Sometimes the B plot is the worst thing aired in an otherwise stellar episode.
Example: “Endgame” Voyager’s Finale. Great episode except for the whole Chakotay/Seven romance subplot.
May I present to you, SUB ROSA!
Followed shortly after by All Good Things.
The worst and best TNG episodes were only 12 episodes apart.
Edit: got an episode name wrong.
I still say ‘doctor fucks candle ghost’ is better than ‘captain and pilot turn into amphibians, have babies, then get turned back into people but the babies stay on the planet.’
Guy, Guy, Guy… Fairhaven and not Threshold?
I’d still prefer those over Tattoo, where they scrambled to shoehorn in an alien explanation for Chakotay’s odd Native beliefs after it was discovered that the consultant on Native beliefs they hired was a complete fraud.
Uuh, do you have a link to that story? I always found that episode so weird
Nice, thanks
I understand why they did it though. They had to do something and they couldn’t just say “well, Chakotay was a fake indigenous American all this time.”
They should have been more up-front about the whole thing, but I can see why they did it.
They could have kept most of that episode as a character background filler without the aliens traveling 70000 lightyears over multiple generations just to visit some primative tribe with no language on some backwater planet. That part seems to be the most awkward to shoehorn in.
I’m not saying they did it well. I’m saying they were kind of forced into it.
I feel like they could have just stopped focusing on his made up culture. He could still bring up authentic bits of culture and trivia when relevant, but it could be featured about as prominently as Picard’s french heritage, rather than dominating the character like Worf’s klingon heritage.
They could maybe even throw in a line at some point about how much of his people’s heritage is lost due to that nuclear holocaust thing that messed the Earth up a bit back in the day. Acknowledge the disconnect with reality connecting it to the established lore.
Or it would have been fun to find out that he’s actually the descendant of a fraud and the whole culture he was raised to believe in was a scam. But that might have been a little too on the nose.
Don’t forget that the technologically superior visitors who brought culture to the primitive natives were given the distinct visual design of being white. Nope, no unfortunate implications there.
