FaxModem1 wrote:As was said about Neelix, I think needs to be said about Torres as well.
I think a good chunk of ignoring character growth or change if its really minor and subtle, and going more for the farce parodies Chuck has created, has a lot to do with the fact these reviews jump around all over the place and have been done over the course of 10 years, for shows that go roughly 175 episodes.
If he was reviewing everything in order there'd be more place to slowly change how a joke works or what a version of a character is... but when you can be doing a season 7 episode one week and a season 1 the next and then season 4 the week after, and you might be doing a good, bad, and mediocre episode... well... there has to be some sort of more consistent middle ground to refer to. Especially when the eventual archive is show airing order rather than SFDebris production order.
In cases where a character only has a few episodes like Barklay (and he's doing them all at once as a theme) or there's a clear delineation point of major change that affects the character profoundly and significantly for the rest of the show, such as Bashir revealing he's an enhanced genius, its a little easier to break up how to treat a character that has changed in a significant way.
Or on TNG where you have the extremes of "season 1 sucks" and "season 7 they ran out of ideas" you can lump things together a little bit and have jokes and observations that go together well in those specific eras (like coming back to the idea of Thomas Riker sticking around) but you can't be wondering "what if they'd had Thomas in a season 4 episode" because he hadn't appeared yet and because speculating on that for that point makes no sense.
Something like Babylon 5 he manages to track better, but that show is shorter and super serialized... and he's actually done very large chunks of it in sequence... plus it has a very obvious production change over from season 1 to season 2... and again from season 4 to season 5. (Which he's only done one episode of.)
But little nuances are harder in this format, and while season 7 Neelix (or Torres) may be more tolerable and fleshed out than season 1 Neelix, it doesn't mean that stupid thing they did in season 3 isn't going to continue standing out, especially if it was reviewed recently.