Did you see the episode of ST: TNG called “Captain’s Holiday”? I’m pretty sure he and Vasch “tread upon new ground”.
There was Vasch for sure, and also that new officer who played the piano - astrophysicist lady. At least. I may be forgetting a few.
Also Famke Jannsen’s character, in “The Perfect Mate.”
We could learn a lot from Picard, actually. Being calm, collected, and an interesting conversationalist without trying even a little to push anything seems to work very well. Of course, it helps to command a starship, I’m sure.
I never saw Picard get in so much as a vigorous scuffle. He’s a disgrace to the starfleet!
The struggle with Star Trek is that the universe always postulated a future civilization that’s way more societally advanced than our own. Earth is at total peace, its nations and people fighting no more. Given that we’ve been fighting each other since we weren’t even Homo sapiens that’s a hell of a thing. There’s no more hunger or want (on civilized planets, at least) or any of the usual things that have bedevilled us.
But the writers have to make the stories accessible to today’s audiences, so you have to provide some familiar conflicts, situations, contexts and characterizations. And of course the show would be boring without some danger, which is why you don’t see week after week of the Enterprise, a pretty large warship, just batting enemies away like flies.
The notion of a military organization in the 23rd century being radically different in attitude and tone from today’s militaries is not the slightest bit outlandish. Militaries have not always been the way they are now. The professional, civilian-supervised militaries enjoyed by First World countries today are, by historical standards, a modern invention. 400 years ago armies were either gangs of mercenaries or were raised by temporary levys and were not so much professional as they were a gang of criminals beaten into discipline; their interaction with the civilian world was primarily stealing food and raping women. (This was replicated in the 1990s civil war in Yugoslavia, where many of the Serb and Croat “army” units were effectively about as military as an L.A. street gang.) One SDMB poster, whose name I don’t recall, said an army of the past was much like a plague of locusts. Today’s professional militaries would have been as fantastical and unbelievable to an observer from 1510 as Starfleet (in its more artsy-fartsy moments) seems to us today. So why couldn’t the military arm of a 23rd-century interstellar empire be mostly a scientific endeavour? It wouldn’t be any more a change than what we’ve seen the last several centuries.
If anything, Star Trek didn’t go far enough. It talks a good game about the enlightenment of the Federation, but the Federation is really just the United States of America on a galactic scale; engaged in cold wars with its neighbours, showing up in battleships but claiming to be peaceful, and generally trying to be the good guy but engaging in some sneaky shit. The alien races are little more than stand-ins for other countries, which is why they’re all humanoids with different forehead wrinkles.
All space TV shows suffer from this. Babylon 5 was much the same; darker and grownup but, again, a lot of aliens with different foreheads and haircuts, and the various factions were, again, just ou current countries and alliances projected into space. Battlestar Galactica had only one enemy and they were either human-looking or CGI robots, and the idea of the humans being desperately living out of the same spaceships for years was slowly dropped (where did they keep getting clean clothes?)
I think it would be neat to have a space show that REALLY changes the game. Star Trek: Hard Core. What would a seafaring human race inthe 23rd century with matter reproduction technology really be like? What would drive us? How would people act? How would it change the military? How would it change family interaction? Religion? Politics? Recreation? It would be neat to see people in such dramatically different circumstances and to see how they acted differently and yet see their common humanity. Star Trek really only touched on this stuff a tiny bit; the one touch I always liked was that everyone seems very interested in the arts, which strikes me as being quite a reasonable hypothesis for people who don’t have to spend time worrying about food or money or even cleaning up. But they didn’t do much with it.
But… as to “I, Hugh,” that was one of the worst-written episodes of all time. No matter how you approach it the idea was extremely ill-thought-out, because nothing Picard does there is consistent with his own character, and nothing he COULD do would be consistent. Picard’s decision not to use the virus against the Borg doesn’t really make any sense from any angle. He’s passing up a chance to defeat the Federation’s mortal enemy, so he’s a traitor. He’s a talk-first-shoot-later kind of guy but he’s certainly not a coward or unwilling to use force when need be - after all, there’s a combat maneuver named after him - so it makes no sense that he’d take it easy on the Borg, especially given that he hates them. Now, you could argue that the virus constitutes and illegal type of warfare, in which case he would be correct in not using it, but that is never once mentioned in the episode. If the virus constitutes biological warfare, nobody says it, so that possibility isn’t used.
More to the point, if it’s a hard decision, why on earth does Picard not call Starfleet? It’s well established that calling Starfleet isn’t much harder than making a long distance phone call. Picard calls up Admiral Plotdevice, explains the situation, and the Admiral either says “no fuckin way, that’s biological warfare” or says he’ll get back to Picard with a decision in a time frame too long for Picard to wait for it, or SOMETHING to introduce some logical ambiguity. Instead Picard just unilaterally decides to let his mortal enemy off the hook because Hugh seems like he might be a nice kid if he wasn’t a robotic ant.
It’s one of those episodes where you get the sense they wrote it in a hurry and only noticed that it didn’t make any sense until after it was filmed.
I think you are mis-remembering; he didn’t go on all the away missions, because he had a first officer to do that (and that makes perfect sense to me), but he still managed to mix it up on occasion.
Either that or they considered it to be entertainment used to advertise household products in order to generate revenue for CBS and Paramount.
That’s just crazy talk. 