What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?

It's a principle that's defaulted to, with several "unless" clauses afterwards.

 

Sometimes, and maybe more than this, the needs of the one are the needs of the many. Groups often make terrible, selfish decisions because of their grand, collective myopia.

 

Although, arguably, Strange New Worlds does put a really interesting twist on that decision, and it's a contrast with Pike's horror when a similar choice is made earlier in the season.

In "Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach," Pike is indignant when Majalis sacrifices a child for the quality of life within their society. But in "A Quality of Mercy," Pike decides that not only is his life but the lives of children/future cadets, who have no choice in the matter, are worth the sacrifice of securing a better future.

One can argue that saving the Alpha Quadrant from a decades long never-ending war is different than a planet that puts a kid in a machine so they can live in the clouds, but both are decisions where people make choices in the belief the sacrifice of some for a better world is worth it.

 

I find most of the TNG main characters to be smarmy and/or boring. Perhaps the best characters to come from the series are supporting/recurring, like O'Brien and Q.

 

Hence why the episode is called, "A Quality of Mercy".

 

Late to the party from a few posts back, but even though I like PIC better than TNG and especially the TNG Movies, by contrast: I like TOS and the TOS Movies equally.

 

I wonder if Pike had a different view because he was at least able to have a choice. The child didn't while Pike, Spock and Kirk all did.

 

The child did have a choice. He chose faith instead of knowledge, and it cost him dearly.

 

I mean a fully informed choice.

 

That's what I meant with my second sentence.

 

Insipid, New Age-y, puffed-up chest and lifeless. No wonder the majority of TNG's characters are still drawing blanks within popular culture awareness nearly 40 years after its debut.

...and if your best characters are any from the periphery of the main group / overall story, it says much about the unappealing, soulless nature of that main group.

 

Part of the issue is that other than Picard, Data, and Worf, TNG characters do not have personalities to speak of.

Oh, they have quirks. Riker gets laid and plays the trombone. Geordi is bad with women. Some characters don't even get this, though. I'm struggling to come up with anything to say that makes Deanna stand out beyond liking chocolate (which she shares with half the human race).

In general, the characters are defined by their ranks, jobs, and social roles. So Bev is a doctor and a mom, and that's about it. But she doesn't have a personality beyond this worth speaking of. Who she is as a person in no way defines the choices she makes in the show. The needs of the plot of the week define those choices.

 

Pike doesn't have a new choice that he can stick to.

Anytime he chose differently, a time traveller intercedes from a dark timeline and begs Pike to reconcider.

 

One could certainly say the same thing about TOS. Of course on TOS the supporting cast weren't co-stars. (Until The Search for Spock.)

Deanna is certainly "Most Improved". No, she does not have a "quirk". But she becomes much more of a personality as the show goes on. What's amazing is how much Deanna grows and yet she never becomes remotely like Marina.

 

I've noticed this too. Marina Sirtis takes the rather thin material she's given and absolutely runs with it for all she's worth in later seasons. Troi gets a little bit of a harsher, sarcastic edge, but also some real warmth and humour beyond just generic "empathy" – and also becomes, despite being half-alien with borderline magic powers, something of the accessible everyman of the TNG crew. She's a joy in seasons six and seven. (Now I'm wondering what Marina is actually like...)

EDIT: also, she's fucking brilliant in PIC. I mean, they all were in season three, that's a given, but she's genuinely excellent in season one's "Nepenthe". Pathos, humour, caring, guts. Marina can do a hell of a lot with very little.

 

I SENSE PAIN. PAIN!

UNHAPPINESS. TERRIBLE LONELINESS!

Nothing, really. Just thought I sensed something.

Oh seriously, I agree with what's been said here about her.

Still in the thin category, but Troi/Sirtis was also great comic relief in STVIII. And unless I'm overlooking something, with the exception of Data/Spiner, who had often been that in the series anyway, none of the other characters/actors could really say that about their parts in the films. Guinan/Goldberg had done comic relief in the series, sometimes really well, but I don't recall her doing much of that in Generations or NEM either (though in fairness, I've largely deleted that train wreck from my active memory buffer).

 

I'd say even Worf fits into that category, at least until DS9.

 

The Romulan Supernova should have never happened. It sounds very nonsensical to me and anything involving Picard and Discovery is not at all "Star Trek" to me.

 

TOS was explicitly set up to be effectively an anthology show which happened to have a recurring cast. This was the era where serials were considered to be lowbrow, and anthology shows were at their absolute apex in terms of being considered the high art of moving pictures.

I'd actually argue that to the degree there was any characterization at all, it mostly came down to the actors discovering the characters and the writers beginning to pivot their scripts to actually reflect what they were bringing to the table. This famously happened with Spock, as Nimoy came up with the stoicism thing after Shatner was cast because he thought it played better off of a more lively leading man, with the whole "Vulcan logic" thing just added later.

 

It's an interesting enough plot point (and we can't do Praxis twice.) Of course the notion that the Romulan supernova would "threaten to destroy the galaxy" is JJ BS.

Heh, I never realized that Star Trek 2009 never says that it was ROMULUS' star. Just "a star" that was "consuming everything in its path".

I know distance rate and time has never been Star Trek's strong suit but this really takes the cake. And leaves it out in the rain.