#010 - Riker proceeds to chat up the computer for fifteen minutes

There’s a thing from the pilot episode of The Next Generation which, depending on how much of your time you’ve spent watching this show and how much of your brain you’ve dedicated to storing info gleaned thereby, you may or may not have ever known and if you did know may have forgotten, but it’s an important thing and so we’ll just pretend nobody remembers at all and go over it together:

Riker and Troi could originally converse telepathically. They just straight up have a conversation in the turbolift. This is because Troi is an empathic half-Betazoid and also because of…reasons? Also she and Will had totally boned in the past so there’s this soap operatic tension between the yearning of the two imzadi and the requirements of duty for them not to recommence with the whole Cardassian Mambo thing while serving together as senior officers of the Enterprise. Or something. Very soap opera.

But so yes: telepathic conversation between Riker and Troi. The show got rid of that after the pilot — after that scene, pretty much, if I remember right — and made Troi merely able to sense feelings and that was structurally speaking a good idea because how annoying would voiceover conversations be to incorporate into every single goddam episode. (And it meant they could play it for more effective laughs later on when Troi’s mom, a full-on Betazoid who could get her telepathy on even outside the confines of the Practically Non-Canon Pilot Quadrant, would visit the ship. And mentally molest Picard. WHO PROBABLY SECRETLY LOVED IT.)

But man think what it would have been like for Troi if that had stuck around. In the pilot, sure, they were lovers reunited for the first time in a while under complicated circumstances, there’s that romantic flush of meeting one another again and you remember all the good bits. But within three days, maybe a week tops, it’d all come back to her why she’d been avoiding him in the first place: non-stop, 24/7 psychic chat-ups and intrusive come-ons and the mental equivalent of “hey, look at my penis” pranks. Riker is basically Dennis Duffy from 30 Rock. You broke up with that guy for a reason, Deanna. Don’t be a sucker.