Unpopular opinion, but I liked Pulaski. She didn't put up with bullshit, but she was also one of the only characters to actually have legitimate growth over the course of their time on the show, going from not respecting Data's sovereignty as a person to understanding why he was one.
And she was Star Trek alum. The only regular on TNG that had also been on the Original Series.
Pulaski was indeed good. But Crusher was better. Especially the v1.5 character that came back to the show. Full Commander, command experience, clever as fuck (solving actual murders and conspiracies), not being a doe-eyed soccer mom all the time.
Apart from the infamous candle fucking, her episodes are among the best of the series.
My conrade in Starfleet, this woman gonna bring spirits onto your ship if she can't get the Captain's attention.. She is a liability on any space vessel.
Well... it was a ghost inside a candle... that was actually an alien... that looked like a guy out of a romance novel... that also fucked her grandmother... but always as a glowing cloud of gas instead of the handsome guy... on Planet Scotland...
I have always hated that episode but you kind of have to respect how far the writers took it. Like one of those things you listed would be an episode. They shoved them all into one episode and still had a B plot that was commitment.
+1 for Pulaski being a good chief medical officer. Personally, I would prefer her to Crusher, were I staffing a ship. (Nothing wrong with Crusher, I just like the cut of Pulaski's jib a little more.)
Edit: note that in real life McFadden strikes me as an absolute badass in a way they never let her character be.
No nonsense and you dont have to worry about the captain porking the chief medical officer. But then again, romance between the Captain and chief medical officer is a proud Enterprise tradition.
And that was really my gripe. She was basically just genderbent McCoy. At least to start. They did enough with her character that she was more than that by the end, but using that as a starting point just rubbed me the wrong way.
Yeah but most of the characters on TNG started out as two dimensional caricatures of what they actually became. I don't think the Pulaski character is any more deserving of criticism than early Picard or Riker or, heck, Data himself (who I'd argue started off as Albino Spock).
Holy crap, originalucifer, I understood that reference. Muldaur's character Roz Shays was killed off in LA Law that way...by inadvertently walking into an empty elevator shaft! The character was prickly and not well-liked, but it was shocking AF because it was in the middle of a scene and came out of nowhere. Shit, I haven't thought about that for a while.