And in Hollow Pursuits the characters in Barclay's program behave more like NPCs in a video game, such as the "Goddess of Empathy" version of Troi who just repeats her introduction over and over again.
What are your TNG unpopular opinions/hot takes?
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And in Hollow Pursuits the characters in Barclay's program behave more like NPCs in a video game, such as the "Goddess of Empathy" version of Troi who just repeats her introduction over and over again.
That could be because with Barclay's limited interpersonal skills and possible high functioning autism, he likes an element of simplicity and predictability in his holo-playthings.
Unpopular TNG opinions:
- Data is a pretty average franchise character.
- S1 and S2 are significantly more entertaining than S6 and S7.
- “The Measure of a Man” is dull
- “I, Borg” is overrated
- Riker is the best regular character on the show, because he’s the most flawed and human
- Most Worf/Klingon episodes are pretty trying
- “Encounter at Farpoint” was a great pilot for the series
- Jelico was awesome
- Wesley Crusher doesn’t deserve the hatred he gets
- Dr. Crusher may be the most boring and unremarkable character in the entire franchise*
- The Borg should have taken a long hiatus between BOBW2 and FC
- The Klingons as portrayed in “Heart of Glory” are better than anything the later episodes portrayed
- I actually really like the production design. It’s not as fun as TOS, but it’s pretty cool.
Twice? I only know of the time with the Ferengi scientist.
In terms of the LGBTQ content being asked about? Golden Girls, Northern Exposure, Twin Peaks...before them Night Court, Barney Miller, Soap, anything by Norman Lear...
Indeed Soap is from the late seventies yet, one regular character (played by bill crystal) is gay, at that time Star Trek was nearly forty years away from even acknowledging that gay people exist!!!
Not just gay but nearly trans.
Yes, bi actually.
The Gay character on Soaps and the confusion about what exactly he was (Gay, Bi, Trans) just suffered from the show runners, and a good chunk of the public in general not understanding that Gay, Bi and Trans people are three different kinds of people (compare the scene in the movie Hair, where the prison psychologist believes one of the Hippies is gay because he has long hair, or the part in Go Ask Alice where the narrator is worried that the drugs have made her a lesbian and whether that means she wants to be a man) It all was kinda lumped under the "Gay" description back then.
That's also why, originally, conversion therapy seemed to be effective because it made a lot of bisexual men focus on relationships and sex with women (at least temporarily), and because people didn't understand yet that Gay and Bi are two different orientations, it was seen as a "cure".
So at a time Soaps was released a lot of people understood that a Gay man is attracted to other men, but they didn't necessarily understand that he didn't want to be a woman or that he wasn't also attracted to women.
Certain groups still don't understand that to this day.
That's also why, originally, conversion therapy seemed to be effective because it made a lot of bisexual men focus on relationships and sex with women (at least temporarily), and because people didn't understand yet that Gay and Bi are two different orientations, it was seen as a "cure".
So at a time Soaps was released a lot of people understood that a Gay man is attracted to other men, but they didn't necessarily understand that he didn't want to be a woman or that he wasn't also attracted to women.
Certain groups still don't understand that to this day.
I do understand that TNG and frankly all of Trek was bad in LGBTQ representation. Maybe the worst seeing as they didn't have their first gay character until Discovery. What makes TNG progressive though is frankly the Roddenberry Vision. I know he just sort of made that up during the years after TOS while going to fan conventions but the vision is still a major thing in TNG. It shows a world were humans have mostly evolved out of our most dangerous characteristics. No other show back then had that. It shows a world that people can only dream about living in but everyone would love to live in that kind of world. It's basically a socialist dream come true. So also basically fantasy since we know that kind of world will never happen but it does spark the imagination. I mean Cagney and Lacey catching criminals ever week just can't compare to something like that.
Or he really was all that. After all, in real life some persons are.
Well technically you can't be Gay and Bisexual at the same time. Either you just like men, or you like both men and women.
You can be, for example, homosexual and bi-romantic though.
Of course sexuality is often a spectrum rather than a either/or thing.
But you can be bi, very much on the gay side and a little on the straight side. Plus you can change your sexual habits with time, people have been known to do that especially ones who've had much of one thing and not enough of another.
That's why I said it can be aspectrum rather than a "either/or" thing
Still hat character we were talking about was at a time when that wasn't much talked or known about, so I think his portrayal was relying more on stereotypes (and that's fine for that show, since all the characters on Soaps were more or less caricatures of soap opera characters)
So...aside from the monthly re-fresh of the old discussion about the merits of TNG"s representation philosophy.....any other interesting "unpopular opinions" or hot takes? I kind of feel like the thread has drifted significantly, and this has the potential to be a fun topic otherwise.
^^this
Data is average, buoyed by Brent Spiner and production styles (direction, music) for the series. I still adore him, but the Spock-trope would invariably be a Vulcan, android, or some other species with emotional issues.
Maybe seasons 5-7, though 5 despite a couple solid episodes is still the shark jumping season... there's more in 1 and 2 that aged well or feel like there's more adventure and action to offer than the soap opera sledgehammer digest of the later years. (The topics weren't always wrong, but not always right...)
MotM was intriguing but whose plot was milked far past the sell-by date.
I Borg was overrated. Still kudos for not trying to one-up TBOBW, but years and decades later and trying to see I,Borg in a different perspective it's still loaded with plot holes and contrivances.
I preferred Geordi (he and Data I gravitated to the most) but you're not wrong. Riker was the most flawed in his own ways, and used to good effect.
Worf episodes after season 4 definitely were. Nor could they do what DS9 managed to do (IMHO).
Farpoint is a mixed bag, corny at times, but making it a 2 hour event WAS appropriate given the time and circumstance. Q was also more interesting than just the space jellyfish, though Troi was used in a way better than "I sense the obvious captain!" as she can read other beings' minds, minds of corporeal non-humanoid aliens that no human could - especially when no visual or audible cues were present (or picked up on). The show needed to do this a little more often, but didn't.
Jellico was exactly what one needed to see with the 1701-D clique.
Very true on Crusher; Pulaski was the better doctor and she's less of a McCoy redo than the EMH was.
Agreed; Borg should have not returned. The wallpaper music definitely did not help, and Lore was fanservice where it's improbable he'd find his way to this part of the Collective that had gone into disarray.
Klingons again - gotta agree. In HoG there's an aura of mystery. Seasons 3 and 4 go into some detail but it's not overly done. After that it got boring. Then comes DS9 and the goofy blood bond murder rituals were compelling again, and TNG wasn't going to do anything like that. And couldn't. But DS9 got silly with it all as well. That's not tinnitus you're hearing, it's wedding bells...
The production design isn't as refined as in season 3 onward, but it's not overproduced in look either.
Making money off Star Trek?
I never liked Q. I don't find him interesting. I don't find him entertaining and I usually skip most of his episodes and the whole "The Trial Never Ended!" nonsense from "All Good Things..." was BS.
Most of his episodes just seem to me like the show runners basically went "Oh we need another cheap bottle episode, let's get John DeLancie and have him do random crap with costumes and props from the studio stock"
Most of his episodes just seem to me like the show runners basically went "Oh we need another cheap bottle episode, let's get John DeLancie and have him do random crap with costumes and props from the studio stock"
Wow...and I thought my post was harsh!
In all seriousness....I like Q overall, but the specific Q episodes are pretty "hit or miss."
I like that Q is almost like a holodeck, in that his powers and his interactions with the crew allow for some really twisty and strange scenarios to develop outside the normal day-to-day settings. But, there are other instances, particularly post-TNG where it just kind of grates.
For recurring characters, I find Barclay and Lwaxana really irritating. I like Ensign Ro quite a bit. Q is kind of "in the middle"
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