[ SECRET POST #2395 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2395 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


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02.
[The Most Popular Girls in School]


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03.
[Welcome to Night Vale]


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04.
[Gerard Way and Frank Iero]


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05.
[Mastumoto Jun]


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06.
[Macdonald Hall]


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07.
[Downton Abbey]


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08.
[Generator Rex]


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09.
[Neil Oliver]


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10.
[Star Trek]


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11.
[Star Trek: TNG]


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12.
[The Vampire Diaries]













Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 025 secrets from Secret Submission Post #342.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[riddian]

Well that's kind of sad to me, since I adore Pulaski... and Wesley. And I tolerate Neelix. /different

[(Anonymous)]

I really want to adore Pulaski, because she's awesome in SO many ways and is totally the type of character I'd usually love and I want to ship her with Worf and she's interesting and unique and sassy and drinks beer for breakfast. But whenever I remember the scenes where she belittles Data for no good reason except to feed her own superiority over him I get too mad to love her.

If she'd just gotten properly smacked down for it once, I'd have been able to lay that issue to rest and love her in peace, because while I don't mind a character behaving like an asshole, I just can't abide a bully who goes unconfronted.

/also likes Wesley and kinda likes Neelix

[(Anonymous)]

I think the writers were trying to write Pulaski as "thinks of Data as a fascinating machine, no more, no less", but it came off as insistent bullying -- after all, we as viewers already had a season to see and think of Data as much more! There's also a lost opportunity in not having her re-examine that belief in the ep where Data's autonomy from Starfleet is challenged.

There's a late-season ep, though, where I think she's written with a more palatable attitude towards him that could have developed into something interesting if she had stayed on for another season. It's the one where she pretty much pushes Data into playing a strategy game against an extremely skilled and arrogant visiting alien tactician. Data loses and ends up losing confidence in his decision-making, and while Pulaski is upset that a "computer" lost, she later chides him for having a bruised ego and then apologizes for manipulating him -- both attributing a high level of sentience and autonomy that she probably wouldn't have in the first half of the season. She also argues to Picard (who is in disbelief that Data can lose confidence) that the loss of confidence is the same, whether it's through human emotions or android algorithms, which I think is kind of huge for her character without sacrificing her central belief.

But yeah, I can't really watch her early interactions with Data without getting all "MAYBE YOU'RE THE HEARTLESS CLOCKWORK ;_;"

[riddian]

Ah, that's totally understandable! That bothered me too, but it didn't strike me as bullying or trying to seem superior. I think it's more that that's the prevailing attitude in the rest of Starfleet about Data and machines in general. He is very much the exception, so of course people would have some trouble believing that he is truly sentient, which is demonstrated a couple of times from other people.

While it's kind of an ignorant and jerky opinion, she seems to be the least assholish person to ever hold it, and to me it helped a great deal that she seemed to have changed her mind about it by the end of the episode. (Was it just me or was she totes infatuated with Moriarty? I feel like they implied some kind of romantic connection there, but I'm not terribly good at spotting these things. Either way, I think Moriarty completely convinced her that artificial lifeforms can be sentient.) An apology or something would have been nice though.

I agree with anon below, the writers totally missed a trick by not having Pulaski have some role in "The Measure Of A Man." That would have been so cool and satisfying.

Do tell me more about shipping her with Worf. I am... intrigued.

[(Anonymous)]

TOS fan here. Diana Muldaur IMO can do no wrong, so, yep I loved Pulaski from the get-go. Fandom never (that I saw) got on the "discriminating against Data" bandwagon for her, back in the day; didn't she stick up for him at the trial where Commander Maddox wanted to disassemble Data to his component parts to reverse-engineer him?

[(Anonymous)]

She unfortunately didn't get a chance to figure prominently in that ep (probably time constraints, or they didn't want to distract from the central conflict), which is a shame -- if she had done what you said, that would represent great character development and would take the sting out of her earlier interactions with him because we could have seen her explicitly noting her changed her attitude.

She did improve her attitude a lot (for example, her behavior towards Data in Peak Performance, the second-last episode of the season, was a big change from her first impression), but it's just frustrating that no one ever actually confronted her and she never got to outright take back her initial attitude, because that would have stuck out in people's minds a lot better -- enough to counteract something that sticks in the mind as much as "it does know how to do these things, doesn't it?"