the last time i watched the episodes with ensign ro was like a month before i came out and honestly they might be even weirder to come back to than the autistic android child who is confused by gender but eventually decides to be a girl
yknow, for how much of a reputation star trek has in pop culture for camp (which, i mean, is totally deserved in TNG for stuff like the “klingon imperial empire” full of fantasy-racist space warriors that talk like banjo kazooie characters), it still has tons of down-to-earth, quiet, emotional moments that feel like they couldn’t happen in shows now, and that’s maybe sort of a trite generalization but it’s still Fucked
anything with ensign ro in it because she doesn’t take anyone’s shit, heck yeah
at least one or two trashy holodeck episodes, or maybe that videogame that’s basically 90s CGI oculus cocaine because that gets funnier every time i watch it (oh god i have a job working on augmented reality stuff the future is now and it sucks)
something with Lore in it because i have a soft spot for brent spiner
this is a weird one to stick out in my memory so much but i really really like lower decks and want to revisit it
oh the episode where picard and Q hang out in purgatory is good, this episode is probably real and not another thing i made up? it’s the only Q episode i like
EDIT: i forgot about the episode with two rikers so… the episode with two rikers
Yesterday’s Enterprise is, of course, always a good watch.
Unrelated: I’ve been re-watching some of the better Voyager eps as a way to unwind after work (been unusually stressful). The Doctor, Seven, and Janeway definitely do become the singular core of that show.
Couple that I’ve really enjoyed:
“Blink of an Eye” is just a real rock-solid Star Trek premise. They adapted it from Dragon’s Egg, which I think benefits from some compression. Some great moments with the Doctor. I love that the stakes and the challenge of this episode aren’t some villian, but the peril of a potentially unsuccessful first contact.
“Bride of Chaotica!” is probably the best episode of the show? My first time seeing it. Just a great, fun premise with perfect execution.
“Barge of the Dead” is, I think, Ronald D. Moore’s only script for Voyager. I love the idea that the Klingon religion and underworld is real.
“Someone to Watch Over Me” is a real cute Doctor/Seven ep. Highlights include a duet.
“The Omega Directive” has a fun, kinda shlocky premise with solid execution. It’s basically a straight action ep. Loved Seven being put in absolute authority and press-ganging members of the crew into a mini-collective.
“Year of Hell” is, of course, delightful.
“Latent Image” has some of the best consideration given to how the crew start to reconsider the Doctor as an EMH.
I also started coming up with TNG Season 8-style fake premises for a hypothetical Voyager Season 8:
VOY S09E12 “To Die For”: The crew finds itself in a tense faceoff with the Borg Queen when Mr. Neelix accidentally bakes a stable Omega particle into one of his famous Talaxian Meat Biscuits
VOY S09E13 “Right of Way”: Captain Janeway struggles to convince both the crew and herself that helping the borg to assimilate Earth in a future timeline may be their only way home in the present. Meanwhile, the Doctor tries to teach Seven how to drive “stick”.
Mothra - Today at 9:48 AM
James remember when that Microsoft Flight Stick came out of the console in Insurrection, and Riker basically flew the Enterprise solo
I’m imagining flying stick in Voyager is just a shifter that comes out of that console
That you gotta use a clutch pedal to shift from Warp 4 to Warp 5
JamesEdSmith - Today at 10:50 AM
The episode ends of course with the doctor being loaded into Seven’s cybernetic parts and controlling her like in that one episode
so we can have a scene where the ship crash lands like in Generations
and then Seven can walk out of the bridge with messed up hair and dirt on her cheek, comedically acting like the Doctor and say some one liner so that Janeway can roll her eyes and do a soft face palm while Jacote looks shocked but then see’s the captain’s reaction and giggles.
Yeah, the only thing that would have made it better was if all the characters featured had been consistent background characters like Ogawa was, but I guess that’s not something they probably had much control of without thinking about it beforehand.
The end is a joke about how the crew conspired to get him laid, and at the end they think that is what he did when actually he went adventuring.
The story beats aren’t so different from what your brain tweaked it into.
Your version sounds like what it would have turned into if the writers took another pass at it. The adventure seems a little ‘fake’ and that tweak would perfectly explain that away.
@haley Have you gotten to to the ep yet where riker nearly destabilizes a genderless culture by trying to fuck it? It’s actually p good by the end
Part of what I love about TNG is the barely concealed dysfunction in the main cast and the writers’ willingness to kinda aim it from the hip and do things in the name of good humour. It’s often as good as a character comedy as anything else
my father told me not to watch it as a kid so that’s gotta be a good sign, right
i was scared even before i trans’d to find out how the writers approached it but if it’s being recommended to me i’ll try it sure
we’re working through a combination of max temkin’s and tulpa’s old watchlists but they’re missing some of my favorite (as well as some really important-for-plot) episodes, maybe i should write my own list (maybe i should work on our vidcon instead jfc)
I regret trying to cut out episodes on my viewing a couple of years ago. I switched to just watching to the first commercial break and making a snap judgment because what clicks is so personal.
My list was never meant to be exhaustive, just an expansion on the temkin list that I personally feel was left out. I like more than those episodes
That being sad, tng doesn’t really have a plot and consequently “important for plot” episodes. Its not ds9
The genderless episode is not good but it is an earnest hamfisted gay rights episode in the early 90s when that might have been politically controversial
The episode that introduced the trill was much worse but the trill were so effortlessly queer that they were one of my fav parts of ds9
i mean, the episode i’m thinking of that got left off introduced worf’s not-wife and not-son, resolves conflicts from an earlier episode and sets up the the klingon civil war (the events get referred back to a lot). or you could talk about locutus → hugh → lore or a couple other character arcs, idk there’s nothing overarching everything else per se but i think some stuff is relatively essential, at least as “you need to watch this episode for these other episodes to make sense”
I don’t really agree that you need to go back. The subsequent episodes are written under the asssumption of syndication so they do a more than adequate job of covering all missing backstory within the episode itself. (and the lore two-parter is one of the worst of the series so you don’t really miss much by ignoring it)
Though yeah if you want the best experience of the klingon civil war, you should watch the klingon episodes as a set. That’s not to say you should watch every alexander appearance because he’s down there with lwaxana for most annoying character
The episode is basically about Riker falling for a trans-woman in a culture that doesn’t accept gender-reassignment. It has a very loose sci-fi veil of her being from a genderless culture instead of specifically switching from one gender to another.
It seems like some sort of bitter and bizarre irony that it doesn’t really work as well as it could of, because the casting went for a cis-gender woman to be the genderless transwoman: The metaphor probably would have read better with a male actor.
It sure feels weird to point that out though.
It is probably one of the more interesting TNG morality plays in that Riker and Picard are both acting in different modes of ethical behavior.
They are both doing different ‘right things’ in an imperfect situation.
The lawful good ‘big picture’ view being at odds with the neutral good ‘actual people’ view is an interesting moral conflict. I enjoyed when TNG writers explored it. I think the episode does a pretty good job of posing both positions as perhaps not equal, but nevertheless both being valid, and the conflict between two valid but contradicting moral views as uncomfortable.
Riker and Worf, do go against Picard, and that does seem to be the writers leaning toward the view that maybe the neutral good position is the better one.
Which uhh, I agree with, though not comfortably so.
Oh, and true to life, the good guys don’t win. ;_;
