Star Trek

Sounds more like Gates McFadden's second season departure.

To bring it back to Trek.

Did Doctor Crusher not come back later though?

She did, but the conversation had gone to circumstances of departure.

Oh alright. I thought I saw her after season 2.

They're similar in that every party involved has a different story as to why she left. Some say she wanted more money, some say she wasn't happy with her role, some that she wanted to pursue other work, and some say Maurice Hurley was making unwelcome advances.

After the second season, Hurley wasn't working there anymore, and they decided her replacement wasn't working out, so they invited her back with a higher salary.

I'm one of the few people who's okay with Pulaski. I wish she could have stayed on as staff under Crusher. We've heard there are other doctors who work in Sickbay, but we've only met Dr. Selar because Diana Muldaur wasn't available for an episode, and there's another doctor on staff we've heard the name of. But mostly, the hospital for a floating city seems to be run by Dr. Crusher, Nurse Ogawa, and some interchangeable extras.

But mostly, the hospital for a floating city seems to be run by Dr. Crusher, Nurse Ogawa, and some interchangeable extras.

You mean on a ship that seems to be run by the bridge crew, LaForge, and some interchangeable extras?

Patrick Stewart was playing, at that time, a standard Michael Gough "patrician" role. Found in British sci-fi, such as Doomwatch and Moonbase Alpha, he's a mouthpiece for the author's big slogans. This is evident when you splice them together. The rest of the cast fared worse: I would argue that the cast was much too large. In hindsight, everyone talks of how skillful Roddenberry was at casting. And he was. The fact remains that, besides Picard/Data/Wesley, none of them had a lot to do. Sirtis barely held onto her job.

The "real" TNG, the one we remember with rather rose-tinted glasses, is kind of a fluke. The atmosphere on set and in the writer's room between '87 and '88 was not unlike Voyager. Finally, Roddenberry, who had been so imperious in the past (even doubling down on Trek tenets which, if you go back and look, were nowhere near as strict on TOS), was slowly being peeled away. Piller was put in charge — and my guess is everyone figured that TNG was not long for the world by that point — so with no one watching, he took the brakes off and let the writers do what they want. And the result was a more fulfilling show for fans and the actors. Stewart, who had been shoehorned into a humorless, sexless patrician, gradually began to show weakness and develop as a human being. Wesley stopped being a jackass. The command staff had more screentime.

DS9, same story. Rick Berman was so over-stetched between VOY and the TNG movies, he couldn't spare time to micromanage another show — even if he disagreed with the war arc. Majel, who I like, continued to be a busybody by writing open letters to fan-mags protesting about this or that. But for the most part, the writers did what they want.

edited 21st Aug '14 5:34:06 PM by johnnyfog

TOS was worse about that. You at least occasionally get to see non-bridge, non-engineering operations going on. TOS was so limited they did two movies where it was just the senior staff flying a whole ship.

edited 21st Aug '14 8:12:40 PM by TParadox

And in both of them they broke the ships because even for Starfleet's seven best officers, no matter how much of a wunderkind Scotty is, the Enterprise can only be stretched so far before it breaks.

Nitpick: They only broke the Enterprise once. In Voyage Home it was a Klingon Bird of Prey they broke.

edited 22nd Aug '14 2:09:43 AM by Nohbody

Is it just me, or was Year of Hell what Voyager was supposed to be?

Year of Hell was supposed to last an entire season, but they weren't allowed to do that because... I think something to do with syndication? (It needed to be possible for the episodes to be shown in any order.) It's definitely what Voyager should have been: like the Battlestar Galactica reboot or Stargate Universe, but with a less morally ambiguous cast and a bit less growling.

edited 24th Aug '14 10:59:20 AM by imadinosaur

Kind of. The plan was to have limited resources hobbling them, enemies all around, and tension between the Starfleet and Maquis crew. Year of Hell cripples them and has them fighting an enemy with superior firepower, but I don't think there's much tension within the ship.

More directly, Year of Hell was originally planned as a full-season arc. So we'd see it over the course of an actual year. They decided to make it just a double-length episode instead probably because it was too bleak to stick with, but I think it wouldn't have been as dark if it was, because there would be time to take breathers.

Good point. They were still more reluctant to get away from the standalone story format. And this is Voyager, where the Reset Button was king.

edited 24th Aug '14 11:09:30 AM by TParadox

And weren't they going to have the Reset Button occur with one of the crew remembering so that there'd be one traumatic survivor...or was that just a good idea someone else came up with?

There is always a hundred ideas being considered, many of which may have never gone past "I thought of it once." Ronald Moore said when he helped develop Voyager the intention was to show the crew and ship slowly fall apart, lights get broken and they don't have the resources to fix it, damage in one episode makes them limp for the next 3 episodes, etc. The one thing he fought for but didn't get was he wanted the Maquis to not be in modified Starfleet uniforms but in their own clothes, which makes some sense from a thematic perspective but realistically it would only foster greater descent between the Starfleet and Maquis crew and the integrated crew mixing command staff made more sense given the situation.

That's one reason I liked Enterprise is that they, more or less, stuck true to the premise that they were alone. It's a nice realization in one episode where they note that they had been cruising around at warp 4/5 for a while and the structural damage they took from a Romulan mine meant they couldn't go past warp 2, so limping home for proper repairs would take months if not years. Season three was also, in effect, a realization of the Year of Hell storyline.

There's something to be said for never having to refuel. ENT traded infinite supplies for the monotony of something breaking, needing a part (self sealing stem bolt, let's say), having to bargain with a shady alien culture to acquire it, lather and repeat.

It was not nearly as bad as you're making it out to be, the Romulan mine in early season two (technically one episode recovering from it) and the latter half of season three was about the extent of that (because the ship was badly crippled). And having to interact with and make bargains with alien species was the actual premise of DS9, except replace "supplies" with "political favors."

Whether you love or hate "Who Watches The Watchers", you have to admit it was pretty ballsy of them to air an episode with such a strong pro-atheist, anti-religion message in 1989, regardless if it was science fiction or not. Then again, I've been listening to how classic Doctor Who being worried about offending religious groups and it may not have been the same case in Britain as it was in America.

edited 31st Aug '14 8:07:19 PM by DS9guy

They could get away with it. To my memory it's less about atheism and more about the idea of a Living God being kind of silly. You should test the world around you and learn from it, but the lesson doesn't really destroy the idea of God or a god existing.

That doesn't even really discount the possibility of a Living God. Just, science has to set aside "A Wizard God Did It" as an answer if it's going to get anywhere. If you like, you can phrase the question, "what did it look like when God...?"

Actually, when you get down to it, it only stabs at counting someone with superior technology as Godlike. It doesn't do nearly enough to count as Pro-Atheism for the censors.

Yeah, it's Sufficiently Advanced Technology.

It's not "Pro-Atheism" but "Anti-Religious-Fascism." Picard's message wasn't "All religions are false" but "Don't use my name to justify horrible acts," and the problem escalated to the point Picard had to explain what he did was not supernatural but Sufficiently Advanced Technology.

There are some religions who ascribe that God is not a supernatural being in that they defy science, but simply ascribe to a form of the natural world that we can't comprehend yet. That is more in line with the message of the episode, and I haven't read anything that suggested any sort of controversy around the episode.

Problem is, the religious facists are the ones who'll be the first to cry "pro-atheist!"

Picard is just anti-ignorance. He confessed to agnosticism in "Where Silence Has Lease", because the tools available to us can't confirm or deny God. But he knew for a fact that "The Picard" was a phony idol drummed up to rekindle bronze age nonsense.

edited 31st Aug '14 9:24:11 PM by johnnyfog