Month: March 2010

Another episode that dances around the subject of Holodeck porn. The reality of the 24th century would be that the computer’s memory would be stuffed with no end of it, but somehow all we ever see in the show is the kiss. A lot was done right in this episode: Picard’s fascination with the alien…

Welcome to Meh. Population: This episode. There’s nothing really that wrong with the writing or the acting of the episode. There are even some good moments, such as Wesley talking about his Father’s death. It’s just, at the end of the day, not a very interesting Star Trek story. Someone’s mother dies, and they has…

I know the moral of this episode was supposed to be ‘gosh, isn’t the Prime Directive wise’. But that wasn’t my interpretation. I’d suggest the opposite – the episode shows that the ‘cultural contamination’ is more a result of not controlling contact, not the contact itself. Anyway, leaving aside my Prime Directive problems, I was…

Ah, it’s the super-powerful alien again. Well, I suppose it had been quite a while, really (The Royale was the last, I think). The episode is a bit of a throw back to The Original Series in a lot of ways. It had echoes of *The Man Trap* and *Metamorphosis*, but also still had its…

So the Enterprise has every imaginable type of scientist on board, but not even a single ensign with a legal background? That seems short sighted.[^1] So we end up with the Enterprise command staff looking through the treaty text on their own, trying to find a loophole. Seems like a pretty bad idea to me.…

And on to Season 3. The ‘Wesley nearly destroys the ship’ thing was a nice change from the earlier ‘Wesley saves the day’, but it bugged me that no one ever seemed to mind that a dangerous experiment had gotten out of hand. Surely a stern talking to, at least, is called for in this…

Season 2 is a pretty polarised year. As opposed to Season 1, which was bad with the (very) occasional hint of good, Season 2 seemed to alternate between bad and good. There are some very dreadful shows (The Royale, Shades of Gray), and some of the very best of all time (Q Who, The Measure…

Everybody loves a clip show. OK, no they don’t. No one ever likes a clip show. This episode isn’t dreadful until it gets to the clip show bit – a bit by the numbers, but still not the worst thing ever put to film. The clip show itself is dreadful – poorly organised reminders of…

Sharing your episode title with the subject line of spam I’ve received recently isn’t a good start. Still, I thought this episode was very good up until the Ferengi turn up. That was enough to push the episode from ‘very good’ to ‘good’, but even the Ferengi weren’t as awful as previously here. Overall the…

Another strong episode, this time with Worf getting a girlfriend (and also a little bit of time in the big chair). Klingon culture struggles along – apparently Klingon mating rituals are largely based on 1980s romantic comedies, where the two main participants fight until they realise they’re in love. I was a little sad that…