Repost from Risa@startrek
As a millennial, the Trek VS Wars debates always confused me. Star Trek is philosophy and political science class in a scifi, flavor of the week format. And Star Wars is fantasy in a science fiction setting. Why can’t we all just love them for what they are?
Here we see Deeana Troi poking fun at how quickly a couple retcons about family and the force sort of ruin the first half of a New Hope. If Luke could call out to Leia at the end of ESB then how did Vader not know here?
Troi legit sucks at her job. Most scenes of her in a therapy session usually amount to “I dunno eat chocolate about it maybe”
Meanwhile down in Ten Forward, Guinan would be asking questions that get to the heart of the issue.
I’ll be the first one to say I actually love Marina Sirtis, but let’s be real the writers did her dirty.
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I have literally never heard anyone say Troi was a bad empath. She can single out someone’s emotions from multiple kilometers away without any prior interaction.
Also imagine how terrifying an empathetic Vader would be no need to torture people, just ask them questions to get your answers, even if they lie you can see through it.
She is a poorly written character whose powers are frequently ignored or forgotten by scripts. It’s established that she can sense emotions, intent, honesty, deception, danger, and so on. Yet, even after establishing this, a conman can lie to her face and she won’t notice. She can be surrounded by people who are preparing pull weapons and take the crew hostage, and she doesn’t sense a thing.
Yeah, for some reason she can sense emotions through the viewscreen despite the person on the other end being lightyears away. But even then, her role is mostly to state the obvious, letting us know that the scowling guy who was been yelling at them is upset.
On a more fundamental level, her entire concept is at odds with the rules governing the show. It’s the enlightened future where people are more evolved and we aren’t allowed to have interpersonal conflict or psychological issues. To the point that they were forced to rewrite a script about a kid trying to cope with the death of his mother, because Gene insisted that in the future, people don’t grieve. And of course none of this was enforced consistently, but it did mean that they couldn’t focus too closely on the crew dealing with the kinds of issues that would actually require some kind of psychological help.
At the same time, they also gave a lot of the advice giving duties to Guinan, some of which goes way beyond the stuff a bartender should handle. They even gave Guinan mental powers to further the needed advice in one episode, which makes Troi that much more superfluous.
Part of the problem here has as a lot to do with pacing and expectations. Guinan, being a guest character, gets to pop into existence when someone needs to have their perspective altered with an anecdote or keen observation, possibly while they look miserable at a bar. And then, having prepared our heroes for the climax of the story, she exits the script with another tally in the win column.
Troi, whose official job is providing guidance and therapy, is going to be the first person you talk to when her skills are needed. So sessions with Troi tend to be early enough in the script that we can’t have them solving the problem. Therefore, her advice can’t actually work, so she either misreads the situation (looks bad for an empath), or she just gives very bad advice. For fuck sake, her response to being told “I think the only emotion I feel is anger, and killing gives me pleasure” was to suggest that the patient go explore these emotions on his own, without guidance or supervision.
What we’re left with is a character who mostly states the obvious, who forgets she’s psychic when it would actually matter, who is terrible at her job, and for bonus points, who spends most of the series in her pajamas when everyone else wears the damn uniform.
The closest Star Wars has come to Star Trek was in The Last Jedi when they came up with that stupid bullshit storyline about a hexamajigit door blocking them from disabling a hyperspeed whatchamacallit. They technobabbled their way into going to Casino World, that’s a very Star Trek thing to do, but otherwise, Star Wars is a fantasy world with sci-fi trappings.
Deanna Troi was a glorified HR rep who dressed very inappropriately for the job she was supposed to be doing.
And then the Super Hacker Cameo guy predictably betrays them and disappears forever, and the super important maguffin they needed him for wasn’t at all necessary, and the entire plot thread could have been cut from the movie without changing any of it.
Among all the bullshit I could call TLJ on, this is the most egregious.
It’s writing 101 that you cut what doesn’t serve a purpose, if you can remove an entire chunk of your story and nothing changes, then you wrote an unnecessary plot point and should rework the script to account for it and make the characters do something more useful, creative, or intelligent.
Lazy. Lazy-ass writing. That’s all that movie is.
Have you ever even thought about how much time it would have taken Finn to construct a stretcher and drag Rose? Forget the fact that they don’t shoot him for a second, this dude covers like five miles in an implied 3-5 minutes. Finn is a super soldier apparently.
It feels like they made the trailer in a total vacuum, and then had to write the movie around the scenes they’d already shot for the trailer. Working their way backwards to design the plot.
It felt like I was watching someone play with their action figures.
And then Finn is like racing at the AT-ATs, and it’s like “fvrrrrshooo” but then at the last second, Rose comes out of nowhere and is like “krshpoosh” and then is like “we have to protect love” or something.
How is her attire “very inappropriate”? Because it displays like 1" of cleavage?
No, because she’s in a military style organization where everyone else has to wear uniforms and for some reason she’s just excused from that for who knows why.
If Luke could call out to Leia at the end of ESB then how did Vader not know here?
That wasn’t related to their familial connection, though. Their familial connection wasn’t established until ROTJ.
I mean, you low key hit the nail on the head.
In Vader sucks at noticing obvious things because nothing was planned and everything got reconned as they went along. For forty-five years.
It’s absolutely shocking that the time-warped remnant of Vader can find his own face, let alone sense a force-sensitive daughter that wouldn’t exist for years and wouldn’t make sense for decades.
My point still stands. Did Vader not realize she was force sensitive? Luke was able to determine their relationship through the force in ROTJ
No, Luke was told by the ghost of Ben Kenobi.
OK good point.
Presumably she would have been taught to shield her force sensitivity? That’s not an uncommon thing to do in the SW universe.
If she was taught from birth/childhood, hiding it would be extremely natural.
(Ignoring that it was all retconning) I think force sensitivity wouldn’t necessarily be an indicator of anything. Force users can probably detect some amount of force sensitivity from others, in varying amounts. Most people are probably weak, with a few standouts here and there. But latent force sensitivity probably doesn’t set off any alarm bells the way a “trained” force sensitive would. So if he had detected she had any training, like I assume force users somehow “guard” themselves against others probing, that would’ve set him off and he’d realize, she’s hiding something. Also, given that this occurs literally right after the events in Rogue One, he was probably more focused on retrieving the Death Star plans.
Luke would’ve had a stronger connection to Leia than Vader would’ve, given that they’re twins, so he would’ve felt a stronger pull than Vader. Vader is the kind of Dad that probably would’ve forgotten his kid’s birthdays and social security numbers.
If I were writing the Star Wars movies with the benefit of hindsight, I would allude to the fact that Vader seems much more aggressive when dealing with Leia compared to other Rebels, like something about her Force aura is triggering to him.
To be fair to Vader, he has literally never met her. Nor does he even know she survived, Palpatine told him they died with Padme.
Unless they effed that up in Kenobi, didn’t watch that yet.
IIRC Kenobi didn’t mention Leia. Paps and the people hiding the kids had the same aim. To prevent Vader from knowing his kids existed. Obviously for different reasons.
Obi-wan and Quigon Jin (spelling) were able to detect Anakin’s force ability just by being near him. Supposedly Leah’s ability is even stronger than Luke’s. So how does Vader not detect anything?
I’m not sure if I remember this correctly, but Qui-Gon only starts suspencting Anakin’s Force sensitivity after learning about him racing pods, which is usually beyond human capabilities.
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Different instance
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Bullshit excuses
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