Icon from a picrew by grgikau. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
Which U.S.S. Enterprise sickbay would you rather visit?
The TOS Enterprise sickbay complex is way bigger than what we saw on TV, which consisted if J, H, D and F on the floorplan above. Not bad at all, but if a crew of 430 get sick all at once, they’d be overwhelmed.
The classic movie Enterprise sickbay section is literally what we saw in movies I and II. Tiny for a crew of 500, a space plague or something and crewmembers will be left dying in the corridors.
The Next Gen Enterprise sickbay is huge, with the ward and office we see on TV taking up only the bottom left. Special quarentine wards for space diseases, and a hospital ward. Still for a crew of 1,012 I wouldn’t want to be caught in an outbreak of lungworms. In TV episodes they talk about converting cargo bays to wards in time of need, so at least they have backup plans. Gotta be the winner.
SOURCES:
The Star Fleet Technical Manual (Franz Joseph, 1975)
Mr. Scott’s Guide to the Enterprise (Lora Johnson, 1987)
Star Trek: The Next Generation Officer’s Manual (FASA, 1988)
Strange New Worlds be like,
We’ll fit everyone just fine in our massive, multistory sickbay😎
Watched TNG: Birthright: Part 1 (Because I need to see one of my DS9 faves with my two TNG faves).
Geordi gets some food from the Replimat, and is all “Eww… I have to talk to Chief O’Brien about these replicators. This is gross.” Geordi, he’s only been here a few months, give your bro some time to fix everything. He’s doing his best xD You’re lucky there’s even pasta al furella at all.
Julian, oh Julian… He decides to sneak aboard the Enterprise, with an unknown piece of Gamma Quadrant tech, sneak into the medbay lab, and run experiments on it, without asking any permission. My man, what if you had fucked up the Enterprise doing that? It’s a good thing Data found you when he did.
Julian, I see you holding Data’s hand with both of yours way longer than needed for a handshake.
Data, upon finding Julian, doesn’t report him or anything, just is like
“Yeah, I’ll help with your experiment. In fact, let me rope in Geordi,
he’d love to help, too.”
Julian being adorable trying to work and failing to not be distracted by Data. The *grabs wrist* “You have a pulse!” move was smooth.
That tender way Geordi moves Data’s hand away when he wakes up.
Julian just staring intensely and anxiously through the window as Geordi checks Data over.
Julian, within maybe a couple hours of meeting Data, is like “You’re so much more Human than you give yourself credit for.” <3
I don’t know why, but there’s something I like about Julian being a little taller than Data. It’s cute somehow.
“Thank you, Data. And sweet dreams.” They’re so cute.
Julian’s experiment accidentally gives Data the ability to have dreams, and I think that’s beautiful.
(Data totally showed Julian his paintings before he left).
Why couldn’t we have more of these three in Birthright Part 2?
tng: we accidentally made a hologram self-aware. he tried to destroy the ship and we had to build a tiny holodeck to trick him into believing he was a real person
ds9: vic fontaine knows hes a hologram and is Completely Fine with it. He mostly uses that knowledge to help officers get laid
Star Trek: The Next Generation 2.09 | The Measure of a Man
I feel like old-school trek had a lot of jank that was just the result of budget issues for a tv show like this or special effects of the time or maybe differences in how acting was done on tv back then but I think without a doubt one of the greatest things TNG accomplished was the way Data made you FEEL because the combination of all of the things that led to how the show was produced and presented essentially left us with a human guy in some make-up like literally the rest of the entire cast, be they human or alien characters they were almost always just a person in some make-up unless they were a CG energy being or something.
So here we’ve got Data who is played by a human pretending to be a robot, but the fact that his character is a robot learning to be human sort of flips the suspension of disbelief issues behind the fact that a man can’t PERFECTLY play a robot because there WILL be emotion in the performance and there WILL be little micromovements that androids wouldn’t need to make because at the end of the day the ACTOR is human.
And so we get these moments like this episode where you almost forgot Data WASN’T a human being until someone started treating him like a machine and you’re like “OH FUCK NO YOU DON’T, YOU’LL HAVE TO TAKE HIM FROM MY CORPSE YOU RAT” and the rest of the characters do the same!
It’s genius, really because what most people probably see as a limitation of the show, to have to just slap some make-up on a guy and call him an android and have him try his best against human nature to give a performance that feels like a machine instead of a person as opposed to using some filmmaking tricks to make him feel more still and rigid or giving him a computerized voice or something, actually ends up being so damn compelling because of the choice to make his character aim to be more human, and it leaves this sort of ambiguity where the text is like “no, Data doesn’t feel… or does he?” and you’re like “FUCK YEAH HE FEELS LOOK AT HIM I WOULD DIE FOR DATA”
Data is without a doubt my favourite character in all of Star Trek because of this. For as many limitations as a production like this has on how you could do something as difficult as having a human portray an android convincingly, the writing makes it work and allowed Brent Spiner to KILL this role. This episode is a great example of how this concept can make the entire cast AND AUDIENCE get legitimately emotional over Data. This whole episode is still one of the most emotionally compelling episodes of a tv show I’ve seen in a while, and people would dismiss it as having come from a cheesy sci-fi show full of technobabble and actors shuffling around to pretend their space ship got hit by something.
It’s the kind of show people would accuse of being mere spectacle and nonsense, that it’s so unrealistic it couldn’t possibly have emotional depth, and then episodes like this come around and kick you in the teeth.
