I'm rethinking Geordie marrying Leah
- Thread starter CT_Phipps
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There's been plenty of team dynamics down there. The issue is that none of the actors they tried having be integral really seemed to gel with Levar enough to keep being around, but Lefler, & Gomez seemed to really work well with him. He was able to collab with Wes & Data as needed. Even Tyler from Phantasms had a crush on him.
"I want to go back to the moment Soran boarded the Enterprise and throw him in the brig." makes it a sub 90 minute movie and saves CGI $'s. They don't even need to show the Enterprise crashing if it's just going to get wiped away.
They have a large team when Barclay needs to be uncomfortable in crowds and shut down by Wesley. Then everyone goes off to work solo. It's really weird analyzing in retrospect. DS9 does the same thing at times. Morning meeting at 0700 then not see another co-worker for hours? Unless of course you need Miles cuddled up with an assassin stealing his tools or a horny Cardassian female to introduce some weird sexual tension for the plot to add runtime. At least Geordi never grabbed Leah and said "You have very steady hands. I assure you I'm quite fertile."
Well, the main characters doing all the work themselves is a TV drama staple. In Las Vegas, the forensic police are run by only 6-7 people, three people at JAG handle all the work themselves without any staff, etc. The reasons are obvious (dramatic license), but there were a couple of episodes where having the main characters do all the work seemed ridiculous.
For example, in Darmok, the task of understanding the Tamarian language falls on Troy and Data's shoulders. It seems absolutely ridiculous that a spaceship with a crew of 1,000 whose mission is literally to discover new worlds and new life forms doesn't have a dedicated linguist. Obviously, they couldn't have a guest star appear for the task just for the episode, but still it really defies belief.
Another example is The Ensigns of Command. One of the tasks we often see the Enterprise doing is helping sign new treaties or the like, so it's reasonable to assume there are legal experts on board. Instead, the task of navigating the Treaty of Armens falls on poor Picard's shoulders.
From watching TNG, it seems like the Enterprise is operated by only a dozen people, and the other 988 are passengers enjoying a cruise.
For example, in Darmok, the task of understanding the Tamarian language falls on Troy and Data's shoulders. It seems absolutely ridiculous that a spaceship with a crew of 1,000 whose mission is literally to discover new worlds and new life forms doesn't have a dedicated linguist. Obviously, they couldn't have a guest star appear for the task just for the episode, but still it really defies belief.
Another example is The Ensigns of Command. One of the tasks we often see the Enterprise doing is helping sign new treaties or the like, so it's reasonable to assume there are legal experts on board. Instead, the task of navigating the Treaty of Armens falls on poor Picard's shoulders.
From watching TNG, it seems like the Enterprise is operated by only a dozen people, and the other 988 are passengers enjoying a cruise.
Picard is still holding out hope that Minuette is coming back so he's not going to legislate nothing against banning holographic sex workers, meanwhile Inner Light was Picard in AR with AI for decades where he made a family, so that's more of the same, only 50 shades of vanilla-er.
Star Trek is especially vulnerable to this trope, because they have utopia standards going on as well. Every character is some evolved human, who is an astronaut, scientist, combat officer, diplomat, tech specialist, & has hobbies that literally take a lifetime of focused study to be as good at, like playing orchestra instruments. How do you make humanity look exceptional without the characters are being exceptional all the time?
Picard literally picks up a metal filing & programs a message into a rare, cutting edge android's static memory. I don't even think he'd seen inside of Data's head until then. We just accept they can do that shit lol
I'm perfectly okay with the characters being a bit of a polymath. I mean, in theory, they're the best of the best. The problem is that in the two episodes I mentioned, they clearly demonstrate that they're out of their depth. They're like, "Oh no, if only there were some discipline that studied linguistics and/or law, and specialists who were experts in them! Unfortunately, there's nothing like that, and we have to be the pioneers and start from scratch in understanding these exotic subjects."
A lot of policy & diplomacy stuff kind of always falls to the captains, like Picard with the Sheliak, leaning on the notion that the leader has to represent or there's a disrespect inherent... & honestly, I can think of no one who'd be better at languages than Data, the walking oracle of knowledge. Troi being there was just to give her something to do lol. I think the intent of Darmok wasn't that they had no linguistic specialists per say, but rather that in this specific case, none of them were at all useful, with this type of communication. Whether you buy that conceit as realistic is a different matter
This is why Ensigns of Command drives me absolutely insane. Why is there no diplomatic officer to navigate these processes and advise on legal complications around border disputes. Instead it falls to the counselor and the captain to navigate the process kind of blindly.
The diplomatic entourage wasn't arriving until Tuesday. :|
That is a sign of bad writing, when they deliberately avoid clearing up a normal resolution to create a misunderstanding for fake drama.
Like in All Our Yesterdays, when Mr. Atoz is about to explain the situation, and conveniently is interrupted by a call from the Enterprise.... or in Errand of Mercy, where the same thing happens. And once the call is over, the chance is TOTALLY expired for no reason.
I expect that is a joke, but in a way it is totally valid. We don't know what the Enterprise would have been like without their modifications to the computer. TNG is not really that serialized, but if it were, then holograms coming to life could have been a Bynar change having a side-effect. Then, once these "upgrades" are studied and added to other installations, we get Vic Fontaine coming to life; Dr. Zimmerman studies and tries to harness this change, and we get the development program for the EMH, etc.
In my mind, the fictional version of the JAG office has many other cases and plots we don't see. We just only follow the three main characters for the stories in the episodes. The admiral calls them "the best" repeatedly, so that means likely they get the most interesting cases most of the time. The first season built up JAG's main character as getting into exceptional situations, and the other seasons build from that starting point. If there was another group doing more interesting cases, arguably the show should follow them instead. But we are to assume there isn't, and the other people at JAG are doing other things.
The same can apply to Star Trek in many ways. I like the idea of TOS being one ship among several, but at least as far TNG is concerned, we are supposed to believe that this is the best ship and best crew, and if not, then the show should focus on a different ship. I think that the main characters on the show are supposed to get the benefit of the doubt most of the time because of this, but that has a consequence of the episode being likely supposed to show us that Geordi is extra specially talented in Engineering, but has issues in social situations (oddly he doesn't tolerate similar behavior from Barclay).
Given the above, as others have said, if Geordi immediately told Leah the whole truth, then the tension would have gone away, but the point here is, I think, supposed to be that Geordi does not know better and is underconfident, and makes things worse. If he had just asked her out, she would have said she was married, the socialization would have ended, and maybe she never even would have seen the hologram, but even if she had, she would have known it was just a computer simiuation he had used to simulate the computer's development of the ship that had taken place years ago.
I assume there are such officers, they just did all their work and briefed the main characters off-screen before the episode started.
Ensigns of Command failed, on purpose, to dissuade me of this notion.
UHURA: Positive. It repeats over and over.
FOX: Is that supposed to mean something?
KIRK: Code seven-ten means under no circumstances are we to approach that planet. No circumstances what so ever.
FOX: You will disregard that signal, Captain.
KIRK: Mister Fox, it is their planet.
FOX: Captain, in the past twenty years, thousands of lives have been lost in this quadrant. Lives that could have been saved if the Federation had a treaty port here. We mean to have that port and I'm here to get it.
KIRK: By disregarding code seven-ten, you might well involve us in an interplanetary war.
FOX: I'm quite prepared to take that risk.
KIRK: You are. I'm thinking about this ship, my crew.
FOX: I have my orders, Captain, and now you have yours. You will proceed on course. Achieve orbit status and just leave the rest to me. You're well aware that my mission gives me the power of command. I now exercise it. You will proceed on course. That's a direct order.
FOX: There are no buts. Obviously it's a misunderstanding, and one of my jobs is to clear up misunderstandings.
FOX: I want you and expect you to obey my lawful orders.
ANAN: Mister Ambassador, I am truly sorry for what must happen.
FOX: I beg your pardon?
ANAN: You and your party have been declared war casualties. You will be taken immediately to one of our casualty stations so that your deaths may be recorded.
FOX: You mean we are to be killed?
ANAN: That is correct, Mister Ambassador. I regret it very much, but there is nothing I can do about it.
SCOTT: Diplomats. The best diplomat I know is a fully activated phaser bank.
A Taste of Armageddon was supposed to have dissuaded everyone of the use of experts. Space cowboys have much higher success rates. All the times admirals and commodores made messes Kirk had to clean up reenforced it. TNG continues the trend with "specialists" being useless at best and dangerous at worst such as Tam Elbrun in Tin Man and a surgeon that refuses to operate on Picard in Samaritan Snare because even he isn't qualified. Pulaski has to save Picard. Even Devinoni Ral screws up in The Price and buys access to a worthless hole in space. Riker beats out the mind reading expert because he's played some poker or something.
HOSHI: Starfleet needed language specialists more than they needed to make an example out of me. They let me back in on probation, and here I am.
She universal translatored herself and countless others out of a job. Sato and Kelvin Uhuru had skills that demonstrated this obvious need that previous ST iterations didn't realize somehow. ENT did a pretty good job of it in early S1 episodes.
Almost all the crew we ever see really should be experts on making the ship run first and foremost, not about what they do when they get somewhere. It almost became a trope for guest experts to fumble and the regular crew save the day. I wonder how much of that was an intentional message by the writers or just convenient.
"You left space dock without a diplomatic entourage?"
Sooo...don't trust authority?
It was a joke, but also not a joke lol, because one of the changes we specifically saw was a hologram that prioritized really appealing to the crew, like intimately, & while we see Riker's Minuet is gone at the end, there is no follow-up calculation as to how much of their influence, that caused her in the first place, is still present or removed. The idea that the holodeck got really good & more intuitive at interpreting human signals, & delivering on them, could still be in play.
And yes, that level of social awareness, which they imbued, could theoretically be at the center of programs developing into more than holograms had been before. At the very least, the Leah program getting too personal, because it's reading Geordi, & endeavoring to meet his needs, could potentially be taking unspoken liberties, based on signalling, that when his guard is down made him susceptible to going farther than he'd normally have, not only because of the ethnical quandary of kissing a recreation of a real person, & getting back rubbies from one, but also because his priority ought to be using it as an emergency tool
When Trevor Noah got the Daily Show, a good deal of the cast (Jason, Samantha, Roy, others?), who had thought they were going to get promoted and take John Stewart's seat, after years of accomplished service, packed up their shit and left town.
I can only imagine the mass resignations in Engineering on the D, from career engineers jockeying for position until season 2, having their command track cock blocked by the Captain's pet helm-boy.
To be fair, Logan & Lynch were D-bags, MacDougall was duped by a drunk teenager, Singh got himself unalived & Geordi smokes Argyle any day of the week. There didn't been to be a wealth of talent burning up the chain of command. From the sound of it, Geordi was getting primed for the gig all along
And this is another thing that drives me crazy. You have Data? So? Don't we need experts anymore? Does the Enterprise only carry the bare minimum to keep it running? And if for some reason Data is no longer available, is everyone suddenly lost because the only expert in all the subjects is no longer available and everyone else was deemed redundant?
Narratively, I completely understand why. You have one of the main characters who is an expert in just about everything, and you don't have to call in a guest star every time. In-Universe, it makes absolutely no sense, because Data doesn't have the gift of omnipresence and his primary job is to pilot the starship.
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