New Ground

Alexander competes with Gul Dukat’s daughter Ziyal for most actors to portray the same character. I mean, at least Alexander will have Jeremy Astor to spend time wi–Oh, right. I just checked which one “Hero Worship” is. IT’S THE SAME EPISODE AS THIS ONE!!! In defense of both New Ground and Hero Worship, neither one of them is Imaginary Friend. We’ve got a chromakey wall like the local TV weatherman, right? So that’s pretty much what ILM does. LET’S DO THIS Worse than Worf’s terrible fathering example for the previous year is the writing policy of TNG during this time that made recurring characters such an anomaly. Not letting extras speak….minimal to no continuity w intriguing interesting story arcs. Glad DS9 showed the right way to go about Trek lore. Yeah, I think you nail what is a recurring problem with TV from a certain era as well as the difficulty of self-imposed rules on how TNG was written. It’s too bad TNG painted itself into a corner sometimes with those rules. It was routine for shows to not write/plot serially because there was no guarantee that episodes would air in the correct order in strip syndication. Satellite feeds for weekly shows had only just become a thing when TNG premiered; fresh feeds for nightly (“strip”) syndication were only becoming a thing around the time TNG went into its last couple of seasons. Until then, strip syndicated shows were “bicycled” – literally, the tapes would be run on one station and then overnight shipped to the next station in the chain, which would air those episodes the following week. I worked at a Fox station in ’93 that was still “bicycling” Mama’s Family and Love Connection to a station in southern Arkansas, and we’d receive them from (I think) a station in Springfield, MO. It was only around the time that I started that strip-syndicated shows were starting to do “gang feeds” (i.e. all the episodes for that week fed on satellite in the space of 3-5 hours in the wee hours of the morning) that would put every station in the country on the same schedule. So even in ’93, there’s no guarantee that, for example, Family will air right after Best of Both Worlds Pt. 2, because the tape might’ve been eaten by a VTR at the Shreveport affiliate, and you’ve got to run an “evergreen” episode kept for backup purposes (which was always, for some reason, Home Soil). It wasn’t until there was a mechanism in place to ensure stuff airing in correct order, or in “themes” as they later did with the nightly strip syndication run of Voyager, that you started getting even “lightly serialized” stuff like DS9, Highlander, and Xena. The mechanical, physical limitations of the medium as it was going into the ’90s was limiting the creative side. Fast-forward to now, a post-Twin-Peaks, post-Buffy, post-Babylon-5, post-Lost world, where we would be agape if CBS announced that Discovery would be 13 standalone episodes that were barely connected to each other. Binge watching is now the norm. Interestingly Ro and Alexander both only really make a lot of appearances during the 5th season and then 1 or 2 episodes in the 6th/7th season. Which means that they were trying it out and they likely found that it didn’t work the way they were doing it. Also I don’t think DS9 went the right way with a Trek show. It’s a decent show for what it is, but there are just so many things about it that make it not be very trek like… like there not being a trek and it being 100% serial. FYI – I almost drove right off the road laughing at “Miss Kaaaaaahhhhlll”. Nice try, gentlemen, but I’m still here. And because of what my then-spouse and I did, respectively, for a living, we arrived at the conclusion that I’d be the one staying home with the baby. And that’s where I got the deer-in-the-headlights look. Making best use of resources is mentioned, and it’s a valid point, but sometimes the environment doesn’t completely support that. I’m in a southern state where, no matter how much I’d like to fight the prevailing w