Month: April 2010

Groundhog day with explosions. What’s not to love? This episode could easily sound very dull on paper – after all, it consists of the same sequence of scenes four of five times, with only fairly minor changes along the way. But the direction and acting is flawless, and the writing is pretty good too. Easily…

Oh dear, another thinly veiled allegory episode. This time it’s homosexuality. The veil is awfully thin (‘I was born like this’), and the relationship between Riker and the J’naii just isn’t believable. Riker hasn’t shown himself to fall in love at the drop of a hat like this. The action is tedious, the outrage synthetic,…

Million Dollar Klingon (with a happier ending). The plot is fatally undermined by the fact that we know, for certain, that Worf is going to be alive and back to normal by the end of the episode. That takes all of the emotional punch out of the ethical debates about suicide and experimental medical techniques.…

There are quite a few people around who dislike particular characters in this show. The top three would pretty clearly be Lwaxana Troi, Wesley Crusher and Deanna Troi. This epsode shows, for at least one of the three, that the problem is more in the writing than the actress. Marina Sirtis manages quite a clever…

Probably the best use of the amnesia plot device I’ve ever seen. There are a lot of great fun moments in the episode: Worf assuming (literally) command, Riker and Ro hooking up, Picard when he thinks he’s not in charge. But there’s also a great ‘WTF’ with MacDuff hanging around the bridge, and a clever…

The Enterprise destroys the perfect society. Oh well, it’s OK – the Prime Directive didn’t apply, they were human. The nice change of pace here was that they avoided the society having some ‘dark secret’ or any other motivation that would make people feel better about destroying the situation. But the only representative we have…

Interesting idea, slightly shaky and ponderous execution. The main problem I had was that the ‘mind rape’ sequences weren’t frequent enough, or disturbing enough. While they were unpleasant, they didn’t quite convey the full horror of what was supposed to be happening. I think this might have been an important episode for me: throughout my…

You know what would be a good palate cleanser after a kid heavy episode last time? A good action heavy episode. You know what wouldn’t be (at least on paper)? An episode where a small child starts to emulate Data. The similarities between the two episodes are pretty significant, but this ends up being a…

Worf has a sullen child. Yeah, that’s going to go well. A sole parent dealing with their child’s abandonment issues is not exactly the stuff of great Star Trek episodes. Great Gilmore Girls episodes, sure. While it picked up in the back half, it’s still just not very interesting. Star Trek is about strange new…

The final voyage of the original crew. I think this is probably my favourite of the original Star Trek movies. Star Trek IV is probably better as a pure movie, but as a piece of pure Star Trek I think this has the edge. The movie has a nice feeling of closure for the original…