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staringdownabarrel · 8 days ago

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When it comes to the Pulaski discourse, I think there's a few things people tend to forget.

Firstly, her character arc makes sense if you watch the second season in order, but people haven't always done that. There was a period of twenty-ish years after it aired where the overwhelming majority of TNG fans weren't doing that at all, and it wasn't entirely by choice. Owning the entire season on tape was cost prohibitive enough that most people wouldn't, and watching it in reruns on TV usually meant that you were watching it in random order.

So a lot of the intended arc was lost on people who hadn't seen these episodes in the order they originally aired when they aired. How it came off, especially when it came off in how she got on with Data, was that there were episodes where she got on fine with him and others where she seemed like she was being rude for no reason.

That didn't go away once people were able to buy the box set on DVD, either. Don't forget that the conventional wisdom about TNG is that the first couple of seasons sorta suck, but it picks up in the third season. I have my issues with that assessment because I feel like the quality curve is much more of a gradient than that lets on, but that was still the popular assessment for a lot of years.

Because of that, people didn't always watch it in the original aired order even when they'd paid to have that option. A lot of the time they'd still watch the episodes in a somewhat random order, or they'd watch the episodes in order once and then go back to just watching their favourites from that season and none of the others. The effect that her overall arc was meant to have was still being lost.

At least anecdotally, it's only been in the last decade or so that the popular assessment regarding Pulaski has started to change. The big thing that's happened in that time is that streaming has become widely popular now. Sure, you can still skip episodes or watch them in a semirandom order on Netflix just like you did with DVD, but most people don't, or at least not to the same extent.

Secondly, one of the bigger criticisms TNG faced early on was that it was basically just the original series but with new characters. That's died down almost completely now, but the Pulaski-Data dynamic still has hints of that older criticism.

Mostly, the criticism goes that the Pulaski-Data dynamic feels like a bad rehash of the McCoy-Spock dynamic, only mean spirited because Data is too childlike to really understand what's happening. That's only compounded by the fact that people haven't really seen the second season as it originally aired until the last decade or so.

Thirdly, and I'd argue most importantly, group think is a thing. There's a lot of people who'll hear certain criticisms of a character and then just run with them basically forever without ever critically examining them.

That's especially the case in a fandom like Star Trek, where there's a lot of people who basically inherited their interest in the franchise from their parents. A lot of the time people's opinions about certain aspects of the show will almost entirely be based on something someone said to or around them when they were fourteen, and they've never really considered for themselves why they think that.

I don't think people really take this into account enough because once you fully internalise that it's a tendency people have, you sorta do have to reconsider a lot of your own views, both fandom and unrelated. I think Star Trek also has a large enough fandom with a wide enough range of views that there's an unspoken assumption that it doesn't happen with Star Trek, but there's still enough views that are sorta taken as gospel even if they don't really line up with canon very well that I think you have to assume groupthink is the culprit at least occasionally.

Group think is an important factor here because before Netflix came popular, huge chunks of the fandom spent twenty or twenty-five years under the assumption Pulaski sucked. Even with how people have warmed to her in recent years, you can't undo all those years of people actively disliking her quickly.

#rant #pulask #star trek #star trek tng #star trek the next generation #the next generation #tng #st tng

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