Finished Star Trek TNG, Started Voyager

So, some takeaways from TNG

• Everybody's a racist, even the aliens. Especially the aliens, actually. Human racism and misogyny is pretty constant. And single attribute alien races that exist for the simple reason of saying, "well, telorians are just like that," are everywhere.

• Speaking of racism, you'll be glad to know that we're done calling indigenous americans "native americans" by the 24th century, and we go back to calling them indians. But that's okay, because they're happy to go on endlessly about their animal spirits. This even overflows into Voyager and DS9.

• Other than Data having the specs of a high end desktop computer in 2018, the computer science is pretty solid. It's nice to know that the computers on the ship have limitations. Even if they are the same limitations you would see in an IBM mainframe in 1981. They really didn't think out wireless computing at all, and I think they should have. That said, I do find the central point of failure in the form of the "computer core" a little troubling. They try to talk their way around it, but the system is centralized, and vertically designed. It could happen, but it's bad design. You would think we would have worked that out.

• I shouldn't know more about cloning than the Enterprise crew, or the Klingons, or the writers of the show. It's sad that I do. Pretty much every time it's brought up, it's nonsense. The same stupid problems are talked about again and again. And every time they're presented with an interesting opportunity to explore the metaphysics of it, they don't. Instead, it's "look at these stupid people who make immoral decisions, because they can't figure out things transporter engineers figured 200 years ago."

• It's remarkable how often the Enterprise crew gets away with war crimes. Probably true of every Trek series, but especially noticeable here.

• Data is dangerously unreliable, and prone to hacking of one sort or another. But this isn't all that important. In fact, by the end of the series, they're even running secondary computer systems through him. Bad idea. No way he should be on active duty in any capacity. Let alone in a senior leadership role.

They do talk about Data's rights as a life form, but they never really talk much about how many times he's been taken over by his brother, his father, a malevolent scientist, an alien presence, an unknown piece of hardware, an unknown software program buried in his system that nobody thought to look for, and so on.

If he were a human officer, he would have been dismissed, maybe even court martialed on at least a couple of occasions. I wonder how long the "I was being controlled by an alien presence" defense would hold up. Also, for someone who has no emotional aptitude, he certainly does get frustrated, even angry often.

• Before Season 5, there are really only a couple of episodes you need to watch. Everything else is pretty much filler. A couple of really solid episodes here and there, but not a lot that we remember. Pretty much everything we still love about the show happened in Season 5 and beyond.

• Fuck physics.

I've already watched all of DS9, so I don't think I want to see it all again right now. But, it's been awhile since I binged Voyager. So far 12 Episodes into Voyager now, and it's a very weak start.

Tuvok is getting a little rapey with the mind melds. We know from every other instance of Trek how intimate a mind meld is, and how rare of a process it's been. But, Tuvok is offering it as a solution in every third episode so far. And the crew's into it.

In this show, the computer science is non existent. They're always mixing up "uploading" and "downloading," to the point where what they're saying makes no sense. But I assume that it doesn't matter if you're uploading or downloading bad data from a shuttlecraft computer, as long as you can reconstruct it.

Voyager seems a lot more dependant on plot devices, sometimes literal plot devices to keep the show interesting. At least in the first season. I hope this changes.

I'll let you know how that goes.