Dr pulaski STNG

Bigwill1923

I think this character and actor gets a bad rep.

Yes gates McFadden should not have been fired but the actress playing doctor Pulaski was a better actress. More in your face.. Diane Muldur

I was always a bit frustrated with character development on STNG.

Dr Crusher hardly developed. The romance between her and Picard should not have taken 40 years to be fleshed out.

Was it not cruel to just dump Diane Muldur

Spear

She got screwed around basically, by fans and producers alike. Pulaski did have a proper arc and development in her relationship with Data, only to be fired afterwards. The less bright segments of the fandom were harsh to Muldaur, conflating here with the character, leading to her avoiding cons and the fandom ever since.

eadrom

100% agree. Doctor Crusher is the worst and least developed character in TNG, and that’s no shade towards Gates McFadden, she did fine I guess with what little was provided.

Pulaski wasn’t a particularly likeable character but at least she was a character. Her relationship with Data alone felt like more character building over 1 season than crusher had with 6.

I liked her and wish she was remembered a bit more in-universe.

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mewso

Really I thought the modern take was very positive on Pulaski. Everywhere I look I see talk of how good she was, better than Bev Crusher and so on. So much so I was expecting it to turn again soon so that the hipsters would scratch their beards and say no actually now I think Crusher was better.

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Greyjoy

My main problem with Pulaski is that she was essentially just a gender-swapped Dr McCoy. You can see that in how the writers tried to recreate the Bones/Spock pairing in her relationship with Data. Crusher would rank very low in my favourite TNG crew but at least she was her own character and not a copy of an earlier character.

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mewso

Indeed if you want to object to Pulaski being McCoy then why not object to Data being Spock.

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Inviere

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121380957#Comment_121380957

No doubt there, but even at that, it still made her far more interesting than Crusher.

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AMKC

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121382030#Comment_121382030

Data was not Spock do. Spock was at least half Human Data on the other hand is an emotionless Android at least untill he gets his emotion chip later on. If anything Data was more like Pinocchio than Spock.

Greyjoy

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121397616#Comment_121397616

Agreed. Spock & Data did share some similarities but their differences outnumbered that. Data wanted to become more "human" but Spock wanted to repress that side of himself. Pulaski on the other hand was such a carbon copy of McCoy that she even had McCoy's same fear of transporters.

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Stark

I think Pulaski could have been very interesting had she stuck around for season 3. One of those characters that's introduced as annoying and gruff but with lots of room for development.

Also I thought her relationship with Data was genuinely interesting. When we're introduced to Data, we're introduced to him through the eyes of people who've already worked with him and have come to the realisation that he's not just an automaton, that's there's sentience and a level of emotion of there (I know Data keeps saying throughout the show that he doesn't have emotions but I don't think that's true based on the depiction of the character, but that's for another thread). Whereas as we've seen from the likes of "Measure of a man" that's not how he's viewed by the wider Starfleet. Riker himself assumed Data's rank was some sort of honourary rank. The ship's computer is also highly advanced and intelligent but you don't see the ship's crew interact with it with the respect they'd give a human. Over the course of the season we do see that Pulaski comes to see Data the way we the audience and the rest of his colleagues see him.

mewso

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/121397616#Comment_121397616

Not sure where I said data was Spock. Read the post I was responding to.