Living up to his reputation

You can be brilliant in some ways while being useless or a POS in other ways.

Steve Jobs was an excellent salesman and marketer. He was an awful father and thought that a fruit-only diet would cure pancreatic cancer. Then, when he realised his curable cancer became incurable because of inaction, he jumped the organ donor queue (because apparently in the US money lets you do that), which not only didn't help him, but also likely killed someone else who it could've saved.

Richard Stallman is an excellent steward of open source software and user freedom in software, and he has been very prescient of the shit that would ultimately come from proprietary software. But he is also a major creep to women and a staunch defender of paedophilia and bestiality.

Someone I knew, before she passed away, was enormously selfless. Gave everything she had to others, fostered a lot of children who all grew up to be great people. Lived with almost no money because she preferred to spend it helping other people, was a big pusher of LGBT rights in the 80s and 90s, helped run a centre that helped HIV victims, never spoke up about the good she was doing because she preferred to keep it a secret... was (astounding to me) enormously racist.

People are complicated.

Berman wasn’t the one writing or directing, he was the executive producer. which means he also wasn’t producing, he was the one who signed off on other people’s work. Read: he vetoed a lot of good ideas out of fear it would anger the studio. As progressive and intelligent as Star Trek was, he kept it from being so much better.

The writers and the lower producers did what they could. Sometimes sneaking around behind his back to make sure something was shown or said.

People contain multitudes.

Decent people can write stories about murderous characters who do not reflect their values.

Terrible people can write stories about decent people who do not reflect their values.

As an aside, perhaps that speaks to just how great Gene Rodenberry was to have created the show in the first place? Here's an awesome comic about him.

Because every time he changed an episode's script to "berman it up a little" he'd give himself a writers credit.

Let's invent a real agony booth and stick Rick Berman in it.

who's the other Rick thats a POS?

Sexist piece of shit who liked to step all over anyone he perceived as "beneath" him (everyone) and if you've ever thought to yourself "given the rest of the show, why would THAT be a thing? It feels gross and entire groups of people would feel marginalized by this" while watching it, it was probably a Berman Special. Like Seven's.... "uniform"...

Also from what I understand, racist. Like the ferengi.

Whoa whoa he dribbled a bit on his phone, he didn’t get struck by a hurricaine, Mr. Moneybags.

There's a frood!

The Mierdas Touch

This is a long watch, but this video explains how Harry Potter is essentially a story about the virtues of bland centrism, and shows that the breadcrumb trail to Rowling's bigotry was there all along. The scales fell from my eyes while listening to this.

continued Roddenberry's thing about putting women in skimpy outfits

No. Female officers wearing short dresses was requested by the women on set at the time, not by Roddenberry.

Initially men and women were going to wear the same uniforms, which was criticised by feminists.

Remember that at this time, women were rebelling against having to cover up their bodies for modesty sake. It was at around the time of "free the nipple" and women burning their bras. Short skirts and dresses were popular at the time because it's what women wanted to wear.

Women dressing "skimpy" on TOS was an act of female empowerment. Youre looking at this through a prudish 2024 lense and assuming seeing womens legs is down to sexism.

TOS was very progressive for the '60s, but TNG, VOY, and ENT were significantly less progressive for their time.

It'e also been a trend that's unfortunately carried over into the newer treks. They barely push the boundaries at all.

DS9 probably only got away with as much as they did because Voyager was commanding most of the attention at the time.

My issue with Berman isn't the occasional sexy, skimpy woman on screen. I don't mind that one bit.

No, my issue is with all the behind the scenes problems they were having with women. Gates McFadden was really disrespected, as just one example.

I mean, it seems pretty reasonable that he might have remembered the wrong episode, 30 years later

Amazing.

She's great, he's a dick.

Just that it wasn’t her last episode

Ceremoniously makes sense. You’re doing something you know is wrong so you play it up so no one will stop you, or they’ll be interrupting a grand gesture of sorts when they do so you can play the part of flustered surprise.

I think people, including Tasha, are forgetting that she's the one who chose to leave the show.