Month: February 2010

Wheee, all the way back to the beginning. Why this one now? Because it was first shown on television on 4 October 1988, a month or so before the start of Season 2 of TNG. It had been around in other forms before then, but I’m going to go with TV release dates. For those…

This show was honestly pretty lucky to get a second year. There are some good moments. But not nearly enough. There’s really only one truly great episode (“The Big Goodbye”), and a an awful lot of just plain bad episodes. Some of the episodes are up there with the very worst ever. The blame for…

From the title I was expecting a nice tense Romulan-centric episode, something like *Balance of Terror* back in the original series. Instead we get borderline-slapstick fun with the unfrozen humans, clearly meant to underline just how incredibly advanced and awesome the Federation is. I wouldn’t have been a fan of this kind of thing even…

Babylon 5 ruined this episode for me. You see, before Babylon 5 the idea of having a vast conspiracy just come up and be resolved in one episode was the norm. Babylon 5 started to do this kind of plot over whole seasons, which added to the impact. For instance, in a more modern era…

A fairly interesting episode that’s slowed down by writing that doesn’t quite reach as far as its grasp, but manages to avoid mediocre or terrible. As a result it’s better than almost anything else in this season (yeah, faint praise I know). It doesn’t actually rise to the level of ‘good’ – Picard’s relationship with…

A giant oil slick kills the security officer of the Enterprise. The episode mainly fails simply because the alien looks so ridiculous you cannot take it seriously. Really, it’s just a giant pool of black liquid. It’s hard to believe it as a significant threat to the Enterprise. Fundamentally there’s the potential for something nice…

Star Trek visits the always exciting world of pharmaceutical companies and contract disputes. And the politics are as always very subtle – why, no one has ever compared pharmaceutical companies to drug dealers before. The entire plot rests on the assumption that the planet is completely full of idiots. No one who has ever tried…

For a moment I thought everyone was going to get over the case of the stupids they’ve been experiencing since the start of season one. They pick up the fake Starfleet officer very quickly. But then Captain Picard falls in a hole. Oh, and then despite the fact that they’re within fifteen seconds run of…

Worf gets an episode at last. I think the only real failing here is that it’s hard to appreciate any kind of deep cultural struggle wihin Worf because he hasn’t mentioned a single thing about being a Klingon to this point. To an extent that’s admirable – he just fits in with the rest of…

I have to assume that the competitive selection for Starfleet Academy is a new thing. Because otherwise we wouldn’t have seen the stupidity levels from the crew we have so far. On paper, this would seem to be the dullest episode ever: Wesley takes a test, Picard has an inspection. To make things even duller,…