Month: February 2010

There was a germ of a good episode in here somewhere, but it kinda got lost somewhere in the fourth or fifth long, talky, scene. It’s great to be exploring brave new worlds, discovering strange and beautiful alien species. But honestly, could we spend a little bit less of the time in the conference room?…

Gene Roddenberry did have some great ideas. But kids and families on a starship? This is a warship in more danger week to week than the average Navy ship in our day. And it’s not like it takes a long time to get home – people jet around this corner of the galaxy pretty frequently.…

There was a while there when I didn’t think this episode would ever end. Egads it dragged on. And I’m still not really sure what the point was. Seeking youth is bad? Concealing things is bad? Arming terrorists is bad? Breaking the prime directive is bad? All we get through the episode is the crew…

Yay! TNG’s first self destruct sequence.[^1] This episode takes a while to get going, but the ‘slice of life’ thing is quite entertaining, and helps to draw the characters out. But once it gets going it really is fantastic. We haven’t really seen Riker and Picard working together like this before, and it’s great. The…

It was pretty subtle, so you may have missed the message of the episode: “sexism is bad”. When the B-plot about everyone on board the Enterprise getting the sniffles is the better half, it’s a pretty bad sign. But this episode is didactic, literal, sexist (even though it’s complaining about sexism). It’s a pretty strong…

There is nothing I hate more in TV than the idiot plot. You know the one, the plot that relies entirely and solely on the characters beings idiots and not doing something obvious. It annoys me in sitcoms, so it’s especially annoying when it happens in a supposedly ‘intelligent’ show such as Star Trek. The…

At long last, the inaugural Holodeck malfunction. The Holodeck is just such a magnificent concept though. Without the malfunctions it wouldn’t make for good television. But while watching the start of the episode I was struck by the idea of playing *Mass Effect 2* in a Holodeck, and that’s enough to make me want to…

Picard sums this one up perfectly in the last minute of the episode: “I was not amused”. Neither was I. Another obvious attempt at ‘the funny’ falls flat on its face. I’m sure that there are some who would find Lwaxana funny, but to me this just felt like a bad episodes of Desperate Starship…

The good episode of this performance is the Q versus Picard dynamic. Both actors do a fantastic job. But the writing is pretty clumsy, and undermines everything else in this episode. The long scene at the end of the episode, for instance, where Riker tries to provide gifts which are all turned down, just goes…