Warning: Spoilers follow for random
episodes of Star Trek: The Next
Generation. Mostly the gross ones, though.
Lately, I’ve
been watching two things in my free time – Gilmore
Girls, as most
followers of this blog know, and Star
Trek: The Next Generation, which you probably could have guessed, given my past
entries on Voyager.
Here is the
thing I didn’t realize about TNG until
bingeing upon it – There is a whole lotta uncomfortable sex stuff. Like, Riker
is out there banging half the galaxy. As he mentions in his awesome Random
Roles interview at The AV Club, about him and Counselor Troi, “They wanted
to free us up, obviously, to have relationships with alien lovers.”
And, boy,
does he ever! In “The
Game,” Riker and everyone else is making these weird, orgasmic sounds when
playing a VR game. We covered it in our Emmy
show on Your Parents Basement, but it’s an uncomfortable episode. It
doesn’t help that Ashley Judd(!) is a guest star, and she’s makin’ time with
Wil Wheaton! Riker basically serves as the bearded sex god of TNG, there to bone any attractive alien
with breasts. “A colony of statuesque blondes in a female-dominated society? Sign me up! A retribution-obsessed servant gal? Sure!”
Troi serves
the opposite role for the male aliens. This is normally much, much, MUCH
creepier, like the telepathic aliens who
mind molest her. There is also the time she randomly
gets pregnant.
However, the
person who has it the absolute worst when it comes to “romance” on TNG is Dr. Beverly Crusher. First off,
the show starts off with her husband being dead, which isn’t so great for her,
obviously.
But then,
things get worse because she falls
in love with a ghost. Or as Wikipedia describes it, “Dr. Crusher attends
her grandmother’s funeral, and spends time in her grandmother’s haunted house,
romanced by her grandmother’s non-corporeal lover.” Well, that sounds great!
It’s on the
list of Tech Republic’s five worst TNG
episodes, with good reason.
Another noteworthy
“romance” for the good doctor involves her falling in love
with a parasite in a symbiotic species relationship. He starts bound to a
male alien, then jumps to Riker, before finally ending up in a female alien.
It’s all kind of weird and uncomfortable.
So, anyway. TNG has a lot of weird sex stuff going
on. Beyond the stuff I mentioned, there is also “fun” aspects like Tasha Yar’s dubious-consent
child becoming
a villain, or the fact that Tasha and her sister had “rape gangs” on their
home planet. But outside of those episodes, it’s a perfectly fine show! The
series introduces us to the Borg and the Q continuum, and they’re both bad ass.
They’ve got that going for them, which is nice.
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