Oh, absolutely. That seemed pretty clear to me. Picard can be irritatingly detached, but he cares.

Yeah, I keep checking all week. People still come up with stuff days later. I salute them.

Oddly, I mostly read TOS novels, though I was a TNG kid. The Final Reflection was indeed awesome. I remember being completely baffled by How Much For Just the Planet? I have to admire the lunacy of whoever came up with it.

Again, I'll take "Violations," over "Cost of Living," just like I'd take "Sub Rosa." It's bad, but there's plenty of camp value. The mind-rapist dude is like EEEEVIL Owen Wilson, and I find that sort of comical. "Cost of Living" just makes you cringe the entire hour.

I'm touched to have inspired this. I'd write more, but I have to wait till I'm done with work.

God, I loved Ishmael, too. How embarrassing.
Strangers From the Sky was actually pretty great, as I remember.

Richilieu — if I'd been older, I probably would have been surprised at the cheesiness of the shows once I got to see them. Your imagination has much better acting and special effects. But I was just a little kid, and it was all awesome to me. The one that really got to me was "Operation: Annihilate." On the page, that…

Yeah, that's truly bizarre. I never would have thought. But hey, writing for money is writing for money. You're going to come up with some utter crap, no matter how good you are.

"Genesis" is unforgivable. I'm going to pretend I don't know what "Genesis" is, just like Shatner. And just as unconvincingly.

Well, Dukat's daughter is totally in love with him, but he pretty much admits he just likes having her around because he's lonely. I don't think he'd ever let it become sexual, even if he IS into the ladies.

The Blish books were my INTRODUCTION to TOS (along with Wrath of Khan). The show was hardly ever on in my town. I thought those books were great. Fond memories.

@Porkchop — "Force of Nature." It's not remembered fondly.

So are you up at, like, 4am writing this? We're touched. (The rest of us are supposed to be working, of course.)

Yeah, Data's head = awesome. (Especially since it means that his head remains 500 years old for the rest of the series.) The rest? Not so much.

Right. Nobody cared that they were lesbians; the other taboo was more important. It was well done, but, like I said, not particularly brave.

Yeah, Dax's apparent bisexuality is being discussed above. It's definitely there. But it's just not terribly brave for a show to have an attractive woman making out with other women.

I like it when people here will admit to reading Trek novels. I mean, we're all understood to be nerds, but it seems like there's tacit agreement that READING is taking it too far. But I read a ton of those things when I was a kid, and have fond memories of many of them. Probably I'd think they were terrible, now, but…

Fantastic, I like the way the repetition was handled, too. But Frakes directed it, and I think we have to give him the credit rather than Braga.

I hate to say it, but I agree. I want it to be a believable romance, the way Zack sees it, but I just can't get there. I like Riker. Riker's a good guy. But we have ample evidence of his taste in women, and "androgynous" just isn't it.

Elim Garak COULD have been gay. Andrew Robinson deliberately played him that way in his first appearance — watch him flirt with Bashir. But my understanding is that the producers flipped out and made it stop. It's still very easy to read the character as bisexual, though, even if it never comes up again.