And the award for “Worst Explaining Away of Out of Character Stuff That Unfortunately the Whole Script is Based On” goes to… News Posted by John Hoare on 16th May 2005, 20:47 CAT: That ion storm has really done her head in, man.
It wouldn’t be *quite* so bad if it was actual dialogue within a scene, rather than what appears to be a last-minute voiceover during the edit.
Well, that’s interesting. Holly was portrayed as anything but senile in Queeg. But the Backwards opening text seems to indicate things have taken a turn for the worse. But I don’t think anything in the preceding episodes indicate anything like the fact that Holly has to bang her head against the wall in order to count. Sure, Parallel Universe indicates he has blind spots with numbers, but I always assumed he was taking the piss to worry the crew. I’m not sure Rob and Doug ever quite figured out whether Holly was senile or not. And I think the change in Holly added to the confusion. In fact, I think there’s something about this in an interview online somewhere – I’ll dig it out. But anyway – she’s a lot worse in White Hole than she ever had been before. Which indicates to me a quick line to fix stuff that is dodgily out-of-character. What stage it was added at (first draft? final edit?) I don’t know, though.
From http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Stargate/9566/gnint.html : TS: It seems that one character who’s been getting short shrift these last few seasons is Holly, whose part has been reduced substantially. ROB: Actually, the last thing we think about when the script is getting the final pass is to be sure that everybody gets a fair sharewe just never got around to doing that this time. It’s something we’ve thought about. We were thinking of doing one with a mirror where you go into a room and she’d be sitting there facing a camera. I don’t know if we’ll do that, but I certainly think we’ll be giving Holly a bigger part. DOUG: What did you think of the Norman Lovett version? TS: Norman was very funny, but he also had a lot more lines. You don’t have any five minute scenes with Craig and Hattie as you used to do with Norman, such as the joke about Lister’s tax bill, or even Queeg, which is essentially a Holly story. ROB: I think one of the problems is that when you’ve got Norman playing this computer, is he really dumb or is he really smart? When you’ve got the blonde there, she’s playing a dumb blonde computer, it suddenly changes to take on the character. TS: It’s all a problem you really haven’t tried to wrestle with. When you get to the point where you have to make some decision about it, you seem to say, “Let’s look at her next season,” and you put in the obligatory x-number of lines to give her something to do. ROB: Oh, you’re cruel! DOUG: Cruel but true. ROB: Kind of they did with Geordi LaForge in The Next Generation for three seasons!
