I got the character name wrong. She actually played Tech #1. Silly me.
Unlike Corwin, she never got promoted and stopped showing up after a while. I can only assume she got reassigned in early 2259 (another cool thing about B5, each season covered one calendar year, while on TNG you had to kinda make a rough bullshit guess when anything was happening. That said, you’d half expect people to suffer nervous breakdowns every Thanksgiving knowing SOMETHING huge and dramatic was going to happen every single New Years
As far as not having counselors on a starship… eh, we have counselors in the Real Life™ military, although I want to say most of the folks you’d consider “full time” counselors are all Chaplains (that’s pretty much what Chaplains do in the military, though I guess a Chaplain wouldn’t really mesh so great in Star Trek)
Incidentally, with the humans being all holier-than-thou about having outgrown such silly character flaws (which they do tend to lord over everybody else), one of the great moments was the season 2 finale of DS9 where Sisko gets taken down a peg by Quark, of all people, who basically rips him a new one over it, and points out that nothing in Ferengi history comes close to the stuff humans used to revel in (and indeed, human history on Star Trek seems a lot nastier than it is in real life, at least around the time of the end of the Cold War.)
I liked Riker for the most part, but Frakes’ talents are wasted playing good guys. No, you want to see him play a master villain. The kind of guy who buys castles and has them air-lifted to New York City.
Also, to continue the game: Scylla, facing the blimp in the night.
HAH! i think campbell would have done better in both roles. frakes just looks oversized, like baby huey. plus with the extra lbs he gained as the seasons went on, he became less and less convincing as a ladies’ man.
what, because he has a rudimentary grasp of jazz trombone, and three pins on his uniform he gets to slay his way through dozens of vag’s? i don’t buy it.
What I meant is that if the mission is, say, setting up a hospital on a colony world, then obviously it’s the CMO who actually leads it. But if they’re doing emergency response to a big disaster I can see the CMO going on the away mission as well, as I doubt even Picard’s Enterprise (with a much larger ship’s complement than the other ships) had more than two doctors on board.
I liked the blue dress. And I could understand her thoughts in wearing it; she didn’t want to be thought of as the person who might relieve you of duty, which is really more Crusher’s call anyway. I wouldn’t want them both to have that authority.
It struck as fan-pandering, almost a Mary Sue-ish element:
“The Enterprise was the flagship, because it was the bestest ship in all the Federation and it had the bestest crew and the bestest adventures and they always saved the day in the bestest way.”
But more likely, I figure, the show was being written by people who’d never been in the military, had never had any interest in being in the military, and who actually kinda disliked the military to the point where educating themselves about it would feel like they were admitting failure or something.
Heh…this reminded me of a fanfic I started writing way back in the late 90s, about an Enterprise ensign who heroically sacrificed his life to defend the last evacuees of an invaded Federation colony. He was beamed up at the moment that he took a phaser hit that vaporized his heart, and his consciousness merged with the ship’s circuitry and created a machine/human intelligence for the ship. After the first two segments were published on alt.star-trek.creative, someone criticized the heroic ensign as a Gary Stu, and I spent about ten posts protesting that. Then realized it was true and the SHIP ITSELF was about to become the Gary Stu, and dropped the story like a hot potato.
Whose quarters are so small that her bed is DIRECTLY IN FRONT OF THE DOOR TO THE CORRIDOR.
Admittedly that was just a setup to show off her wheels, but still, I’d much rather have a half-as-big bunk on the wall.
I’ll fanwank it. The translator works best when there is a one or two word equivalent for the word in question. Words like “knife,” “ship,” “weapon,” “run,” and “happy” work well. But for terms without such an equivalent, it will just let the original word come through. Thus if Picard is telling the Vulcan ambassador about his memories of winter vacations as a youth, the word Christmas is not going to be translated into Vulcan, because there is obviously no Vulcan equivalent than can be anything but misleading. (The same may apply to winter.)
Admittedly the translator could try to handle Christmas by saying something like “the holiday commemorating the mythical Jewish hero in whose honor the religion of Christianity was founded,” but there are obvious problems with doing it that way.
In addition, the UT is programmed to ignore certain words even if they could be translated as in a single word. These include proper names and profanities. Take the proper name Hannah, which literally means “grace.” Assume the Klingonese word for grace is kil’Poq. If Picard is referring to the philosopher who spoke of the banality of evil, it’s not helpful to give the literal meaning of her name. Likewise, if he’s talking to a species that doesn’t marry, and insults someone by calling him a bastard, it’s best just to let the original word through.
