Doesn't Barclay count? Also there was Lon Suder on Voyager. I realize that Jayson was probably looking for something deeper than those examples.
Edit, yeah Suder was criminally insane I totally missed that sorry.
Bryan Fuller: Diversity is key
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Doesn't Barclay count? Also there was Lon Suder on Voyager. I realize that Jayson was probably looking for something deeper than those examples.
Edit, yeah Suder was criminally insane I totally missed that sorry.
No, it's a case of you not catching the part where I said that the sexual revolution missed out on straight men (cue Emma Watson he-for-she). Sorry I did not prefix every single reference to men with "straight" so you didn't lose context. I'd think the part about not turning women off would be obvious enough, as it would be of little interest to gay men.
Probably a side step here - but I can only think of Buck from the OA and OITNB's Sophia off the top of my head. I'm probably missing a few, but thats kind of odd that I know more trans people in person than I've seen on TV...
Does he? It was played for laughs, not pathos and angst.
Whose mental illnesses manifested violently.
Hmm, I'd say Barclay had a fair amount of angst going on in various episodes.
On Suder you are correct, I had edited my post right afterwards after missing Jayson specifying not violently disturbed.
On Suder you are correct, I had edited my post right afterwards after missing Jayson specifying not violently disturbed.
Yeah, but the audience was supposed to laugh. Voyager made him be taken seriously, but still be Reg.
I feel like "Realm Of Fear" took his phobias seriously and didn't reduce it to a joke.
"Hollow Pursuits" had comedy, and it's been longer since I've seen it, but I seem to remember at least one great scene of Barclay describing his anxiety issues in a way that was really touching and well-done.
I suppose the approach they took depended on who was/is writing it.
Not to defend one of the worst hours of Trek of all time but I think this story idea can work in the sense from Quark's perspective being a woman would be something he would be embarrassed about. Quark has always had backward views on women. I think they were trying to balance that out by making a big deal about how smart it is to give women equal rights in terms of having a strong economy and also showing that the Naqus's number one financial advisor was a woman. Basically saying that sexism is stupid on a intellectual level. At least that is what I think they were going for.
Jason
What about Garak?
It's done at least two, Reginald Barclay in TNG/FC/VOY and Lon Suder in VOY. Ninja'd by @The Grim Ghost.
It would be nice, if it wasn't done to make the character the butt of jokes because of their condition or to depict them as dangerously violent, though. Instead, say, show someone who suffers from depression; that's neither funny nor dangerous.
I'd agree there was no conscious intent to deliver insulting messages about women or trans people with "Profit & Lace"... in fact, I think the reverse is true, they probably thought they were making a fun comedy with a feminist message. Did that ever not work out, though! They weren't thinking deeply enough about how all this would play, and their own unconscious biases were infecting and warping it.
This also makes me think of that Trek era's two attempts to tackle a gay story, "The Outcast" on TNG and "Rejoined" on DS9. I appreciate the intent of "The Outcast", but it isn't fully successful. Their heart was in the right place, but they didn't grasp the underlying issues enough, and thus they end up with some accidentally homophobic moments mixed in with their attempt to deliver a pro-gay message. And then "Rejoined" comes along and is a great corrective to the mistakes of "The Outcast." Obviously a regular gay character would have been better, but as one-off message episodes goes, this is an excellent one -- powerful, moving, with an unmistakable moral but also avoiding lapsing into preaching.
Maybe Quark should have gotten cosmetic surgery to make him a Hewmon instead. He's always criticizing them.
I don't mind Garak's Clasta(have no idea how to spell it) phobia but it really is one of the safest mental illness's to use when tv shows want to use a mental illness. I think fear of heights might only beat it out in that category.
I would like to see someone who is bi-polar or manic depressive or like me with OCD, only show their is more to it than the someone just being a stickler for details and the hand washing and basically all the stuff you can play for laughs. For example you never see anyone with OCD who has the intrusive thoughts because people don't understand them. I can have very violent thoughts to people I love and feel compelled to repeat them to even thoughts of just saying mean things to people. For example when my Grandma was still alive I would feel the need to say "I don't Love you" for no reason at all. Then you deal with the guilt of having those thoughts and that was one of the reasons why I tried to will myself once into driving my truck into a lake. It doesn't matter if you never act on those thoughts or even if you don't believe them because it makes you feel like a horrible human being who has a evil soul, basically,
Jason
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For the record, it takes a real manly man to wear a pleated miniskirt and white pantyhose... in battle.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Evzones_at_Changing_of_the_Guard,_Syntagma_Square,_Athens.JPG
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Evzones_at_Changing_of_the_Guard,_Syntagma_Square,_Athens.JPG
Rejoined did really well for the time, and although it's a shame that's as far as Trek on TV has gone to date at least sightly redeems the franchise from ignoring the issue completely. My only real gripe with Rejoined is that the original romance between the previous Dax and Khan hosts that the new hosts 'remember' was a straight one. It would have been much stronger imho if the original relationship had also been homosexual, or left ambiguous. As the episode stands, the characters are engaged in a homosexual relationship only because their symbiotes remember the earlier, heterosexual, one.
once again we are running into a conflict between fans that want social issues presented straightforwardly and those who are content to have social messages given by allegory. Being set in a technological future utopia means that by definition they will have already solved whatever present day problem you want a light shined on, thus necessitating the allegory approach (which has it's own strengths which is why Roddenberry wanted to do it that way in the first place).
It has by no means been the case that present day problems are solved by technology in Star Trek.
There's always the struggling colony in which technology has failed, is backward, or is otherwise not state-of-the-art, and there could be colonies that explicitly reject technology. There are canonical examples of all of this.
Then, there are allergies, also canonical.
There's no reason why a crew member couldn't have any ailment that the writers want him or her to have. There are myriad excuses available to make anything happen.
Ha! When I saw the reference to Garak, I thought it was being brought up in the context of a gay character. "That doesn't count, he was only bisexual in the subtext" I thought. I had completely forgotten the claustrophobia.
I think that's a fair criticism, though it doesn't bother me personally. For me, they really managed to thread the needle on that one... they had already so thoroughly sold the Trill as capable of having sexual attraction to any type of person, I thought it truly felt incidental that the original hosts had been in a heterosexual marriage. I think the key decision was making the only form of intimacy we saw in this episode be between two women, and to really allow them to show some real passion for each other (and of course casting -- if either actress had been holding back, it would have failed). I could easily imagine some producer thinking they needed to put in, like, flashbacks to the male/female hosts, and putting a visual on that hetero backstory would have ruined it. Or if they hadn't been allowed to have that passionate kiss. This is where "The Outcast" went awry: while delivering their pro-gay message simultaneously making sure that everything we actually see happening is very very straight.
First of all, that sounds very difficult. I'm glad you didn't actually drive in to a lake.
Secondly, the difficulty with mental illness is that it is difficult to portray all the nuances that can be accompanied. There isn't a "cure" in the traditional medicinal sense of the word, and recovery can take more than an hour episode.
Finally, it's spelled "claustrophobia" though that wasn't the episode I was referring too.
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