StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The latest offering from our favorite opinionated reviewer

This episode is like a piece of pornographic fan fiction, albeit of course without any explicit pornography. Even the implied Data & Yar sex scenes are something the fans probably would have come up at some point, so they just decided to do them pre-emptively. Fully functional indeed. I still think Picard should have "made it so" with the good doctor, though. Maybe it would have loosened him up a little, which was desperately needed in Seasons 1-2

This was really the second episode? Wow. I guess poor Gene must have ticked the wrong box somewhere. I'll confess that I like watching this episode purely for the camp factor. Fully functional indeed.

If we want Wesley to lose for a change, I suggest 'The First Duty', in which he is shown to be capable of failure (though it's actually the fault of Tom Paris, albeit with a different name).

Marcus Aurelius wrote:This episode is like a piece of pornographic fan fiction, albeit of course without any explicit pornography. Even the implied Data & Yar sex scenes are something the fans probably would have come up at some point, so they just decided to do them pre-emptively. Fully functional indeed. I still think Picard should have "made it so" with the good doctor, though. Maybe it would have loosened him up a little, which was desperately needed in Seasons 1-2

This.

(though it's actually the fault of Tom Paris, albeit with a different name).

Yeah, why did they change that up? It should have been the same character, just as Ensign Sito appeared in a later episode of TNG. It was a nice plausible backstory for the character anyway.

Last I heard it was a royalties issue - something along the lines of having to pay the writer of that episode for every appearance of the character.

Yes of course. They'll sue your ass off if you try and steal from them, but they won't shell out a dime more than they have to. Damned communists, the lot of them. Well, more like socialism since they want to control everything but let other people do all the work.

Exactly. If they wanted 'Nick Locarno' on Voyager then the writer who created the character would have gotten a check every episode. I think they retconned it to Tom attending the academy under a fake name so that he could be a regular cadet and not get special treatment. There's even an ep of Voyager that shows Admiral Paris' office with a picture of Tom on the desk, and its a screenshot from the TNG episode.

CaptainChewbacca wrote:Exactly. If they wanted 'Nick Locarno' on Voyager then the writer who created the character would have gotten a check every episode. I think they retconned it to Tom attending the academy under a fake name so that he could be a regular cadet and not get special treatment. There's even an ep of Voyager that shows Admiral Paris' office with a picture of Tom on the desk, and its a screenshot from the TNG episode.

I don't think the fake name explanation is canon, but it's a decent fanwank explanation. Better than having two identical Starfleet cadets with near-identical backstories in the same time period.