Who was your least favorite Star Trek: The Next Generation character?

You do realize that the US Navy regularly does much the same thing by putting barely trained 18 year olds at the wheel/lee helm of those very same super carriers, right?

Doesn't it, though?

Even so, it seems...unwise...to place someone of Wesley's level in such an important job. Can you imagine if the Enterprise had been badly damaged in an engagement with the Romulans? Here's how Picard's court-martial would've gone:

That's true: the Pulaski-Worf dynamic worked and they would've made for an interesting friendship.

Hey, don't mess with a good analogy!

But, really, the analogy only goes so far: Wesley's post in Star Trek encompassed not only steering, but also navigation and, on occasion, sensor scanning. Also, unlike a carrier, a starship actually fights other ships from time to time, so rapid, precise manuvering becomes more of an issue.

What got me was Wesley's 'Charlie Brown' shirt that he wore every day. Sitting there in his space threads while everyone else was in uniform looked lame as hell.

I wish this poll allowed for more than one choice. I definitely did not care for the Tasha Yar character. But, I also didn't like the idea of a teenager without any genuine credentials piloting the flagship of the fleet. That didn't make sense. I can't picture an organization like Starfleet allowing that to happen when there were far more qualified people who had gone through Starfleet Academy.

I picked Lwaxani Troi. But she's not really a main character. And avoiding the easy option of Wesley, out of those in the main cast, I go for LaForge. He's just the least interesting.

All of the above, I'd say.

18 > 14, AND they have already been trained and certified as qualified.

Gawd, I hated Dr Pulaski w/ a blinding white-hot passion.

I think I could have liked Wesley Crusher had he A) been a bit older like an Ensign on his first cruise and B) not been some wunderkind.

The way I understand it, Picard, Riker, and Wesley were all originally envisioned to be essentially Captain Kirk at various stages. Picard would have been Kirk as an old man, seasoned, a bit wiser, and not quite so ready to jump in feet first into every problem. Riker would have been Kirk as a XO, not ready to take command himself, but learning how to shoulder the responsibility while still being a bit brash. Crusher would have been Kirk as an Ensign, freshfaced and wet behind the earsand looking at every adventure as new. Somewhere along the way those ideas were kicked aside.

Before:


After:


Captain Jellico agrees!

She looked much better in a regular uniform

Not to mentioned the aforementioned boy was the son of the captain's best friend (whose death the captain was at least partially responsible for) and the captain's current chief medical officer and lust/love interest.

There had to be some conflict of interest going on there.

As Paladin said, "Half Life" was a decent episode, and there were a couple of light-hearted moments w/ L. Troi.

How do you define "qualified"?

Because of his Mary Sue-ness, Wesley was more qualified than vets because he was the Mozart of space travel.

That makes him more qualified than the vast majority of people who just happened to sit through enough lectures on Temporal Mechanics and Warp Field Theory to graduate from the Academy.

"I'm from Starfleet. Starfleet doesn't lie."

I don't know that the idea was kicked aside, per se.

I think that Picard always exemplified, if not Kirk per se, the notion of the leader as a negotiator and Wesley the leader as the youth.

The main problem with the idea is that Riker got kinda wimpified. Somewhere around the fifth season, he became more about filling out crew evaluations than kicking hostile alien ass.

Not to mention that Goldberg delivered her lines like she was made by Geppeto.

Lwaxana Troi had the highest suck:rock episode ratio, at least in TNG, with only one good episode, maybe two. She was much better on DS9, but this is about TNG, so...

How do you mean she was much better in DS9? She was in "Fascination," which was pretty mediocre and what else?

Aside from the fact that it's a shitty line, I can see a newly minted Ensign Crusher spouting that tripe. Four years at Shuttlecraft U getting that crap drilled into him, never seeing the real world or real Starfleet in action, and he still beleives that nonsense. While Kirk or Picard will try to hold to that ideal, they're more than willing to kick it aside when circumstances require it.

it would have been interesting to see how an Ensign Crusher would have reacted to seeing Picard lie his way out of a jam or into a treaty or something.

I don't disagree with the Riker got pussified aspect, but I think it's just as much that Picard slowly turned to an action hero, especially in the films.

I must the the only one who Hates Worf with a passion.

Hate all that crappy Klingon stuff he does and the singing, i can't be the only one who cringes when he does it.

I can't stand Worf either. I hate the Arrrgh Me Have Honor Klingons, I hate the whole Worf storyline, and I hate hate hate the fact that he was raised on Earth by Human parents but doesn't know shit about Human stuff.

Instead of saying "Prune Juice, a warrior's drink" when offered it by Guinnan, he should have said something about it being something his human mother drinks to clean out his pipes.

There is no human culture. His foster parents tried to teach him RUSSIAN culture.

I hate Gene Roddenberry and his Oxycodone inspired early seasons. Man skirts and children are bad, but blatantly creating a Mary Sue with your middle name is the last straw. Personally, I don't even hate the "boy" in the later seasons. It's just the early seasons that anger me so.

Remember the episode where Wesley got the death penalty for breaking the little greenhouse?

I hoped he'd die.

Avoiding the obvious choice of Wesley, (did we really need Will Robinson 2.0 on the Enterprise?), of the main cast, I had to go with Geordi. He was just a cipher. One could just as easily dropped Ensign Mayweather, Ensign Kim or Morn in that slot. Actually, that's not really fair, since Morn did grow as a character, and got more action from the ladies than LaForge, Kim, and Mayweather combined.

But really, all of Star Trek: The Next Generation's characters had Aplha-Quadrant sized wormholes in them.

Can you see the U.S. Navy putting a captain back in charge of the U.S.S. Enterprise after he's been brainwashed by the Chinese or the Russians into leading the enemy attack fleet against the west coast of the United States?

Just how much character consistancy did Worf have? We never see him do anything but get his ass handed to him by every live opponent he faced until he whacked Duras. To this day I'm convinced that if Wes had stayed with the ship for one more season, it would have been his turn to kick Worf's ass. Hell, capt. Archer did better in fights than Worf did, until the character went to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where the writers finally got it, that if you're going to portray him as badass, show him being a badass on screen.

I could go on, but it's been a long night, and it's getting hard to see the screen, (re-curring eye issues )

Troi didnt know what a warp core breach was she shows why trek handles sexd badly.

I voted Guinan just because Crusher did leave the show and Luxwana was only a guest star.

But even my choices for worst do not imply any particular hatred towards any of them.

So. Picard got turned into a cyborg. The Borg cut out big chunks of him and replaced them with shit they got from Black & Decker and the local Radio Shack. But by the end of the episode, he's completely back to normal!?

Shit, they should've had at least half a season with Riker in command. Then IF you bring Picard back, you maybe give him a prosthetic arm or an eyepatch or SOMETHING--and really change his character.

But I guess the Borg kept all the discarded parts on ice, just in case they changed their mind because clearly Star Fleet doesn't have the technology to grow new organs.

Or Picard wouldn't have an artificial heart and Geordi wouldn't have artificial eyes.

Wesley wasn't 14 during the series. He was around 16 when he first started piloting the Enterprise, the same age students get accepted into Starfleet Academy. And again, do you honestly think Picard didn't put him through extensive holodeck training with every scenario imaginable?

Stuff like that is more common now. Before B5, DS9, and BSG it wasn't very popular to go make too many references to old episodes, especially for syndicated shows like TNG which would often air out of order.

Racist.

I think that in the early years, they hadn't wuite figured out Worfs background. It was probably a bad idea to write it that he was brought up on earth.

And that's exactly what an XO's job is. The vast and overwhelming majority of the XO's duties are administrative. The CO gives the orders and the XO makes sure they're carried out along with all of the other tedious bullshit that isn't fun.

Frankly, I'm glad they showed a bit of it and I wish they'd show more of it on BSG.

Thing is, given the setting the character could've worked. The TNG Enterprise allowed family members to tag along with the crew. Wesley included. He was a prodigy of sorts and possibly Picard's son. Letting him take the wheel from time to time wasn't such a stretch, the problem lied mostly in Wil Wheaton's performance.