My Little Ktlikitkak

"Seems that folks turn into things
That they never want
The only thing to live for is today"

 

The Ramones (or Tom Waits originally) - I Don't Want To Grow Up

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"After everything they've been through, they're still monsters!!"

Endtown 2013/08/20

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"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so"

Bertrand Russell

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Before we start I simply must specify that I am not a brony. Got that? For added clarity: I. AM. NOT. A. BRONY.

Of course, pretty much nobody is, given the whole "brony" fad died down as nonsensically as it sprang up, with many finally realizing their idolatry centered on a show that never was and never would be anything but a half-hour toy commercial, with all the disdain for quality and coherence that implies. Still waiting for the same coin to drop into Transformers fans' brain-slot. But honestly, I never actually gave a shit about Friendship Is Magic itself. Never watched it, never cared. Ten year old girls exist. SOME programming will be tailored to their tastes. 'Kay, fine, whatever. It was brony-ism itself (adult male fandom) conspicuously coextant with the rise of anti-male snowflake / woke politics, that made me flatten my ears and bar my chompers, as for the life of me I could see no more in it than an abject, primitive auto da fe, waving an eminently girlish banner in performative devotion to female supremacy. Of course, I never took enough of an interest to actively oppose that nonsense either, aside from one blog post back in the early 2010s.

I do, however, miss Unicorn Jelly, an amateurishly drawn and soapboxy webcomic from the early 2000s which nonetheless featured some delightfully obsessive worldbuilding, to the point its plot diagram (spoilers!) rivals that of Dark. Unfortunately, after the first couple of sequels running to 2009, the author went into a dry spell, and broke it... by delving into My Little Pony fan fiction, specifically The Conversion Bureau, centered on the precept that humans are forced to become ponies by a dimensional collision of Earth with Equestria, and everyone lives happily ever after in a magical paradise, free of care, as painfully nice and adorable quadrupeds. As I don't even read fan fiction in general, of anything, I thought to check back when Jennifer Diane Reitz comes to her senses, wraps up that digression, and gets back to JDR originals. As a decade later that has not happened, I decided oh, what the hell, at least this particular fan fiction can't ruin the show for me, and dove in. After all the core material itself cannot be accused of overtaxing one's attention, leaving quality to skill of interpretation, and I happen to like the interpreter.

 

I won't bother with details. JDR, henceforth Chatoyance, obviously repurposed some multiversal ideas from Unicorn Jelly and plays up more direct violence than I'd guess appeals to the core following. Still, after a couple hundred thousand words, I can safely claim to grasp the precepts of dirt ponies, airhead ponies and horny horsies. Most of the collection's inspiration's concentrated in The Taste of Grass, with the previous 27 Ounces providing a bit of backstory and a similar theme in Teacup, Down on the Farm. The farther I get past those the more I find myself skimming instead of reading, but skin-changing's a topic dear to my own demilupine self and The Taste of Grass especially builds a bit of Robinsonesque charm on the idea of a village of freshly transmogrified humans learning to use their new pony bodies and build a community. "Little Stable on the Prairie" if you will.

It also stands out as the only Chatoyance story so far calling into question (minimally and tangentially, but still) this setting's central conceit, ponydom's supposed moral and existential superiority to the human condition. Because ponies are "nice" you see. Of course its flimsiness becomes rapidly apparent, for instance in the false distinction between natural and artificial, juxtaposing a resource-impoverished, polluted industrial hellscape on Earth with lush Equestrian greenery... which is more artificial (created and maintained by pony magic) than any factory. And, while I'd be fine with a transcended cosmic intellect destroying the Earth, I draw the line at lying, general dishonesty and falsification, and especially at brainwashing. See, the ponies are nice because they simply have no choice, being programmed as such, top down, by their deity. There is no room in Chatoyance's Equestria for digression, deviance or free thought. Patterns of thought which don't fit its bucolic charms simply get erased during conversion (i.e. you start talking like a G-rated cartoon) to the point the former humans deliberately erase their own culture.

 

"The pain, the suffering the despair, all of it was gone, and in but one generation, only one single generation, even the memory that it had ever existed would be forever gone.

All they had to do was to simply not speak of it to their foals; and why would they? Tales of a terrible world and a shameful past were best kept buried."

 

Revisionism. More than that, erasing ontology itself, because food for thought is unnecessary in a world where thought itself is unnecessary because mommy Celestia has everything planned out. The unending infernal oblivion of 1984, elevated to paradisiac promises of tasty apples. Well, at least I was right about the inherent infantilism of bronydom. These codependent cloppers stand out particularly in contrast to JDR's past comics, where characters' individuality drove the plot and a forgetfulness ray was presented as a horrific last resort. It's especially striking when you remember the author's been a transsexual for decades prior to writing these little pony yarns. The transition from Unicorn Jelly's vague mysticism and self-made fate to the pony stories' debased begging for addled, subservient happiness is one facet of feminization taken to its logical extreme. What we consider femininity is after all overwhelmingly neoteny, and wishing for a Celestial parental figure to feed you magic power, prevent harm and save you the burden of free thought progresses naturally from such regression. Tone policing aside, let no-one accuse Chatoyance of failing to think things through.

In other words, maybe it's no accident that Chatoyance the former transgressor eventually devolved to espouse the same view on brainwashing for peace as the infamously Mormon Orson Scott Card did in his Homecoming books.

Solasta: Lost Valley, Lost Aspirations

Given I bought Solasta a couple of years (and discounts) after release, and on sale, I bought it along with its expansion packs, gave the whole mess its fair shake, and it shakes down to disappointment. I'd hoped the Lost Valley campaign would address the original campaign's many flaws and even more lacks, but if anything it just feels even less creative, less mindful and less... developed. Which should be a red flag in game development. Mind you, a ten-level campaign isn't necessarily a bad thing, so long as it uses those levels in a focused and detailed manner. Granted, their main selling point of integrating tabletop movement/spellcasting and other mechanics remains encouraging, but Tactical Adventures' failure to actually put those mechanics to use has more or less ensured Solasta will now quietly fade from memory, its considerable potential wasted.

All complaints from the main campaign remain valid:

The weak writing is now also so sparse as to barely justify the game even having text boxes.

The weak worldbuilding also seems to have lost any sense of its own scale (how long exactly has this valley remained isolated?) or ambition, but I'll get into plot below.

The music/ambiance remains bland, and though the voice acting is uncommonly good for such a bare-bones project (or even more expensive ones) the aforementioned lack of writing puts those voices to little or no use.

Skills checks are more rare and still skewed toward athletics.

Animations still tack on wind-up and clean-up half-second timesinks to every single action, and though you do get a few new monsters to fight (hags, giants) these once again include ridiculously overextendifieded casting or death animations as timesinks. Hell, Green Hags seem implemented precisely because their infinite casts of Invisibility lengthen fights.

 

To that, add a whole new range of incompetence, from bugged terrain

to bugged quests not triggering properly (entry into Dark Lab cannot be completed if you find your way in before finding the key) and bugged interactions (traps on treasure chests are untargetable) and you'd still have to address to almost aggressive incompetence of their actual gameplay. While Crown of the Magister's economy made you value the loot you found , Lost Valley showers you with endless food, ingredients and cash.

I finished a campaign where the most expensive loot runs around 2-2.5k with 40k gold to spare after buying everything I wanted and then some. Even Wasteland 3 was less ridiculous. Reminds me of the infinite money in VtM: Redemption, and that is NOT a compliment.

 

Rewards aside, even your actual adventuring turns sour by mid-game. This fort map for example was copy/pasted in seven different locations.

While this could have charmingly conveyed standardized imperial construction, aside from one hole in the wall they didn't even bother altering the decor the bare minimum to get that point across. It's just... the same fort. Moreover, I had to discover the hard way that (in, explicitly, a stealth mission!) my stealth skill meant nothing here, since the guards aggro automatically if you don't take the exactly single-tile path the devs wanted you to take.

 

Encouraged by the "Lost World" theme I'd hoped my druidic charms (as in, charming animals) would come in handier, only to discover none of the scattered beasts you fight in the second half even count as beasts.

 

Worst of all, this lack of imagination or foresight stretches to the storyline itself. Once again, ZERO roleplaying. Ostensibly, you do have to select a faction out of five, unlike in the Crown campaign, but their juvenile presentation pre-empts any emotional investment or curiousity. There's an isolated kingdom ruled by an ironfisted tyrant, and four plucky rebel factions oppose him.

The first has a nominal merchant theme but otherwise no personality.

One of them's supposed to be secretive, but it makes no difference in the context of being starved for information altogether.

Another's supposed to be the "nice" salt-of-the-earth commoners' faction, but they're all too milquetoast to stand out.

The last is The Rebellion, except all of these little cliques are rebelling, so... yeah, fuck it.

I allied with the tyrant when I discovered he's got a secret lab in the jungle. Nominally evil. You're seriously trying to pull this tired old anti-intellectual science:bad routine? Then your villain just became my hero. Needless to say, dialogues still trigger in the final zone as though you were playing one of the "good" factions.

Maybe this infantile moralism wouldn't rankle so, had we not all seen how much better this theme can be handled in Obsidian Entertainment's last game worth mentioning, Tyranny. Look at the moral and narrative complexity of the Tiers' multiple rebel factions fighting a tyrannical empire itself divided amongst competing armies, then look again at Solasta's mind-numblingly shallow little ditty about an evil wizard. Even more discouragingly, I find this mirrors all too closely Wasteland 3's or Wrath of the Righteous' own infantilism and pandering. If this children's storytime idiocy is all cRPGs can offer, twenty years after Bloodlines and Torment, then the genre's fucking dead and no number of athletics checks will save it.

Dear readers,

 

While I have made many controversial statements here in the past, I believe I am about to state my most provocative observation yet:

The weather's been lovely here this year.

27-29 centigrade, mostly sunny, precisely the prescribed quantity of intermittent rain to keep the air circulating and the greenery lush, and oh the daintiest little summer breezes caressing one's cheek upon the promenade.

 

Love,

Werwolfe

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edit 2022/12/08

It occurs to me this may require context after the fact. Just look up "summer weather '22" or something. Globally.

Civitate Thetani

"Middle America, now it's a tragedy, now it's so sad to see

An upper-class city having this happening"

 

Eminem - The Way I Am

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"you get a handful of different people representing different religions who're changing their minds constantly so the room is always filling up with more and more people, each with the absolute truth; they all have a dart in their hand and they all throw it blindfolded at a board (hopefully) but wherever the dart lands that's the absolute truth and they gonna stick with that until the next guy comes in and throws his dart, and that's why religions seem to shard off in every possible direction - because they have no substance, whatsoever, to them"

 

Aron Ra - The Failures of Creationism, Little Rock Arkansas, 2012/10/27

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Been amusin' m'self with a few more episdoes of Scientology and the Aftermath recently (everyone loves a freakshow) and for the most part it's what I expected - which only prompts me to re-iterate my consternation at others' consternation at Scientologists' excesses. So let's get this out of the way first: they all do it. Power structures. Religions, corporations, armies, street gangs, there is no fundamental difference. They're tribes to which one swears allegiance in return for joining in communal aggression against outsiders. Search their ranks and you will always find a disproportionate weight of those whose impulses might offend society at large, and who join such organizations precisely to be shielded from investigation behind the organization's defensive apparatus, to indulge their sadistic impulses with impunity. It's not a bug. It's a feature. It's one of the unspoken perks hidden between the lines of every recruitment pamphlet. Give us your life and we will allow you to harm others in return, to the worst of our collective abilities. The ready proliferation of such cabals merely demonstrates that anywhere "da gummint" and the press' light does not pierce, you will invariably find a venomous, verminous nest of abhumanity.* It's not Scientology's putative uniqueness which warrants condemnation but its all too familiar essence and trappings.

 

While Rinder and Remini's interviewees are slightly more clean-cut than I'd expected from a bunch of brainwashed cultists (yeah, yeah, putting on a good face for the cameras) they're still painfully... average. Random schmoes incapable of evaluating their environment, lost in an uncaring universe, looking for an ideological "security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold" as Asimov's quote goes. One exception stuck out halfway through the second season: Paul Haggis (guy who directed Crash, remember him?) who most concisely verbalized Scientology's inherent conflict. As a post-Enlightenment faith targeting white-collar, literate proselytes, it promises free thought while remaining no less dogmatically obtuse and occulted than any other irrational belief in an unproven master plan. How'd they pull it off? Bury questions in discipline, ritualism, officiousness, the illusion of quantifiability and preparedness, until the very concept of "free thought" is just another mindlessly repeated mantra. Invent new jargon for everything, even if it explains nothing. Makes ya sound authoritative-like.

 

But, lest we unjustly accuse that hack Hubbard of originality, even his "free your mind (by repeating our catchphrases)" schtick's been done to death. Pre and post-Christian Persian monotheism (or monolatrism, there's your word of the day) went heavy on revelations, complete with good/evil dichotomies, but gnosticism especially springs to mind, as Hubbard's "thetans" seem lifted wholesale from Mani's notion of divine light trapped in demonic darkness to yield our human, material existence, complete with the dianetic "bridge" as gnostic reawakening back to one's purportedly divine nature. Quantifying this transition in levels of thetan-ness is again merely an adaptation of general religious holier than thou informed superiority to an audience at least marginally aware of scientific rigor.

 

Setting aside Remini's constant insitence on Scientology's special kind of evil, viewing it as just another religion predicts an interesting development in the following decades. See, the original prophet croaked back in '86, and if Hubbard was just a ruthless fabulist and profiteer indifferent to the misery he caused so long as the donations kept pouring in, his successor became more and more actively sadistic by the decade. By driving away some of his followers, combined with many second and third-generation Scientologists** being more mentally capable to look beyond their abusive cult upbringing, this provided our current flood of entertaining stories from former insiders. But to my surprise, a few of the show's interviewees actually claim to be practicing Dianeticists despite having left the church. Should've seen it coming. The new religion's gradually rounding out its first century, the prophet's dead, and his successors are staking out their claims.

Scientology's seeing its first schism.

But while we can all wonder and shudder at what Mahayana Hubbardism will look like, another look back at fourth century Christianity suggests one likely outcome in the near future. From what I gather, while his predecessors or opponents (Origen, Pelagius, Donatus) were busy trying to prune away bad priests or stressed personal agency, the individual's aptitude and necessity for self-improvement, Augustine of Hippo (you remember, the "just war" guy?) consolidated power by stressing the importance of consolidation itself, of avoiding schisms (usually by eliminating dissenters) and reinforcing hierarchy. Salvation comes only down through the offices of the church. Doesn't matter if the priests are bad (or if the Sea Org's stuffed with sadistic pricks) because the lessons they teach will save your soul. Doesn't matter if you're not improving as a person, because divine grace via the church will save you. Never mind how. Trickle-down faithonomics. Don't sweat the details. Just obey. And that shit stuck. Just look at which name in this paragraph's a saint and which a heretic.

Call me crazy, but I fully expect that after a decade or three of schisming (they're sitting on literal billions upon billions of funding; they can weather Rinder and Remini's little tantrum) Scientology will acquire a unifying figure preaching... preaching. That self-improvement crap was good to lure in an educated core and establish the brand, but now the faith must expand and engulf. It needs obedience, not self-analysis, control not self-control. It needs divine grace, passed downward through the hierarchy, wine and crackers. The only question is who gets to be Scientology's Augustine, a reformed heretic claiming that The Church itself contains an ineffable grace by which the lower orders are cleansed.

Come on, Leah. Don't ya wanna be graceful?

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* Yes, sometimes such nests are even necessary to incubate valuable new thought to which the public is not yet amenable.

But don't hold your breath.

** This also explains the Sea Org's eventual outlawing of reproduction. When actively recruiting, the recruitment process itself winnows the available pool of converts down to the receptive. But a new generation lacks that guarantee of mindless receptivity, what with recessive traits, random mutations, embryology and adolescent rebellion. And they're positioned dreadfully close to those skeletons in your closet. The offspring of your most faithful can be your greatest liability. It's just another spin on monasticism: you want illiterate peasants producing more illiterate believers, not the scriveners with access to original scriptures.

The Die Is Recast

To the several regulars who used to revisit my old suicidal posts in hopes they'd catch the big moment, and eventually wandered away when I never carried through, I'm sorry to disappoint.

Not THAT sorry though. (Sorry.)

From the Foundered Lang

"learn a few scraps of Horace and Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads" **

H.G. Wells - The World Set Free

 

While the fantasy writers he inspired will as a rule just slap together something with old-timey medieval "feels" and call it a day, J.R.R. Tolkien himself rooted his works firmly in careful study, to the occasional point of recherché posturing. Alright man, we get it, you love Beowulf, but alliteration still sounds buffoonish in Normanized modern English.

Anyway, as random thoughts will oft pop into your head of their own accord, I woke up this morning to that rhyme about seven stars and seven stones and one white tree. When I first read The Silmarillion in my teens I glossed over the explanation of the stars symbolizing the dipper; for a SciFi fan, stars just made a generic cool symbol at face value, and seven's just a ubiquitous numerological gimmick. And, though I'd heard the term septentrional years or even decades ago, I never connected it with Tolkien using the seven stars as shorthand for the Numenoreans as northmen. Together with anchoring his reflections on Atlantis through the langobardi* (a.k.a. Lombards) in the earliest version of the Numenore myth, it's another reminder of just how much of Tolkien's early writing was an attempt to reconnect with his pre-Imperial heritage in a society dominated by the church, the entrenched Norman aristocracy and classical philology.

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* Thereafter mixed in with Saxons stylistically to create the Rohirrim, and linguistically repurposed for the Longbeards.

** Irony, in case you didn't look up the full quote, which I've cited here before vis-a-vis English delusions.

ST: TNG - Love and Marriage

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.

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"But in the end, I was more afraid that you would blame yourself if I died. Would you have?"
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Seriesdate: 1.11

Haven

In which a turtleneck is worn in space.

Haven was bad all around, an insult to every archetype it caricatured, but most so the romance novel toy-boy who spends all episode apologizing to Troi for an arranged marriage he did not arrange then is matronizingly awarded nice guy status for resolving the plot via a grand gesture abandoning his old life to devote himself to another woman.

So settle in for a long haul and keep that slavish precept in mind as we trudge through a score of TNG's many attempts at romance over its seven seasons.

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Seriesdate: 1.24

We'll Always Have Paris

 

In which Data rerolls a rogue and multiplies.

The crew experiences deja vu and receives a distress call from a reclusive scientist studying time. Hmmm... could those two things possibly be connected? Turns out science is evil. The mad wizard used time as a 4th-dimensional gateway to reach a parallel dimension and now he's gone mad from witnessing that which man was not meant to know. That and the galaxy's about to blow up. Then Data dodges laser beams, vanquishes the robotic guardian, finds the blue key and pours antimatter out of an old-timey blacksmith's crucible to seal the portal to Hell. Ding! Level 2 Thief.

 

Yes, the whole episode has a distinctly "original series" feel to it, down to the tinfoil toga worn by Picard's long-lost love interest, who coincidentally married the mad scientist. Their relationship is introduced in terms of Picard's regret and his informed inadequacy (via Troi's mind-reading) in dealing with his fee-fees. We proceed to him submitting himself to the old flame's judgment, saving her husband and, having performed his duty as a dependable 'Plan B' male, packs her and his rival off to live happily ever after.

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Seriesdate 2.20

The Emissary

 

In which we learn that Klingon calisthenics consists of a level 2 dungeon crawl.

 

The Flamin' Patoot there just happens to be Worf's old half-klingon flame (and patoot) express-mailed to the Enterprise to intercept a ship of freeze-packed Original Series klingons who still think they're at war with the Federation. Eventually they're fooled into thinking Worf's in charge of the ship because their side won the war. Definitely one of Season 2's best plot ideas, though very little screen time is dedicated to it, reserved instead for Worf and K'Ehleyr rubbing forehead ridges or whatever. Actually, for being such rough, tough, stalwart, bristly fighting machines, they spend quite a lot of time holding hands. At lest we got a funny line out of it:

Worf: Something incomprehesibly klingon!
K'Ehleyr: "Wait, you can't mean..."
Worf: "We are mated."
K'Ehleyr: "I know. I was there."

 

But the romance angle might work better if K'Ehleyr weren't such an utter bitch. She opens by publicly taunting Worf about their past relationship, constantly needles him while the script prompts us to condemn him simply for wanting to be left alone and openly mocks him to his peers while on duty, then when they finally fuck (after she swings a sword at his head) she throws a fit when he tries to do the honorable thing and marry her. We're supposed to marvel at rough-and-tumble klingon mating rituals here, but aside from Worf defending klingon culture and pressing her claws into her palm after she tries to kill him, we see nothing all episode long but him staunchly, one-sidedly absorbing her abuse, on and on and on and on.

The pattern carries over into her professional role, as she inexplicably carries the rank of Ambassador, which, like an early-series Lwaxana, she fits about as well as a coked-up pit bull. You have to wonder what exactly qualifies her given her overt disdain for full-blooded klingons and her only solution, in reply to all the others' arguments, being to shoot them on sight. Wait, what exactly is your job description again?!

And nobody sees anything wrong with this! Not one officer takes her to task, either on her unprofessionalism and overt racism against the very race she should be mediating, or on her abuse of their friend and comrade Worf. If a male character acted like K'Ehleyr, he would've been scripted not just as obviously wrong, but an outright villain.

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Seriesdate: 4.07

Reunion

 

In which Worf acquires his MiniMe and a corpse is cattle prodded.

 

He died a klingon. Which is to say klinging on a chair.

 

The klingon chancellor dies poisoned, leaving Picard tofindout whodunit, Worf's flame gets axed for knowing too much and he avenges her, space-warrior style. Season 4's Klingon civil war meta-plot would deserve discussion in itself... but maybe I'll get around to it when I can set it against other series/serials as points of comparison. Suffice to say this is one of TNG's pivotal episodes, tightly scripted and edited to cram information on klingon culture and politics, advance ongoing intrigue vis-a-vis romulans, introducing Worf's son and giving both K'Ehleyr and K'mpec notable deaths, and a magnificent scene of Picard dressing down Worf after he goes AWOL to kill his recurring villain Duras in ritual combat with a side of vigilante justice.

"Mr. Worf, the Enterprise crew currently includes representatives from thirteen planets. They each have their individual beliefs and values and I respect them all. But they have all. Chosen. To serve. Starfleet. If anyone cannot perform his or her duty because of the demands of their society, they should resign. Do you wish to resign?"

A far more aware version of inclusivity than you'd find in most scripts. Makes me wonder why Drew Deighan and Thomas and Jo Perry, credited with writing it, didn't find more lucrative careers in Hollywood. Actually, no, it doesn't. Lively thought is professional death.

 

Reunion even introduced the bat'leth, one of the most absurdly impractical yet totes awesomesauce fictional weapons.

And yet miraculously for these 45mins' sheer density, its coherence speaks quite well of Jonathan Frakes' directing.

As to my common thread here, K'Ehleyr benefits from vastly improved writing over her appearance in The Emissary, treating Worf with reciprocated respect and even believable affection and willing to fight for his honor just as he for hers, and taking her position as ambassador seriously. None of which changes the simple fact that she shows up on Worf's doorstep with a surprise son, having unilaterally decided whether or not his one night of passion should saddle him with care of such and knowing full well she can expect him to take the unfairly honorable route of full retroactive responsibility for a fait accompli.

I swear, this bitch isn't half-klingon, she's half-cuckoo. And again, noone sees anything wrong with this.

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Seriesdate: 4.10
The Loss

In which a tele can't path.

 

An episode I keep referencing for its demonstration of telepathy's unsuitability for a SF show and the impact such a gimmick has on a character's (lack of) development. To the point here, when Troi loses her superpower and tries to bitch about it to Riker, he's given a surprisingly cogent retort:

 

"That's it, isn't it? We're on equal footing now. You always had an advantage, a little bit of control of every situation. That must've been a very safe position to be in. To be honest? I always thought there was something a little too... aristocratic about your betazoid heritage."

But you don't need telepathy for that. Females' higher average sociability and social aptitude is well established, and always presented as a deserved victory over males. See K'Ehleyr playing on Worf's honor. Where the term "manipulative" is generally understood as negative, feminine manipulative traits and behavior (seduction, wheedling and betrayal of trust, character assassination, subversion of other relationships, etc. (many etceteras)) are passed off as... classy.

Aristocratic.

Clever girl.

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Seriesdate: 4.16
Galaxy's Child

In which the ship nurses a baby space whale.

 

But in order to do that they need to jimmy the engine's quantum fluxamiscombobulative quadrilithium matriz or somesuch, requiring the aid of the engine's designer, one Dr. Leah Brahms a.k.a. the hot nerdette on whom the ship's computer based the simulacrum with which Geordi became infatuated back in season 3. His initial excitement withers at finding her true personality quite different from that reconstructed by the computer from her public persona.

Brahms barely steps off the teleporter pad before she starts snapping at Geordi and criticizing every detail of how he ruined her engine. On a basic level their several exchanges reflect the eternal conflict between theoretical and applied science. Show me any high-tech design and I'll show you at least some end users forced to jury-rig the finished product to get it working off the drawing board... and conversely, designers enraged at seeing their babies manhandled. However, it also sets up yet another scene of Guinan condescending to Geordi that he should not have mistaken last year's holodeck simulacrum for the actual Leah Brahms... despite Geordi's biggest source of error being the computer neglecting to volunteer the information that Leah's married.

Then half an hour into the action, Leah (by immutable sitcom logic) happens upon that simulation and instead of being amused at this social blunder she Flips. Her. Shit.

"I'm outraged by this. I have been invaded. Violated. How dare you use me like this? How far did it go, anyway? Was it good for you? How many other programs did you create - one for every day of the week, one for every mood?"

Wait.

Back up, bitch.

First off, she's outraged at something that objectively not only did not harm her but very likely benefited her, as Geordi's infatuation could only make him more pliant to her nonstop bitchiness. Gave her the upper hand. She was in no way violated by an animation of herself that

1) she never knew existed and was never re-directed at her in any way until she met Geordi (who wasn't running some targeted advertisement algorithm off it)

2) was based on information she herself had distributed in publishing her papers/lectures/etc. and not any sort of covert datamining invading her privacy

3) due to 2) was in fact a very poor copy (major plot point) and you've got to admire Leah's hypocritical rage at both being copied too accurately and not being copied accurately enough. And once again, nobody sees anything odd about the conceit that anyone who derives pleasure from your mere existence, without costing you any harm, property or extra effort on your part, should be declared a criminal unless contributing two months' salary to your glory.

(On a personal note:

I find Leah's scenario particularly amusing because I ran across an erotic story a couple of years ago featuring one character which from both marginally fudged personal characteristics and the very specific setting appeared to be a gender-flipped... me. Aside from the oddness inherent in one of my former classmates thinking I'd make a smokin' hot lesbian, what exactly should my reaction be to finding myself portrayed thus, assuming I really was the source of inspiration? I finally realized: no reaction at all, since it had no effect at all. Well, aside from mild amusement.)

 

Try to imagine a man screeching in a woman's face that she "invaded" and "violated" him for eyeballing a photoshopped picture of his face on a pornstar's body while she masturbates. I should damn well hope Geordi created a program for every day and every mood, from candle-lit dinners to leather&chains dungeon romps, since they're his damn days, his damn moods and his damn fantasies! Is there any incarnation of the thought police older or more pervasive than females' abuse of men based solely on projecting their own expectations of male behavior?

But then... something happens, something magical, something which once again set The Next Generation a class above anything you'd see on television, then or now: a man calls a woman out on at least some small portion of her bullshit.
"Ever since you came on board, you've been badgering me and I've taken it. I've shown you courtesy, and respect, and a hell of a lot of patience. Oh, no, no, no, wait a minute. I've tried to understand you. I've tried to get along with you. And in return, you've accused, tried and convicted me without bothering to hear my side of it. So, I'm guilty, okay? But not of what you think. Of something much worse. I'm guilty of reaching out to you, of hoping we could connect. I'm guilty of a terrible crime, doctor. I offered you friendship."
Even more amazingly, by the end they both apologize to each other for jumping to conclusions and remain Platonic friends. Galaxy's Child ends not with Geordi begging forgiveness or being browbeaten or some big display of contrition or subservience to the arbitrary judgment of a morally superior being (as you'd expect of gender relations in 99% of TV shows) but with him sipping a drink calmly and contentedly by a window in Ten Forward.

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Seriesdate: 4.20

Qpid

 

In which archaeology is not discussed.

Vash, the Lara Croft impersonator who dragged Picard along to futuristically shovel futuristic dirt for a futuristic magic artifact in season 3 meets up with him at a scientific conference. They finally fuck, then the next morning Crusher walks in and immediately bonds with the dashing roguette so they can dish dirt on their shared alpha male love interest. Then Vash flirts with Riker while mocking him for flirting with her, advertises her ownership of the ship's captain by sitting in his chair on the bridge and bitches him out for not telling everyone about their two-day fling on Risa.

Then Q shows up, so if this episode had anything resembling a plot it would go to pot. We randomly segue into a Robin Hood parody, and aside from the comic relief of Troi shooting Data with an arrow we can pretty much skip it. One aspect deserves mention. Q is portrayed as somehow in the wrong for warning Picard against the slavishness of romantic devotion, yet given the script has Vash qua Marian turn the whole conflict three times over by seducing Sir Guy into marrying her, the strawman has a point!

Anyway, needless to say everyone continues lavishing praise on the selfish, manipulative bitch and the episode ends with her being rewarded by backpacking across the galaxy in search of adventure and glory with fuckign Q! as her guide and devoted guard-dog. Because she's irresistible even to ersatz gods.

 

But obviously there's no danger to feminine manipulation!

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Seriesdate: 4.23

The Host

 

In which a body is desired.

The Enterprise hosts yet another diplomat, Odan, who turns out to be a parasitic slug (for more on the trill species, see Deep Space Nine) but not before putting moves on the ship's doctor, as one does by and by whilst diplomacing. Then the diplomat's host body gets space-lasered and it hitches a ride on Riker's liver until space DHL can ship a spare corpus.

There's also a fairly memorable scene of Riker-Odan convincing the two sides of the conflict he's mediating to trust him despite his changed appearance. Never mind the fate of two worlds though, we need to spend more time gazing lovingly in each others' eyes.

Yes, because Riker-Odan keeps putting moves on the ship's doctor. Including after receiving HER new FEMALE body.

Babe, I'm still the same space tapeworm you fell in love with!

I mean... just weighing in here, but I'd consider option 2 overwhelmingly preferable. Dat chick's hawt. Of course, I may be naturally biased.

And that's sort of the point.

Reviews will inevitably focus on the question of Bev's refusal to continue a sexual/romantic relationship with a gender-flipped partner being either homophobic or somehow justified. But this question cannot stem from a fair-minded standpoint. It's based on presuming homosexuality/bisexuality's moral superiority, meaning anyone who refuses to fuck a socially approved non-heterosexual mate must somehow be either corrupted by the vice of heteronormativity or in need of justification. Granted, that anti-straight reviewer tilt's more of a figment of subsequent decades' political correctness. More importantly, pay attention to all the potentially fascinating questions ignored by the orignal script.

Though the trill host is a bit zombie-like, she has a name and can speak so is presumably sentient. Not sure if the sadomasochistic creepiness inherent in puppeting sentient hosts was properly addressed in DSN; c'mon trills, doesn't your planet have dogs or something?

On a related note, we spend almost all our time watching (and presumably sympathizing with) Beverly agonzing back and forth over whether or not she's in love. Troi legitimizes Crusher fucking Riker's body so long as it makes her feel like she's in her daddy's arms again. I am NOT making that shit up, people:

"The first man I ever loved was my father. He was strong and tall. He carried me when the ground was muddy. He chased away the monsters that hid under my bed at night. And he sang to me, and kept me safe. And he went away. What I wouldn't give to hear those songs again. To feel his arms protect me. I never will, but I can still feel his warmth and his love as though he were here with me. If you can feel those things from the man we know as Will Riker, accept them. Accept the love."

Awwww, how adowable!

Except neither of these bitches (or anyone else) ever bothers questioning whether Riker himself wants to fuck Crusher, or at any rate have his commandeered body used to pleasure a coworker. Accept the love you bastard! Hngh! Yeah! Accept it like that!

Anyway, Bev also gets her emotions validated by Picard... you remember, her on-again / off-again romance?

"Beverly, whatever else I may be to you, I'm your friend. I can only imagine what you're going through, and I want you to know I'm here."

Full support, full stop. But don't worry, I'm sure Bev will reciprocate that support.

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Seriesdate: 4.25

In Theory

In which motives are nebulous.

 

Data's comely young assistant torpedo wrangler whines about being asked out by her ex-boyfriend whom she dumped for not lavishing enough attention on her and for slurping his soup and yes that last part is in the damn script. After noticing that Data always remembers her problems and lacks the capacity to be annoyed by her constant blather, she starts putting moves on him as the ideal man. After getting bad advice from several crew members, he reciprocates by creating a subroutine to C:relationships/romance/her.

Meanwhile, dark matter is causing the ship to dis/re-integrate at random spots, causing rampant tchotchke damage. Also death.

That part's actually great, including a daring display of shuttle piloting by Picard to guide the Enterprise out of the nebula (so long as you ignore the absurdity of the middle-aged ship's captain being the best available pilot) but it barely takes up half the episode. 

 

Spiner clowning his way through rom-com routines partly salvages the other half (and his episodic girlfriend doesn't do too bad either) but it's still utter nonsense from start to the predictable finish of her dumping Data because he's too emotionless. Yes. He is. Because that's what you decided you wanted. An emotionless man. The hell's your problem, lady?

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Seriesdate: 5.12

Violations

In which rape fantasies induce coma.

 

When this is how you introduce a character, before the opening credits even roll:

 

 - complete with sinister music... is there any chance he won't turn out to be evil?

That opening gives you a fair assessment of storytelling quality, as does the rampant use of slow monologues, overextended takes and reused scenes as filler. Long story short, the Enterprise is carrying telepaths who can manipulate memories, then they start reliving bad memories and falling into inexplicable soap opera comas. Then it turns out the son who envies his father was secretly trying to frame him of mindrape, oh and also he's a literal rapist who's got the hots for Troi.

Yeeesh, no wonder nobody even remembers this damn episode... it was wiped from our memories by dream telepaths!

 

(It was, unsurprisingly, created almost entirely by women, including Jeri Taylor.)

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Seriesdate: 5.17

The Outcast

 

In which the man must save his mate.

 

The Enterprise helps members of an androgynous species locate a missing expedition. One of them, Soren, falls for Riker and runs afoul of the Inquisition for sexual deviance in having a sex at all.

I'm tempted to bash this one due to a few lines: calling for gender-neutral pronouns, Crusher bemoaning that women were once thought weaker than men (while of course never adding that they're also considered more deserving of life and health; it's a good deal) and Worf suddenly being rewritten as a reactionary with a line about poker wild cards being a crutch for feminine weakness and indecisiveness. On one hand it's never an attitude he's needed to take, except when the script calls for a male to have himself condemned by females. On the other hand, poker aside, anyone observing gender differences cannot fail to spot women taking fewer risks and clinging to plausible deniability at every opportunity, so the scene makes no damn sense from any angle. The speed of Riker/Soren's development as a couple is also ridiculous, but chalk that up to the 45min constraint.

But aside from that? Excellent. Vilified sexual dimorphism among the J'naii obviously stands in for homosexuality in the '90s, with deviants ostracized and even physically abused. Soren's big speech goes beyond that to a plea against the unjust suppression of harmless social deviance in general. If they'd left it at that, it would've been good, but much like Timicin the Kaelonite's ritual suicide, the issue is polished to more facets than perhaps its audience would like. What makes it great is Riker returning with Worf to spring Soren from re-education, mission:plausible style, only to find Soren has already been "cured" of having a gender and no longer wants to escape. No major changes in personality, no One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest lobotomy, no zombie shuffling or cultist chanting, just the same rational, bright and gentle person as before... who no longer feels the urge to mate with a male. The ending leaves the question of whether Soren got brainwashed or cured of a species-specific ailment up in the air.

What if the rebellious desire on which you've built your entire life is not an intrinsic, defining characteristic? What if for some it is just... a glandular imbalance. Endless metabolic disorders cause endless urges and manias in their sufferers to the point they are not competent to care for themselves. J'naii metabolism may or may not include this one. If you cannot honestly consider each new case's possibilities, if you reflexively condemn anyone who doesn't toe the line of your claim to your own legitimacy... well, then, you're not considering the matter rationally and you're not out for equality. You're just another narrowminded fanatic pushing yet another self-serving political agenda.

 

A good SciFi writer can throw its intended audience off balance without betraying the initial premise.

This was good SciFi.

(And for the ambiguity of her contibution to Star Trek, consider it was once again written by Jeri Taylor.)

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Seriesdate: 5.20

Cost of Living

 

In which parasites are fed.

 

Lwaxana Troi returns, having regressed after Timicin's death to her old flamboyant diva persona. Now she's engaged herself to a member of some random planet's royal family. There's a lot of convoluted back-and-forth here about enjoying life, as Lwaxana tells Worf's son to break rules and takes him to a holodeck space circus without permission, and increasingly monopolizes everyone's attention as is her wont.

Which is too bad because the crew need to deal with a bunch of space-glitter chewing through all of their ship systems until life support begins to fail and they all go unconscious from oxygen deprivation - but nobody suffers brain damage because that would be a downer. They solve the problem by having breathless Data return the parasites to their natural feeding grounds.

Then it turns out Lwaxana hates her new beau for being too stuffy and shows up naked as per betazoid wedding traditions at the ceremony, causing him to break it off. We end with her telling us to live in the real world only when we have to, a message which I certainly approve given how much I enjoy my own escapist fantasies... but escape's not even remotely what Lwaxana did here. She interferes in Worf and Alexander's life, in her daughter's and by extension the rest of the crew, and in Picard's who rightly points out she keeps using a thousand-person starship as her own personal taxi on a whim. That's not even getting into the engagement. She could simply have admitted, after meeting her incompatible internet date, that she made a mistake, owned the negative consequences of her impulsivity. Instead she throws a scene to publicly humiliate her groom, and the writing and directing prompt us to side with her because she's a free spirit.

Bullshit.

Her every action indicates her addiction to her own power over others, not any appreciation of freedom. And the rest of the cast just feed that addiction.

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Seriesdate: 5.21

The Perfect Mate

 

In which perfection is female.

The Enterprise is mediating yet another interplanetary conflict, this time by delivering a peace-sealing present which turns out to consist of a telepathic young woman who automatically imprints on the first male mind with whom she spends much time to anticipate his needs as The Perfect mate. Which by screenwriter contrivance just happens to be "accidentally" Picard. Don't ask me why, if she imprints specifically on men, nobody thinks to have her interact entirely with women. Or Data. Or just have her binge soaps alone in her cabin during her trip. I'm sure Days of Our Lives must still be running in the 24th century. Just don't ask why. That's not a TV sort of question. As a topper, they wrote in a couple of sneering, spitting, gamboling Ferengi clowns once again out to steal women as per their species' absurd introduction.

Any excuse for a plot being painfully, Kirk-level obvious from the moment she steps out of her GIANT GOLDEN FLOATING COCOON the rest of her episode consists mainly of the future Jean Grey sashaying around in her gauzy gown while the future Professor X wrings his hands at the injustice he's helping perpetrate against her by delivering her to a life of luxury and fame as a princess. Make special note of Crusher badgering, condemning and browbeating Picard.

 

Whatever moralistic argument they were trying to make about individual freedom flies out the window with an offhand comment:

"You see, male metamorphs are somewhat common, but females are born only once in seven generations. So obviously they are greatly sought after as mates."

Oh.

Ok.

So in fact there would be far, far more males predisposed by their genetics to imprint on some bitch who then runs their lives and the only difference between them and our heroine is that they don't get upgraded to planetary royalty for their trouble. They are not seen. They're "common"-ers. We don't need to worry about them. Their devotion is natural and fitting, their ingrained brainwashing uncontroversial, beneath notice. We focus our entire 45mins' attention through feminist-tinted glasses on the plight of the one female exception, the one female counterpart to all those conveniently servile males.

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Seriesdate: 6.13

Aquiel

In which the woman is innocent.

 

They had these on sale at Pier Singularity.

Bearable little murder mystery set on a remote outpost, complete with snarly klingon as hateable (and too obvious) red herring. Too bad the bulk of it merely recycles the idea of Geordi yet again falling for a woman based only on video logs, who of course turns out to be the prime suspect, but even of courser is proven innocent by a hackneyed old twist lent some legitimacy by the SciFi setting.

Their entire forced, awkward relationship consists of Geordi repeatedly re-affirming his devotion to her despite mounting evidence of her guilt, all the while hand-waving her abrasive personality as being a complicated woman. Introducing a telepathy angle doesn't help one bit, as it eats up several minutes of the show all to set up a single one-liner making you think she's about to eat Geordi. Which any viewer knows she won't, because you can never go wrong irrationally defending a woman again logical suspicions.

 

Then, for all the hullabaloo over mind-melding, she turns down Geordi's recommendation for a position on the Enterprise because she wants to earn it herself. Admirable, except she had no problem accepting his support until now. In other words, thanks for risking your career and even your life on the unwarranted assumption that I'm not a murderous blob, bye-bye now.

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Seriesdate: 6.19

Lessons

 

In which... you know, I'll skip the joke here. In the context of all this other dreck, Lessons rather impressed me. Proof that while TNG's creativity had stalled a bit during season 6, it still coasted on that mid-series peak.

"hold your position until we finish evacuating the colony. Picard out."

Picard gets yet another love interest. I'd have something more snide to say about it, but Nella Darren matches more closely his own personality and intellectual level and acts both personally charming and professional in her post in stellar cartography. They bond over her teaching him to improve playing that thousand-year-old flute from The Inner Light. They converse, without the need to prove devotion by absorbing one-sided abuse. They consciously establish personal and professional boundaries and they grow closer, naturally, quietly, equally, honestly, realistically... beautifully. And none of that stops them from being futuristic spacefarers or driving the plot.

In fact it's pointless to try pointing out the myriad ways Lessons succeeds beyond television expectations, because it amounts to NOT doing everything outlined in the other hackneyed scripts on this very page. Take every contrived, abusive, willfully ignorant, anti-rational, unprofessional, absurd gimmick on which the others leaned for cheap relationship drama and you'll find none of them here. Even the dramatic climax, when Picard is forced to send his love down into a dangerous environment and then order her team to hold position in the face of a raging firestorm, is not presented as some sadistic male oppression of women or a sentient universe plotting against our heroes' happiness. It is merely, as science fiction fans might well recall, a Cold Equation.

Regulations or no, you shouldn't have to be told not to let personal relationships compromise the security of a thousand-person mission. And neither of them needs telling. They make a rational choice to part ways, recognizing their romance's untenability in a field of life or death decisions. Male and female, captain and commander, archaeologist and astronomer, alone and alone, they meet and they part, and retain each other's touch and remain themselves.

One Day, One Room.

Lovely.

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Seriesdate: 6.24

Second Chances

 

In which Riker is Riker, to Troi's surprise.

Already discussed in reference to teleporter plots, a dodgy 'port off a stormy planet cloned Riker years ago and marooned the clone. In context here, the freshly discovered clone restarts his romance with Troi. She's initially enchanted by returning to a time before he went off to follow his career, then devastated when the new Riker gradually shifts his priorities to Riker norm, which is to say he goes off to follow his career.

We're heavily pushed to sympathize with Troi being left in the lurch, but as -

A) The guy ain't caught a whiff of pussy in eight years and eighty parsecs, of course he's gonna jump your betazobones

B) As the initial relief at being rescued wears off, of course his attention will expand beyond you as his emotional lifeline

C) You're supposed to be a top-trained psychologist who can spot these issues and keep in mind he's the traumatized Robinson, not you

D) You went into this having known half your life what his tendencies are

- then I just have to reiterate a sentiment from above: the hell's your problem, lady?

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Seriesdate: 7.02

Liaisons

In which the meat is abused.

 

The Enterprise is once again hosting diplomats from a newly discovered planet. One of them gets chummy with Troi and eats his weight in dessert; the other infuriates Worf with brusque, insulting demands until he takes his anger out on the second course. Their pilot flies back to their world with Picard, but oh noes! - they crash-land, because shuttles on this show have about the same safety record as adolescent dragracers.

 

Picard gets saved by another crashlanded survivor who locks him up in her rusty old transport ship to protect him from dangerous animals on a planet composed mainly of rocks and lightning bolts. It only takes a few thousand-yard stares, a forced kiss, some undue clinginess and reluctance to seek rescue and the words "I love you" greeted with apprehensive string music to realize the chick's loonier than an Apollo mission. By the time Picard discovers she's been faking his injury too keep him hostage, he's ready to tell her to jump off a cliff.

Turns out she was his perfectly holographically disguised pilot this entire time. All three diplomats had decided to explore different aspects of human culture by immersion: pleasure, anger and romance respectively. Mediocre script all told. The idea of any species lacking the concepts of pleasure or antagonism (in other words lacking all motivation in an evolutionary sense) is just absurd. The perfect visual, aural and tactile camouflage they use comes out of nowhere and seems like it would up-end all galactic spy programs... except our stalwart "exploration" vessel as usual shows zero interest in exploring this latest game-changing technology.

The romance angle works remarkably well for about ten minutes in the middle of the show, while the ersatz female's gaslighting Picard and securing his captivity. But, what could've been a welcome exploration by a more logical species of emotional manipulation among naked apes gets subverted and needlessly muddled by "her" entire story being a failed imitation of a supposedly succesful hurt/comfort romance the aliens discovered recorded in the crashed freighter.

Also, not particularly pertinent here, but let's all acknowledge: Picard smooched a dude. Heehee!

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Seriesdate: 7.08

Attached

 

In which male thoughts are embarrassing.

The ship is mediating half a planet's application to the federation, a world is split between two factions distrustful of each other to the point of zero diplomatic contact and infinity spy games. Ridiculing the idiocy of the Cold War could've worked well, but is overplayed by the two representatives' comedic paranoia in an otherwise middlin'-serious plot. Their sniping at each other grows so childish as to defy mockery of their childishness.

 

Anyway, the A plot concerns the hemisphere NOT applying for Federation membership kidnapping Picard and Crusher and implanting them with mind-reading macrochips. Our heroes stage a daring escape including a phaser chase scene and outrunnable gas explosions

 

- but discover they're broadcasting on each other's thought-frequency now and are forced to share some embarrassing cogitations. Crusher's is a three-line snippet about accidentally hurting a boy's feelings with an offhand joke "is that a beard or is your face just dirty" designed to make the audience side with her sense of humor. Picard's is a five-minute display of self-flagellation over his guilt at falling in love with Crusher while she was still married to his soap best soap opera soap friend.

 

In conclusion let's just be friends and don't think about your blue balls too much, and they lived happily ever after (with her having some extra dirt on her friend) but not before Crusher mocking Picard for his dreams she read while they were still linked.

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Seriesdate: 7.11

Parallels

 

In which Worf is home for Christmas. Too bad klingons don't celebrate that.

Worf the batl'leth champion returns to the Enterprise to an embarassing surprise birthday party, notices some incongruities, asks Troi to be his son's soy cheese in case he dies, then notices every time he gets dizzy the world changes. He may have suffered neurological damage but worst of all he lost his first place bat'leth trophy!

They determine Worf has become unstuck in... dimensions, jumping from universe to universe. A fight with the Cardassians, LaForge killed by an exploding panel, Picard killed by the Borg, Lieutenant Wesley still serving, Riker captain, etc. drive a rather rollicking plot to be honest. When the various realities start collapsing we're even treated to one of the series' more memorable scenes of an infinity of Enterprises materializing around each other.

But the main event, arguably, is Worf discovering a universe where he's married to Troi. Pairing these two up has been repeatedly decried as one of the series' worst decisions, and you can gauge the scale of contrivance by its introduction via multiversal cascade. While largely random, it also fits perfectly into a larger trend I'll address below.

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Seriesdate: 7.14

Sub Rosa

In which space ghosts want to rape human medicine women.

Unholy grandmother of fuck, there is just no way to summarize this misconceived wreck favorably.

I take it back: the turtleneck was comparatively sensible

Jeri Taylor strikes again!

Sub Rosa makes a lovely capper to this rather lengthy tirade, cropping up in every "worst of TNG" list with good cause. Beverly attends her grandmother's funeral in a colony of quaint rustic space alien space Scots. Then she fucks her grandmother's fucktoy space ghost that lives in a space candle.

"Don't you remember? I came to you last night while you were asleep" - please tell me he got his prepositions correct.

Anyway, she immediately shacks up with her grandmother's immortal lover, resentful of anyone warning her this seems just a smidge odd. Then she blows him up with a radio antenna. Maybe I'm being too hard on this script? I mean, he's not really a space ghost. That would be ridiculous. Nonono, he's an electric space vampire. Who lives in a candle.

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I skipped Wesley's romances because the rules of Wesley worship rendered them too dull. Just as every teacher and coworker and cosmic entity fawned on him ceaselessly, assume every other episode the wunderkind would be supplied with a gorgeous young female whose only real function was to fawn on him until the universe itself somehow conspires to pull the two young lovers apart. Also, I'd already addressed those in the two posts concerning that dread malady, Wesleyitis, which is why I also skipped the four closely-clustered romance plots from season 3. Even so, I may have missed a few episodic romances, but I think we've accrued a fairly representative sample, haven't we? So what observations can we draw?

- First off, note their sheer abundance.

Twenty on this page, four more in Season 3, several more involving Lwaxana or Troi/Riker or Wesley, etc. On a show of twenty-odd episodes per season, you could safely ignore an entire season of seven if you add up all the star-crossed bullcrap expounding little or none on futuristic societies or galactic wonders or technological marvels or strange new life forms, the odd trill excepted. So let's call sexual relationships, among other things, what they really are to TV writer hacks: random filler, that the audience will instinctively swallow without question. The galaxy's about to destructively merge with another dimension - but by all means let's rehash our old fling for thirty minutes.

 

- Romances disproportionately double as diplomacy plots.

Not an uncommon theme on a show famed for its Utopian peacekeeping, but there must be some reason why about half these set-ups involve negotiations. Even when the diplomats aren't the love interest per se, TNG's scripts tended to be divided between action or social plots, with diplomacy and romance both falling on the social side.

One one hand, introducing a character as "ambassador" Glorgnax or whatever automatically establishes high rank and respectability with no specific duties or complicated links in the existing chain of command - therefore free to flout the captain's orders to move the plot along. It also limits the "action" largely to a drawing-room, skimping on location filming or special effects, and as the sexual angle again limits the action to a bedroom the two skimps go hand in skimp. Oooh, skimpy outfits too, it's three skimps in one! Not many extraterrestrials' props budget can consist of a gauzy nightgown off the discount rack.

More importantly, in order to register as a worthy mate a male needs high social rank, and a diplomatic title once again helps. High rank and doesn't get his hands dirty, just mediates? Helps even more!

But still... note this boardroom access gets leveraged for cross-purposes depending on sex. The females at the conference (e.g. Lwaxana, K'Ehleyr, that teenage centenarian from The Vengeance Factor) got a recurring role or noble/tragic send-off as nominal heroines/martyrs, while counterpart males (The Price, Violations) exist solely to be unmasked as fake/evil or at least disappointing to the female cast member they're involved with (The Host). They exist to be rebuffed, establishing the woman as even more important, intrinsically, than any rank. Notable exception: Bev's pet A.M.A.M. from Transfigurations... who literally ascends to a higher plane of existence never to be heard from again.

Our reaction to a high-ranking outsider male is to take him down a peg or absent him. Female? May thy radiance illumine the universe forevermore mine most glorious goddess!

- Rescue the damsel even as she claims not to need it.

Won't go into the endless examples of rescue operations or men immediately jumping to a woman's aid. K'Ehleyr's willingness to risk her life standing up for Worf's honor in Reunion makes a rare moment of glory indeed. Particularly funny when Riker and Worf mount a rescue in The Outcast and are left to deal with an "ah, no thanks, I'm good" with barely an acknowledgement of having been jerked around and made to risk their careers and possibly lives.

- Females preferentially enter the scene as old flames.

In Haven, the artsy dupe has been dreaming of the love of his life his whole life.

We'll Always Have Paris - chick from Paris resenting Picard for leaving her to pursue his career

The Emissary - resents and mocks Worf for their past relationship - up to 11 in Reunion dumping the kid on him

Galaxy's Child - Leah flies into a rage at the idea of Geordi having already been fantasizing about her

Qpid - advertises her ownership of the ship's captain from Captain's Holiday

In Theory - Data's already her confidant in bitching out her past boyfriend

Aquiel - Geordi's been watching her logs

Second Chances - same old Deanna, same new Riker

Attached - have fun invading, exposing and playing on your captain's private shame in being attracted to you

Parallels - you're already married

To the effect, in every case, that the woman is supplied with a prior claim on the man. He owes her something. His past guilt indebts him to her. She's his life's dream. Whatever the contrivance, it must pre-emptively secure the man's devotion. Women deserve men's servitude.

- Women invade your privacy for your own good.

Geordi is presented as somehow invading women's privacy by watching video footage despite one case being merely amalgamated public info and the second being carried out as part of a murder investigation.

Meanwhile, no one bats an eyelash at the telepathic females outright reading men's minds to humiliate or bash them for it or endlessly manipulate them: The Perfect Mate, Attached, Troi's default setting, and the less said about Lwaxana the better.

- Women should be supported in seeking new mates while men are condemned.

Contrast Jean-Luc's unconditional support for Bev in The Host with Lessons where she's just cold and aloof, or The Perfect Mate, in which Bev first badgers him into taking a personal interest in the metamorph, then badgers him again for being attracted to same metamorph, uphill both ways through the snow. Or her immediately palling around with Vash in Qpid to mock him for having a fling. Or Troi resenting Riker's vacation on Risa while he's expected to stay out of her business in The Price.

When a woman really is making an obviously wrong choice (The Price, Cost of Living, Sub Rosa) don't expect her to own her mistake, or apologize to the friends whose advice she ignored or against whom she conspired with her new beau.

- Seduction of man by woman literally "brings out the best in him" (Qpid) while seduction of woman by man is just a cover to cheat at negotiations or a sinister rape/mindrape plot, or a space vampire pretending to be a space ghost.

 

- (edit: oh and lest we forget, we don't need to call it rape if a woman rapes a man. By modern definitions, Riker was raped at least three times during the show's run (while having his body hijacked by a trill, plus the kinky nurse, plus on the matriarchal planet, etc.) to a chorus of applause from the audience. The same audience crying rape at the slightest physical touch between a man and woman in other contexts.)

- Career women are heroines. Career men are heartless cads for not devoting themselves to a woman.

Picard in "Paris", Riker in Second Chances vs. Aquiel, Haven or The Emissary.

- Lifelong devotion by a man is a cosmic romance; by a woman, a cosmic crime.

e.g. Haven vs. The Perfect Mate

While Soren in The Outcast claims femininity she's treated as entitled to Will championing her cause, socially, legally and physically. When Soren summarily annuls their relationship, Will just gets to deal with it. Note the tipping point in Data's failed romance from In Theory consists of her resenting him for thinking of other things while kissing her. He's not completely, mindlessly under her control? How dare he!

 

- Never call a woman out on her bullshit.

Men can only be right, and women wrong, when the relationship is no longer male-female, and even then rarely. In The Host the man is not really a man, so Bev can be directed and acted as slightly awkward and not morally superior. In Liaisons the woman gaslighting Picard is not really a woman, which is the only way feminine, manipulative crimes could be honestly portrayed on screen. Contrast to the myriad scenes of Troi, Crusher or Guinan condescending to men about their failure to meet women's every expectation. We're pushed to feel sad for Data's pinhead romance experiment from In Theory despite every step (initiating, driving and ending the relationship) being entirely her own active decision.

The exactly two glorious moments of reversal (Riker in The Loss and Geordi in Galaxy's Child) still end in pax. Contrast to all the episodes featuring male villains (The Price, Violations, Sub Rosa) or just men being bashed and humiliated on the whim of a woman (Qpid, or almost anything with Lwaxana) where her victory is always final and he always makes an ignominious exit. Or Worf being gratuitously rewritten as Archie Bunker in The Outcast to prop up female contempt.

Circa 1990, feminism's stranglehold on public discourse was less absolute than it is today, and TNG still included some negative female characters: Tasha's daughter and Duras' sisters in the klingon civil war arc, the con artist in Devil's Due, the sun goddess Masaka in Masks, etc. However, when writers turned their attention to women's relationship with men specifically, all favor weighed entirely on the side of the unfairer sex. Looking over these examples, I find it quite telling that the second most cooperative relationship (after Lessons) is probably Riker and Soren... and the third would be K'Ehleyr's klingon-style redemption in Reunion. The farther removed from human female norms, the less the female required absolute control. There's a subconscious truism to that.

 

I've also conspicuously re-used the term "contrivance" for the various plot twists justifying females' moral high ground. Watch Lessons' naturally, thoughtfully developed romance. Why was that a one in twenty aberration? Maybe the desperate need writers felt to fabricate pretexts for righteous female indignation is best explained by Lwaxana Troi in Manhunt:

 

Lwaxana: "[Picard]'s a fine man. Solid, reliable. He's a little on the stuffy side, but, all in all, he's not that bad."
Deanna: "I can't believe you, Mother. You sound like you're sizing up a commodity."
Lwaxana: "But that's exactly what men are, darling. Especially human men. Was your father ever unhappy with me?"
Deanna: "No. He worshipped you. But I don't think I'll ever learn to see men the way you do."
Lwaxana: "You will as you mature, darling. And the men in your life are going to bless you for it."

You are a commodity. Worship your owner and bless her. Women need all those pretexts to justify their claim to men's time, effort, resources and very lives. We all know what romance means, that all pervasive paraphilia, and it has nothing to do with equality.

 

Keep in mind this is a show lauded for its egalitarianism, and it aired thirty years ago. You often hear complaints (from myself included) that TNG's women were too flighty or damsel-ish or motherly. Yeah, and despite that they were consistently held up as more entitled and morally superior to the more competent men around them! My generation grew up imbibing this self-flagellating, supposedly anti-female culture to which feminists hearken back as justification for their abuse of men today. Tim Allen grunting like a caveman, Homer Simpson getting dumber by the episode, and strawman Q being bashed for trying to open Picard's eyes to human males' self-destructive subservience:

"If you've learned how weak and vulnerable you really are, if you finally see how love has brought out the worst in you"

How many generations of indoctrination does it take to inculcate willing slavishness? Especially when it's already so instinctively ingrained.