TNG - Galaxy's Child

[LordFeagans]

Geordi says he isn't much of a writer, yet in "All Good Things..." Geordi is a writer and married to Leah Brahms. Maybe he has the ideas, she's doing the writing and he's getting all the credit.

As for her husband, the Enterprise was built at Utopia Planetia, which was also the location of the Android terror attack and Mars burned for like 15 years after. Really hope Geordi didn't say to Leah "Hey, sorry about your husband's grizzly death at the hands of those androids. Since we here in the future don't greave for our dead loved ones, how about dinner tomorrow night?"

[CrypticMirror]

Geordi says he isn't much of a writer, yet in "All Good Things..." Geordi is a writer and married to Leah Brahms. Maybe he has the ideas, she's doing the writing and he's getting all the credit.

As for her husband, the Enterprise was built at Utopia Planetia, which was also the location of the Android terror attack and Mars burned for like 15 years after. Really hope Geordi didn't say to Leah "Hey, sorry about your husband's grizzly death at the hands of those androids. Since we here in the future don't greave for our dead loved ones, how about dinner tomorrow night?"

All Good Things occurred in the Pre-Janeway Endgame timeline, so Utopia Planetia was fine in the future it predicted. I guess their marriage just didn't work out then. Man, it is amazing how much Janeway messed things up. If she'd screwed up much more, they'd give her a staff writers position on Discovery.

[Fianna]

BTW, I do miss 99 Luftballoons. Its been the TNG soundtrack for a decade. I do understand though, copyright nowadays is a bitch.

Though it looks like Chuck forgot to remove the 99 Red Balloons credits from the end.

The "Nobody's stalking you. They don't need to!" joke is great, but it's worth remembering that standards of privacy change over time.

In the 90's, people were afraid to put any personal information about themselves on the Internet; revealing your real name to someone you met online was just asking to have some psychotic stranger stalk you down and break into your house. Now, people freely and readily share all sorts of personal information about themselves with thousands of anonymous Internet goers, and don't think anything about it.

Except for phone numbers. No one wants their personal phone number spread around to anyone for anyone to find, and spreading that info without someone's consent (called "doxxing") is a huge no-no. But go back to the 20th Century, and everyone's phone numbers were regularly collected into huge indexes and sold in massive numbers, and that was seen as perfectly normal and innocuous.

[Rocketboy1313]

I am trying to think of what the equivalent situation would be in the modern world.
You are a well known academic, going to work with an acclaimed engineer and you find out they have all your books, the DVD's for a show you contributed to for the Discovery Channel, and their Alexa uses your name maybe?

Cause the holodeck program looks like her, but... it is clothed, it exists to study the ship, we the audience know he was being weird about it in one episode, but it is not a sex doll.

There are Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud holograms that do things... There must be living VIP's working as hologram assistances for scientists. That would be one of the best uses for the holodeck.

You can say he was weirdly obsessed about her... But he didn't know she was married? Like, that seems like a big detail to not know about someone you are being creepy about? So, he is not all that creepy.

[CharlesPhipps]

Galaxy's Child is a ST:TNG episode I am constantly back and forth on because it is amazingly relevant today and was pretty damn relevant back then. However, it's fairly clear the writers didn't actually get what makes the episode relevant and thought they were giving a far-far different lesson from it. There's also the fact that Geordi's behavior is REPELLENT and if he actually believes the things he's spouting this episode, he's a creepy mothersucker like that Salt Monster.

This episode is a prime example of how DEATH OF THE AUTHOR can be relevant. I say that as an author and who generally hates the idea. However, here, the writers thought they wrote, "You should get to know a real person before making snap judgements" and, "Don't be a bitch to guys who like you." The problem being the latter is entirely justified if some creepy stalker repeatedly ignores your statements you don't want shit to do with him, let alone romantic advances. Geordi makes multiple passes at a woman just here to work on the engines.

The problem is the story WORKS REALLY WELL as a commentary on parasocial relationships and fan entitlement. Geordi is in love with Jennifer Lawrence basically because he's the world's greatest Hunger Games fanboy nerd. So when he meets her in person, he immediately tries to make the actress his girlfriend. Its disturbing and creepy and yet plenty of people have these exact sort of delusions. It's not at all what they were going for, or at least not NEARLY as bad as the episode has come off.

That's also REALLY not a good look for one of our protagonists. I mean, the original episode makes it clear that Geordi did not make a Deepfake Sex Hologram of his idol. However, he did make erotic fanfiction and thinks that this gives him a deep insight into a woman he didn't even bother to check the galactic subspace Facebook page of before throwing hearts her way. It's an episode that has aged both well and terribly because it's more relevant but what it shows is definitely much darker than what was intended.

Leah apologizes to GEORDI for Chrissakes.

[Durandal_1707]

BTW, I do miss 99 Luftballoons. Its been the TNG soundtrack for a decade. I do understand though, copyright nowadays is a bitch.

I don't. Why on earth you'd choose that song for the soundtrack to this series has never made any sense to me. "We're destined to annihilate ourselves for extremely stupid reasons because we can't trust each other" is about as close to a polar opposite of TNG's message as I can think of.

Was it just because it had the words "red alert" in it?

(on topic: yeah, this episode sucks. I expected it to be the one where the ship has a baby and goes to New Vertiform City, but it appears I had this confused with another episode.)

[Taurian Patriot]

I think it would have been easy to resolve the contradiction between "they're sending someone to copy your amazing engine upgrades" and "so you're the one sabotaging my perfect engines" by making their exchanges a balanced point / counterpoint about the trade offs in his modifications.

Yes, he got more performance out of the engines, but at what cost? He's essentially overclocking it, voiding the warranty and tuning it in ways that it wasn't designed for. Even if it doesn't explode and kill them all, is it going to be more wear and tear? Is it going to increase the chances of a serious engine problem, making it go from statistically insignificant to just unlikely?

This episode was after The Drumhead, right? One of the plot points in that episode was a rupture in the warp core from a flaw in the components. If Brahms brought that up as an example of one of Geordi's modifications, it could have been a good in-continuity example.

I love this idea. It sure beats the hell out of a space engineer referring to observation, analysis, and experimentation (i.e., the basics of the scientific method) as "tired rhetoric."

[RobbyB1982]

I don't. Why on earth you'd choose that song for the soundtrack to this series has never made any sense to me. "We're destined to annihilate ourselves for extremely stupid reasons because we can't trust each other" is about as close to a polar opposite of TNG's message as I can think of.

Was it just because it had the words "red alert" in it?

I'm sure the red alert line is what inspired it, but after a decade of having that as intro, I've gotten used to the other lines that match up. "There's something here from somewhere else" and "Focusing it on the sky" are pretty good Trek lyrics. (And he also found a good visual for the eye line)

Also consider what episodes Chuck originally reviewed when he first started. He's got clips from Encounter at Farpoint in the intro from the trial, so war machine is okay there.

Plus the whole song *sounds* upbeat even if in context of the actual song it's... something else.

But then, Chuck also picked out the Enterprise theme based on one scene of Archer jumping down a ladder that looked like Superman, and the Voyager theme for the title rather than any lyrics, so... really he probably only needed Red Alert. (And the downer tune picked for Discovery based on its first season being dark and graphic...)

[Link8909]

Galaxy's Child is a ST:TNG episode I am constantly back and forth on because it is amazingly relevant today and was pretty damn relevant back then. However, it's fairly clear the writers didn't actually get what makes the episode relevant and thought they were giving a far-far different lesson from it. There's also the fact that Geordi's behavior is REPELLENT and if he actually believes the things he's spouting this episode, he's a creepy mothersucker like that Salt Monster.

This episode is a prime example of how DEATH OF THE AUTHOR can be relevant. I say that as an author and who generally hates the idea. However, here, the writers thought they wrote, "You should get to know a real person before making snap judgements" and, "Don't be a bitch to guys who like you." The problem being the latter is entirely justified if some creepy stalker repeatedly ignores your statements you don't want shit to do with him, let alone romantic advances. Geordi makes multiple passes at a woman just here to work on the engines.

The problem is the story WORKS REALLY WELL as a commentary on parasocial relationships and fan entitlement. Geordi is in love with Jennifer Lawrence basically because he's the world's greatest Hunger Games fanboy nerd. So when he meets her in person, he immediately tries to make the actress his girlfriend. Its disturbing and creepy and yet plenty of people have these exact sort of delusions. It's not at all what they were going for, or at least not NEARLY as bad as the episode has come off.

That's also REALLY not a good look for one of our protagonists. I mean, the original episode makes it clear that Geordi did not make a Deepfake Sex Hologram of his idol. However, he did make erotic fanfiction and thinks that this gives him a deep insight into a woman he didn't even bother to check the galactic subspace Facebook page of before throwing hearts her way. It's an episode that has aged both well and terribly because it's more relevant but what it shows is definitely much darker than what was intended.

Leah apologizes to GEORDI for Chrissakes.

I'm with you and many on this, Geordi's story in "Galaxy's Child" is honestly creepy, I fine with the episode going back to "Booby Trap" and having an expectations meeting reality story, even having Leah Brahms find out about the program is interesting as it can lead to questioning morals about using the Holodeck.

But it would have been so much less creepy if Geordi had knew about Leah's marriage, and simply wanted to be friends, and also have Geordi being the one to apologise at the end.

[clearspira]

Galaxy's Child is a ST:TNG episode I am constantly back and forth on because it is amazingly relevant today and was pretty damn relevant back then. However, it's fairly clear the writers didn't actually get what makes the episode relevant and thought they were giving a far-far different lesson from it. There's also the fact that Geordi's behavior is REPELLENT and if he actually believes the things he's spouting this episode, he's a creepy mothersucker like that Salt Monster.

This episode is a prime example of how DEATH OF THE AUTHOR can be relevant. I say that as an author and who generally hates the idea. However, here, the writers thought they wrote, "You should get to know a real person before making snap judgements" and, "Don't be a bitch to guys who like you." The problem being the latter is entirely justified if some creepy stalker repeatedly ignores your statements you don't want shit to do with him, let alone romantic advances. Geordi makes multiple passes at a woman just here to work on the engines.

The problem is the story WORKS REALLY WELL as a commentary on parasocial relationships and fan entitlement. Geordi is in love with Jennifer Lawrence basically because he's the world's greatest Hunger Games fanboy nerd. So when he meets her in person, he immediately tries to make the actress his girlfriend. Its disturbing and creepy and yet plenty of people have these exact sort of delusions. It's not at all what they were going for, or at least not NEARLY as bad as the episode has come off.

That's also REALLY not a good look for one of our protagonists. I mean, the original episode makes it clear that Geordi did not make a Deepfake Sex Hologram of his idol. However, he did make erotic fanfiction and thinks that this gives him a deep insight into a woman he didn't even bother to check the galactic subspace Facebook page of before throwing hearts her way. It's an episode that has aged both well and terribly because it's more relevant but what it shows is definitely much darker than what was intended.

Leah apologizes to GEORDI for Chrissakes.

I'm with you and many on this, Geordi's story in "Galaxy's Child" is honestly creepy, I fine with the episode going back to "Booby Trap" and having an expectations meeting reality story, even having Leah Brahms find out about the program is interesting as it can lead to questioning morals about using the Holodeck.

But it would have been so much less creepy if Geordi had knew about Leah's marriage, and simply wanted to be friends, and also have Geordi being the one to apologise at the end.

Its definitely an early 1990s piece of television. True, Geordi didn't have sex with the hologram, but she didn't know that and its not an unreasonable assumption. And yet her views of feeling like she had been raped were dismissed as ''she's being a bitch.'' This wouldn't fly today.