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sshbpodcast · 5 months

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Character Spotlight: Deanna Troi

By Ames

I’m sensing excitement for our new character spotlight blogpost. That can only mean one thing: the Enterprise’s resident Betazoid is here to do her empath thing, and frequently not much else. We’re big defenders of Marina Sirtis here on A Star to Steer Her By, though we don’t always feel the same way about how the writers developed her character – or more frequently, how they failed to do so at any given opportunity.

When you give Deanna Troi something to do, she super nails it, and we’ve got the examples to prove it! On the flip side, we’ve also got plenty of times she missed the mark by a few lightyears. It’s like people in the 90s had no idea how to write about mental health. Or write for women in something other than some kind of sexual peril. Or sometimes just write for women at all. So plop down on the counselor’s couch as you read our best and worst Troi moments below and sense our emotions about them over on this week’s podcast episode (discussion starts at 1:09:34). Tell us how that makes you feel…

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

You can’t hide the emptiness from me Let’s start things off with Troi actually doing her job as a counselor as she occasionally does throughout the series, and she even uses some of her Betazoid empathy when she psychoanalyzes Armus in “Skin of Evil.” It’s compelling to watch her deduce his whole deal, and use her skills to find a way to distract him with his own rage and allow for her escape.

What’s under the words is what’s important We also remember shipping her and Riva from “Loud as a Whisper” like whoa. The two had natural chemistry and he kicked off a whole string of random mediators whom Troi got down with. But Riva definitely proved to be the best as he and Troi showed us that finding ways to communicate form the basis of any kind of relationship – personal, cultural, or otherwise.

Can I borrow a feeling? Here’s one more great example of Troi actually using her empathy to some purpose. Now don’t get me wrong, “Shades of Grey” is a pretty pointless and boring episode for the most part, but even I have to admit that watching Troi sensing Riker’s emotions was a good touch for her character, and her connection with her imzadi was pretty palpable in this sloggy clipshow.

Eyes in the dark Oh boy, another pretty terrible episode that actually has some quality Troi moments. It’s no wonder her character doesn’t usually get the credit she deserves: whenever she’s actually doing something noteworthy it’s in the lousy episodes that people just want to forget. But in “Night Terrors” she saves the day by figuring out the nightmare puzzle and getting a much deserved nap.

Why do you have to be so nice? Upsettingly, in the same style as the sexy characters like Seven of Nine and T’Pol, Deanna seems to mostly get used on the show to get mindraped a lot or otherwise treated as a plaything for men (and that includes men in the audience for whom her terrible jumpsuit was definitely crafted). So it makes me shout for joy when she beats the hell out of Jev in “Violations” because both he and the writers deserved that.

You will take orders from me and no one else The tippy top of anyone’s Troi list should be her amazing performance in “Face of the Enemy.” This was one of our highlights of all of TNG since everyone and their second foremother has been underestimating Troi this whole dang time. So to watch her infiltrate a Romulan ship, pass herself off as a Tal Shiar operative, and save the defectors without blowing her cover was as surprising as it was engrossing. It makes you wish they had written her like this all along.

Bad thoughts, they hurt her We’ll talk more fully about Lwaxana another day (definitely make sure you’re following this page for that!), but Deanna’s relationship with her mother is still one of love and admiration despite how much their personalities clash. Which is why it’s so lovely in “Dark Page” for us to see Deanna go into her mother’s mind to help her through reliving the trauma of losing her first child, Kestra Troi.

I’d read two chapters Another good gal relationship we don’t see nearly enough of in the show is the Troi-Crusher friendship. It’s always nice to see the two lady characters of the show interacting and [sometimes] passing the Bechdel test, but specifically we actually have to shout out to the progressive moments of “Sub Rosa” that actually discuss female pleasure in a positive way. Get it, girls!

Everyone orders Geordi to his death eventually A couple more from season seven, when Troi finally seems to have hit some kind of stride and developed as a character, even going so far as to take the command test! It’s in “Thine Own Self” that she proves she has what it takes to officially be put into the command rotation when she orders a simulation of Geordi to his death. After our La Forge spotlight, we all kinda wanted it.

I’m sensing horniness Caitlin also wanted to make sure to appease the Troi-Worf shippers out there. There may not be many of you, but you’ve got some solid foundation after we saw this unusual couple give it the old college try starting in “Eye of the Beholder.” We’ve got to admit: it was an interesting pairing of the Klingon who had a lot of emotions and the Betazoid who could sense them.

I’m a leaf on the wind Many people would put crashing the Enterprise in Generations on their Worst Moments list, but not us! Frankly, that thing was going down no matter who was in charge, and we’ve got to give Troi a lot of credit that she landed that saucer as safely as anyone could. Normally, splatting into a planet surface would yield no survivors, but pretty much everyone walked away thanks to her!

Have you tried plexing? We see Troi do the impossible and actually help Barclay through therapy in episodes like “Hollow Pursuits” and “Realm of Fear” even though she has every right to not work with someone who was diddling her likeness in the holodeck. But she stuck with it, even into Voyager episodes like “Pathfinder” and “Inside Man.” Give it up for the Goddess of Empathy.

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Worst moments

Wouldn’t you rather be alone with me? With me in your mind? Another week, another “The Naked Now” reference. We’ve said it before: it’s so disgusting for all the female characters to just get horny while they’re spacedrunk, while all the male characters have a variety of drunken behaviors. Sadly, Troi is relegated to swooning all over Riker while she’s infected with the polywater virus, and we’re pretty done with it.

When I snap my fingers, you will bark like an Antican So frequently I can’t tell if Troi is practicing legitimate psychiatry, some made-up future psychiatry, or just what writers from the 90s thought psychiatry entailed. But episodes like “Lonely Among Us” give me the impression it’s the latter when suddenly Troi is doing some kind of hypnosis thing on Worf and Crusher after they’d been possessed by some random entity. Cluck cluck cluck.

Turn off your beam into my soul A small factor that I have to give Troi a little bit of guff about is when she tries to force counseling onto Stubbs in “Evolution.” An allegedly trained counselor should know that it can be harmful and even dangerous to therapize someone who does not consent to it, and it actually made me a little uncomfortable to watch. Leave this man to his mental baseball games, lady.

You’re unusually limber this morning In a reminder that the writers of this show have no idea how to write for women, we get this utterly embarrassing aerobics scene from “The Price.” Sure, the ladies can talk about boys if they want to if that’s what they’re into, but it’s so obvious that they’re in these skimpy leotards just to appeal to the adolescent boys in the audience and for absolutely no other reason. Gross.

It’s more than just letting them cry on your shoulder Troi spends most of “The Loss” literally going through the stages of grief over her empath powers, and I guess her favorite stage was pissiness since she just camped out there and bitched at everyone she interacted with. And then Guinan so smoothly schools her on counseling that Troi hits rock bottom hard enough to come around the other side again somehow.

The chain of command is the chain I go get and beat you with... “Disaster” could have gone on both lists because Troi does end up being right in the end, but it’s going here partly to make room for other examples above and partly because Troi was so out of her depth trying to lead during a crisis. In reality, her move was the wrong move, as she learns later in the afore-mentioned “Thine Own Self” which teaches her the correct move was to kill Geordi!

I never met a chocolate I didn’t like For some strange reason, the writers decided that one of very few character traits that define Deanna Troi other than being an empath (in case you forgot) is that she’s obsessed with chocolate. And in “The Game” we practically get to watch her orgasm over a chocolate sundae in a fully out-of-place scene that just reminds us that the writers rarely knew what to do with her.

If it looks like an android and quacks like an android… The writers also frequently had no idea how to write for Troi when she was supposed to be doing her counselor job too! In fact, in “Hero Worship” she pawns off a kid clearly suffering from post-traumatic stress on an entirely unqualified and ill-suited Data, whose ability to relate to people is questionable at best. There’s a reason we never hear from Timothy again…

Sign here, here, and here More terrible counseling comes in “Cost of Living.” I have to give Worf credit for going to Troi for help with his brat son, but the advice Troi gives them to write up a parent-child contract is perplexing! Alexander is a child, somewhere between two and twelve years old (who can tell with Klingons?). Treating him like a contractor is so impersonal that it surprised me coming out of her.

But forward we look and forward we go The will-they-won’t-they thing between Troi and Riker was always frustrating, since they need to both remain single so they can woohoo random aliens. So it actually seems like the perfect answer to Troiker shippers (is that the right portmanteau?) when Tom Riker shows up in “Second Chances” and Troi blows it. How she said no to that man I’ll never understand.

And have you noticed how your boobs have started to firm up As we’ve said a bunch of times now in these character spotlight posts, the attempts at comedy in Insurrection very rarely land. And one of the most groan-inducing moments is when Troi remarks on her newly perky tits because of the effects of the Ba’ku planet, which just goes to remind us that she was first and foremost meant to be a sexual object for the fans to ogle.

I never kissed you with a beard before On the subject of dumb jokes from Insurrection, we have to complain again, even though we already covered it in the Riker spotlight, about Troi shaving off his beard because they were suddenly acting like horny teenagers again. And shame on her for acting like kissing a man with a beard is yucky! I can tell you from experience it’s the way to go.

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Our therapy session is now over, so make sure you’re keeping up with our weekly appointments as we have more TNG crewmembers to analyze next time! We hope you’re also slogging through Enterprise with us over on SoundCloud or wherever you podcast, telling us how you feel over on Facebook and Twitter, and doing your plexing exercises whenever you’re stressed out.

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sshbpodcast · 1 year

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That’s what I call brain freeze: Cryostasis in Star Trek

By Ames

We’re due for our coolest blog activity yet! That’s right, we’re talking cryofreezing this week, the easy way for writers to freeze time for characters, so long spans of time go by in a snap! We see it in pretty much everything, from Alien to Aliens. On Star Trek, going into stasis can allow for people from the past to make it to the future, pause the spread of whatever ails you while your doctor logs into WebMD, and make long-distance travel without warp something survivable for someone with a normal human lifespan.

A Star to Steer Her By is digging into the freezer for some frozen snacks, so make sure to check out everything we’ve got defrosting on the counter below and listen to this week’s podcast chatter (frosty discussion starts at 1:07:29).

I’ll say this up front as well: I wasn’t expecting to have to include a minor spoiler for season three Picard after literally the first episode, but here we are.

Cool off!

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

“Space Seed”

The villain Khan is just too much for Earth of the past, so he becomes the future’s problem when he flash freezes himself and his augmented followers. The episode in which we first see cryostasis in Trek also paved the way for one of the most popular movies in the franchise, so we’re glad that the plot device opened up the possibility of dragging people into the future. For now.

“The Neutral Zone”

...and I’ve already eaten those words. The three frozen folks from this episode are mainly here to make fish-out-of-water jokes. They don’t understand that stocks and bonds don’t exist in the future. Isn’t that funny? Sure, some of the scenes with an overwhelmed Clare Raymond are a little more intimate and thought-provoking, but this whole episode was just unfocused and tiresome.

“The Emissary”

We all loved K'Ehleyr so much (see how much here!) that it’s easy to forget the rest of the episode in which she was introduced. You’ll remember that a ship of Klingons, all in stasis, is about to get their wakeup call and someone needs to be on hand to make sure they don’t attack the Federation since they’re pretty behind on the news. And who better than our girl K’Ehleyr? Worf helped too, I guess.

“The Perfect Mate”

Sometimes, your mail-order bride comes in a well-preserved package. In the generally squicky “The Perfect Mate,” Kamala is being kept in her little cocoon in the cargo hold until pesky Ferengi accidentally break it open earlier than it’s supposed to be opened. Why did the cocoon need to float in the air where it could easily be knocked down? Hey shut up, the episode needed to move forward.

“Relics”

Do we count being stored in the transporter buffer as an equivalent to being in stasis? Well, “Relics” is on this list, so yes, yes we do. It’s actually a really ingenious plan to effectively freeze yourself using the transporter, even if it seems to only be effective 50% of the time, that we’re frequently flabbergasted that we don’t see it used more often in Trek. You’ll see it a couple more times on this list though.

“Face of the Enemy”

Like in “The Emissary,” it may be easy to forget that the driving force of “Face of the Enemy” is cryo-related, but we get too distracted by watching Marina Sirtis actually getting something really great to do for a change. But the main thrust of the episode is about transporting Romulan defectors out of Romulan space, and that’s achieved by putting them in cryo and moving them around like luggage. Go Troi!

“Vortex”

This mostly forgettable episode from early DS9 also had a mostly forgettable cryo scene. Croden’s daughter is being stored in stasis on some rock or other so that he can go pick her up when he’s escaped his shitty, shitty government. It’s a rather small inclusion, but as we’ve said before: when you’ve got this technology, you might as well use it!

“The Abandoned”

This one’s just a tiny little inclusion in an episode that veers hard in another direction once the sleeping pod element is done with. After Quark buys up a whole bunch of products and he’s started sorting through his wares, he discovers a small pod containing what turns out to be a Jem’Hadar baby. Why was he being transported in a cryochamber? The better question is: why not transport ALL babies in a cryochamber?

“Empok Nor”

We see a lot of “The Emissary” in this horror episode of DS9, especially in that “if someone wakes up, they might wreak some havoc on us” kind of way. In this case, it’s a couple of drugged-out Cardassians that have awakened from their slumber on the space station Empok Nor and the episode turns a little into Jason X: The One in Space. Which we should totally cover on the podcast one day.

“The 37s”

Boy, did we have a lot of shitty things to say about “The 37s” when we wrapped season two of Voyager, and so much of it is because of the very forced and highly unnecessary cryochamber plot. There was already too much going on in this episode, and adding unfreezing Amelia Freaking Earhart to the mix was not only convoluted, but just agonizingly bad as well. Let the poor thing rest in peace.

“The Thaw”

We talked more about this one when we discussed dreams the other week, but it has the added bonus of being a cryosleep episode as well! Like many gimmicks in which the idea is for the characters to get woken up from cryo at an appointed time, something goes terribly wrong for the sleepers and they get stuck in their worst nightmares: dreaming of clowns and not being able to wake up.

“Resolutions”

This is another brief scene, but we do get a moment at the very top when we’re dropped in in media res to see Chakotay and Janeway waking up in their pods on some paradisiacal planet. They were only in there briefly to be transported to the surface without dying of their incurable illness (score one more cross promotion to our diseases post), and then we never see the pods again.

“One”

One of our favorite Seven of Nine episodes so far has been “One” and there’s so much cryostasis that I’m feeling a little freezer burned just thinking about it. It’s such a good premise: the whole crew needs to go into cryo because they can’t survive a span of deadly nebula or other, so Seven has to pilot her sleeping crewmates to the other side without succumbing to cabin fever! Excellent!

“Counterpoint”

Well, we included “Relics” on this list because being stored in the transporter buffer is akin to being stored in a cryopod, so here we are doing it again with “Counterpoint.” Seriously, they really don’t use this technique often enough in Star Trek, but since the telepaths kept in the buffer start to suffer from cell degradation from constant use, maybe that’s a good enough reason.

“11:59”

One of the good things about this otherwise deplorable episode was the story we get from Harry Kim about his uncle Jack. The account goes that Jack was on a sleeper ship (we really don’t see enough of those!) back before space travel was quite so fast, awoke at their destination to find nothing there, so he turned the ship around and went home again. It’s quite a cute and funny little anecdote!

“Dragon’s Teeth”

The episode we covered on the podcast this week hit a lot of the same beats as previous instances from this list. A warlike race gets woken up from their slumber only to try to take over the ship, a la “Space Seed.” Their pods had been scheduled to wake them and failed like in “The Thaw.” And we had nearly no motivation to open the pods in the first place, as has happened a whole bunch!

“Precious Cargo”

An even more egregious retread comes in Enterprise when they basically try to redo the super cringe TNG episode “The Perfect Mate” that you just scrolled past, and somehow continue to be fairly cringe. Same deal: a gorgeous Kriosian woman is being transported while in stasis. Her pod gets damaged and she wakes up and eventually falls for the hunkiest guy in reach. We’ve done all this before.

Into Darkness

Since Into Darkness is just “Space Seed” / The Wrath of Khan but with more lens flare, the movie obviously has to use the cryostasis plot device since it would actually be more trouble NOT to include it and anger the fans [more]. But finding Khan’s crew in cryo inside torpedoes is at least a good touch, and the chilly resolution to the film is somehow kinder than stranding him on Ceti Alpha V.

Rukiya’s story arc

One last one that’s from the transporter buffer loophole that we’ve decided we’re using for this list, but it’s also a really good and quite sweet characterization for Doctor Mbenga to put his daughter into stasis to prolong her life. We ask every so often on the podcast why the medical staff doesn’t put patients in cryo all the time, and it took until Strange New Worlds to really make good use of it.

“Preludes”

Learning Jankom Pog’s backstory in this Prodigy episode really helped shed light on his character in a way that we didn’t realize we needed so badly. It’s a fascinating addition – especially for a kids show! – to have this Tellarite be a blast from the past who awoke accidentally from cryo to find he needed to maintain the ship. And it’s crushing to see him get no credit for it!

“The Next Generation”

Literally right after we recorded this week’s episode, the season three premiere of Picard came along to taunt me. It too contains a scene related to cryostasis. We don’t know much yet about what’s going to come about from this turn of events since, at the time I’m writing this, dear Doctor Crusher has just entered the deep freeze, so watch along with us to see what happens, I guess!

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Let’s get you thawed out so you can enjoy more blogtivities! You should also be keeping up with our watch-through of Voyager on SoundCloud or whatever your podcast application of choice is, hanging out with us on Facebook and Twitter, and just generally chilling out.

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