Fans, why did the ratings slide?
- Thread starter Warped9
- Start date
When did he do that? Before or after he poisoned the wells?
TNG's first season is now almost completely unwatchable, with most of Braga's TNG output later on in its run head and shoulders above earlier earnest dross like "The Neutral Zone".
The trouble was that Brannon Braga liked putting Riker through the grinder in his stories: in "Frame of Mind" Riker was mind raped, thinking he was in some hellish alien asylum, and in "Timescape" Riker gets mauled by Spot then spends most of the episode lying on the floor.
I don't think Braga deserves a lot of blame for TNG's problems...maybe the later Star Trek shows that he co-produced or was otherwise heavily involved in, but not TNG. He did tend to go back to the same well too much with too many episodes about people going crazy, but I think on TNG he was generally reigned in nicely, as he co-wrote some very good episodes with Ron Moore (who I think is a much better writer than him) and was solely responsible for "Cause and Effect" which is one of the highlights of the series. "Frame of Mind" is rather ridiculous, but I enjoy it in a sort of campy way. I love Frakes' over-the-top freaking out in it. One of the few times a TNG cast member got to reach Shatneresque levels of hamminess. 
I'll give Braga "Cause and Effect." It wasn't a bad episode. The trouble is that it was a much better story when it was "The Tunnel Under the World" by Frederick Pohl.
Yawn. More Braga-bashing.
Jump on a bandwagon much???
Trek drones. Gotta love 'em.
I can't comment on Braga's later work (I understand that many fans feel it was only when he came a showrunner that the quality of his writing really started to suffer) but I get fed up with people retroactively inserting this "Braga hate" into the TNG days. Back in 1992-94, I remember most fans loving his work, as indeed I did.
Most of his episodes still play rather well - "Cause And Effect", "Frame Of Mind" (and wasn't his rewrite on "Reunion" what got him the staff job?) and many others.
Jump on a bandwagon much???
Trek drones. Gotta love 'em.
I can't comment on Braga's later work (I understand that many fans feel it was only when he came a showrunner that the quality of his writing really started to suffer) but I get fed up with people retroactively inserting this "Braga hate" into the TNG days. Back in 1992-94, I remember most fans loving his work, as indeed I did.
Most of his episodes still play rather well - "Cause And Effect", "Frame Of Mind" (and wasn't his rewrite on "Reunion" what got him the staff job?) and many others.
What's interesting now is that it seems like the bashing of Braga and Berman is retroactive. He was bad on Voyager, so now he's bad on TNG as well, despite him being good on TNG before. That makes no sense.
This has been my thought, too. As I said earlier, I like Braga's TNG stories. I was always pleased to see his name in the writing credits. I didn't really watch his Voyager stuff, so I don't know how bad or otherwise his stories were there, but I don't recall Braga being considered a bad writer when TNG was on the air.
Somehow, someway, he was also bad on TOS.
On Voyager, the creative output of Michael Pillar and Jeri Taylor was significantly going downhill as well, so Brannon Braga cannot be singled out in that regard either. On Voyager, Brannon Braga was not so bad if he was writing alongside Bryan Fuller and Joe Menosky, which lead to a few very strong episodes like "The Thaw", "Distant Origin", "Drone", and "Living Witness".
Last edited:
Being such a TNG-era Braga apologist for so long, I never thought I'd find myself in this position, but I gotta say...let's not get carried away here. I'm all for giving him more credit for his TNG work than he usually gets due to the overabundance of people who blame him too much for the show's downfall, but the reality is that he did have some negative influence/writing tendencies on that show.
While a lot of his writing was brilliant in the TNG TV era, he was definitely limited in the range of subject matter for his stories, and his weakness was that he had a bit of a fetish for 'weird, surreal shit happens'/'someone goes crazy or has psychological issues'/'the holdeck goes crazy' or some combination of those, many of which were just too ludicrous to make good drama and/or be taken seriously. For example...
"Realm of Fear" - Barclay has a psychological fear of transporters (the only Barclay-centric episode I don't like). Much less interesting than McCoy's frequent (and hilarious) transporter grumbling in the original "Star Trek".
"Schisms" - Riker, Troi, and others are abducted by aliens and this causes them to have freaky dreams that drive them crazy.
"Birthright, Part 1" - Data has freaky dreams.
"Frame of Mind" - Riker acts in a play about a guy who is going crazy, which causes him to go crazy.
"Phantasms" - Parasites invade the Enterprise and affect Data, causing him to have freaky dreams that drive him crazy.
"Timescape" - The Enterprise is frozen in time. Data, La Forge, Troi, and Picard investigate. Weird, surreal shit happens.
"Parallels" - Worf hops around from one crazy parallel dimension to another. Weird shit (like hundreds of Enteprises from different universes co-existing in the same space) happens.
Some of these are fun and entertaining enough, but in general they're just ridiculously nutty, and a few are absurd to the point where they're just lame.
While a lot of his writing was brilliant in the TNG TV era, he was definitely limited in the range of subject matter for his stories, and his weakness was that he had a bit of a fetish for 'weird, surreal shit happens'/'someone goes crazy or has psychological issues'/'the holdeck goes crazy' or some combination of those, many of which were just too ludicrous to make good drama and/or be taken seriously. For example...
"Realm of Fear" - Barclay has a psychological fear of transporters (the only Barclay-centric episode I don't like). Much less interesting than McCoy's frequent (and hilarious) transporter grumbling in the original "Star Trek".
"Schisms" - Riker, Troi, and others are abducted by aliens and this causes them to have freaky dreams that drive them crazy.
"Birthright, Part 1" - Data has freaky dreams.
"Frame of Mind" - Riker acts in a play about a guy who is going crazy, which causes him to go crazy.
"Phantasms" - Parasites invade the Enterprise and affect Data, causing him to have freaky dreams that drive him crazy.
"Timescape" - The Enterprise is frozen in time. Data, La Forge, Troi, and Picard investigate. Weird, surreal shit happens.
"Parallels" - Worf hops around from one crazy parallel dimension to another. Weird shit (like hundreds of Enteprises from different universes co-existing in the same space) happens.
Some of these are fun and entertaining enough, but in general they're just ridiculously nutty, and a few are absurd to the point where they're just lame.
You're saying that like it's a bad thing. The episodes you mentioned are episodes I for one really like. Perhaps it just depends on what you want out of Trek, but some absurdity and nuttiness in a Trek series is never a bad thing.
So anyone who criticizes Braga's work is a "Trek drone." Spare me.
I can say with pride I hated Braga's work before it was popular to do so.
"Cause and Effect" was a technobabblier version of a much better classic SF story. "Frame of Mind" was poop.
Braga was never good on TNG.
I remember when "Cause and Effect" first aired, I watched it a second time and paid attention to who wrote it. I thought, "Wow, Brannan Braga, huh? He seems promising. Can't wait until he tops this one." It never happened. "Cause and Effect" seems to have been a fluke. On top of that, any time I watch it, I can't help but think how much better "The Tunnel Under the World" is.
It is when it's totally out of left field. Star Trek may not be hard SF, but it isn't supposed to be complete fantasy, either. My biggest problem with Braga is that he didn't seem to put any thought into any of his story elements. They existed simply because they were "cool," not because he had anything interesting to say or wanted to explore in any depth the implications of his weird concepts. Braga once said in an interview what he loved about writing Star Trek is that in science fiction "anything can happen." No, Brannon, anything can't happen. That's what separates speculative fiction from fantasy.
^You speak like someone who is holding a grudge. Frame of Mind was Poop? You're like the first person I know of to not like that episode.
I'm not going to convince you otherwise because you seem set in your opinion, but you do know Braga co-wrote All Good Things right? I consider that one of my favorite series finales ever just because it was a damn good episode, not just by looking at all the technicalities and picking it a part as nauseum, and Braga was involved in that. As for the episodes that were mentioned, I liked those as well for pretty much the same reason, so that's why I respect Braga a lot. Also, he's honest and will tell you he screwed up, hence talking about Threshold on the Season 2 Voyager DVDs.
I'm not going to convince you otherwise because you seem set in your opinion, but you do know Braga co-wrote All Good Things right? I consider that one of my favorite series finales ever just because it was a damn good episode, not just by looking at all the technicalities and picking it a part as nauseum, and Braga was involved in that. As for the episodes that were mentioned, I liked those as well for pretty much the same reason, so that's why I respect Braga a lot. Also, he's honest and will tell you he screwed up, hence talking about Threshold on the Season 2 Voyager DVDs.
I don't know Braga. It's nothing personal. For all I know I'd like him if I met him. I'm not going to sugarcoat my opinion of Braga's writing, though.
Riker freaks for an hour. That seems to be all Braga had for an episode when he sat down to write it. The whole episode just feels like it was written in one sitting with no planning whatsoever.
"And it was all just a dream!"
And yet there was a lot about that episode that didn't make sense with the anomoly. The character stuff with Picard was interesting. The anomoly wasn't. If the anomoly worked the way Q said it did, all life should have already been wiped out and Picard shouldn't have had a past, present, or future to jump around to. Neither Moore nor Braga seemed to really accept the implications of the thing they created; that's a big SF rule breaker.
I don't ask a lot of Trek writers. Only that they 1)have a tenuous understanding of that which they are writing about, and 2)explore the implications of their own concepts. Braga wrote about evolution more than once, and every time he did he painfully demonstrated his total lack of understanding of a very simple scientific concept. "Threshold" was merely the worst offender.
Last edited:
Similar threads
