times people would start to work from the viewpoint that they are not freaking crazy, particularly since every time it happens it turns out that it really WAS something and not them being psycho. bugs me.
Yeah, and it seems everyone got their own "twisted reality" eps. Picard in "The Inner Light" Riker in "Future Imperfect" and "Frame of Mind" Crusher in "Remember Me" Worf in "Parallels" Troi in "Phantasms" and that other 7th season one I can't remember Geordi in "The Mind's Eye" Data in "Phantasms" with his weirdo dreaming. They all had their visits to the ST Twilight Zone.
exactly, sch! and yet every time they all act like it's a surprise to wake up in an alternate reality.
Ok, these episodes are 176 instances over 7 years. You've listed 10 "twisted reality" episodes. Roughly 10 of their days out of 2557... It's not all THAT common. Plus, in Remember Me, Crusher was INSIDE her own reality, no one believed her because all of those people weren't real. Besides, they were all humoring her and trying to find her friend at the beginning, and were trying to figure out what was going on. Even they were all creations inside of her own reality bubble. And then Riker, in Future Imperfect, was inside a hologram created by the boy. Of course the boy would make the characters not believe anything was wrong, in an attempt to convince Riker that nothing was wrong. Picard in The Battle? That was towards the beginning of the series, during season 1, so obviously they are all new with each other, besides, it started out as Picard just having unexplainable headaches, it's not like he suddenly started acting like someone else or had some odd thing happening to him that no one believed was actually happening to him. And if Realm of Fear is the one with the whole people in the transporter beam, Barclay was overly paranoid and scared of everything. Boy-who-cried-wolf syndrome. It's understandable that they wouldn't believe anything was happening to him.
Party Pooper!, we all know the OP is right. I've thought this before myself. Maybe Kirk comes on the bridge and sets a course directly towards a star and then runs off the bridge....later Spock tries to arrest Kirk but Kirk says he was sleeping in his quarters. Spock would shrug and assume it was another android/clone/space-ghost/pod person etc.
It's because of a wide spread disease known as Genre Blindness. Many famous fictional characters suffer from it, but unfortunately few seek a cure for it.
I know where the OP is coming from. Most recently I remember having this thought watching a SG1 episode (can't recall which one now), when I was thinking, "oh, fer crying out loud! Of course crazy shit is happenin' to Jack. Why can't you remember that it happens every damn week and just accept it?!?!?" Of course the audience is in a state of suspension of disbelief when watching drama, and I guess us accepting the assertion that the other characters don't believe the afflicted character is just part of that.
Yet funnily enough "Lost" gets quite a bit of stick for the characters not being genre blind. I've lost count of the number of posts I've seen wondering why they don't question the strange things that happen to them every week.
so glad that it's not just me this bugs! while i get the whole genre blindness thing you're getting at, kelthaz, but it just seems like they could have involved the audience so much more by building on these experiences instead of making the characters seem utterly slow. i guess they would have lost the option of stand alone episodes, but personally i'd rather see the characters build on past experience rather than have different characters experience variations on a theme.
DL, I totally agree, I was thinking about this while watching Parallels (which is VERY similar to AGT if you think about it) and thought that Worf had earned the right to be taken seriously sooner. At least in AGT people listen to Picard in the first act and start investigating! I always put these in the Uhura in Tholian Web category, c'mon people, these officers are professionals!
I think the worst example on SG-1 was when Daniel Jackson was seeing things that weren't there, so obviously they diagnosed him with schizophrenia and threw him into an insane asylum. Oh, don't get me wrong, I hate genre blindness. I much prefer Genre Savvyness in my characters. There's no excuse for writing characters who live and breath sci-fi/fantasy, but have them act totally inappropriate when something weird happens.
The worst instance of this I've seen in Trek is in the episode Clues. While Data is trying to deceive the crew he proposes a hypothesis about what's happening to them. After he gives his hypothesis he leaves the room and LaForge says something like "That's completely impossible! I'm amazed he even suggested it." I remember when I first saw the scene I thought "Yeah, you see utterly inexplicable, alien, and unknown stuff every day. However, with this idea you can right off the cuff dismiss it as impossible?" Another example is how the crew reacts to Q, especially in the early Q episodes. Q will do something and everyone will act like Doc Brown in Back to the Future, Part III - "This isn't true! It can't be real! I refuse to believe it's possible!" They're dealing with an omnipotent being, but adamently refuse to believe he's omnipotent.
ha! and yet in devil's due when ardra was pulling all that crap picard immediately suspected it was a con.