#Maddox Loves the kids he trains. He adores them and absolutely thinks of every single one as his children. Hes still a bitch ass

[bitchfitch]

I'm finishing up the script for that lil comic about how Cadfael and Monty met and have officially decided to do that thing Elden Ring does where you can tell who's related to who based on their names but in a Much stupider way.

[bluering8]

TNG S02

TNG S02 roundup let’s do this let’s make it happen!

Data - I still love Data!! That’s it that’s all you’re getting on the topic because I love Data so much that if you let me talk about him at all I’ll Talk Forever and there are non-Data things in this show which  need to talk about.

Geordi la Forge - I’m glad that Geordi’s the chief engineer now. Last season was kind of weird in that there wasn’t a dedicated engineer character so they were pulling out a new random yellowshirt every time they needed someone to explain a thing to the main cast. If I’m yelling something at the screen (use a shuttle! fly in a different direction! fate is bullshit shut up riker!) then usually Geordi will be the one to say it. This is like, one of the fastest ways you can possibly endear a character to me.

Anyway, I love Geordi and I love his friendship with Data and honestly, you could give me an entire show entirely about these two being bros and I would adore it. I forgot that Geordi likes to build model ships, but now I remember and it delights me that he’s just like, a huge fucking dork in his own right.

...it occurs to me that I’m better-disposed to characters when I know what their hobbies are. Part of the reason I love Data and Geordi so much both as individuals and as a brotp is that the show devotes a lot of time to showing them fucking around and getting into shenanigans outside of their duties. Contrast that with the characters I’m more ambivalent towards, such as Riker or Dr Crusher, and it becomes really obvious that part of the reason I’m ambivalent towards them is that I have no real idea what they do when they’re not doing their jobs.

Kate Pulaski - I hated Pulaski the first time I watched TNG and now, several years later, it turns out that I still hate Pulaski!! I talked about her before and tl;dr: my issue with her isn’t how she treats Data or that she’s decided he isn’t a person, but that she thinks treating someone that way is acceptable as long as she’s decided they’re not a person. Listen, mate, I’m not here to insist that everyone should be a perfect morally-pure cinnamon roll (all my faves are problematic as Hecke). I hate Pulaski because it would be so so easy for me to love her as a character, but she simply doesn’t fit the universe. In a grittier setting? Fantastic, splendid, superlative, I’ll take ten. In spacefuture utopia? I can believe in Pulaski as a person who might exist, sure, but I cannot believe that the rest of the Enterprise crew would stand there and watch her treat Data the way she treats Data, and not respond by hauling her off for sensitivity training. I hate Pulaski not because there’s anything wrong with Pulaski, but because the way the rest of the characters let her get away with it feels like a betrayal of everything I believed in about Star Trek.

Wesley Crusher - Alias FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER, because he is the absolute worst. Why is he wearing a uniform now? I am not usually a guy with strong opinions about wardrobe choices, but I actually really liked his collection of ugly-ass sweaters. If Wesley adds anything to the cast it’s his identity as someone who, despite all his smarts, is still just a teenaged civilian, and as a result lacks both the experience and the training of the other characters. Once you stick him in a uniform you start to lose the impact of that difference. I mean yes the difference will inevitably be lost as he embarks on his Starfleet career but at this point he’s still not even a real cadet yet, let me have the one thing I actually kind of like about the character.

Also why is he on the bridge. Seriously why. Why why why. Stop this!!

William Riker - Somehow it took me until halfway through this season to realise that Riker is mostly just a clone of Kirk? I think this contributes to how bland I find him, all Kirk’s philosophical inclinations got given to Picard instead so Riker ends up feeling super flat and underdeveloped. He’s, like, generally a decentish person (sometimes), and he’s good at his job (sometimes), and he flirts with pretty ladies (often), and his dad is a piece of shit? That’s all I’ve got on him. Dude could use another personality trait or three.

S02E02 Where Silence Has Lease - I have very mixed feelings about this episode. The first half was excellent horror, the kind of thing I love about the SCP Foundation or the Sick Land, that scenario where you’re trying to look at a thing from the perspective of a researcher but you’re in a situation where research simply doesn’t work because the thing is a fundamental violation of the way you interact with reality, and you’ve reached the point where all you can do is look at it and describe what you’re seeing and hope really, really hard that someone will figure something out eventually maybe. (The exploration of the Yamato reminded me a lot of House of Leaves, which also has that delicious sense of nightmarish slowburn reality-breakdown even if it lacks the desperate attempts to Do Science to something which completely resists the application of the scientific method.) Horror is an incredibly subjective genre, but for me a vital part of it is denying me any explanation while maintaining the illusion that if I go just a little further, learn just a little more, suddenly I’ll have my explanation and everything will make sense.

This episode not only gives an explanation, but salts the wound by giving an incredibly shitty explanation. See, something something rats in a maze and then there’s a face in the sky and I don’t give a shit. It was Whatsisface all along!! All it achieves is making me super super confused about what are Whatsisface’s capabilities even. He can make fake ships and fake people and instakill a dude, but he can’t deactivate the ship’s autodestruct or prevent Picard from activating the autodestruct in the first place?

S02E03 Elementary, Dear Data - What the fuck is up with the holodeck? My friend pointed out that “bear in mind they probably have a thousand problem free uses of the holodeck for every freak issue” but like, that’s not the fucking issue here, the issue is that regardless of how many problem-free uses they’ve had, they’ve also had an alarmingly high number of potentially-fatal malfunctions in a relatively short span of time. Why is overriding the mortality failsafe even a thing which is possible?? I can completely buy the holodeck being too useful as a training tool to get rid of it, but they should really have some kind of restrictions or guidelines on the thing for recreational use. You’ve had it demonstrated to you multiple times over that holodeck malfunctions can end in corpses, why are you not doing something about this! Why is there apparently no Health & Safety department on this ship!!

S02E07 Unnatural Selection - Philosophical argument time: do transporters kill people? Normally I’m happy to put this question in a box labelled “let’s not think about that too hard” but the ending of this episode makes more sense to me if the answer is yes. Instead of some bullshit technobabble de-aging nonsense, what they’re actually doing is replicating a new body using the hair as reference and jamming Pulaski’s memories into it then destroying the old body.

S02E09 The Measure of a Man - See, Bruce Maddox is Pulaski done right. I’m straight-up incandescently mad that this episode was Pulaski-free, because whenever she never misses the opportunity to remind Data that he’s not a person, and I super wanted Pulaski and Maddox to interact. Pulaski’s absence here makes the issue with how casually the show treats her attitude towards Data even worse. I feel like if you’re going to spend an episode debating whether Data counts as a person you should at least have the decency to acknowledge the cast member who comes down firmly on the “no” side. You can’t have Data’s personhood as a serious topic for serious debate while simultaneously shrugging your shoulders and going yeah well Pulaski’s just Like That I guess nbd. It doesn’t work that way!

S02E10 The Dauphin - “She’s perfect, absolutely perfect,” says FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER about a girl he’s only met once and barely exchanged a dozen words with, and then he gets super super mad when it turns out she’s a weird space alien shapeshifted into a human which just goes to prove that her personality mattered to him not one iota and he only liked her because she was hot and gave him a boner. And... that’s it, that’s the episode. There’s no subplot, nothing else happens, the entire episode is about FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER having a crush. In conclusion: FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER.

S02E15 Pen Pals - If anyone ever attempts to fight me on the topic of Does Data Is Emotions?, this is the episode I’m pointing them to. I’m pretty sure there’s not a single action Data takes in this entire episode which can be justified from a completely unemotionless point of view. He goes from “I’m too focused on my personal project to spend two seconds stacking this crap neatly so I’ll just leave it lying around as a trip hazard” to “hey Captain remember when you said I could break the Prime Directive a little bit, is it okay if I break it twice that much? actually I broke it ten times that much sorry not sorry” to “so I know this kid has no memory of me or our interactions now but I stole Pulaski’s weird space rock to give to her anyway because sentiment is important to me”.

S02E17 Samitarian Snare - The a-plot of this episode is that multiple people tell Riker that sending their chief engineer over to some random alien vessel is a bad idea while Riker tries to insist that it is a great idea and will be totally fine and then is completely fucking blindsided when it turns out to have been a terrible idea. I’m pretty sure this is the first time Troi’s said anything useful so of course Riker ignored her because she’s not allowed to be a worthwhile character.

The b-plot is that Picard and Wesley take a shuttle trip together and Wesley is so incapable of taking a fucking hint that even when Picard gets up and moves seats to be away from him Wesley doesn’t realise that his constant stream of personal questions might not be welcome. In conclusion: FUCKING WESLEY THE WORST CHARACTER.

S02E18 Up the Long Ladder - Oh my god it’s like they listened to my complaints about S01E17 and somehow managed to fuck it up even worse!! WHY ARE YOU ALL SO WEIRD ABOUT CLONING.

tl;dr: Direct from my liveblogging of S02E03: “DATA CHANGED HIS OUTFIT data my boy my son my precious cinnamon roll how many sherlock holmes cosplay outfits do you own”. I know the reasonable explanation would be that he replicates one fresh each time, but I choose to believe that Data owns an entire closetful of Sherlock Holmes cosplay outfits.