“Sock it to me?”
“What does a god need with a starship?”
“Where is Aphrodite?”
The fact Troi was a bridge officer has bugged me too, even her position on the bridge next to the captain’s chair! Not to mention her clothing, until 7of9 she was the only one wearing a skin tight bodysuit.
My fanwank is that counselor is a “cover” of sorts to explain her being on the ship, if she really was a counselor she wouldn’t be sitting next to the captain. Her true job is as an empath(although she is pretty shitty at it) to help psychically read those the Enterprise deals with. Imagine what an empath could do for your nation in international negotiations, wow! Even if you refuse to view it cynically, it helps to cut through cultural misunderstandings and such if you know what the stranger is feeling and thinking.
Stop quoting Richard Nixon.
That could have been interesting, if they’d presented it like that instead of like this:
Alien: How dare you trespass upon our space! We shall destroy your ship and display its ruined hull as a warning to others!!
Troi: I sense hostility.
That’s not a fanwank, that’s canon. Her role on the bridge was to be an advisor to the Captain on the emotions and intent of whomever they encountered. It’s just the scriptwriters sucked at it.
Or, by historical analogy (and personal experience), in an organization full of Colonels, the Major makes the coffee. Always.
Captain Darling, would you bring me my tea?
Blackadder could take Troi’s place.
Picard: “Is it intelligent? Is it dangerous?”
Blackadder: “I’m sensing it’s a giant git with bad breath, hemorrhoids the size of Uranus, and a plan so cunning even it doesn’t fully understand it.”
Space Baldrick: “I have a cunning plan…”
Worf: “Captain! We must destroy it!”
Picard: “Make it so. Anyone one for a spot of tea? Number One Darling, would you be so kind?”
Pardon the juvenile nature of what I am doing, but I stumbled upon this thread while searching for something else Trek-related, and the insightful and often hilarious responses to the original question kept me reading. I had not decided to actually register for an account at this forum until I read this particular response, and I felt the need to reply in kind. I realize I’m responding to a two-year old response on an old thread… but the response irked me enough to say something on the matter.
Acsenray, you mention how you feel others are, and I paraphrase, “letting [their] personal values and experience lead [them] to unnecessary assumptions”. My response would first be to question what you, individually, define as “unnecessary assumptions”.
My second response: of course the others on this board are allowing their personal values and experiences to guide their thoughts and answers. So are you, whether you acknowledge that or not. All human beings do it. That’s part and parcel of being human. For our own survival, we are meant to learn from personal experience. When we do learn by osmosis, it’s through someone else’s experiences that we relate to for whatever reason, thereby making those experiences as personal to us as experiences we have been through ourselves. To expect anything else of any human being would be to expect them not to be human.
You know who else allows their personal experience to guide them? Fiction writers. The old writers’ adage goes, “Write what you know.” When Gene Roddenberry crafted the Star Trek universe, he allowed his personal experience as a former member of the U.S. Army Air Corps (changed to the “U.S. Army Air Forces” in 1941) during World War II to guide not only how he wrote Starfleet, but to guide his ideas on what he wanted Starfleet to be like. How could he know what his ideal “quasi-military” organization would be like if he had zero experience in how an actual military worked? He served in the Army Air Forces, learned how a military during wartime conducted its business (as well as gaining an understandable distaste for war itself; this was World War II, after all), then began fantasizing about what an ideal military-like organization would be like during peacetime.
All writers do this.
We learn about something, and it leads us to speculate upon what we have already learned via personal experience. Generally speaking, we dream of the unknown based on what we already know or have seen/done (although in some specific cases, a case for genetic memory could be made, but that’s an entirely different kettle of gagh). For example, I have been learning much of Hebrew, Judaism and the ancient Levant lately. What I have learned makes me dream of going to Israel. I would not have that dream had I not first experienced learning of Judaism and the ancient Levant. I am quite certain that what I experience in modern Israel when I go someday will make me dream of having been there in ancient times (specifically during the eras I study primarily, the Middle Bronze Age to Iron Age II, but I digress). These dreams of what I want to do and where I want to go come from my personal experiences of what I have already done and where I have already been.
Humans learn through personal experience, and we dream of what could be based on our experiences of what is or what has been. To demand that we do otherwise would be to rob humans of their very humanity.
Don’t harshing on other posters for what you perceive as their lack of whatever you deem “objectivity” to be simply because they are doing what humans do by drawing upon personal experiences to make intelligent, well thought-out and often humorous arguments.
Anyone else ever wonder what the “range” of Betazoid telepathy is? I mean Deanna was only half-Betazoid and her supposed empathetic abilities worked on individuals hundreds or thousands of kilometers away and seperated by 2 starship hulls, the vacum of space, and usually 2 sets of shields. When you think the indea of her as a Federation political commissar, with the Federation as it’s portrayed in TNG, is way creepier than anything in the Mirror Universe.
Not necessarily. In complete accordance with Hodgkin’s Law of Parallel Planet Development—mentioned in the episode you refer to, “Bread and Circuses”—many aliens actually did speak English, without benefit of translation. At the beginning of that episode, in fact, Spock specifically points out that the Roman world is “Highly parallel; the language here is English!”
Whether you buy this explanation or not depends entirely on how much you’re willing to temporarily suspend your disbelief, or to consider current theories on the “infinite worlds, infinite possibilities” concept.
FWIW, James Blish also suggested in his adaptations of the TOS episodes that some aliens spoke (or at least understood) “Basic,” which was a kind of dumbed-down version of English proposed for international use after WWII. It seems to have caught on in a lot of countries, at least in concept, and was apparently carried out into the Galaxy as well.
There’s an episode of Voyager in which Janeway is castigated for believing only in the things that science can prove and, one would assume, has her eyes opened to the possibility that maybe there are “more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”*
One thing that grated on me intensely was the difference in the character’s attitudes toward religion in TOS and TNG. Kirk and crew were much more tolerant and respectful of other people’s beliefs, whether they agreed with them or not; there was even a ship’s chapel set aside for those who wished to use it. Picard and crew were often openly hostile to them, while gushingly embracing a lot of other things that were just plain silly (e.g., a culture where one man needs three interpreters to express his thoughts: “What a beautiful form of communication!”).
Roddenberry wanted “human engineers” like Troi on board to help people deal with their problems, rather than anything resembling a chaplain, because he thought humans would by that time be “more mature.”**
HA! It always seemed to me that in this respect, the 23rd century was a lot more “mature” than the 24th.
*By which Shakespeare meant “in one’s philosophy.” Thanks, Cecil!
**It probably didn’t hurt that Troi had a spectacular rack, either.
EDIT: The characters’ attitudes (plural).
Returning to this thread after a long while but one wonders if there wasn’t a concerted effort by the Federation to have at least one Betazoid or half Betazoid on each ship as a “counselor”.
Was not Ezri Dax a counselor?
Not a very good one, she tended to get under your skin.
flees
Look she was very pretty.
Yes, but she wasn’t stationed in Ops. Maybe Troi being a bridge officer was an experimental thing Starfleet was trying out, like stationing families on ships. Speaking of Ezri Dax; am I the only one who thought having the new Dax host be female was a huge mistake on the writers part? Just imagine Worf’s reaction.