Month: April 2010

Not a great start to the new season – not bad, just missed the mark with me. We spend an awful lot of time with Sam Clemens – which is a bit anticlimactic, because the dramatic conventions of this type of story mean we know he’ll be on the side of the good guys by…

The season was chronologically split by the final movie of the original crew, making this a real season of two halves. Prior to *The Undiscovered Country* the episodes veered between poor (*The Game*) and great (*Darmok*). In the second half, the standard deviation increases: from absolutely awful (*Cost of Living*) through to truly superb (*The…

Silly Data. You’re meant to leave your *heart* in San Francisco, not your *head*. Much like *Unification* this episode suffers a bit from the prologue problem – not as badly as Unification, as at least this doesn’t feel too much like padding. But it’s hard to judge, as it feels like only half a story…

Simple. Affecting. Beautiful. Perfect. 233 down, 504 to go.

G-g-g-g-g-ghost Bajoran! Telling a good Star Trek story is about balancing the philosophical with the plot action. We want to see a good SF idea explored, but also want to have a bit of action to move things on. Here, the action overwhelms the idea. It could have been an interesting clash between Ro’s idea…

Poor old Picard. The war crimes become a lot harder when the kids give your prisoner a name. This is a nice story, and it’s very interesting to see Picard and Guinan be the ones who are resistant to logic, rather than the other way around. I did feel that everyone was won over by…

There has been a strange fascination with children in the episodes of this season. Previous seasons have talked about the Enterprise being a family ship, but only this season has really done much with it. I suppose it’s part of the design of the show, but it’s very rarely something I enjoy much. A big…

Ah, here are the Ferengi, just one week late. They don’t get much time to mess things up, at least. There’s a germ of a nice little unrequited love story here, with Picard trying hard to not fall in love with the perfect (and perfectly unavailable) woman. But it just doesn’t land, perhaps because we’re…

Yuck. Alexander *and* Lwaxana Troi? I presume the Ferengi got lost on the way to the ‘worst episode ever’ contest. Well, it’s not that bad. Even if the ‘colony of free thinkers’ did come dangerously close to the space hippies of *The Way to Eden*. It’s still in the worst 10 episodes of all time,…

Wesley’s back, and this time he’s in trouble. It’s another fairly slow, courtroom centred episode. But there are some fantastic scenes, particularly the two big confrontation scenes of Wesley with Picard and then with Locarno. For the first time Wesley is given a bit of real character development, and a bit of imperfection. It builds…