There’s just so much wrong with the whole Enterprise Friends and Family program.
As you mentioned, what happens to children who are orphaned while on board? Do they just dump them at the nearest starbase or do they become the property of Starfleet and the ship?
Is there daycare on board?
According to the internet, there are 1100 people on board the Enterprise. What percent are families of crew? And what percent of the crew are in roles related to taking care of the families - pediatricians, teachers, family counselling, etc. Or is it all just dumped on Dianna Troi and Dr Crusher to deal with?
What happens if a family gets divorced?
What do the non-Starfleet spouses and children do all day? Drink space-chardonnay in 10-Forward while the children run around the engineering spaces getting into trouble?
You know what we never saw a lot of in most of the TNG Star Trek series? News. Sure, TOS and Enterprise they were exploring the unknown and Voyager got itself tossed halfway across the galaxy. But in TNG and DS9, they spend a lot of time in civilized space and have real-time FTL communications. There’s never monitors in the background of the 10-Forward lounge showing random CNN shit going on around the galaxy.
Yup. Lots more nonessential personnel consuming energy and other resources.
Nope. Lots of nannies and teachers; plenty of babysitting work available for girls of Wesley’s age. (How often did we see any of those? Poor kid had, what, one girlfriend in four–five years. And she was only a passenger!)
No idea. But they’re obviously mature enough to deal with it without conflict.
Work to “better” themselves, of course!
They never do stuff like read magazines, listen to rock music, or watch old movies and TV shows either. And they’re always traveling back to the 20th or 21st centuries. For them, pop culture doesn’t exist. Apparently today is about as interesting as it’s going to get.
That’s because Ten-Forward is a “happening” place. They don’t want anything there that might bring down the mood of the patrons. (You’d think they’d serve real alcohol to liven things up a bit, but noooooooooooo! :mad: I guess they’re more worried about people staring silently out the windows and slitting their wrists.)
All pop culture was destroyed in World War III. That’s why the only music Zefram Cochrane had available on his maiden flight was a nearly 100 year old Steppenwolf CD.
I think sixteen has long been the minimum legal age you can enlist in any service, as long as you have your parents’ permission. So this doesn’t bother me either.
Service personnel are one thing. Underage civilians along for the ride are another.
Offhand, the only pop-culture predictions I can think of are that professional baseball and television would essentially disappear by the mid 21st-century.
One thing that DS9 did was redeem Worf. On TNG they had Woopie Goldberg beat him in the holodeck at target practice to show that she was someone not to be messed with as well as to try and score feminism points. On the first DS9 episode with Worf they had him did batliff fighting with dax, who has 8 lifetimes of experience including a man honored by the Klingons, and although she held her own Worf decisively wins the battle.
They would go on to turn Worf into a paragon of Klingonness including where he was imprisoned and would fight and win countless one on one battles against gem hadar without any proper medical care and finally having the Gem Hadar commander declare that he could not defeat Worf… only kill him.
So what I’m saying is TNG made Worf a joke and DS9 made him into a legend.
