deleted by creator
The character of Troi was such a strange collection of decisions.
In addition to a ship’s doctor, let’s also have a psychologist on board. Okay cool. A show as progressive as TNG was in its day would do something like “Hey we have a psychologist. Taking care of mental health is a thing you’re allowed to do.” Plus, in the Trek future, I can see where a psychologist might perform the roles of a present day Navy chaplain; Trek, especially TNG era Trek, had no use for religion and championed science, reason, philosophy and understanding, and so instead of a ship’s chaplain you’d have a ship’s counselor. Makes sense.
She’s a member of an empathic species who feels the emotions of the people she’s talking to so she’s an extra good counselor. And “logical” Vulcans are always science officers, right? Kind of on the nose but it’s on brand for Trek. Surprised the Klingon on the crew isn’t the weapons officer. Yet. So I guess she’s going to be a recurring character kind of like the ship’s doctor, when characters have personal issues they can go to the counselor to work through them?
The man cast will never have personal issues or conflicts among each other. They are the elite best of the best that humanity has to offer, they’re all pictures of perfect mental health and they work flawlessly as a team. …so why did they bother bringing a therapist on board with them?
She’s going to spend most of her duty day on the bridge sitting next to the Captain Ah, so she can use her empathy skills to aid in negotiations with outside characters, aliens and such, tell if they’re lying or upset or something, giving the Captain an amazing upper hand in pretty much any interpersonal situation.
…Shit I hadn’t thought that through. That does eliminate any plot that relies on deception to work. Well she’ll nearly never say anything actually useful, she’ll just sound smart. Okay…so the character is basically pointless?
She’s going to wear a short dress like Uhura did, but this time she’s going to sit in a chair facing forward with no console in front of it so the camera can always see her legs. Ah, there it is. None of the other two women on the crew are wearing such a uniform though, they’re wearing onesie jammies like the men, the doctor even has that really practical coat. Isn’t that kind of sexist even for the late 80’s?
We’ll have some male extras wearing the same uniform in the background sometimes. …Okay sure. So is this counselor a civilian serving aboard ship? She dresses different than everyone else on the crew, and has a purely personnel support role like the teacher and the barber characters.
No, she’s a commissioned officer, a Lieutenant Commander, fifth in command of the ship after the Captain, the first officer, the chief engineer and the navigator. Okay, is she going to command the ship while her superior officers are away, will she be on watch while the others are relieved, play a part in the chain of command?
Of course not, she’s a womanNo, in fact several seasons in she’ll be thrust into that situation and the only enlisted man on the show will have to explain to her that she’s even an officer in the first place, and in one of the movies she makes we’ll have her fly the Enterprise, and she’ll immediately crash it. She’s completely useless as a commanding officer. …Okay…so moving on I see you’ve hired Whoopi Goldberg as a recurring guest star, what’s that character like?There’s going to be a crew lounge on board with big windows, and she’s going to play the wise bartender, Guinan. Interesting. What does she do?
She’ll dispense sage advice, offer to talk to characters who are vexed by the current situation, act as a sounding board, sometimes re-contextualize their problems so they have a revelation, you know. Bartender stuff. Shouldn’t the ship’s counselor do that kind of thing?
Hey speaking of the counselor, what do you think of this spandex aerobics suit instead of the mini dress?
They really could have done themselves a favor by adding some clear limitations to her abilities.
- Proximity required: No sensing through the view screen.
- Surface impressions only: Disciplined minds can fool her
- Background noise: The more people are around, the harder it is to get a clear read on someone.
- The more alien a mind is, the more difficult or painful it is to interact with.
There you go, she can still use her abilities to help the crew, and sometimes to solve problems, but you can also get stuff past her without making her seem oblivious. Then all they have to do is consistently write her as an intelligent and competent member of the crew, and we’re good.
Early on they established she can’t read Ferengi minds. Which actually made her just that much MORE worthless. “We want money! We’re an entire civilization of late stage capitalists. Acquisition!” “I can’t sense anything.”
Her and Riker were the ones chosen to be there for their attractiveness. It was a showbiz rule that at least one female character has to be fuckable and in this case we got a male character too. Too bad the writers created such weak episodes for her, like S2 E1 “Child”. I agree that they didn’t think through her plot spoiling abilities properly. She even senses “a unifying consciousness” from Moriarty, a holodeck character made of literal photons of light… I wonder how much cocaine those writers were doing in the 80s…
Riker, Troy, and Data all came from characters that were supposed to be in ToS: Phase 2.
Riker was originally the character that would learn from and replace Kirk. Troys original character was an alien that had to repress her sex drive. And Data was a Vulcan.Those characters were first repurposed for the movies, and then repurposed again for NG.
I saw an interview with Marina where she said she was only ever given intelligent sounding lines in the episodes where her cleavage was covered up.
Well at least they justified her existence when Barclay showed up. That guy needed an entire therapist all to himself.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
Is there a /bestof in Lemmy? This comment deserves to be framed for reframing Troi.
I agree with most of your analysis except for her outfits. Every other woman on the ship wears a standard uniform, no other woman on the ship is vaguely sexualized. We have plenty of opportunity to see that women aren’t just ditzy accessories for men but equals.
It feels weirdly regressive that there can’t be a woman with cleavage on the show else it’s sexist and reductive. Obviously women aren’t just there to be sexualized by men, but some women enjoy it and that’s okay too. Basically you’re slut shaming Deanna.
This is why I hate how everyone is so afraid of “objectification” these days
It doesn’t feel like a victory for gender equality, it feels like a defeat for sex positivity.
I say this as a woman
And yet people shout about Seven of Nine’s catsuits.
I like the approach SNW is taking with long lived races. Where Guinan was all calm and wise, Pelia is a quirky ball of energy. Maybe it’s because Guinan is much younger and Pelia knows that there is something significantly worse than death. Boredom.
deleted by creator
I think there was an episode of Voyager to that effect; a Q decides to show up on Voyager of all places wanting to kill himself because immortality, omniscience and omnipotence get boring after awhile, and Actual Q is (for some reason) cast as the responsible adult in this situation.
Q showed up on voyager because he knew that Janeway would happily oblige on account of her being a bloodthirsty war criminal, chomping at the bit to extinguish more life in her eternal quest for caffeine
Other Q really just had to make himself look like Tuvix and Janeway would’ve killed him instantly
I came here for blood and coffee, and I’m just about out of coffee.
And further supported by the Q Continuum being shown to be full of bored Q who have already seen and done everything.
deleted by creator
They’re max level with BiS gear. Time to start alts!
Q’s final scene was Picard’s Season 2 only redeeming quality. Then Season 3 retconned that too.
The real reason she wasn’t a telepath was because of fans screaming that psychic powers was “validiating psuedoscience!”
ESP was a thing in the original series but back then mainstream science took such things more seriously. Didn’t have skeptics yet.
Saying the obvious actually is very useful. Yes, it might seem obvious that they’re angry, hiding something etc., but what if they weren’t and are just really good liars and actors? Troi is there to confirm if they’re honest or not.
The facial expressions on this one are perfect lol. Good work!
deleted by creator
Counterpoint: Vader was not a potted plant.
He’s got SOOO many plates spinning! He’s very busy being the driver of the entire plot of a great big saga. There’s a lot on his mind.
What have you done today, Deanna? Eating a fudge sundae doesn’t count.
To step out of the bit for a moment, when people criticize Troi, they’re really criticizing the writing. This character is there to look good and rarely gets anything meaningful to do, and when she does, it’s almost always redundant or superfluous to the situation. Marina Sirtis deserved so much better.
*sundae
“Look! I have one job on this lousy ship, it’s stupid, but I’m gonna do it! Okay?”
Sometimes I wonder if Galaxy Quest didn’t understand Trek better than some actual Trek shows?
It did.
As did The Orville.
Agreed. I started to bring that up, too, but my comment was turning into an essay, so I decided to reduce it all to a pithy two words.
Agreed. For a show that started out as just a parody, it pretty quickly developed into a spiritual spin-off.
I never considered it a parody as much as an homage with more humor. And yes, it got better when they toned the humor down.
It did though I lost my way with it, the new season just had some poor choices for me, probably due to Seth thinking with his penis instead of his head.
I liked it overall. Better than the first season, certainly.
I am meaning New Horizons, series 3 I think. Season 2 was better than 1 but they still insist on the love stories a lot of the time which is fine but it seemed each week someone was falling in love.
Ha! I just finished listening to the Film Reroll podcast episode where they play Galaxy Quest, so I find this comment extra amusing.
Bloody autocorrect. Fixed it.
I like it when memes get defensive right in the meme itself. Really sets my phaser to kill, if you know what I mean.
Force powers are vague psychic/mystic stuff. We see Vader sense Kenobi, and he can tell that Luke is strong with the force when he is focusing on him. And there’s other stuff like sensing Alderaan blowing up or things happening in other places and times (aka literally anything the plot wants the character to see). But the rules just really aren’t clear, especially in the original trilogy. There’s no indication given that Vader should be able to sense that someone is related to him, nor would he be able to pull it from Leia’s mind since she doesn’t know either. If anything, he should have sensed the millennium falcon coming in to cover Luke during the trench run, that seems like the more obvious thing to be able to detect.
Troi has empathy, which is a much more clearly defined concept. And while they stray from that sometimes by letting her sense danger or other nebulous generalities, we do know that she should be able to sense emotions, intentions and honesty vs deception. That makes it stand out when the script seemingly forgets that she should be able to sense lies, deception, and malicious intent. Conman pretending to be a researcher from the future lies in order to steal from them and she can’t tell that he’s a fraud. The staff at a party are getting ready to grab weapons and take them all hostage, and she doesn’t notice. These are situations that call for things that are well within her established skillset.
Maybe not if they are related, since neither of them knew.
But shouldn’t Vader detect the force in someone? Like Qui-Gon Jinn in the prequels.
We now know both his children are strong with the force
Who says he didn’t? We only know he sensed that Luke was strong in the force during the death star trench run because he said it out loud. Presumably he has encountered many people with relatively strong force potential, but that’s probably something he’s going to keep to himself unless he has a reason to act on it. She’s a prisoner that he’s unlikely to recruit, and it’s not like she’s had any training. Hell, he probably dismisses people like her as being too old to start training anyway. (And if we bring in stuff from outside the movies where they explain that force sensitive people often become leaders, or larger than life figures that shape the course of events, then one would expect a lot of those people to run into Vader eventually.)
It may also be that force ability is more apparent once someone actually starts using the force. That would be logical and consistent with the fact that Luke is only really noticed by Vader once Obi Wan started telling him to use the force, and the fact that Vader and Luke could sense each other in space over Endor, but apparently that didn’t apply to Leia.
And again, he wasn’t trying to reach Luke on the radio to make him an offer once he noticed the force was strong with him, he was trying to kill him. The empire wasn’t determined to capture Luke until the emperor was able to sense him making waves in the force, when he was at the point where he was already using a lightsaber and capable of telekinesis, and when he had been identified as Vader’s son. At that point he had demonstrated actual ability, not just wasted potential, and the familial connection offered a plausible way to work around his opposition to the empire.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
The entire concept of the podcast is shitting on everything and the listeners are well aware of that. No one is forced to listen to it. Ironically the guy who said it is most likely autistic and a closeted star trek fan. I’m autistic as well and I don’t see an issue with making fun of it. It makes me feel more included than unnecessarily patronizing behavior.
deleted by creator
This also explains the “cum town” at the beginning :o
their Steven Segal takedown is legendary
I just want to point out that it was you who took “autistic” as an insult, when there was no such negative connotation in the original comment.
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
I guess you read the comment different than I did.
It’s a shame the writers made her terrible at the one thing she’s meant to be good at.
If I needed therapy on the Enterprise, I’d be going to Ten Forward.
Haha, that seems about right. Only you have to specify that the fans in question were the ones actually writing the show. These are of course the same social pariahs who made the engineers into hopeless incels, the science officer into an emotionless android, and the doc into a sexy redhead who just happens to have a romantic history with the aloof captain, a literature nerd who hates kids. The only character on the bridge with his shit together is the first officer, a parody or pastiche of Captain Kirk, the untouchable coolest person in the franchise.
Cumtown represent
okay, one: vader? an empath? really?
two: even if he was how is empathic reading supposed to tell him she’s his daughter? it’s telempathy, not remote gene testing. it isn’t like leia was feeling familial affection for the guy.
Vader can sense Luke repeatedly throughout 5 and 6. Luke can sense Leia in 5 and 6. Vader can sense Leia at the end of 6. But no one ever asked why Vader couldn’t do it in 4. Hopefully this helps.
Vader only starts sensing Luke after he gets some training and goes from being merely Force sensitive to a proper Force adept. Trained adepts are consistently shown in the franchise to be easier to sense than untrained sensitives, like Leia.
Vader only knows Luke is his son after being told his name. He only finds out Luke has a sister after ripping the knowledge from his mind, and it’s unclear if he got her name.
In 4, Vader senses Obi-Wan’s presence on the Death Star, but not Luke’s.
Vader can sense Leia at the end of 6.
He can? The only thing I remember is him reading Luke’s thoughts that she was his sister, which doesn’t involve sensing or reading her at all.
i’ll admit it’s been a while since i’ve watched the films, but it was probably a bit more obvious with Luke, right? he wasn’t exactly hidden. he had vader’s last name and lived with vader’s family on vader’s home planet.
meanwhile leia was adopted by some rando and had her name changed to match. she probably didn’t even know she was adopted.
anyway, i will have to rewatch the OT with this in mind at some point.
In retrospect, hiding Anakin’s son on his home planet and keeping his last name wasn’t such a great plan.
I think they were banking on Vader hating the planet so much he’d never willingly return and then later training Luke in the hopes that Vader may hesitate to kill his own kids, because Vader hesitating to kill someone is basically the only way anyone has a hope of beating him.
He does hate sand!
He could sense his son.
Yeah, but that was after he was already doing some pretty Forcy things. Leia only used the Force very weakly for empathic connection.
Leia didn’t even know
As an Irish person, Troi doing this impression boiled my piss more than Up the Long Ladder
I’m gonna need a translation here.
It made me mad lol
What a beautiful language
Something about Guinness
Up the Long Ladder is an episode in which they picked up some backwater folks with Irish accents, in which the hot Irish woman existed mainly to yell about how men are useless and then bang Riker after coyly attracting him by asking him to wash her feet. It is widely regarded as not a great episode, and the only way they could have stereotyped the Irish further would be if someone ran through each scene yelling about how they’re always after his lucky charms.
I like it. It’s corny and hokey, but that was a lot of S1 and S2 TNG.
Let’s talk Vader.
Vader didn’t even know about Leia until Luke leaks it in RotJ. During the Vader/Luke duel is the first and only time Vader acknowledged Leia. Luke’s thoughts turned to her during that fight. Vader saw that “weakness”, the attachment, and he leapt on it. And it worked (for a moment).
Now it’s possible Vader had a rough idea of her existence near the finale of Empire. Luke calls out to Leia. Leia is with Luke when Vader calls out to Luke. I expect Vader was too distracted to notice Leia.
Back to A New Hope. Vader doesn’t suspect anything until Obi-wan shows up on the Death Star. Why is Obi-wan here? What is he doing? Then he just disappears? Something about the crew he arrived with is suspicious. Then during the Death Star trench run. He is focused. Vader can sense something. Vader can sense something that can not be. Obi-wan has a Padawan? Why now? Who? Then Han Solo fires at him. Vader should have seen it coming, but he was distracted.
Sooo! Vader seeing Leia opening? He just had no idea.
Ok but would y’all actually want to see a mental health counselor who could read your mind? I’d avoid the psychiatry department like the plague.
Agreed. I would just hide out in the holodeck instead.
So that explains Broccoli.
Yes! I kind of always felt this was an intentional sub-text. Deanna is presented as trustworthy, but maybe Broccoli’s previous betazoid ships counselor was not.
deleted by creator
Absolutely, that was my point and I worded it poorly :) If Troi were any more telepathic, Starfleet shouldn’t allow her to practice mental health services. She’s right at the edge where it’s really useful before it becomes terrifying.
On the other hand, I feel like Lwaxana would fix all my mental health problems in an off hand comment after reading my mind for 2 seconds.
Um, yes? Assuming I haven’t done anything that will get me in trouble, and that the society we’re in doesn’t punish wrongthink, then most definitely; a mind reader should be much better at counseling than anyone else.
Especially one who’s that damn hot
Fan theory: Vader recovered just fine in a few days thanks to space aged technology, but used the event as a facade to wear his kink gear full time.
“uh sir? does it…absolutely have to be skintight leather?”
“yes. it also needs to be black.”
That’s not a defense. It’s a distraction. They’re both bad empaths. Vader being worse doesn’t make her better.
deleted by creator
Is it Star Wars fans complaining about Troi? I always figured it was Star Trek fans. Then again I never understood why there was a divide or why you have to be one or the other?
Even so empathy is the thing that Troi is supposed to excel at. She’s the counselor presumably because she’s an empath.
Vader, on the other hand is a capable warrior, commands the dark side of the force, is a legendary pilot, leads troops, and senses other force users. At this point neither Luke nor Vader is aware of Leia’s sensitivity to the force.
This seems like the equivalent of the Flash being bad at running then saying Superman isn’t very fast either.
I’ve got no problem criticizing Star Wars. There’s plenty to over. But this isn’t really a good comparison.
It’s still trying to distract, rather than defend. The target audience doesn’t effect my point at all.
deleted by creator
At best, it’s an implied admission, then a distraction to minimize consequences. “Sure I suck. But not as much as this guy! Amiright!?” That’s not really any better.
You mean the daughter he thought was dead at this point?
deleted by creator
Jedi powers kept changing from movie to movie, so its more inconsistent writing than anything else.
At that point she’s is not his daughter in the script itself. And he is not absurdly powerful as portrayed later by fans and prequels.
He’s an angry evil space monk.
deleted by creator
At least Star Trek stayed consistent with its prequel stuff.
Have you seen Klingons?
Like when Kirk et al left the galaxy but it’s going to take Voyager decades to get back from another quadrant.
We could go on about just Voyager honestly.
Stardates.
The Warp Speed Limit appears to have just been dropped.
Pretty sure Kirk also broke warp 10 before and no one turned in to a lizard.
Star Trek has plenty of inconsistency too, these are just some examples.
It sounds more like you’re unhappy someone is criticizing a thing you like. We like it too. Sometimes we do it so someone who is writing can recognize a problem and improve. Sometimes we do it because it’s fun. Like Weird Al parodying a song you like.
deleted by creator
I think a better suggestion is that she was weakened by the stun blaster. Leia hadn’t developed her force powers much at all at that point, so being in a weakened state could lead Vader to thinking nothing much of her. He would expect his child to be unusually powerful, of course.
Honestly I believe “20 years of hatred fueled by the belief that both of your children are dead clouds your perception” over “well she got stun gunned recently” lol
deleted by creator
People in general are really bad at reconsidering life-defining events under a different light, impulsive people most of all, so it’s not out of character for Vader to ignore any instincts that tell him there’s a connection between him and Leia.
Vader could likely sense that Leia had some latent Force Sensitivity, but so do a lot of people. The inquisitors only cared if they were former Jedi or Jedi in training.
He also didn’t realize Luke, whom he almost killed at the end of the movie, was his son either. At least not immediately.
Since Luke still called himself “Skywalker”, it was pretty easy for him to put 2-and-2 together after the Death Star event. He had to read Luke’s mind on the second Death Star to figure out that he even had a daughter (Anakin did not know Padme was having twins, so he never bothered to search for another child after Luke) and even then he still doesn’t know it was Leia Organa, he only refers to her as “your sister”.
Obviously the precognition that comes from being an adept user of the Force doesn’t allow you to simply pluck knowledge from thin air.
Yeahhhhhh see there’s your problem. You’re taking Star Wars lore too literally. Don’t you know you can’t take every little thing Star Wars adds and assume its actually supposed to make any sense other than “this sounds cool”?
/s, but also not really
deleted by creator
Yeah I didn’t say it was a good suggestion, just that it was better lol.
Here’s my cool guess: Maybe he can sense her, but she was introduced to him as an important political figure first, which caused a blindspot in identifying any personal relevance she may have to him. Luke was sensed without any context because he was actively training?
deleted by creator
I read an interview with Dave Filoni. He basically said that what he’s trying to fix with all the Star Wars shows on Disney+. He’s trying to fill in the major plot holes, clarify stuff the writers left vague, and make the movies at least somewhat reasonable.
As a nerd, I appreciate the effort, but he’s got a LOT of work to do.
deleted by creator
Agreed. Original trilogy and sequel trilogy is what I was referring to. He’s trying to use the shows to bridge that gap.
deleted by creator
How did she bluff Vader? He took her and tortured and interrogated her, he didn’t fall for her lie. And she didn’t even know she was his daughter at the time, so why would he have sensed that?
Nah, the easy explanation is the Force is fucking with Vader.
My guess was always that she was an active Force user, but since she didn’t spend a lot of time around other Force users, she learned to use her power defensively (being taught to hide from enemies as a child).
So she developed a natural “cloaking” effect, which she cultivated over time, and used to keep hiding from people (her father, the Empire) during her various escapades, so by the time she met Vader all her skill points were dumped into Hide in Plain Sight.
…and since why would Vader bother taking a second look at the Force presence of a random Senator’s daughter…
deleted by creator
She was his daughter, and based on Lukes feats and Yodas yammering, she is also insanely powerful. It is fully possible her raw force powers, instinctively honed into an “you ain’t seeing shit” effect over her entire life, are strong enough to bluff him.
The real cause is that she wasent his daughter at this point in the movies, because luke and leia weren’t related in the first one. George “i want han solo to be a lizard man” lucas leaned in and made it “weird” after the fact.
I think ‘foresaw his wife’s pained death, choked her out in a fit of rage on a lava planet, lost consciousness, then woke up and immediately learned she had died (which was true by then)’ is a bit more convincing evidence his kids didn’t make it than ‘someone lied to him’.
It could also depend on the force users mind
vader could have unconsciously ignored his force senses because he beleives she was dead
Ooh I love this template
It’s not your empathic abilities, Troi. It’s the amount of leading question and interpretations you barrage your clients with that leads me to the conclusion that… well… you are a little shit at your job.
