Been binging on Star Trek NG lately. Just finished watching season 1 and I am dumbfounded that I am just now realizing how bad it is.
Now I’m on season 2, still bad but episode 2, “Where Silence Has Lease” (That’s the episode with the cloud face guy) gave me pause. Terrible writing in this episode.
So the Enterprise manages to get itself stuck in a “nothing-hole”. They fecklessly try many ways to get out of this trap.
At one point, Geordy says: “Keep the cheese, I just want out of the maze”. This remark went virtually noticed.
Later on in the episode, Dr. Polaski says: “Rats in a maze!” of course this piques Picard’s interest as he asks for further explanation. To which she explains the obvious: “It’s like we’re test subjects in a lab experiment.”
Well, duh! Geordy just pointed that out not more than 10 minutes ago! :smack:
Second issue:
The show starts off with Wesley at Navigation. And then for some reason, with out explanation, he is replaced by some black dude named Haskel. He is present just long enough for cloud face guy to mind fuck him and kill him off.
And as soon as he dies, guess who’s siting back at navigation? Wesley!
Okay, saying it’s racist may be a stretch. But good golly that is some really bad writting there!
The early TNG episode Code of Honor is notorious for being racist. Yar is kidnapped by black savages and forced into a fight to the death.
Personally I found the episode Justice to be slightly racist. In this episode the crew find themselves in a sort of paradise where everyone runs around half-naked and has sex all the time. The show prided itself on its diversity, but this “paradise planet” is filled with nothing but white, blond-haired Aryan übermenschen.
After sitting through yet another craptastic episode (I think it was the one in which Riker worked out his issues with his father by boxing with him), I said to my wife, “If next week’s episode isn’t any better, I’m going to stop watching.”
The next episode, which ever it was, was not bad, so we stayed with it.
I never understood people who thought TNG was a more “mature” show than TOS. I always found it to the contrary - TNG would go for simplististic, moralizing solutions, while TOS at times went for less-satisfying grayer endings.
I understand that. But to move Wesley off of navigation only to have him return a few scenes later is just crazy. It would have made a lot more sense to just not have him on navigation in the first place.
The intent had been around for a while to make a “more mature” Trek. But by the time they got to it Gene’s mind was sliding into some sort of preachy fit instead, so Season 1 TNG’s basic approach to crises was “let’s just sit here talking about how we’re taking the morally superior position”. Were it not for Q (original uncrappified flavor) showing up ocassionally to kick their rears…
And a lot of those involved knew it, but kept their game face on like troupers. I loved Wheaton’s memoirs on how terrible those early stages were. It did get better.
I could at least see the natives in Justice as being kind of a nod to Wells’ Eloi—they even have a similar name, the “Edo,” and a similar appearance to the 1960 film version. So, while peaceful and pretty, they’re also essentially little more than domesticated animals, although more like “pets” than “livestock” in Trek’s case.
What’s the original series episode in which they run afoul of the aliens who can turn people into compressed blocks of sand?
The original landing party has Kirk, McCoy, a black guy, and a white girl. The aliens demonstrate their power by turning the black guy and the white girl into blocks of sand. Then, the leader takes the blocks of sand, crushes one of them and remarks “that member of your crew is now irretrievably dead.” Kirk and McCoy are stone-faced and solemn. The aliens then revert the second sandblock into the original human form – it was the black guy!! The WHITE GIRL WAS KILLED!! Kirk and McCoy gape in abject horror! The theme music swells DRAMATICALLY!! Kirk gets to his knees and runs his hands through the sand that was once a white girl, I think I might’ve even done a “NOOOO!!!” And then we cut a commercial. Oh God! The horror! A white girl was killed!
But would they have had the same reaction if the black guy bought it? Seems to me, the whole scene played out as if, while there’s a chance the black guy could’ve been killed, it would be no big deal. But the white girl???
As much as I like John de Lancie, I really couldn’t stand that character. Oh, look, he’s infinitely powerful, and yet cares about humans because humans are just so gosh-darn important.
I mean, I might find a Petri dish full of amoeba interesting, but I’m not going to lecture them on the evolution of their political and economic systems. Interestingly, the writers had Q sneering about humanity’s bloodthirsty past while wearing a WW2-era USMC uniform. Had this show been broadcast a few years later when that “greatest generation” guff was everywhere, I expect this might have earned quite the nasty backlash.
Another recurring bit I found tiresome was Data’s schtick of “I have read the collected works of Kant, Confucius, Locke, Descartes, Voltaire, Hume, Nietzsche and I skimmed Spinoza but now I think I’ll ask Commander Riker - what is the meaning of life?” I’m confident there were at least four bits along those lines in the early seasons - name-drop a bunch of important-sounding philosophers and writers, and then get some chicken-soup opinion from one of the other characters: “Well, Data, you gotta do what you gotta do. Understand?”
I think the idea was to actually have a planet ruled by blacks … for a change. As I recall, they were all big, athletic dudes who exuded sexuality. Hmmmm, wait a minute… :dubious:
Sweden … with a draconian death penalty. Again, hmmmmm… :dubious: