Month: April 2010

Star Trek meets Rashomon. The fundamental plot idea here is a good one – sifting through different points of view to work out who is guilty of a crime. But it falters on a few false elements. Firstly, the points of view are a little too diverged to make it feel like everyone was honestly…

Star Trek tends to overuse the ‘what does it mean to be human’ theme. While personally I find being human quite nice, it doesn’t seem like it should have to be the be-all and end-all of existence. This episode subverted that theme nicely with a reduced-to-mortality Q basically finding that he doesn’t care for being…

From the Vietnam analogies straight into the Northern Ireland analogies. It’s no surprise that this episode was banned in the UK for a very long time. The episode falters along in places – the drivers of the conflict are a bit murky, and the ending is probably a bit too ambiguous. But the good news…

This episode would have been better had it been a little subtler. As it was, they might have just used a great big neon sign saying ‘bad guy’ around the prime minister. There was never any suggestion that the point of view of the government might be valid, and as a result the episode was…

The Romulans do get the short end of the stick. Here they are, being an effective, menacing enemy, but from the point of view of 2010 we know they’re just a prelude to the main act of the Borg. Not much else to say about this one – just another generic excellent episode. Star Trek…

Star Trek: CSI. Seriously: this episode has DNA tests, mysterious deaths, super-human databases with all the information that’s convenient to the plot, and even photo enhancement that puts in things missing from the original photo. And all this 11 years before the first episode of CSI. Still, the reason that there are three CSI TV…

This was looking like a nice little episode, but then the Ferengi turned up and stunk the place up. The romance between Troi and the negotiator was a little abrupt for my tastes, but it at least felt real. For a while I was wondering if there was some kind of devious mind control going…

Geordi gets himself trapped down on a planet with a Romulan. The main weakness of the episode is all the setup they have to go through in order to disable the communicators and the transporters. One of the problems with a show around as long as Star Trek is that you end up with a…