I’m always bugged more by individual moments than bigger things. So while T’Pol might be wearing an old fun center carpet as a uniform, and the temporal Cold War is both overly complex and excruciatingly boring neither of those things bothers me more than the following.

In season one, there is an episode titled ‘Unexpected’. In this episode Tripp becomes space pregnant from an alien space mama. During his pregnancy he is framed as becoming irrationally overconcerned about the safety of very minor or unlikely hazards.

At one point, he is in engineering and complains that if you hold onto the handrail of the elevator while it moves, your fingers will be sliced off against the scaffolding since there is no gap.

A crew member brushes him off by just saying, essentially, “Lol skill issue, just don’t hold the handguard.”

Again, Tripp is the one being framed as irrational in this discussion. Because he has a problem with a handguard that slices your fingers off.

Space hormones or not, he’s right that it’s a terrible design.

  • Rekliner
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    1 year ago

    Robert Picardo directed a lot of those episodes, so I’m sure he could have written in that recognition…but preferred the tension of having talent and ability mixed with a personality that made him unbearable. His character recognized this at times but never really grew. One of the better jokes was that all the other EMRs of him were so toxic that they were decommissioned as doctors and put to work piloting garbage transports.