Examples of times Troi was used well in the series?

[SoM]

Strikes me that it might just been more useful to make her a proper telepath. Have any of the writers discussed why they didn't just do that?

I suspect they thought it would short-circuit a lot of plots - it's one thing if Picard or Riker can read the poker face of the Romulan/Cardassian/whoever on the viewscreen and guess what they're up to, it's quite another if Troi can pipe up and say "Captain, the Romulan ship have planted mines at 020 mark 120". Spock wasn't afflicted by this primarily because they range-limited him - even when his mind-meld ability was introduced, it was only over short distances, and they soon limited it further to touch-only.

The problem with the character that emerged, however, was that her power was a horrible kludge of "still too powerful" and "too useless" - too powerful because she could sense deception at a million kilometres, and too useless because often they ignored this and, as everyone soon notices, just had her state the obvious - after all, if she did more than that, the plot would be over too soon. It was a simple failure of planning when they set up the show, and unlike other characters that were underplanned and didn't work in initial form (Worf, DS9's Bashir), they never really took steps to fix this. They should have depowered her, permanently, in the shuffle at the start of S2 when they moved Geordi to Engineering, retooled Worf, etc and worked from there.

 

[erastus25]

I may be in the minority but I liked her subplot of having difficulty passing the command test.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

I may be wrong, but I always thought that Gene Roddenberry came up with Deanna Troi, and he, not being a very experienced television writer, didn't realize that her powers were a nightmare to write for convincingly, and that you could only write two scenes where she's using her natural empathy: one in which she states the obvious and one in which she solves everything instantly.

 

[Amaris]

She had a good part to play in Disaster, she was shown to be inept as a command officer, but she was supposed to be. Also the episode with the cosmic string where she loses her mental abilities.

Plus, I'd like to think that after Deanna hooked up with Worf, that she was "well used" on a nightly basis.

I just watched "The Loss" last night (cosmic string). She is really effective in that episode, having to deal with a sudden and painful disability. Marina Sirtis can act, and when they gave her good opportunity to do so, she did very well.

 

[Silvercrest]

Strikes me that it might just been more useful to make her a proper telepath. Have any of the writers discussed why they didn't just do that?

I may be wrong, but I always thought that Gene Roddenberry came up with Deanna Troi, and he, not being a very experienced television writer, didn't realize that her powers were a nightmare to write for convincingly

I remember reading some quotes from Gene around the beginning of the series explaining how it would be hard to make a full telepath work: a character who's constantly bombarded with everyone's thoughts, who sees their companions say one thing and think another, etc. They'd turn into a quivering neurotic in short order. This is supposedly the reason Deanna was made just an empath.

Of course, that doesn't explain why Lwaxana Troi had no problem with it.

I think those quotes are in an old fanzine article. I'll have to go home and dig it out.