Sisko is who I would most rather be friends with, and the most human. But Picard is the best Captain, as a professional.

Good points. I almost feel like the writers felt like she needed to be professional all the time because she was a woman. She couldn’t be seen as being too soft, and given the Delta Quadrant situation they figured having her make a lot of moral compromises was the best way to offset that. Unfairly, that made people…

I agree with all of this.

Agreed — and I would go one step further, that Janeway’s lack of personality outside of Being the Captain was the big issue with Voyager: that it failed to delve fully into the whirlwind of emotions that might arise from the premise of the series.

I blame this on Enterprise (and a lot of the sexytime in TNG/VOY) to Rick Berman. Clearly the pushback from Ira Steven Behr kept his hands off DS9, which I feel led to a better characterization in later seasons.

Remember that episode of Voyager when that discount Vulcan went through Pon Farr and tried to fuck Torres? In the process he mind melded with her, and gave her Pon Farr and she tried to rape Paris? Then Tuvok had the bright idea of having the Vulcan fuck a hologram on the holodeck.

Enterprise’s problems are way more complicated than just the “boys’ club.” I’m not disagreeing with anything you said, just trying to illustrate that Enterprise failed because of a confluence of different events.

Here’s my take on Kes. She didn’t start out as the sex object but the writers sexualized her by making her sole character trait “Neelix’s girl.

The problem that Crusher had, which is one that’s kinda shared by all of Star Trek’s doctors, is that their role in the episodes is almost always “be a doctor”, which isn’t something that gives a lot of prominent screentime.

Up to that point in the canon, they didn’t. It was something Vulcan males went through.

Exactly. Pulaski was considered an asshole because she acted like an asshole all the time. Had nothing to do with gender.

But Crusher challenged Picard ALL the time. She just wasn’t an abrasive ass like Pulaski usually was about it. 

I agree on Crusher. Far be it from me to question Mcfadden’s own impressions, and I get that you could argue it’s a “nurturing” role, but I always really liked and looked up to Dr Crusher. She always seemed very authoritative and respected, and I loved episodes like Descent Part 2 where she is in command and Remember…

You’re . . . not entirely wrong. But you’re also not right. Pulaski did not go down well with the audience, but in this case, it wasn’t her gender which made her so grating. It was that she bullied Data, who was essentially the audience favorite character. And it’s actually worse by contemporary standards, because the…

Yeah, the one addendum in the case of Kes is that we actually know for certain that Jennifer Lien wasn’t initially supposed to leave the cast. It was Garrett Wang, whose character Harry Kim the writing team effectively “couldn’t figure out”. But what saved Garrett was that People Magazine named him one of the 50…

I’d say they did a good job giving the other captains an off-duty persona.

The sad thing is that the massage therapy stuff was at least in service of giving her and Trip an actual goddamn character arc, instead of her being basically the Shrewish Sitcom Mom that tells all of the excited manchildren around her to do things properly. That fucking characterization, can go die in a fire, it was…

Great write-up. Roddenberry was a product of his time and though his vision gifted something of wonder to the world, he was messy in its execution. I think on TOS, he wanted to be progressive but had to swim upstream a lot, which is why we went from the intelligent, cool-nerved Number One to all the women wearing…

It really is a fascinating situation because... well, yeah, Star Trek on this subject is often a “it was often not-good-to-bad, but it was still better than most of the contemporaries” situation.

Enterprise erasure!!!