Why Was Whoopi Goldberg Added To TNG?

To annoy you.

Mission accomplished

...said George W. Bush, even though the mission wasn't accomplished.

I have re-imagined TNG with an episode featuring Guinan taking over the bridge during one of Picard's moments of equivocation. She then leads the crew in several glorious space battles. When I am President, I will direct the communications office to make a pilot for this version of Star Trek that I prefer.

Oh, and Measure Of A Man, when she made Picard realize that letting Starfleet strip Data of his rights was the first step to creating a race of android slaves. She sold the fuck out of that scene, and saved the Federation from the inevitable Cylon uprising in the process.

Trolling your members in Media Central, gul?

She also convinced Picard to work with Ensign Ro when everyone else in Starfleet hated and mistrusted her. Cuz they were both refugees or something.

And her experience with the Borg helped build them up as a threat.

I didn't like that episode either. Made no logical sense whatsoever. Data had attended Star Fleet Academy and served for two decades roughly at that point. It boggles the mind that the Federation would not have resolved the issue of Data's rights years prior to then.

Ack, didn't realize this was MC. Sorry to anybody I may have parodied with that.

But then Ensign Ro grew up to be Admiral Cain, and we know how that turned out.

Whether or not you liked it is irrelevant.

But they said fuckall to that when it came to using the EMH Mark I's as miners for dilithium or to scrub plasma conduits.

Surprisingly nobody has out and out said it yet, although Tuckerfan came close. She wanted the role because seeing Uhura on the bridge is what, as a child, told her that black women could have a career in the entertainment industry and be successful. She didn't need to be on the show by the time she lobbied for arole because she was already more successful than Trek itself. But she wanted to be on it purely as a fan, just as much as I suspect you would have liked to have been.

Why? I suppose it doesn't have anything to do with the colour of her skin.....

This whole thread...

Why should this thread be different from all other threads?

What is this, a seder?

I assume you know that "Whoopi Goldberg" is not her original name but "Caryn Johnson". To my knowledge, "Johnson" is not a so called "Jewish name".

That said, I'll admit that I enjoyed "Sister Act".

So what if she was a Jew? Would you have an issue with that, since you don't like Jews and all. Would it put you off the character even more?

Guinan was Jewish?

Yes, yes it is. "Seder" means "order." This thread has a distinctly ordered structure determined by the quality of its initial post. It could not have gone any way other than how it has gone, at least not in any meaningful sense.

I don't care. One of the women with a FoxNews program is a Scientologist and that doesn't bother me even though I consider it a cult.

No, Druish.

I don't feel one way or the other about Whoopi Goldberg, but didn't really care for the Guinan character. The only time she seemed to be needed was during time travel or alternate realities episodes or in Generations.

Well if you saw the mission of the U.S. being to destroy the regime of Saddam Hussein and his Ba'ath Party then the mission was certainly accomplished.

I'll be honest. I never cared much for the idea of "god like" aliens in Star Trek and Guinan's background (connection to Q for example) seemed dangerously close to that idea.

Now, people will maintain that the "god like" aliens was very much an Original Series idea.

Not really, many of the OS aliens we think of as "god like" were directly shown to be dependent on technology to do their tricks. Trelane was connected to his systems by a system concealed behind a mirror that Kirk simply blasted and shorted out for a time. Landru was a computer system. Apollo depended on a temple that was easily dispatched by a couple of minutes of phaser fire.

It wasn't until TNG until you started with the "god like aliens with no apparent limit or source for their powers".

Funny, I never saw Guinan as "godlike" as opposed to, say, the Q (who were an oxymoron, but I digress). She was simply supra-human, i.e., having powers that humans didn't have, rather like Vulcans.

Something that should have been dealt with long ago only comes up now, for the sake of making an episode or even just a dramatic scene out of it? Welcome to Star Trek.