Chuck has talked about her costume, and just wanted them to have put her in a uniform from the start. He also hated the asymmetrical lines around the cleavage of some of them, and amen on that. I wonder if they only did that to show bosom without dipping so low in the middle they showed cleavage.Nealithi wrote: ↑Wed Jul 25, 2018 7:08 pm Heh. I so want Chuck's comments on her diatribe on the 'costume'. But how Troi was used. They seemed to see a great idea then got horrified because she could punch holes in entire plots and make the show about ten minutes long.
They didn't want to hurt themselves down the line by giving her hard limits. So she could read emotions from thousands of miles apart in orbit. So they had to keep breaking her like the transporter, the holodeck, the shuttles, the warpdrive, or really anything that could solve a problem. If she had been a Guinan like character, I think she would have been loved. Most of the time she is helping the crew of screen. Maybe sees the others in Ten Forward and drops an insight to Geordi or her pet project is helping Data with emotions. Picard seeks her out for insight. Imagine Measure of a Man if Picard went to Troi's office instead of the shockingly empty bar.
One probably need only watch the middle of the "Life Line" Voyager review to hear what he thought of how the writers used Troi, at least as a counselor. In a word, the outcome of her advice was often awful. Guinan was written as better at counseling. He has also said repeatedly that too often Troi only exists to "state the bloody obvious", for example in the episode "Cause and Effect" where she said "We have to get out of here now" so many times it is burned into my brain. As for her empathic abilities, they wrote those inconsistently enough where Ferengi were concerned that in more than one video, he has his Picard saying things to her like, "You're a fraud, aren't you?" The only way to rationalize some of those times she 'sensed' what Ferengi were thinking would be to say that she used typically human abilities to sense through observation. Except they had an entire episode about how she has relied so much on her empathic abilities that she has little practice at doing that. Ferengi should seem like a 'reflection' that wasn't really there to her, since that's how she felt about humans without her ability.
I manage to enjoy the character as she is, but it is a shame they couldn't find some way for Sirtis to have more to do with her on a regular basis. To me, what we saw of her relationship with Worf made him more interesting. If they couldn't find something else for her to do while on the bridge, it might have been interesting to have that relationship start years earlier. I don't know, anything for her not to be stuck as a one-note character, except when she was taken over by an alien presence. Some have said she is a bad actor, but that's not really fair. She just had so little to work with most of the time. Seeing less of her could have also worked, but I'd have preferred putting her to better use.
