They thought they were just making a new Bones, and that her being snarky and dismissive and a little racist would play her against Data the same way it did with McCoy and Spock, and recapture some of that old flavorKoshundheit wrote: ↑Mon Sep 03, 2018 4:46 am Can't recall Chuck discussing or ever hearing anywhere else if they actually thought she was going to be a good character. It is known they thought Neelix was going to be great, did they do the same here? If so, one would hope they'd have learned something.
It... didn't work out. Mostly because they made her TOO unlikable out the gate. Maybe if she'd started in season 1 before the audience knew anything about Data so her prejudices and questions could have also been ours and come up within the first episode that dynamic would have worked and fleshed out over time, but by season 2 it was too late, Data was already a breakout character and we were totally on his side.
It would be like having someone join the permanent cast that was racist against Klingons that kept being pissy to Worf, there would just be no way to like them.
Note that Obrien was racist to Kardasians, but that was okay.... because all the season he was on TNG he never had to regularly interact with any, and even on DS9 outside of Garak we didn't have any regular Kardasians that he had to work with.... and he had almost no scenes with Garak. (While Bashir had tons.) ...actually, I'm failing to think of ANY scenes with just Obrien and Garak. I'm sure there MUST be some, they were on some missions as a group, but none of just those two come to mind.
But anyway, Bones 2.0 was pretty clearly what they were going for.
Similarly later on they brought in Ro to be the edgy outsider but didn't make her an asshole... and also didn't really give her all that much edge.
ANd then after that they made it the entire premise of Voyager to have half the crew not be starfleet and all the conflicts that resulted from that, and they dropped that after the third episode. (I've often wodnered if the Maquis had been left in different outfit instead of going immediately into starfleet uniforms, if that unease would have worked itself more into the acting and writing.)
As for Cardassians, it more depends on the person. A difference was that with O'Brien, in the very episode where he was first shown to have baggage about them, he also realized by the end of the episode that it was unfair to resent all their kind for what had happened. He was more left with a sense from a line in DS9, "You learn to watch your backs around those people." So he knows many Cardassians may be fine people, but he's had bad experiences and he's learned to be cautious. Garak and O'Brien had one particular episode of note: Empok Nor. O'Brien doesn't end up showing any hatred towards Garak despite a major conflict.
