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WTF moments in Season 1....

I don't remember the episode title, but the Voyager episode where they encounter a planet where time flows much faster. The Doctor is stuck down there for several years (planet time). At one point he mentions that he has fathered a son!?

Since when is photonic sperm fertile?

(Oops. I forgot this was a TNG thread. Sorry. Well, enjoy the read, anyway.)

IIRC, it was suggested that he "aquired" the sperm through some means, either through a lab at his work or $2 hand jobs on the streets. ;)
 
I don't remember the episode title, but the Voyager episode where they encounter a planet where time flows much faster. The Doctor is stuck down there for several years (planet time). At one point he mentions that he has fathered a son!?

Since when is photonic sperm fertile?

(Oops. I forgot this was a TNG thread. Sorry. Well, enjoy the read, anyway.)

Maybe the doctor and the member of the race he was involved with adopted him or maybe he was the Doctor's Girlfriend's son?
 
One of my favorites is in, I think, "Hide and Q," where instead of saying what presumably was supposed to be, "He's nothing but a flim-flam man!" Picard says, "He's nothing but a flim-flam, man!"
 
Well, by TNG the Feds had encountered so many godlike aliens that it they weren't so impressed.
 
Having just watched Encounter at Farpoint for the first time in several years recently, I have some to add-

The whole "emergency saucer seper" sequence. Why exactly was this a good idea? And why did it have to be done at warp? It plays like a test sequence for the VFX team, and in that regard it succeeds, but story-wise it doesn't make any sense.

Then there is the part where Picard orders Riker to re-dock the two halves manually. Why again? :lol:

I'm a little creeped out by Data's obvious emotionalism in this episode as well. I guess I'd forgotten that they played him that way early on.

On the other hand there were a lot of nice little touches I had forgotten about. I liked Picard's speech to Riker about questioning his previous captain's judgement. It sets up their relationship well. Q was better done than I'd remembered and reflects nicely on a lot of the TOS villains that came before him. At the time I'd originally seen TNG I had never seen much TOS!

Overall one gets the impression in the pilot that the show was kind of an experiment that everyone was pretty uncertain about. It's amazing how the show kind of found it's legs as it went along and really turned into something different than just a revamping or homage to TOS.
 
The whole "emergency saucer seper" sequence. Why exactly was this a good idea? And why did it have to be done at warp? It plays like a test sequence for the VFX team, and in that regard it succeeds, but story-wise it doesn't make any sense.

The idea behind saucer separation is to let the civilians (remember, the original idea was that the E-D had a large complement of civilian scientists and families) retreat to safety in the saucer section while the battle section with only Starfleet personnel aboard returned to engage the enemy. It had to be done at warp because they were being chased at high warp and didn't have the option of stopping.


Then there is the part where Picard orders Riker to re-dock the two halves manually. Why again? :lol:

As a test of his abilities.
 
My major WTF moment was when I first saw the teenager driving the fleet's flagship. OK, it's just me, but I was afraid he was going to total the thing.
 
In retrospect, I think I'd rather have either Wesley or Geordi driving the ship before Troi!! :lol:

I agree about the holodeck being overworshipped in the pilot but I always write that off as an unspoken upgrade because I consider TAS as part of my personal canon and it was already present in "Practical Joker" in a much more primitive form.
 
When did they change the conn and ops station? I forgot that Data sat on the right (left to us) for the pilot. And why did they switch it around like they did?
 
When did they change the conn and ops station? I forgot that Data sat on the right (left to us) for the pilot. And why did they switch it around like they did?

I speculate that it had something to do with camera positioning and making sure Data could be more easily shot in frame with Picard and Riker.
 
When did they change the conn and ops station? I forgot that Data sat on the right (left to us) for the pilot. And why did they switch it around like they did?

I think E@F is the only episode where the CONN and OPS stations are "reversed." Keep in mind that every console on the ship is dynamic. If it suited some purpose they could make the CONN one of the terminals in the corridor.

There may have still been an episode or two in S1 where CONN and OPS were reversed but I think for the most part after E@F the station asignments remained as we know them at the end of the series.
 
That's because later episodes kind of dumbed down the idea behind Data, depicting him as this strictly mechanical thing with pieces you could detach like mannequin parts and lots of blinky lights inside him. His description in the original writers' bible said he was "an android so perfectly fabricated that only a skilled biologist would know he is not composed of normal flesh and blood." In other words, something closer to a Moore-Galactica Cylon, an android whose internal composition was structurally and functionally like that of a human down to the tissue level even if the composition was synthetic. As Data said in "The Naked Now," "My chemical nutrients are like your blood."

There was also an early version of the Writer's Guide that described Data as having been built by "unknown aliens". I so wish they'd gone with that premise. The possible stories springing from that could have been amazing.
 
^That's the same version of the writers' bible I was quoting from, the first edition.

And the "built by aliens" version of Data was essentially a rehash of the Questor character from Roddenberry's 1974 pilot The Questor Tapes. Questor was the last in a long line of alien-technology androids that had been guiding humanity throughout its history, and Data as originally conceived by Roddenberry was essentially the same character -- an android searching for his origins, seeking to understand humanity, developing a close friendship with a human advisor and guide.
 
That first origin could have allowed for Data to have been built by the Android civilization from that Harry Mudd episode.
 
I always rationalized it by figuring that holodeck technology had been around for a while, but hadn't been efficient or compact enough to include on starships until then.

Yeah, it seems much more advanced than earlier versions. Holodeck was in the process of being upgraded all the time during those years, something like Internet and computers were during late 90's and earlier 00's.

In "The Long Goodbye", they are newly upgraded again by Bynars if I'm not mistaken, and even better than before.

The whole "emergency saucer seper" sequence. Why exactly was this a good idea? And why did it have to be done at warp? It plays like a test sequence for the VFX team, and in that regard it succeeds, but story-wise it doesn't make any sense.

The idea behind saucer separation is to let the civilians (remember, the original idea was that the E-D had a large complement of civilian scientists and families) retreat to safety in the saucer section while the battle section with only Starfleet personnel aboard returned to engage the enemy. It had to be done at warp because they were being chased at high warp and didn't have the option of stopping.


Then there is the part where Picard orders Riker to re-dock the two halves manually. Why again? :lol:
As a test of his abilities.

Yeah, Picard is testing his new First Officer and the separation makes sense, especially since it seems that the saucer rides the warp bubble IIRC after the sep.

I recently watched this episode after years and years of not seeing it, and liked it a lot. In fact, I like the whole season 1. The bridge was so new and different, the characters were different, and Starfleet was portrayed differently. It reminded me of childhood when I watched it when everything was so strange, it truly felt like 24th century where they explored strange new worlds.
 
That first origin could have allowed for Data to have been built by the Android civilization from that Harry Mudd episode.

Not really. The Mudd's Planet androids were far, far cruder than Data. They had very low intelligence, little flexibility... they were essentially thousands of mindless drones operated remotely by a single mainframe, and that mainframe didn't have a lot of smarts.


In "The Long Goodbye", they are newly upgraded again by Bynars if I'm not mistaken, and even better than before.

That was "11001001," not "The Big Goodbye."
 
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