“You’re serious? He needs a therapist with him to keep his anger under control?”
“That’s what our intelligence suggests, captain. And there’s more… he was once involved in a bar fight with multiple Nausicans. He was stabbed through the heart, then laughed at them. Should I answer his hail?”
“Oh fuck.”
Now imagine Picard encountering a Cardassian captain with a counselor next to him… oh fuck…
That’s just Garak and his friend Garak
My only question is why Picard is the only captain to apparently have done it before or afterward (aside from Janeway in Prodigy, and keeping the kids under control during the secret mission would require special circumstances).
Aren’t you forgetting someone?
You are correct. I did forget him.
If you want to know the actual reason is that Roddenberry planned for his wife (Marjel Barrett) to be Number 1 in TOS and basically have the ship deeply dependent on her. The Studio canned the idea, and she was relegated to playing nurse Chapel.
So TNG was a chance to revive the idea with Counsellor Troi looking after the whole ship via her job, but this too was downgraded so she was just another character on the show rather than the center of the crew’s lives.
That doesn’t surprise me, but it does surprise me that all future Star Trek people (outside of Prodigy) treated it like it wasn’t standard, and yet no one ever really said anything about it beyond Jellico making her put on a real uniform.
Because the time frame that TNG takes place in. It was a peaceful era and the Galaxy Class ship was designed for prolonged exploration and ambassador missions. Due to the long periods in space the Federation designed the ship to accommodate families of the Starfleet officers. That’s also why the ship could separate, the battle bridge could go into combat while the civilians stayed behind in the saucer section. With these long voyages and family aboard they thought it was important to include mental health being an importance, so important that Troi was a bridge officer.
Voyager was a smaller ship made purely for scientific research and wasn’t supposed to be gone for so long. Also, after the discovery of the Borg, the Federation changed their ship designs to have more combat in mind.
Well, impaths were rare in the federation, and this one could sense things over extreme distances. Why any creature would need to evolve the ability to sense feelings from orbit, I have no idea.