Recycling

I’ve ingested a lot of sci fi recently, what with the minimal work schedule, and noticed a few things.

1. Recycled props. For instance, in TNG’s Dark Page there is a scene supposedly showing Troi’s bedroom when she was very small. There’s a tall red riding toy that looks like it might be an art deco giraffe with the head of Annubis. The toy shows up at the beginning of Voyager’s Mortal Coil, when Neelix goes to tell Naomi a bedtime story - it’s standing prominently in the background.

2. The Inner Light episode. The original was TNG, but DS9 has its time distortion planet where the whole crew of the Defiant breeds and populates a world, and VOY has episode after episode of alternate this, alternate that - Kes lives her life backwards (which doesn’t turn out to be her life at all because the very act of living it backwards makes her change her mind about some things and then of course she ‘ascends’), the one where everyone’s mindwiped and turned into tech slaves and Kathryn gets involved with someone. . . . Being a fan, I adore AU’s, but if they’ve got to hit the reset button and go back to ‘normal,’ I find the original Inner Light to be the most poignant and affecting, because Picard wakes up from the dream and realizes that the family he had died long before he was born, that he won’t have that again, and it’s just so sad and understated by the end when he’s returned to his life as a starship captain without them. Adding in entire ensembles of crew and rolling the dice is a very different animal, emotionally, because then it’s not about their having something they can’t really have - it’s just the novelty of it all and not so much a sense of loss that one can connect with.

3. The Square Peg. Seven of Nine grated on her crewmates’ nerves for a while. Barclay was just mental, and semi-creepy with his holo-images of everyone, but that didn’t mean he was bad, and eventually he gets somewhat better socially. Data and his android quirks sometimes filled the role of square peg, other times he was just one of the main characters. Sometimes characters are briefly nominated square peg to suit the plot; Neelix did that a lot. Bashir helped a lot of genetically engineering square pegs, without being much of one himself.

4. Sanctimonious Phony. The EMH. Dukat. The Kai. Arrogance isn’t their only flaw, or their only trait, but it’s right out there in front where you can hang a coat on it.