Star Trek TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT - pre-Paramount+ TV Series

[derex3592]

I told my wife when we started TNG (my edited watch list version) that the best episodes are always with Data and Picard. I still stand by that. Of course she liked the Deanna episodes...LOL...SKIP button for me, unless her mother was in them, those were fantastic!  

[Seto Kaiba]

Ah, yeah... it took a really long time for TNG to finally figure out what to do with Deanna Troi.  It wasn't until season 6 when Jellico forced her to start wearing a proper uniform (like Marina Sirtis had wanted to all along) that she finally got to act like a proper Starfleet officer and not just "the chick".  That one little wardrobe change seemed to clue the writers in to the fact that they could do so much more with an empath besides repeatedly traumatizing her.

Personally, I blame Gene Roddenberry.  The TNG season 1 and 2 development materials and writer's bible are absolutely oozing his sexist attitudes towards women.  It's screamingly obvious he saw the female regulars as principally decorative given that the character descriptions and casting guidance make frequent mention of the female characters having to have a "strip queen" body.  Marina Sirtis was, and is, certainly lovely to behold but she's a heck of an actress too and they wasted a lot of potential in her character by making her a decorative installation on the bridge for most of the show.  It took a long time for the show to completely outgrow that beginning, by which point they'd lost Denise Crosby and Gates McFadden, and only got McFadden back because Diana Muldaur's character bombed so hard.

(My favorite Troi episode is "Eye of the Beholder", where Troi actually gets to put her powers to proper use investigating the suicide of a fellow telepath.)

[sh9000]

 

[tekering]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

character descriptions and casting guidance make frequent mention of the female characters having to have a "strip queen" body

I had to look this one up for myself:

Wait, Wesley Crusher was originally conceived as a girl named Leslie? 😮

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, tekering said:

I had to look this one up for myself:

It shows up in a fair number of the character descriptions Gene wrote.  After the first few, you start to get the impression Gene really wanted to hire strippers.  (Which, considering some of the pranks he pulled on TOS era staff described in The Making of Star Trek, he may well have... just not for a screen role.)

 

1 hour ago, tekering said:

Wait, Wesley Crusher was originally conceived as a girl named Leslie? 😮

No, Wesley was originally conceived as a boy and an idealized self-insert by Roddenberry (who named the character for his own middle name).  Bob Justman briefly convinced him to change Wesley into a girl named Leslie in a bid to make the character stand out more since TV at the time did much less with the troubles of adolescent girls (and the whole boy genius thing had already started to become a bit of a cliche).  It didn't stick, and the character went back to being a boy shortly thereafter.

 

[sh9000]

 

[derex3592]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It shows up in a fair number of the character descriptions Gene wrote.  After the first few, you start to get the impression Gene really wanted to hire strippers.  (Which, considering some of the pranks he pulled on TOS era staff described in The Making of Star Trek, he may well have... just not for a screen role.)

 

No, Wesley was originally conceived as a boy and an idealized self-insert by Roddenberry (who named the character for his own middle name).  Bob Justman briefly convinced him to change Wesley into a girl named Leslie in a bid to make the character stand out more since TV at the time did much less with the troubles of adolescent girls (and the whole boy genius thing had already started to become a bit of a cliche).  It didn't stick, and the character went back to being a boy shortly thereafter.

 

Fascinating.... had to share this one I found a few months back.....

it's funnier to me cause it's actually my real name...

 

Edited June 30, 2022 by derex3592

[tekering]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Bob Justman briefly convinced him to change Wesley into a girl named Leslie

[derex3592]

I wonder if Will Wheaton has a sister???  

kinda scary how much the above pic strikes a scary resemblance to a young Jennifer Love Hewitt! 😍

Edited June 30, 2022 by derex3592

[azrael]

2 hours ago, derex3592 said:

I wonder if Will Wheaton has a sister??? 

He does.🤨 And she did have a un-credited role in season 1.

[sh9000]

 

[sh9000]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

... and now you've got me rewatching TNG, damnitall.

The writing in the first season really is pretty preachy... I feel like every time I watch it I block out a bit of how bad it really is once I'm done, and don't remember until I watch it over again.  Several of Picard's early speeches are less dignified and more just temper tantrums.

[sh9000]

 

[Lolicon]

Not listening to Gene was the best thing for the franchise.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

36 minutes ago, Lolicon said:

Not listening to Gene was the best thing for the franchise.

 

Gene Roddenberry, like George Lucas and several other noteworthy creators, was a good concept guy and a terrible terrible hack of a writer.  He needed minders.  A group of other, more grounded, creatives around him to hold his leash and refine his wild ideas into stuff that could actually be filmed.  He had that in Gene Coon, Dorothy Fontana, and others on the original Star Trek series.  Predictably, he wasn't always happy with the final shape of the rough concepts he originated or how others built on those ideas with or without his input.

Star Trek: the Next Generation had such a rough start thanks to Gene leveraging his screen credit as Star Trek's creator to obtain full creative control.  Armed with the last word on all creative decisions and with nobody holding his leash, a lot of terrible ideas that would not have survived a proper editorial review made it into shooting scripts and his draconian set of rules for the series nearly caused him to end up without writers altogether.

It's not that listening to Gene was necessarily bad in and of itself... it's that listening to him directly without his minders meant the writers got all his ideas, not just the highly polished good ones that'd been carefully vetted for workability.

 

 

[sh9000]

 

[Big s]

On 6/29/2022 at 9:42 PM, tekering said:

I had to look this one up for myself:

Wait, Wesley Crusher was originally conceived as a girl named Leslie? 😮

I guess that’s how she paid for medical school. It’s like a futuristic lifetime movie special. Single mother has to to a job to pay bills and get through college in hopes of becoming a success. At least it wasn’t onlyfans

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, Big s said:

I guess that’s how she paid for medical school. It’s like a futuristic lifetime movie special. Single mother has to to a job to pay bills and get through college in hopes of becoming a success. At least it wasn’t onlyfans

Gates McFadden is a trained dancer... just not that kind. 

(She's an experienced tap dancer, and did the choreography for the tap dancing her character taught Data herself.)

She got married to Jack Crusher and had Wesley while she was still at Starfleet Academy, and he passed away in unspecified circumstances on the Stargazer a few years after she graduated.  So definitely Lifetime movie material.  (Would've been even moreso if the writers hadn't chickened out on making Wesley Picard's secret son via an affair with his best friend's wife.  That idea got tossed around a few times, but got veto'd every time.)

[pengbuzz]

39 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Gates McFadden is a trained dancer... just not that kind. 

(She's an experienced tap dancer, and did the choreography for the tap dancing her character taught Data herself.)

She got married to Jack Crusher and had Wesley while she was still at Starfleet Academy, and he passed away in unspecified circumstances on the Stargazer a few years after she graduated.  So definitely Lifetime movie material.  (Would've been even moreso if the writers hadn't chickened out on making Wesley Picard's secret son via an affair with his best friend's wife.  That idea got tossed around a few times, but got veto'd every time.)

Yeah...otherwise Wesley would have been bald too!

[Mog]

I thought balding tends to be inherited on the mother’s side of the genome?

EDIT:  Did I Google that after writing it?  Yup!

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

Yeah...otherwise Wesley would have been bald too!

It would've been a hell of a shake-up to the show's status quo, if nothing else.

Not only would it have shaken up or destroyed the "Will they or won't they?" holding pattern the writers kept Captain Picard and Dr. Crusher in the entire run of the series, it would've offered a much better explanation for how Wesley was treated on the Enterprise.  Think about it.  One of the first thing we learn about Picard is that he doesn't like children, to such a degree that he all but begs Riker to deal with them for him early in the series.  Yet Picard not only tolerates Wesley's presence, he very quickly gives Wesley an extraordinary level of privileged access aboard the Enterprise.  Wesley almost immediately goes from being barred from sensitive areas like every other civilian to having the run of the ship, including key operations areas like the bridge and main engineering.  The entire senior staff follows Picard's example and dotes on him.  He gives Wesley an acting Starfleet rank well below the age where he should be able to, and then gives him a field commission. 

It's all very unnatural and a big reason Wesley is seen as a Marty Stu... but if Wesley were secretly Jean-Luc Picard's illegitimate son, it would all make a lot more sense.  Instead of being given such huge latitude "just because", it could all be reframed as Picard using his position to find excuses to spend time with his son in a way that wouldn't reveal his past indiscretion.  Having Wesley find out would also have been a pretty big character moment for Picard.  Wesley practically hero-worshipped him as a paragon of Starfleet virtue.  He and the rest of the crew would have to cope with the reality that Picard is a fallible human being like everyone else.  

It would've been a way more interesting plot twist than Wesley dropping out of Starfleet Academy and bumming around the galaxy with the Traveler.

[derex3592]

I always thought that would have been a great way to go as well.  It would have fit into Picard's younger character development too, as we saw in "Tapestry" when he was a hot-headed young cadet fresh out of the academy picking fights with packs of Nausicans.  A wasted opportunity in my opinion. As @Seto Kaiba noted, it would have explained Picard's handling of "the Boy" so much better than "just cause"...

[sh9000]

 

[sh9000]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

5 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

For what it's worth, I much prefer this early version of the Borg over what they eventually became after Star Trek: First Contact.

There was so much more power and mystery surrounding the Borg back then.  They were a dark mirror of the Federation, a species far advanced over humanity that had taken the Federation's ideals of equality, the free exchange of knowledge and ideas, and using advanced technology to raise quality of life to their logical extremes.  A race of cyborgs who'd adopted an extreme form of collectivism in the form of a literal groupmind that allowed for the instantaneous sharing of thoughts and knowledge, who addressed their biological needs by increasingly replacing their biology with technology as they age, and who quite innocently believe they are doing everyone a favor by sharing their philosophy with other, less advanced, species.  There was nothing that could really equal the menace they projected as a literally faceless antagonist with the voice of legion.

I hate what First Contact turned the Borg into... a race of cyber-zombies whose collective mind was ruled by an evil queen who, despite her protestations, behaves exactly like she's an individual and inverts the Borg's original intention by regarding the galaxy as biological and technological resources to be harvested to improve the Borg.  The Borg Queen was a mistake.

[pengbuzz]

9 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

For what it's worth, I much prefer this early version of the Borg over what they eventually became after Star Trek: First Contact.

There was so much more power and mystery surrounding the Borg back then.  They were a dark mirror of the Federation, a species far advanced over humanity that had taken the Federation's ideals of equality, the free exchange of knowledge and ideas, and using advanced technology to raise quality of life to their logical extremes.  A race of cyborgs who'd adopted an extreme form of collectivism in the form of a literal groupmind that allowed for the instantaneous sharing of thoughts and knowledge, who addressed their biological needs by increasingly replacing their biology with technology as they age, and who quite innocently believe they are doing everyone a favor by sharing their philosophy with other, less advanced, species.  There was nothing that could really equal the menace they projected as a literally faceless antagonist with the voice of legion.

I hate what First Contact turned the Borg into... a race of cyber-zombies whose collective mind was ruled by an evil queen who, despite her protestations, behaves exactly like she's an individual and inverts the Borg's original intention by regarding the galaxy as biological and technological resources to be harvested to improve the Borg.  The Borg Queen was a mistake.

Villain decay writ large, sad to say. The Borg should have been used far more sparsely, and in the shadows.

Agreed with you analysis on them.

Edited July 8, 2022 by pengbuzz

[sh9000]

 

[Dynaman]

The problem is the original Borg were like Zombies - once past the initial shock there is not much to do with them.  (Or the Daleks which had to introduce Davros to get them out of their shtick).  What they might have done (while keeping the plot basically intact) was keep having the "talking" borg switch from one drone to another.

[sh9000]

 

[sh9000]

 

[Seto Kaiba]

On 7/7/2022 at 9:16 PM, pengbuzz said:

Villain decay writ large, sad to say. The Borg should have been used far more sparsely, and in the shadows.

Agreed with you analysis on them.

First Contact made them too human, and Voyager just absolutely destroyed them... repeatedly getting REKT by a Starfleet science vessel is not exactly dignified for a species that supposedly far exceeds the Federation in power.

 

On 7/12/2022 at 11:48 PM, sh9000 said:

 

Loved this one... not just because it's the second use of the Picard Maneuver, it's also the moment Data learns how to be a massive troll.

[sh9000]

 

[pengbuzz]

16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

First Contact made them too human, and Voyager just absolutely destroyed them... repeatedly getting REKT by a Starfleet science vessel is not exactly dignified for a species that supposedly far exceeds the Federation in power.

Right? By the time Voyager got through with them, I half expected to see them on street corners in New York, holding a sign saying "Will work for assimilation".

 

16 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Loved this one... not just because it's the second use of the Picard Maneuver, it's also the moment Data learns how to be a massive troll.

I loved the moment Data made the other guy quit in disgust!

[Dobber]

5 hours ago, sh9000 said:

 

“Pakled!” -Klingon Captain from LD S2

I love these previews, I’m waiting for when they start using the different non Trek 90’s music for them.

Chris