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cdrood wrote: ↑Sun Jun 20, 2021 3:36 am I never quite got how Troi's abilities actually worked. For example, she could somehow sense emotions THROUGH THE VIEWSCREEN. She's in orbit. The other person is on the planet. She can somehow filter out the thousand people in close proximity and focus on one person out of millions or billions who is thousands of miles away, through an electronic device.

Her abilities are all over the place. But that would be the big thing, how far is the range of Betazoid's telepathy. Being able to read someone's emotions on another ship or further, a planet.

Someone should do a rundown every time Troi uses her empathic abilities to figure out her range. That sounds like a Bernd of Ex Astris Scientia website fame to do.

McAvoy wrote: ↑Mon Jun 21, 2021 2:11 am

cdrood wrote: ↑Sun Jun 20, 2021 3:36 am I never quite got how Troi's abilities actually worked. For example, she could somehow sense emotions THROUGH THE VIEWSCREEN. She's in orbit. The other person is on the planet. She can somehow filter out the thousand people in close proximity and focus on one person out of millions or billions who is thousands of miles away, through an electronic device.

Her abilities are all over the place. But that would be the big thing, how far is the range of Betazoid's telepathy. Being able to read someone's emotions on another ship or further, a planet.

Someone should do a rundown every time Troi uses her empathic abilities to figure out her range. That sounds like a Bernd of Ex Astris Scientia website fame to do.

No joke, there is a crossover novel of "Star Trek TNG" and 90's era X-Men.
While on a mission to an alien world where some evil aliens use a bio weapon to give a large number of the population superpowers (functioning like the X-Gene) the X-Men show up for no reason (later revealed to be some kind of hero exchange program between Q and the Watcher) and help out.

Troi uses her empathic abilities to read the motives and mindset of the villain and one of the X-Men (it has been 20 years, I do not recall which) points out the range of her abilities dwarves by a fantastic degree the range of Professor X even with the boost from Cerebro.

Marveryn wrote: ↑Tue May 25, 2021 3:03 am soap opera type of episode

Isn't that what's known today as serialized storytelling?

Yes, and no. Depending on the context, there can be some nuance in the differences between typical "soap opera" and more general serialization. But to be honest, a lot of serialized storytelling falls back on some of the maligned tropes of soap operas because it's easy (that's why they do it, too, after years or decades of trying to keep things going).

Not all serialized stories (nor even all Soap Operas) resort to them, but some of the most common probably fall into a broad category of "constant string of contrived new plot twists or characters that delay, divert, or completely negate resolving existing plots or character arcs". Love interests, surprise siblings, secret babies, etc. are some of the most obvious examples.

That's not a necessary element of serialized storytelling, but it tends to be a problem for ones that are either unplanned, or required to extend themselves beyond the creative talents of the existing writers on the show.