Riker is ultimately one of the best possible examples of a character who doesn’t make sense from a Watsonian point of view because he was used for Doylist purposes. Realistically, Riker should have either left for his own command or taken command of the Enterprise if they’d ended up going with killing Picard in the Borg arc. Instead, he stays on the show in his same job because he’s a well-acted, charismatic fan-favorite who’s also a military administrator with no technical specialty: in other words, he’s the ideal audience-insert character to ask people like Geordi or Beverly to explain a complicated concept so they can have expository dialog for our benefit. For those who know Stargate SG-1, he’s strikingly similar to Jack O’Neill, whose most common script function is to say “uh, can you try that again in English?” in conversations about archaeology or theoretical physics.

That said, they did do a decent job working with that in-universe. There’s actually something compelling with having Riker’s story arc play with the idea that sometimes a person can grow to regret their own ambition, discovering instead that they can actually grow more by putting down roots for a while than they would have by doing the most that they could. But it doesn’t really work in the long run, and there’s a reason he was always depicted as a Captain in every glimpse of the future.

https://smoothest.ytmnd.com/

Can any helpful kbin users tell me the usernames of everyone who downvoted this? It would be nice to add them to my block list.

Did you use your AI to generate some stigmata on your body too? Get over yourself.

Lactose intolerance is a skill issue, 75% of Americans need to lock in

197 mentioned

I don’t know, I think I’d rather they beat a chld than throw them into a shredder.

Speedrunning an established legal precedent for nonvoluntary eugenics in the process

You’re singlehandedly undoing years of hard-won progress by those who argued we should stop beating schoolchildren.

I don’t even sexually abuse your mom, even though she blows up my phone begging me to. You can stop following me around now, take your crashout and handle it with stoic silence befitting a le epic atheist sci[ent]ist

Yeah whatever dude, more like fellatio basis

Perfect username for your grasp on theology

That’s idiodic, shut up nerd

Big dog that is straight up untrue, I was there when it launched and it was nothing but nakedly transparent ad reads. Hobbyist journalism is all captive PR

Emotion and empathy are core and required components of sapience in addition to intelligence, in the same way that eggs and sugar are necessary components of cake; no amount of sophistication will render a cake from just flour. An entity that doesn’t have emotion and empathy is too primitive and limited to be sapient regardless of its computational power because it lacks fundamental building blocks of awareness.

Before you try to get out in front of me with this: I’m fully aware that there are human beings with no empathy or emotion. I will not elaborate and I am taking no questions.

Uh oh! Somebody get this cat 50 CCs of SOURCE before they go into SOURCE WITHDRAWAL

Get your corny ass off the computer and go do something real.

Ironically, you’re proving my point in asking this question.

I’m unaware of these, but I’ll take you at your word

You got lost in the sauce because your critical thinking skills are already eroding. The LLM brainlet effect is real, the neurodegeneration has already set in.

that’s which the series will end with “To Kung Fu, Thanks for Everything! Neo”

Proto-Yelp