I’ve been watching TNG for the first time and so far season 1 has been hit or miss. Ether a episode will be really good or really bad. So far I think episode 23 is a really good episode! I hope that Tasha isn’t actually dead. I liked her and thought she was a gorgeous woman! This is the one and only time I will ever want spoilers but is she fully dead or does she return?
The actress returns. I’m not gonna tell you any more than that haha. It’s a story arc I really liked actually.
And Season 1 is notoriously bad. The show was really struggling to figure out what it wanted to be. Season 2, like around episode 8 is where you start to get into the “holy crap this has no right to be this good” stuff.
@Chetzemoka @DarthonTV I wasn’t particularly attached to Crusher but MAN they screwed up Pulaski bad. You cannot recreate the Spock-McCoy dynamic with Pulaski and Data because Data is too distinct and Pulaski is too derivative. You COULD have had an interesting back and forth if you put more thought into Pulaski rather than just making her bluntly prejudiced, but instead you set her as a bully against the show’s best character and made everyone instantly dislike her. There’s some good stuff in S2, Moriarty, the Borg, but they mishandled a lot.
@Chetzemoka @DarthonTV McCoy and Spock worked because they were on even ground. For all we love Spock, he has a prejudice against his human half instilled by his vulcan upbringing. He could give it as well as he could take it as a result. McCoy and Spock were on equal footing, both working through their own prejudices and philosophical differences while maintaining a friendship. McCoy could snip at vulcan and Spock would come back with a dig at humans.
Data did have the same standing, the same critique of humanity. It was just Pulaski talking over him with no pushback pointing out the flaws in her nature.
@Chetzemoka @DarthonTV Ugh, “didn’t”. Not sure I can edit a comment from Mastodon.
Anyway, the writers in S2 could have set up something where Pulaski doubts Data’s self-determination abilities and Data regularly comes back with questioning the free will of biological organisms, if they had tweaked Pulaski enough that she did speak to Data like a person even as she put forth these ideas. Instead, she thinks he’s a thing and most of her objections are to the people AROUND Data rather than to Data himself.
It was a very bad look and no wonder people wanted Crusher back.