Sfdebris.net

https://sfdebris.com/videos/startrek/t240.php

Many Troii fans hate this episode because Troii being competent breaks her character.

What if this is her real job on Enterprise? Political Officer, Party Commissar, Government Spy? It would explain how she so easily fits the role of Taal Shiaar. Back on Enterprise, she is a very competent spy pretending to be an incompetent counsellor.

Classic Vulcans believed IDIC infinite diversity infinite creativity; modern Trek is that everyone is nailed in to the Prime Directive, disagreement is unthinkable. Every fundamentalist religion needs an inquisition. Telepaths can identify actual heretics which is more efficient than torture that makes everyone confess, orthodox and heretic alike.

Likewise on those rare occassions where a counsellor would actually be useful, she is off doing other stuff.

Even wierder, what if Troii's job is actually useful? Mind-blowing!

Federation has "evolved" beyond money, meat, mourning our dead, conflict, shit, cheese, doorknobs, efficiency, health and safety,

Troii says "The angry alien is angry." We the Audience say "Durgh obvious."
But suppose Federation has "evolved" beyond anger? The crew need this vital information and need to hire a foreign witch to tell them about his ancient mystery called "anger".

I don't need some weird secret plot to enjoy the writers giving Sirtis a good role for once. In fact it gives me enough to really appreciate her role on the ship and assume that she is actually talented, we've just missed a lot of it.

I don't understand "Many Troi fans hate this episode because Troi being competent breaks her character.". Are there people who are a fan of a character being useless? I mean, outside of specific fetish groups? I would expect fans of her would appreciate moments like this since they were so rare and showed her in a much better light (without being complete retcons). If anything, this episode doesn't break her character, it fleshes it out and makes her better for it. When pushed, she showed that she is cunning and can read people, and use that to navigate a dangerous situation. She has charisma and is good at understanding how people (even Romulans) think.

I like seeing Troi be competent, because it makes her position on the Enterprise make sense, when too often she seems superfluous.

As much as it's otherwise a poor episode, I think The Loss is actually fairly good for giving Troi's character a lot of motivation for her attitude. It's one of the few times that the implicit arrogance of the early TNG crew is acknowledged and given a bit of a dressing down; even in the egalitarian Federation, Troi being raised as some kind of royalty combined with her abilities making her "better" than most humans has given her an aspect of her personality that ends up being "spoiled" which she has taken for granted and has to face when confronted by that loss. It's not handled particularly well, but the core idea is a good one. It helps paper over so many of the times that her treatment of a situation seems dismissive or superficial, even if it's not really intentional on the part of the writing.

I think this belongs in the Video reviews section.