It bothers me of how much corruption there is within Starfleet.

[Greg Cox]

Roddenberry's box was always a problem for writers, not for viewers.

Well, for some viewers. I sometimes found TNG a little too "utopian" for my tastes, compared to the STAR TREK I grew up watching in the sixties and seventies.

I still remember rolling my eyes when, in an early first-season ep, Picard got a headache and everybody acted as though he'd contracted scurvy or consumption or some similarly obscure, archaic ailment that nobody had heard of for generations.

Seriously? The 24th century was so perfect that human beings never got a plain old headache anymore? How are we supposed to identify with that?

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Chalk it up to sarcasm (even if the tone of voice doesn't match).

Perhaps some bureaucrat enacted a rule requiring full investigation of even minor medical issues - someone whose ivory tower job failed to impart the impracticality of actually doing so. Maybe some important person made trouble for Starfleet with allegations of malpractice, and they became overly cautious in the wake of the ensuing scandal, but eventually lapsed back to normal as the heat wore off.

 

[Greg Cox]

Oh, I'm sure it can be rationalized. I was just recalling my one of my first impressions of this new thing called Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I confess I was slow to warm to the show at first. "Measure of a Man," in the second season, finally won me over.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

For all its advances, Federation medicine hasn't moved beyond the "every symptom could be cancer" mentality of Internet diagnoses?

 

[Nerys Myk]

Early TNG was GR at his hippie guru worst.

 

[Frontis]

There will never be an organisation without corruption. Sad but true, that's human 's nature.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Heck, the whole point of "The Enemy Within" back in the day was that our positive and negative aspects are inextricably entwined and we need both halves to be whole. They couldn't just beam the "Bad Kirk" into space and let the "Good Kirk" thrive, minus any primitive human traits. Kirk needed both haves to be whole and human.

Indeed, you can find the same message in Star Trek's grandfather, Forbidden Planet. The Krell perished because they thought they had evolved beyond "the monsters from the Id," so they were completely unprepared when all those long-repressed inner demons resurfaced with a vengeance:

"After a million years of shining sanity, they could hardly have understood what power was destroying them."

Well put! That post gets the rare Five Kirk rating for being so spot-on:

And, yes, Q's lecture in "Q Who?" about how space is not for the timid is quite possibly my favorite quote from TNG. The final frontier is not supposed to be entirely safe and civilized and domesticated.

I loved that scene, and I still believe its the Borg at their most believably mysterious and threatening.

 

[Greg Cox]

Well put! That post gets the rare Five Kirk rating for being so spot-on:

I loved that scene, and I still believe its the Borg at their most believably mysterious and threatening.

Well, of course I'm going to cite the Richard Matheson ep, given that I was Richard's editor at Tor Books for more than twenty years . . . .

I'm sitting next to two overstuffed shelves of books by and about Matheson as I type this (along with stacks of Trek reference books, naturally).

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Even if there were no malevolence to find in space, there would still be language barriers, forces of nature, malfunctioning technology, etc, all of which would put safety at risk.

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

Even if there were no malevolence to find in space, there would still be language barriers, forces of nature, malfunctioning technology, etc, all of which would put safety at risk.

Naturally.

 

[Tallguy]

Naturally.

No, you throw it to Who.

 

[Nerys Myk]

No, you throw it to Who.

What?

 

[Tallguy]

What?

He's on second.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Didn't Johnny Carson (as President Reagan) once do a riff off that Abbott & Costello bit?

(I don't give a damn!)

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

No, you throw it to Who.

Objection. My reference was environmental, not sporty. To me, baseball is simply multiple males running around in squares for 2.5 hours, as any fast-forwarding will prove. Plus, the game promotes theft. So, highly illogical. DE.*

(Digression ended.)

What?

Indeed, docTOR.*

(*Out-of-the-blue SPOCK'S BRAIN quote to get us off digressing. Second DE.)

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

To me, baseball is simply multiple males running around in squares for 2.5 hours, as any fast-forwarding will prove.

And to me, basketball is a bunch of guys running around, working up a sweat, in less than I wear for underwear.

Curling, on the other hand, is a chess game on ice.

 

[Tallguy]

Objection. My reference was environmental, not sporty. To me, baseball is simply multiple males running around in squares for 2.5 hours, as any fast-forwarding will prove. Plus, the game promotes theft. So, highly illogical. DE.*

And yet: Take Me Out to the Holosuite! (WITH Vulcans!)

 

[Shawnster]

Curling, on the other hand, is a chess game on ice.

You're not far off there.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

You're not far off there.

Quite: it's even timed like a chess game.

 

[Yistaan]

It got too much in Picard. The Zhat Vash infiltrating the top of Starfleet and controlling Starfleet policy for 15 years (from the attack on Mars up till the events of Picard) is pretty bad. Not to mention the absurdity of the high likelihood of the Zhat Vash and Changeling infiltration overlapping with each other. Shelby should've been hanging her head in shame and still apologizing for the synth ban, letting the son of her frenemy Riker literally die because of said ban installed by the Zhat Vash, but nope she's posturing like no tomorrow on Frontier Day for yet another infiltration to happen and this time end her life (along with a whole bunch of other peoples).