I’m from a military family.
One of the eps did show Picard’s family history with loads of military types. Went back to Napolean even.
They can and did. Geordi, however, told Dr. Pulaski that the VISOR was part of him and he wasn’t going to go to artificial eyeballs.
I guess, however, he got a raise, since by the time the movies came out the VISOR was gone, replaced with “eyes,” although you could tell they weren’t real.
My #1 pet peeve…I want a DS9 movie and I want it now.
They should’ve turned Terak Nor into a death star.
Despite my love for DS9, I think the Ferengi were a big wasted opportunity. Here was Trek’s chance to do some genuine, intelligent commentary on capitalism, and they blow it on wafer-thin comedic plots, overblown stereotypes of conniving businessmen, Wallace Shawn, and crude sexual jokes (I’ll be happy if I never hear the word “lobes” again).
You’re going to hell.
You made me laugh, though.
And I must say…I’ve always been a life-long Picard fan, to the point of disparaging Kirk. A couple of years ago I watched the movies - just the movies! - and noticed something.
The chemistry that existed between the original crew has not been duplicated. Riker has no personality. There are way too many annoying people on DS9. Etc.
The way Spock & McCoy & Kirk interact is engaging and interesting. I adore Picard, but unfortunately he just didn’t have that type of interaction.
That’s exactly why I’ve never been able to get into any of the other series. Well, that and the fact that the Enterprise theme song had lyrics.
The lazy way out? How about as a necessary way for dealing with real budgetary constraints? Until very recently, few television production companies were going to shell out for more than a handful of major roles in a series. Every actor with lines costs more. Star Trek was even more financially strapped than most one-hour dramas.
I was always bothered by the fact that Kirk could talk to any computer, point out how its logic was faulty, and blow it up. Didn’t the alien designers ever hear of service packs?
I also hated how whatever planet they visited, they would always beam down to the One World Capitol, population 83.
“…And be sure to bring it home.”
My pet peeve:
“Captain <so-and-so>, report to <sick bay, transporter room, cargo hold, etc>. There’s something you need to see.”
“What is it?”
“Just come down and look.”
It was done this way so we could have a big dramatic reveal of the whatever-it-was instead of giving it away on the intercom, but it makes absolutely no sense. I can hear Gen. Tommy Franks on the phone: “Son, I ain’t drivin’ all the way to the base unless you tell me what it is that’s so important I got to go look at it.”
And you can get the same effect with some tighter writing:
“Captain <so-and-so>, report to <the holodeck, Ten Forward, the promenade, etc>.”
“What is it?”
<Cut to the whatever-it-is in or on the wherever-it-is, and then a reverse angle of Captain so-and-so looking at it.>
Same dramatic effect, saves a couple of seconds of valuable storytelling time, and IT ISN’T COMPLETELY RETARDED.
Whew.
Anyway: Watch for this. Basically every Trek series did this, like every other week. Once you’re sensitized to it, it’ll drive you nuts.
Good posts thus far. I always cringe at, “Captain, you’d better come down here. I have to show you something.”
My pet peeve is how virtually every ambassador who ever comes aboard has some dark secret, or is going to cause problems for the captain and crew. If I commanded a starship, I’d always refuse diplomatic-courier assignments.
As to the Holodeck’s utter addictiveness, Dennis Miller once said something similar about virtual reality: “Anything that lets Joe Sixpack make love to Claudia Schiffer whenever he wants to is going to make crack look like Sanka.”
<nitpick>
Actually, he did have the VISOR for ST:TNG movies *Generations *(movie 1) and First Contact. His eyes “regenerated” in Insurrection, which is when he ditched the VISOR and we get to see LeVar Burton’s normal eyes for the first time in ST.
You’re probably thinking of the “final episode” : All Good Things where Geordi supposedly shows up with cybernetic eyes. BLUE ones, at that, which was stupid. They couldn’t get a better color match than THAT? Geez, we can match people’s eye colors NOW with artificial eyes - did they suddenly lose that capability in the 24th Century?
</nitpick>
THAT was a bad bit of scriptwriting - the writers of the movies couldn’t be bothered to check what the series writers did before that? I understand that they wanted LaForge’s eyes to regenerate and all that, but how to explain the blue cybernetic eyes in All Good Things, then? But then again, “consistency” was never one of the Great Bird’s requirements.
Nope, he had the cybernetic eyes in First Contact.
My pet peeve about Star Trek? Fan wankery with the women. It was ok in the original series, it was the 60’s after all, but Troi on the bridge in a miniskirt? T’Pol having to rub oil all over her large, heaving, Vulcan breasts in the pilot episode?
Give me a series I can watch without embarressment in the same room as my girlfriend and I might watch it.
Yeah, they were really pandering to the Comic Book Guy demographic there. Star Trek: Show for Ubergeeks could have been the title.
[QUOTE=DogMom I understand that they wanted LaForge’s eyes to regenerate and all that, but how to explain the blue cybernetic eyes in All Good Things, then? But then again, “consistency” was never one of the Great Bird’s requirements.[/QUOTE]
Technically, All Good Things was about an episode with a temporal distortion, so one could argue that Geordi’s visit to Picard in the vineyard of the future will never happen.
For some reason, I really dig the term “vineyard of the future,” and plan to use it as frequently as possible. 
Gobbledygook?
The correct term is “technobabble.” Like when Geordi and Data reconfigure the nutations of the deflector array to induce an anaphasic burst of anti-verterons and fix this week’s problem.
Personally, I use the term “treknobabble.”
Jar Jar. “Meesa so annoying”
