Wednesday, February 12, 2014

A Little Blog About Riker & Troi


Remember when this relationship was about how two people once had a deep connection but it didn't work out and they'd moved on with their lives but continued to care deeply for one another as colleagues and friends?

I mean, Insurrection's solution of having them get together as the OTP of TNG is at least better than her getting thrown into the fridge for "All Good Things," but c'mon!

But really, it's because the movies were about gratification without any depth. They wanted to advance things but didn't want to add any lines or layers of meaning that might get in the way of shitting out a story. So Picard and Data get to do all the plot stuff. Geordi gets robot eyes, taking away the thing that made him unique. Data gets emotions too, taking away the thing that made him unique (P.S. He had emotions the whole time you idiots). Riker and Troi get married because for these morons Riker's only options for character advancement are promotion and marriage and Troi has a vagina and she's already been pregnant so that just leaves the one thing (I'm kidding; the people that wrote these movies had no idea she'd ever been pregnant). Crusher doesn't do much but set up Voyager cameos and tell us whether someone's biology is or isn't relevant to the plot. Worf doesn't get to do anything except stand there and remind me that I could be watching DS9 right now.

If the movies wanted to give us a romance instead of a regressive, "let's make it like it were when we was kids" marriage precipitated by Insurrection's "everyone's younger" field[1], they could've mirrored Riker and Troi's relationship in the story they were telling. I know that the nature of an ensemble cast means that there simply wasn't any room for additional characters to weave into their lives, but shit, even the Die Hard franchise managed to fit a lot about John and Holly's relationship in between shit blowing up. Maybe that's something only good writers do.

I think it's generally accepted that no one gave a shit about these movies. Patrick Stewart was great in them because he's great in everything. Frakes polished turds like it was an Olympic event because there's no line of dialog he can't elevate and there was a lot of awful dialog in here. But these movies were so awful that when someone said, "What if we destroy the universe and start over?" we were all just nihilistic enough to be cautiously optimistic.

Long story short, I would have rather--if Riker had to end up with someone--see that being earned. If you were going to pull someone out of the history of Star Trek and marry if him off in a rushed ceremony to make idiot fans feel like stuff was progressing, I would have rather it been Shelby. Or Ro. Or Worf. Or...fuuuck, if Voyager's hologram stories were any indication, Minuet was on the fucking table. If the franchise was going to crawl up its own butt with no fucks given, I'd have rather they gone large and have Riker marry a fucking sentient hologram.

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[1] Yes, there was a field that made people younger[2].
[2] Yes, it was stupid[3].
[3] Yes, I still think it was the best TNG movie.

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