Because Captain Jellicoe wasn’t in command. He took over and showed what a slack-ass job Picard was doing running Starfleet’s most advanced ship.
Seriously, The Next Generation suffered a lot from writers not really figuring out what they wanted the characters to be, and it took a long time for anyone but Picard, Riker, and Data to actually have a well-defined character motivation and consistent personality. There was a lot of pretty bad writing in the first two and a half seasons, and they often used characters like Dr. Crusher and LaForge to basically be exposition dumps rather than be well rounded personalities. (The less said about swapping out Crusher with Dr. Pulaski for the second series, the better; that was obvious executive interference with purile ‘notes’ on how to make the show ‘better’.) When they finally got the characters well situated and had a couple of seaons of solid episodes, they ran out of original stories starting around the end of fifth season were basically regurgitating previous stories, often without clear purpose. But “All Good Things…” is a legitimately great ending, and wrapping back around to the pilot episode was a nice bit of continuity in a show that often neglected it.
I frankly think Deep Space Nine was actually a narratively more consistent show with more richly developed characters, but it certainly wasn’t as light or fun. And it is pretty clear that the cast and crew had kind of had it with each other in the last couple of seasons.
I mean, I can see the idea: figure, for the sake of argument, that she could make all the difference by being next to the captain in this or that high-stakes situation — and so figure she should be right there whenever they go into one of those — and figure that, the rest of the time, in between the comparatively rare showdowns they show on the show, she has nothing better to do while on duty than see who could use a little counseling. Is it Reg? It’s probably Reg.
But if tomorrow is the one time all month that we’re going to bargain with the leader of the exotic-substance miners, then we’ll do then what we did when we negotiated with those hostage-takers in space last month: tell Troi that she’s needed on the bridge…
I’m told that the storyline bears an amazing resemblance to one of Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches novels. Not being a great reader of Anne Rice, I can’t say for sure.
I was in college when TNG premiered, and was already a big Star Trek fan. I watched it from the beginning, and while I appreciated the improved special effects compared to TOS, I seem to recall recognizing that the writing was a bit weak at times in the beginning. But I did continue to watch it, and it got better as it went along. Having several friends at school who were also big Trekkies helped, as I had people to discuss it with.
I think that one of the early problems was that they had bought too much into the myth of “Roddenberry’s vision,” that the future was this utopian place where all petty prejudices and disagreements had been overcome. As a result, there was no interpersonal conflict among the crew. There was nothing comparable to the Spock-McCoy dynamic that had given TOS so much of its energy. That also led to the sense of most of the characters being flat and not very distinctive, as mentioned above.
Dr. Crusher left after the first season, according to everything I’ve ever heard, because Gates McFadden had several clashes with Maurice Hurley, who was the showrunner at the time. He’s the one who asked for her contract not to be renewed. After Dr. Pulaski failed to gel with the rest of the cast, they decided to ask McFadden back for season three. Hurley had departed by then, and although she was reluctant, she did agree to come back.
I’ve always understood that there was…not relief, per se, when Roddenberry passed away, but at least some more breathing room to tell a different kind of SF story. They didn’t have to entertain “the Enterprise goes to the end of the universe and meets God or something just like him!” ideas that he was fixated on, and they could knock off the semi-remakes of TOS episodes.
Not that everything was great after that, there were still more than a few cruddy episodes and arcs. I still don’t understand the Troi/Worf coupling (right…hippie empath and honor-bound warrior falling for each other…sure…) though that was mercifully forgotten for the TNG movies.
Roddenberry kind of went off the deep end between the end of TOS and the beginning of TNG. The Great Bird of the Galaxy hated The Wrath of Khan because it militarized Starfleet. I don’t think anyone who watched TOS doubted Starfleet was a military, Kirk refers to himself as a soldier in some episodes, but by the time we get to TNG suddenly Starfleet isn’t a military organization.
And then of course there’s how the characters in TNG behaved. I read that Roddenberry didn’t think the crew should mourn the loss of Tasha Yar on the grounds that humans would have evolved to the point where we accepted death was a part of life. And of course he didn’t want interpersonal conflict, again, I guess we would have evolved beyond that in the future. But without interpersonal conflict there’s no drama. It makes for boring television.
But perhaps another problem with TNG’s early seasons is that they were working off scripts originally designed for Star Trek Phase II which would have had the original crew. Maybe they didn’t take the time to make changes to the scripts to adapt them to different characters.
I loved the bit where Jellicoe ordered Riker to re-do the crew’s duty schedule, and Riker just sort of…didn’t. Because he thought the schedule was fine the way it was. And we were supposed to be mad at Jellicoe when he disciplined Riker for this.
There was another bad episode called “Peak Performance” where a strategist arrives to set up and observe a war game between a weak ship Federation ship and a vastly more powerful ship in the form of the Enterprise. This was after Starfleet became aware of the Borg threat and this simulation was supposed to help them figure out strategies to combat them.
I guess we were supposed to be rooting against the strategist becaue he was arrogant, but the crew of the Enterprise treated the entire exercise as if it was a waste of time. Riker says something about exploration being Starfleet’s main purpose as if they hadn’t recently gotten their asses handled to them by the Borg and lost several members of the crew.
What the characters, and maybe the writers, and a lot of fans missed, is that, no matter which shift Riker says (four 6s or three 8s) Jellico was going to have him change to the other one. He needed to establish who was in charge, and fast, because he knew they could be going into combat, and he didn’t need the crew whining “that’s not how Capt Picard does it!” while they are under attack.
Jellico didn’t have time to work into the trust style of command Picard had built up. Picard was the kind of commander that inspired you to do your best just with a look, and made you hate the idea of letting him down. It worked for him. But what it also did, is made his crew a bunch of whiny titty-babies at the first sign of change, Picard’s crew failed what is a pretty basic test of military command structure.
In defense of the TNG crew, while they whined about it, they did get the job done. Riker was the only one who couldn’t handle it, and in his defense, he really should have been the one to take command with Picard unavailable, and he was probably righteously pissed about that.
But Jellico was a great character and the conflict made for good TV, so the writers made the right decision.
My complaint is meta: I think we the audience were supposed to hate Jellico and think he was a martinet, when he was IMO every bit as good a captain as Picard, but just different.
We do all know the real reason she wore that casual wear, but I’ve heard as justification that since Deanna was ship’s counselor, she needed to appear approachable. Since she carried the rank of lieutenant commander, her standard uniform would have the unwanted effect of separating her from the 90% (or whatever) of ship’s personnel who were non-ranking or civilian, who needed to relate to her on a personal level instead of seeing her as a superior officer.
I can easily believe the motivation to shake up the cast was stupid, but Dr. Pulaski was The Best; never understood the Pulaski-hate at all. I vastly preferred her brittleness to Beverly’s sugary blah-blah-blah I’m a Healer stuff. It’s too bad apparently Muldaur never clicked with the rest of the cast for whatever reason. Perhaps they resented her because McFadden’s departure was unjust, which is understandable.
A standout episode! Wonderful casting of character actor Roy Brocksmith as Kolrami, who almost literally chewed up the scenery to my great entertainment. Nice coat, too.
I don’t even think that it was that he was different. It was that the situation was different. Jellico had to establish himself as being in command in a very short period of time, just before going into a situation he knew might result in them getting into combat. He just didn’t have the luxury of enough time to be anything but a hard-ass.
If Picard had been tossed into such a situation on another ship, he’d have probably had to play the hard-ass role too.
There were a handful of first season episodes that essentially reused Phase II scripts with light doctoring, and some that were used almost verbatim in the second season due to a writer’s strike, but even the wholly original episodes were not very good.
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There was another bad episode called “Peak Performance” where a strategist arrives to set up and observe a war game between a weak ship Federation ship and a vastly more powerful ship in the form of the Enterprise…I guess we were supposed to be rooting against the strategist becaue he was arrogant, but the crew of the Enterprise treated the entire exercise as if it was a waste of time. [/quote]
There is really quite a bit of evidence that the crew of the Enterprise is not particularly competent or disciplined, notwithstanding the larger problems of Starfleet which violates its own rules (including its “Prime Directive” which is oft-discussed in hushed tones right before they blow right through it) and flag ranks full of conspirators and infiltrators. The narrative universe of Star Trek seems to really be full of existential threats and horrors which often mutate, “dimensionally phase”, send crew members to alternate dimensions, or have them subject to psychic hazards which drive them insane. And of course, almost none of them get promoted or receive a PCS to advance in responsibility for the entire seven year run.
I’m such a dork that I sent Diana Muldaur a fan letter a while back; I imagine she gets a fair bit still, but hope it brightened her day a tiny bit. She deserves it just from the laughter she gave me in the scene when she met Data, mispronounced his name, then when he corrected her, theatrically pretended to scan him with a tricorder: “Do I detect hurt feelings? From a machine?” Zing! [chef’s kiss]
Pulaski sucked. They were trying too hard to make her McCoy Phase 2, with her (for lack of a better word) outright hostile racism towards Data, mimicking McCoy’s racism towards Spock, which for me is enough to hate her.
While I think The Icarus Factor is one of the best S2 (if not all season) episodes, Pulaski just didn’t get it. She chastises Riker for how he feels about his father, while using as her defense “I would have married him”. Doctor, Kyle may have been the best lover/husband/colleague in the history of the universe, but you just don’t see that to Riker he had ONE job, and failed miserably.
Adding the pointless irascibility that served no purpose, what’s to like?