The Enterprise has a very strange time when monitoring a black hole.
OK, foreboding opening, everyone is passed out except T’Pol, the ship is doomed. What’s the next item on the cliche check list? Well, I guessed ‘8 hours earlier’, and it was actually ‘2 days earlier’. A stupid way of showing the episode that fundamentally did nothing more than ‘tonight, on Star Trek’.
The rest of the episode was not a lot better – slowly ratcheting up levels of obsession from all of the crew, until we’re supposed to notice that they’re out of control. If used to tell us about the character, fine. But most of the obsessions are pretty random, and where they aren’t (Reed’s security focus) they don’t get us any further than previous episodes. Really just a pretty uninteresting hour.
Callbacks: The secret origin of Red Alert. Plus the whole episode reeks of *The Naked Now* and *The Naked Time*, with the crew members out of control.
672 down, 65 to go.