Skin of Evil (S1 ep 23)

Hey everyone, it’s been a long week. Nothing bad happened. Just couldn’t post. I’d written so many of these episode reviews so far in advance that I didn’t think there was any way to have the posts catch up to me during the first season of the show.

Turns out, I can’t write these anywhere near fast enough. I may shake up the format a bit in the second season to see if I can give a review that is more conducive to me getting them out in a timely manner.

But we’re not at season two yet. So I’m trying to keep this up.

And good god, these recaps are getting harder and harder for me to do. It’s like, I can’t figure out why I bother. I’m sure no one reads these, and if they do, they surely skip the recaps. And if they were interested in a recap, they’d probably prefer to read them at mission alpha or somewhere else that gives impartial recounts of the episodes.

But, whatever.

In this episode the Enterprise is having their dilithium crystals reconfigured, rather dramatically, when the shuttlecraft that has Troi on board has a random disaster while in space. And I don’t mean they were hit by an asteroid or sabotaged by a bad guy. Nope. They were just flying along and the whole thing fell apart on them.

Yes, the flagship of Starfleet, less than a year out of space dock, where the crew use teleporters for almost everything, and I think I see why. They don’t have a shuttlecraft that can make a routine flight without it descending into chaos. Could you imagine what it would be like if airplanes just fell out of the sky about one out of ten flights? No one would fly. Ever.

Because I assumed the first time I saw this episode that Armus, the evil being we’re about to meet on the planet Troi crashes into, caused the accident, or at least influenced it. But after rewatching, I don’t think so. It just crashed on it’s own because a new shuttle on a new ship can’t be expected to work in the 24th century, I guess it’s another of those things that people just ‘sign up for’ when they join Starfleet. Who designed that shuttle? They should  be on trial. 

Jesus. The lack of respect of people’s lives is bizarre.

So, I’m not even a little bit sure about what I was talking about here. The shuttle crashed and at least the radio worked well enough to call the Enterprise for help. Of course, remember the drama of the routine dilithium crystal maintenance that is going on. So the Enterprise can’t get there until Lynch pushes a button. He does, but they can only go minimum warp, so Picard immediately orders the ship to Warp 8. Lynch protests, and Picard has them do it anyway.

Again, it’s weird because A) Warp 8 is not ‘minimal’ and B) nothing goes wrong, even a little bit. A perfectly normal shuttle however, it may just explode for no reason (now that I think of it, something about the shuttle craft incident in the episode where Wesley took his Starfleet entrance exams was weird too).

Seriously,  I’m so angry at the poor quality of this show. No one thinks about this stuff. Apparently. 

The ship goes into orbit of the planet where Troi crashed and the Enterprise quickly finds the wreckage.

What proceeds from there is the most bizarre 30 minutes of television history. I’ll try to summarize in one run-on sentence: Riker and away team beams down, an oil slick won’t let them get to the shuttle until an oil monster rises up and kills Tasha and tries to torment the crew with name-calling (Data is Tin Man!) and occasional pranks (stealing Geordi’s visor and moving it around so he can’t get it back or covering Riker in oil) until Picard shows up and acts smug until the oil alien gives up.

There, done. Also, the hologram of Yar has an excruciatingly long scene at the end where she says goodbye to the entire crew. It was uncomfortable for me to watch.

Some thoughts I had while watching:

• Yar’s exchange with Worf in the episode’s teaser is the best Yar moment of the entire series to date. 
• Shuttle had a total malfunction in space. I know it’s TV and stuff like that has to happen, but I just find the whole idea that this sort of stuff happens, and not commented on, disturbing. 
• Chief Engineer Lynch… Jesus. How many have their been so far? I honestly miss Argyle.
• When the oil monster first starts coming out of the slick it actually appears to be scary. 
• Once it’s actually out of the oil - not so much. 
• The Phasers they use, they seem to be poorly designed ergonomically. I mean, wouldn’t that seriously hurt your wrist if you were forced to use it that way for prolonged periods of time. 
• So, Yar died. The splotch on her face while they had her up in the medical bay looked weird. What was that supposed to be? Blood? A bruise?
• Wesley continues to rock that rainbow sweater
• I just realized that Armus - the evil oil alien - sounds just like the College Humor Batman. 
• So, there were aliens that, uh, took all their evil and poured it into some sort of conscious entity and then left. They really had to know an entity of pure evil - which has a great deal of power - would eventually cause trouble for someone. Seriously. That is really dumb.
• Troi is crying again. I’m not sure how many times she’s done it this season, maybe only a couple, but it feels like way too many. 
• Worf's rationale for staying on the Enterprise after Yar dies is really weird. I don't get it. 
• Armus rises dramatically out of the oil four times in this episode. That’s too many. Once was enough.
• The moral dilemma Armus tries to put the crew in would have played a bit better if someone, anyone, acted like they cared. Armus is like, ‘I’ll make the robot kill one of you, but you get to chose who it is’ and the crew are like, ‘we don’t care, whatever.’ Armus gets frustrated. Honestly, I do to. This isn’t how human beings conduct themselves, ever. 
• Data says Armus should be destroyed when analyzing him. I guess the ‘we believe in all life’ stuff isn’t really across the board. I know Armus is 100% evil, but it’s still surprising to see Data’s cold assessment. 
• Per Troi - Armus acknowledging his feelings makes him weak. Uh, what?
• Picard’s solution to Armus’ demands - seriously - is to moralize for a bit and then quote poetry. Is there any situation that moralizing and poetry doesn’t solve? 
• That Picard didn’t melt the face of the planet from orbit is possibly a criminal act. However, he mentioned that the shuttle where Armus had been keeping Troi a hostage in was destroyed, I’d like to think they destroyed it by slagging the entire hemisphere Armus was on into molten rock. So technically, they wouldn't be murdering Armus, they'd be destroying a shuttlecraft. If Armus happened to be on the planet at the time, well, oops. 
• Troi is crying again through Yar’s farewell speech to the crew from beyond the grave. 
• And speaking of Yar’s speech. It goes on for a very long time. It’s cornball in the extreme. 
• Data’s self-loathing at the end of Yar’s funeral is not as well done as I’d have liked. He’s an android that feels he missed the point of the funeral because he’s so darn focused on how sad he’s going to be. 

I’m of the personal opinion that this was an awful hour of television. Yar was killed off in an all but offhand manner (I know this is explored in a later episode quite well, but I’m only talking about this episode, not what may happen in the future) and the production values of the set is comically bad.

In all, this was hard to watch, and despite being a seminal moment of the series, the episode itself is poorly executed. It did have Yar’s best moment of season one, but it’s still an awful display of drama.

My rating?

1 out of 5

Symbiosis (S1 ep 22)

Oh boy - just when I’m starting to think we’re starting to turn a corner something like this comes along. Good god. What a mess.

Seriously, what a disaster.

But first, I’ve been continuing to figure out the muddy timeline of when, exactly, I watched Star Trek, The Next Generation for the first time. After really racking my brain over this, I’m pretty sure I never saw an episode before I moved into the new house we’d built. A house I didn’t move in to until the summer before my senior year in high school. I think.

I say, ‘I think’ because it’s a very fuzzy memory for me. I honestly don’t remember exactly when it was that I moved into the house. It’s possible that we moved when I was off in Texas visiting with my father (my real father, not the fake one I was living with most of the year).

Except, well, I’m not sure. I remember bits and pieces of that time. I remember waking up at a friends house, probably near noon, to a knock at the door. It was my mother telling me that my father was waiting for me at the airport, in TEXAS and I wasn’t there.

Turns out I had the dates wrong for when my trip was. So I shot out of there like a bullet, with my mom, threw some stuff in a bag and was at the airport in less than a couple of hours.

So strange, my dad just told the airline what happened and they moved me to another flight. They just did it. I’m not sure, but I seriously doubt they would do anything like that now. They’d just apologize and ask me to pay for another flight.

But then again, flying commercially before 9/11 was a radically different experience than it is today. Back in the 80’s it was about like taking a bus. If that.

But, my point, which I’m pretty sure I didn’t have when I started, is that that was the summer I moved into the new house, I think. I’ll be damned if I know. It’s just that I lived in the house when I worked at Taco Bell, but that was before I went to my father’s. So that isn’t right.

Wait. I worked as a construction worker on Saturdays before I worked at Taco Bell, and I lived at the new house then too.

Goddammit. I have no idea. It’s frustrating to me because trying to reconstruct a memory is a tricky thing. The mind really loves order, and it will create a narrative for me if I don’t remember the real one. So I’m trying my best to piece together things I know about that time frame and put it all together into one cohesive timeline that is actually accurate.

So I may not have even seen Encounter at Farpoint before ’89, which is two years after it actually premiered. I do remember something quite clearly about that time though. First, I remember reading about the premiere episode in the paper just before it came out. I recall because I was very excited about it. And second, I didn’t see any of TNG before I lived in the new house.

Which means either the my local station didn’t carry TNG until two years after it premiered, or that I’ve gone crazy. Seriously, I’ve been thinking about this a lot over the past month or two (since whenever I started this blog, I’m on the verge of having nightmares about it) and I just can't piece it together.

So, getting back to this particular episode. Yeah, it reeks of the worst kind of shit. The big problem, I believe, is that it isn’t really a metaphor for anything, it’s just a straight up drug addiction episode. How bad was it? Well.. Check this out -

>


- So, yeah, that’s an actual clip from the actual episode I watched, in its entirety. On purpose. For the sake of continuity with my other posts, I’ll try to do a recap anyway. Here goes:

Picard and the crew are really into watching these solar flares in this solar system. It’s dangerous, but they’ve never seen anything like it (weird, as it looks a whole lot like stock footage of solar flares as seen from earth, but whatever) when they get a distress call from a ship that’s in big trouble.

Picard and the gang try to help talk them through the repairs, but the crew aboard the alien vessel all seem a bit moronic. Or, to be specific, they sound like Chong from the old Cheech and Chong movies from the early 80’s - “Heeeyyyy maaaaannnnn. That’s not cool.”

After some frustration, they beam aboard a canister of stuff before finally getting the crew of the vessel aboard just as the alien craft explodes. Turns out that it isn’t Cheech or Chong, but the cast of Star Trek II. Which is really weird. I can understand the one dude (the dealer who played as one of Khan's genetically superior underlings in the movie) but not Kirk’s son, he was clearly noticeable as David Marcus, so I had to wonder, at first, how Kirk’s son ended up so far in his future as a drug addict.

But quite quickly I realized he was an alien, not Kirk’s son, mere coincidence. So, the crew of the Enterprise believe for much too long that they are dealing with morons instead of drug addicts. If that was supposed to be a plot twist it was the worst one in the history of storytelling.

Eventually, Picard and Crusher figure out what’s going on, then Picard trots out the Prime Directive as an excuse to just drop the people off and leave, he and Beverly argue a bit, Picard moralizes (good god, will he ever stop with that?) and eventually, it was might be a slightly clever, if very contrived, twist, Picard refuses to help the drug addicted aliens obtain any future supplies of their drugs through a technicality of the Prime Directive.

The end.

I’m sure that the writing staff eagerly awaited their Emmy for best dramatic series after that baby. Sigh.

Some thoughts on the episode:

• Tasha waved goodbye to the fans in one of the final scenes of the episode. I actually think that was pretty cool 
• Picard and his nonsensical Prime Directive talk. Seriously, considering he was already knee deep in with those aliens, I’m not sure how he can be so hands off while he’s in the middle of interfering with them anyway. 
• Wesley and Yar’s drug talk was difficult to watch. At least if I’m trying to take this show seriously. 
• Riker has gotten zapped by an alien two weeks in a row. Poor guy has become a punching bag for whatever happens to be going on. 
• Speaking of aliens with zappy powers, so, two races, from two different worlds in the same solar system, supposedly have evolved to look identical and have identical powers of zappiness and nobody thinks that's a bit weird. I only bring it up because Tasha said she'd like to know how zappy powers evolved. From there it's a black hole into how ridiculous the whole concept of these people even existing are. She really should have just kept her mouth shut about it.

So, in the end, I don’t know much about the behind the scenes with this, writing wise, like who wrote it, conceived it, or ok’d it. But I feel like I’m watching a 75 year-old man trying to connect with kids in a way that’s cool. Or something. It’s just 45 minutes of being preached at by something that’s supposed to be entertainment. It’s pretty hard to watch. I hated it.

My rating?

1 out of 5

Home Soil (S1 ep 18)

Back in the day, you know, when things were cool - and not lame like they are now – I was pretty big into TNG. I’ll go out on a limb and say my peak obsession with the franchise was probably around 1993. It was a pretty great time for me, I think. But here’s the thing. There were aspects of this otherwise perfect show that bothered me.

I think I’ve credited Star Trek novels for getting me into proper science-fiction literature and it was around this time that I first started picking up the books to read. And the books lead me into other areas because they explored the more science-fictional aspects of the show.

But what was on television, well, it always seemed like there was part of Star Trek that was more interested in reframing current events-related social issues and commenting on them (‘Hey, let’s not be so racist!’ Or, ‘hey, let’s not shoot each other over a disagreement, let’s talk about it instead’). 

But the thing is, I wanted to know why they could travel a thousand light-years, discover a previously unknown race of aliens, and no one think to question that it was weird that those aliens were clearly just a bunch of white dudes that dress slightly differently than the crew of the Enterprise did. I mean, that’s the sort of thing I’d be freaking out about. That isn’t to mention the weirdness in that almost any humanoid species could have children with any other, or that they can make each other sick (Thelosian-Flu? I’m not saying that’s unlikely, I’ll just point out that you and I aren’t at a great risk for catching Dutch Elm Disease – and that particular bug evolved right here on earth with us humans around the whole time. It seems unlikely a bug evolved completely independently many light-years away would give someone the flu, or whatever).

It eventually dawned on me that most episodes were metaphors for people who deal with other people. They weren’t about ‘exploring strange new worlds,’ they were about confronting slightly different versions of ourselves… they are about looking inward and trying to be better people. Um, more like a socially sensitive James Cook than a Neil Armstrong.

And as great as all that is, I fell in love with the science-fictional aspects of the show. I had to tolerate all the melodrama in order to get to that.

If there happens to anyone who doesn’t understand what the hell I’m talking about, the melodrama is the Riker-loves-Troi-and-she-loves-him-but-he’s-a-Starfleet-man-first-and-can’t-have-a-family-so-they-can-never-be-together sort of story, or even a story about Klingons are warriors… that’s all melodrama. Not what I’m in to.

But this week’s episode actually had a legitimate science-fiction premise. Up until now I don’t think that’s happened. This is exactly the kind of thing that gave me the willies, in a good way, when I was watching the show all those years ago.

Too bad they went and f#¢k*d it all up.

This episode was an unmitigated disaster in storytelling that had me so bent out of shape I went looking around the interwebs for some explanation for how it could have gone so horribly wrong. I didn’t look long, or hard, for answers, but I did find out that there were unnamed script problems that led to delays in production. Based on other things I’ve heard about this first season on TNG I really want to say that Gene Roddenbery was busily rewriting the script and it became such a mess they had to give up on having it make sense and instead just film what they had. 

And what did they have, well, I’m glad you asked. Here we go:

A terraforming project team on a lonely, uninhabited planet, has stopped communicating with Starfleet and so the Enterprise goes to investigate. They show up and the Director of the project there says everything is fine and for the Enterprise to move along. Troi immediately freaks out and says he’s hiding something… the Director is panicking even. 

Picard forces the guy to let them come down and it turns out the staff is pretty nice. They get a weirdly long and detailed overview of terraforming (I enjoyed it, it was just really long). Then the Director shows up and is pretty charming, then he orders one of the staff to leave and go stand in front of a laser, the dude acts like it’s an odd request, but goes anyway. Dude immediately gets shot by that laser and dies. The director looks like he’s just as flabbergasted as anyone.

Data goes into the room where dude was killed after everyone leaves and has them turn the laser back on. It immediately starts shooting at Data, but Data dodges the laser blasts and destroys it. Then everyone comes in and the terraformer guy runs into the room and gets mad at Data for wrecking his awesome laser.   

Aboard the Enterprise, Picard and Data and Geordi realize that dude was murdered and start to investigate. About 10 seconds later they discover something small and glowy on the planet. They go back to debate for a long time with the computer before deciding that the glowy thing they found is alive. 

Picard sorta accuses the Director of murdering one of his underlings – Troi just psychically reads him and says he didn’t do it (the murder) but he knew the glowy things were alive.

Later, in the medical lab, everyone gathers around and watches the glowy thing have a glowy baby. Then they decide that it might just be alive… again. Also, it’s intelligent. Picard confronts the terraforming team and they admit that something on the planet was making attempts to contact them… patterns in the sand. You know, geometric shapes appearing and disappearing in the sand. No one thought it was the product of a lifeform.

Later, on the bridge, the debate, now led by Worf, continues on whether or not the glowy things are alive. Sigh.

In the medical lab, the glowy things are addressing the crew as ‘ugly bags of mostly water’ and declare war on humanity. They start making the ship shake violently. Somehow. Picard, remembering how awesome of a thing it was when Q referred to Worf as a ‘microbrain’ decides to name the new living thing they found as a ‘microbrain.’

The ‘microbrain’ succeeds in taking over the ship. The terraformers are grilled about what they did on the planet to piss the aliens off so much. They have no idea. Someone figures out that light is their food. So despite having almost no control over the ship at all, they do have the ability to turn off the lights because the switch for the lights in the medical lab, where the micro brain is being kept, apparently, is located outside of the medical bay.

Riker cuts the lights, the glowy things immediately start begging for help. Then accuse the crew of the Enterprise of proving they are murders if they don’t turn the lights back on. Oh god. Picard forces them to surrender and turns the lights back up a tad, with the dimmer switch I guess. Then the glowy things call Picard too primitive or something and to come back in a few centuries.

Whew, that was hard to write. So, here are some notes I took while watching, you know, my thoughts:

• When the Enterprise crew beams to the planet there are a lot of introductions 
• And mullets, there is a noticeable mullet to be seen here.

  

  "See, in the front it's like I'm all business. But in the back... "

• I really like the exposition on how terraforming works… and it’s a great prop they use
• It seems like we hear the sound effect for an opening door about two seconds before the doors open… just seemed odd.
• Data just glances at the laser and deduces that it was shooting on purpose.  I’m impressed, but also confused.
• Tasha and Wesley both were fine
• Data can dodge lasers. He can’t move fast enough to take action when Lore was trying to kill Dr Crusher a few episodes before, but he can dodge lasers, over and over and over.
• It took them a year to build a laser. I dunno, seems strangely long, just strap a phaser to a stick and it can work just as well as that laser did.
• Given that in this short season that the Enterprise have already encountered some pretty unusual life, like the Crystalline Entity, that Geordi doesn’t believe the glowy thing they found could possibly be alive because it’s ‘inorganic’ seems weird.
• Seriously, that ‘is it alive?’ thing is really overplayed. It’s stupid
• Later, after they’ve all decided that the glowy thing is alive, Riker tells whatshername that it’s still up for debate. It’s like he’s a global warming denier or something.
• Wesley really needs to stop with the Rainbow sweater. I mean, it is better than that stuff he was wearing early in the season, but he needs to change clothes sometimes.
• The glowy things have taken over the medical lab. 
• The terraforming crew says they knew something really weird was happening, but seem to really not believe it was life… so what where they hiding from the Enterprise?
• They call it a microbrain. Goddammit. They stole that from Q

In all, this episode is a mess, and not a hot one. I can almost see where this was going to be a murder mystery and then half way through someone stepped in and said, 'Waitaminute, people don't murder each other in the future, aliens did it.' Then they just ripped up the last 20 pages, ignored the obvious clues they laid into the episode to indicate it was supposed to be a murder, and made up this mircrobrain stuff and shoehorned it in. 

I hated it. It was so poorly executed, poorly paced (very long, yet still inconsequential scenes early in the episode and the near endless debate over whether or not the aliens were alive or not that kept getting resolved, I thought, then reopened again a few minutes later) and poorly written. Data dodging lasers was comical. The behaviors of the terraformers made zero sense as they came clean and admitted they were covering up... something, but they didn't know what. And given that they knew nothing about the aliens, the Director ordering whatshisname to go get murdered by the laser thing makes even less sense. So unforgivably dumb.

My rating?

1 out of 5

It could have been entertaining, it could have been watchable. But instead we get this POS instead of the beloved Science-Fiction show I should have gotten to see. 

When the Bough Breaks (S1 ep 17)

So, remember when I used to talk about my childhood and stuff? Weird, I’ve got a lot more to say about all that, but at this point I’m honestly just trying to get through this first season… sigh, and the second, which might be better, but ain’t great. This shit is really wearing me down. I want to bang on my TV and shout at it to be better.

But it’s too late to save these old episodes, they were all made over 25 years ago - it’s probably too late to do re-shoots.

So what happened in this week’s mess? Well, Picard and the gang wonder into a system and happily discuss the legend of a whole world that was believed to be super awesome and all that, that is hidden in this system. Almost upon uttering those words, a planet appears and the crew are told they’ve reached the mythical world of Aldea.

Tori warns the crew that they’re (the Aldeans) up to no good because of her psychic mojo, and then before they know what’s happening the kids are all kidnapped, well, not ALL the kids, just the talented ones.

Because the population of Aldea is made up of morons, they decide that since they cannot have kids of their own any longer, for reasons they can’t figure out, they will just steal the children of the Enterprise to repopulate their planet - weird that they only took a few children for this, they must have a repopulation program that involves each child having about a million children of their own when they reach maturity.

But whatever, Picard tries to negotiate for the release of the children, but the Enterprise crew is helpless to take action, those Aldeans’ technology is way to advanced for anything the Enterprise can do.

Despite that, they figure out how to circumnavigate the shields around the planet and sabotage that computer, which is all fine and well I guess, and it’s probably the first time I think I’ve ever seen TNG do anything remotely like that. I mean, every other time they’ve had a problem they talked their way through it… well, except for when Wesley was kidnapped before and they were going to just kidnap him back… but that didn’t work out because they didn’t have the power to do it, so they ended up talking their way out of that problem anyway.

Whatever. So Dr Crusher takes about five-minutes and cures the Aldeans and now they can have kids, they’ve disabled their computer thanks to Riker and Data, and Wesley, who had talked all the kids into a hunger strike previously, get’s to go back home to the Enterprise.

Good god.

Below are some thoughts I had during the episode:

• Kids in the future do calculus when they're  pretty young. So, mathematical skills go way up - social skills go way down. Everyone in the future has Aspergers? I know, it’s not a real thing now, whatever.  
• A cloaked planet - can they cloak gravity? That seems like it would be really hard to do. I mean, Throw a rock out the window and see where it goes. I just figured out how to defeat planetary cloaking tech in about 2 seconds. I should be on the Enterprise. 
• I did like the music in the teaser. 
• Humans as aliens - again 
• Troi and her cryptic prophecies - actually, probably her most helpful piece of advice in the show to date. 
• Riker is eating with a two-tonged fork. I don’t know, seems dangerous. 
• I have a solution to the Aldean dilemma. Just call earth and have them ship over all the orphans. 
• Seriously, the Aldeans solution to their problem is so stupid. 
• Kid actors - not always great. 
• Some trivia I picked up somewhere - McKenzie Westmore was one of the little girls in this episode. She’s grown up to be the host of the awesome SyFy show, Face Off. 
• Their computer is ‘hundreds of centuries’ old. My iPhone 4 died after about a year. 
• That tool for producing sculptures seems an awful lot like cheating. You just point it at an object and it becomes art. 
• The lady explaining to Wesley how the world works has no idea what is behind the door next to their main computer. That’s a bit odd. 
• “Why do you want them [your children] back so badly? You can always have more.” When you put it that way… 
• After dismissing, out of hand, every request to see the children, Picard asks again and the guy is like, ‘okay.’ If you’re going to have convictions you need to stick by them. 
• The covert medical exam of the Aldean lady is an awkward scene 
• Don’t get the whole, ‘you have to accept our offer’ business. They’ve already taken the kids, they might as well just dump the promised trade (info or tech, I forget) and lock up their planet again. 
• The musical instrument is just as much cheating as the sculpting tool. You just think of music and their machine produces it. Um, okay. That’s not what I think of as artistry. 
• Wesley even sleeps in his Rainbow colored sweater 
• The Aldeans have had undiagnosed radiation poisoning for a long time. Maybe they aren’t so advanced after all. 
• The Plan for Riker and Data to sneak down and sabotage the planet’s shield is the first overtly aggressive action I think I’ve seen them take on the show. And this is the second time so far this season that having kids on the enterprise has led to trouble surrounding aliens (remember when Wesley was sentenced to death for stepping on some flowers?). 
• The model for the planet’s shield generator is amazing! Wow, the whole set looked super shitty and then this amazing looking model shows up at the end. So all over the place with the production in this show. 
• And Dr Crusher managed to cure everyone on the planet of radiation poisoning. Of course. 
• The little girl runs onto the bridge and give Picard flowers, and apparently sticks a Tribble on his back because she wanted to play a prank, I guess. Or maybe Wesley put her up to it. I don’t know. The whole thing reeks of weirdness. 

So, in the end, this episode is pretty awful. I hated it because it was based on a pretty stupid premise and then they tried to treat said premise seriously. Also, kids tend not to be great actors and the production wasn’t great (aside from the great shield generator which looked great). Great. 

In all, this shows continues to amaze with this long run of horrid episodes right out of the gate here. Aside from The Big Goodbye nothing has been even remotely well done. At this point I don’t see a lot of hope for this show ever being good.

My rating?

1 out of 5

Too Short a Season (S1 ep 16)

It’s funny – to date I’ve given two episodes of this first season a 0 star rating in what was supposed to be a scale of 1 – 5. But what’s ended up happening is that almost everything has been so awful that when I’ve already given half the episodes one star, and the other half two stars… well, you start to want to be able to play within that range. I may go back and change my scale to 1 – 10 so then we can really have the elbow room to play within the boundries and explore some nuance.

Except, of course, I’m not anxious to go back and muck around with all that stuff I’ve already done. So I don’t know, maybe, but probably not gonna do anything different.

The only reason I bring it up is because this episode stands out to me from all the rest. Not that it’s better- god no, it’s not better – but because it sits somwhere in that valley of so-bad-I-can’t-look-away and turn-it-off-my-eyes-are-bleeding. Yes, this is not only awful, but might be my least favorite episode of the season.

But here’s the thing. It’s nowhere near the top of the list in the episodes I most hate, it’s just that I like it the least. Wait, I’m not explaining anything, am I? I’m just repeating myself and hoping that you’ll just get what I’m trying to say. So let me try again. This episode sucks. Hard. But it also blows, hence the paradox.

You see, not only is it awful, but it’s painfully boring. There were other epsisodes where I couldn’t bare to look away from my screen because the next stupid thing to come up might be the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. But with this episode, it wasn’t like that. It was a different kind of awful, the kind of awful that fuels almost no contempt from me. Only overwhelming boredom.

The story can probably be summed up in a few short lines: Aged diplomat orders Picard to one final warzone where said diplomat can create peace. That diplomat is getting younger. He arrives as a cocky young man and promptly does stupid stuff in an attempt to repair stupid stuff he did when he was young the first time (during peace talks decades earlier, he secretly gave super-weapons to every party involved thinking that would assure peace, somehow) and Picard and the gang have to clean up his mess to avert a humanitarian crisis. Also, diplomat’s wife is pissed – not sure if it’s because she likes being old, or if it’s because he took all the fountain of youth stuff and didn’t share with her.

Eventually, he dies of an OD of being young. The end.

And it was boring as hell. I couldn’t remember the episode title, thought I’d skipped it by mistake in my rewatch, and overall think of it as one of the most forgettable moments of TNG to date.

How forgettable was it? My notes on the episode were just a single line:

• Is that one of the Russian dudes from Rocky IV?

That’s pretty much it. And look, that isn’t to say that this episode isn’t full of, well, I hesitate to call it ‘stupid’ but the whole idea that there exists a cure for being old and no one really cares about it...um, maybe this story is focusing on the wrong thing? I mean, sure, whatshisname died from it, but that was because he took a supply meant to last he and his wife several years in a single dose. Dude was a moron.

So old age is a choice in TNG. And it’s a choice that everyone, for the most part, embraces. I already have a pretty tough time connecting with these absurd characters, throwaway nonesense like this does frustrate me. But not enough to make up for all the boring.



My rating?

1 out of 5

Datalore (S1 ep 13)

The baseball bat rested on my shoulder. My fingers were striped red and white, reminding me of a barber’s pole – it happens when you grasp something as tightly as I was. My finger-tips were beet red, the knuckles white. I couldn’t stop thinking about it- why they looked that way. It was probably the first time I understood what people meant when they said that they had clenched their fists so tight that their knuckles went white. I was doing it right then. It was a real thing.

It's funny, the cliches that come to mind when you're stressed. I tried to shrink down so he couldn't see me, my step-father. I was in the hallway that opened up into the living room just a few feet ahead of me. From the angle I was at I could see only the back of his chair and the far corner of the living room. But the thought that he's decided that he'd already gone too far to turn back now and decided he'd have to kill everyone in the trailer felt very real to me.

That bat was the only thing I had that I might use as a weapon. So I tried to tighten my grip even more. I'd considered climbing out my bedroom window and running. But there was no way I was going to leave my mom there. It it wasn't her he'd shot then she might be next. Either way, I had to stop him.

I stuck my head out from around the corner of the hallway and into the living room, there was blood splattered all over the wall, the floor, the couch, and a body splayed out on the floor, silent. Not moving.

There were screams. Hysterical screams. I was aware of them the whole time, but I'd been so lost in my own head that I'd only barely registered them. It was the girlfriend of my step-father's brother. I wasn't sure what she was trying to say, I was distracted.

It was the blood. I couldn’t focus on anything except the blood. Oh man, there was so much of it. I wondered if I even had that much to lose when he finally decided to turn that gun to me.

Oh, you've jumped into the middle of things. If you haven' read my previous post, where I start spilling my guts about my childhood trauma then you may need to read that for context. Or not, I don't care. I'll sorta recapped things here. Maybe. Sorta.

True story, what’s above. A memory from my childhood. There’s more to it, but you know, ‘en media res’ and all that. It’s the hook that’s supposed to make you read on while I drone on for a very long time about boring stuff before I start tying it altogether later on. One could argue that it’s a lack of confidence in the narrative I’m telling, that I feel I need to jazz it up with something big at the beginning, but I don’t know, I’ve seen a lot of those murder-mystery shows, they pretty much all start with a murder and cut away before you get that one little clue that would have allowed you to put it all together without sitting through the show.

Besides, the art of writing is all about withholding information.

So, I found out recently that my step-father died. I hadn’t spoken to him since somewhere around Star Trek: TNG season 4(ish). He was a guy with a lot of personal demons, and his own life story was one personal tragedy after another, so I’m not entirely unsympathetic to him. But at the same time, he was also a guy who thought violence was the answer to all his problems. I hated him even as I felt sort of sorry for him.

I never really wrote about him before because I always had it in the back of my head that one day I’d get a knock on the door and it would be him, leveling a gun at me. Deciding that he was going to finish what he should have done that night 30 years earlier.

But he’s gone now. Has been for a couple of years now. I just found out a few months ago. It’s a weight that I didn’t know I’d been carrying around with me. So, yeah, there’s that.

He’s a guy, I think, that had a lot in common with Lore. Data’s younger brother. Because, believe it or not, I’m here to review Star Trek. Specifically, this episode, Datalore. And since I'm apparently airing all my dirty laundry on the internet, I might as well try to tie some of this together. See, my step-father was a guy, I truly believe, that was just made wrong. Something in the internal wiring was mixed up and he just couldn't help being awful. Even if being awful is going go to cause himself more pain and suffering as a result. He just couldn't help it. You know, like the whole scorpion stinging the turtle thing.

It's just in his nature.

Since the very beginning it’s been mostly one shitty episode after another I was stunned at how much I enjoyed The Big Goodbye. It could be because my expectations were so lowered by the time I got to it, that even something barely tolerable looks like an award winning feat by comparison. All I know is that that episode really struck a chord with me. I liked it. A lot.

So this one, maybe one of the more famous Season 1 episodes (Is it? I don’t know) is a quick turnaround right back into shitland again.

Dammit, I keep forgetting that I don’t want to reveal my personal opinions right off the bat. I’m supposed to play that close to the vest before dropping my opinion later.

Well, with all that air conveniently out of the bag, I’ll give my shortest synopsis ever, because I want to focus a bit on something that Lore did in the episode and talk about that for a few minutes.

So, here’s what happened. The Enterprise returns to the planet Data was discovered on. A colony had been there, but now it’s nothing but dead ground, regolith. They discover a hidden lab and inside is enough spare parts to assemble another android.

They immediately get everything back to the ship and start rebuilding the android. It wakes up and the first words out of its mouth are a lie. We learn that the colony they found him on was dead because the android (Lore) lured an alien life form there that devoured all life, down to the microbe, on the planet.

He turns off Data (by, I might add, spiking his Champagne… what?), poses as him, and lures the alien to the Enterprise to destroy everyone on the ship too. But Wesley figures the whole thing out, fixes Data, and together they thwart his plans, beaming Lore out into space, never to be seen or heard from again. Probably.

Now, there isn’t much about this episode that isn’t stupid. I want to rant about when the children who were fleeing the terror in the sky that was killing the whole world still took time to draw pictures of themselves fleeing from the Crystalline Entity, and whose parents were proud enough of said pictures to hang them up neatly on the walls of the laboratory – AS THEY WERE BEING DESTROYED! – but I won’t.

Instead I want to draw your attention to the part where Lore (posing as Data) tells Captain Picard that he wants to attempt to communicate with the entity - Which, apparently, means turning on the radio and just speaking English.

Upon threating the thing, he then advises that the Enterprise crew beam a large tree out into space, then shoot it. Thusly intimidating the Crystalline Entity and restoring peace to the land, or space, whatever.

I want to reiterate that, Lore proposes that they shoot a tree to prove how badass they are. This is supposed to intimidate a creature that is easily over a mile from tip to tip, and has demonstrated its ability to destroy all life on an entire planet.

But yes, shooting a tree should really teach it a lesson. The stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.

Of course Picard hears the moronic idea and agrees. Let’s start blowing shit up.

Oh Data, why did you have to have a brother?

Some thoughts:

• Wesley hasn't taken that Rainbow shirt off in some time.
• Data is practicing sneezing.
• Humans 'used to' get colds. Guess that's all cured in the 24th century too.
• Data's first memory is opening his eyes. My first memory, and I'm not kidding here, is pooping my pants while watching a rerun of Star Trek. I was 16. Wait, probably younger than that. I can't swear it was Star Trek I was watching, but I remember the Blue, Red, and Gold shirts.
• I like the tunnels that lead to Noonian Soogn's workshop/lab. Just god set design.
• Whatever kid drew the picture of panicked people fleeing from the Crystalline Entity in the top righthand corner of the pictures the kids drew was very talented.
• Soogn was mocked and driven out of the scientific community in shame because he didn't succeed in making an anti-matter brain on his first try.
• Also, it's weird that those pictures were posted. It looks an awful lot like that entity showed up and killed everyone. Was there just enough time for kids to draw the images and for proud parents to hang them up before they finally all died?
• They only had a few hours to explore Data's home planet? Why? They already said they were in a very remote region of space, it isn't like they have lots of other stuff to do, is there?
• Argyle! He's back!
• Why is Argyle and Dr Crusher so awkward about asking Data for a looksie inside?
• Why is the senior staff so uncomfortable about talking to Data about being a robot?
• Why did Riker sorta clap when Picard said humans are machines too?
• Sigh. Data has an off button. He shows Dr. Crusher so they can look at him. I am curious as to why they had to turn him off in order to see how his insides work.
• How did Data know what Picard was going to ask? He's flummoxed by almost every aspect of human nature.
• Data apparently can't use contractions. Weird, as he's been using them pretty regularly up until this Point.
• Lore sighs pretty loudly. It was explained later in the show that Data (and presumably, Lore) fakes breathing to seem more human. Just thought of that.
• Tasha asks how much they can trust Data now that Lore is around. Everyone on the bridge turns to stare at her. Picard answers and adds that the question is totally legit. God, that was so weird.
• Lore spiked Data's champagne. That is so strange. Data passed out. He's a robot, people.
• Lore figured out how to communicate with the Crystal Entity. Apparently he does so by just talking to it.
• Um, Data has a face twitch causing and repairing laser thing in his room. Just pointing that out.
• I broke down and bought the Blu ray disks. The Crystalline Entity looks amazing!
• Wesley gets all mean towards Lore (acting as Data) in front of everyone and doesn't bother explaining himself, so everyone just assumes he's an ass.
• Later, Wesley advises the crew of his Lore suspicion. They ignore him.
• Lore (as Data) just talks to the Entity again, everyone is impressed.
• Lore says they should transport a tree into space and blow it up to prove how badass they are.
• Stupid as that is. Picard seems impressed. Says to go ahead and do that.
• Wesley tries to interject Lore is evil and Picard tells him to 'Shut up!' Classic.
• Wesley refuses and keeps talking. His mom tells him to 'Shut up!' Double classic.
• Lore kicked the shit out of Worf.
• Data has awful reflexes, Lore grabbed him, shoved him and stole Dr Crusher's phaser before anyone can react. I can understand Dr Crusher being slow, but Data?

In summary, this episode is awful. It is one plot hole after another, all spackled up with more plot holes. Despite my hatred for this, Brent Spiner is really good. I like Data heavy episodes because he does a great job with the character. They just need to give him something to work with that isn't so dumb. Also, Wesley gets told to shut up, which is great, and again, which is even greater. Because, yet again, he figured everything out and no one would believe him. He's just so damn smug. Of course, everyone else got real dumb in this episode anyway, it was just so awful. Don't watch it.

My rating?

1 out of 5

Hide and Q (S1 ep 10)

People, you're in for a break today, I don't feel like going into details of my teenage life this installment - consider it my gift to you for good behavior.

Because every once in awhile a show comes around that's so bad... well, in this case it's almost too shitty to put into words. Crap like this has been happening more often than I would think possible. Seriously, this was just awful. Dammit, I'm not supposed to spoil this so early. Pretend I didn't say anything.
Unlike the last episode, I definitely saw this one several times. It seems like the Q shows were repeated over and over during the years. The thing is, I don't remember hating it so much the first half-dozen times I saw it.

They quick and dirty version of this episode is this:

So, Q shows up, again. Ten episodes and I think half of them have been covering territory already covered in previous episodes.

But whatever. Q shows up, does a bunch of crazy stuff like only Q can do, and it's all an excuse to give Riker the power of the Q. Picard takes this as an opportunity to moralize more than he ever has before... and I have no idea what he's moralizing about. Somehow using all this power to save a little girl that just died in a mining accident is somehow evil. So Riker doesn't do it because he promised Picard he wouldn't

Riker gets mad about it and calls the bridge crew up and Picard smugly moralizes some more. Then to prove how correct he is about something, I don't know, it's weird, he lets Riker give gifts to the whole crew.

Firstly, Riker gives Wesley the gift of being all grown up. Weirdly, Geordi seems turned on by it.
Second, Riker offers to turn Data into a real man, but Data refuses because it wouldn't be real (?).
Then, Riker gives to Geordi the gift of sight. Geordi then ogles Tasha before saying he would rather be blind that owe his sight to Q (or maybe Riker, it was a bit unclear).
Then, bizarrely enough, he gives Worf a sex slave. Geordi sorta judges Worf for his un-human sexual practices and desires, and Worf screams about how uncomfortable he is about doing this girl on the bridge in front of everyone. It was so dumb.
Riker looks to Tasha and offers her nothing. Ha!

That's really all there is to say about his episode. It sucked. Bad.

Some additional thoughts:

• To show you how unintelligible this dialog is, Q calls Worf a Macrohead with a Microbrain. Then he laughs at his own clever put down. I was embarrassed for him. I thought the Q were supposed to be a super-intelligence or something. 
• As a production, the alien world they were transported to looked awful. There wasn't much to enjoy there. It was some fake rocks against a green screen, they just forgot to drop in a computer generated background. God knows that couldn't have been on purpose. 
• When Q says something ridiculous Tasha screams out, 'You've gone too far!' Q immediately makes an example out of her. Did she not remember the last time he visited? She made a similar outburst and was frozen solid. She has to have learned not to do that to him.
• Tasha only really has one scene in this episode, and it's maybe the worst one of her's I've seen all season. She cries some before hitting on Picard. It's like her character and Wesley's are tag teaming how much they can piss me off in these episodes. 
• Picard and Q's Shakespeare battle is really, well, it happened. 
• Riker is given the power of Q. Picard and the crew turn on him so fast it's disturbing. 
• In an episode that's already heavy on the moralizing, Picard gives a rant that makes less sense than almost anything I've ever come across in any form of narrative fiction. Somehow using the power at all, no matter how great of a reason, would be evil. 
• Because Riker promised not to use his powers, they get to the mining colony and Riker can easily save these people. Instead he lets them die. 
• Riker gets mad and immediately starts a smugness battle with Picard on the bridge of the Enterprise. The gift giving exchange is insanely stupid. 
• It may not have been anything long lasting. But Wesley being stabbed was somehow cathartic. Probably because in the ten episodes of this show so far, I've only had a moment or two where I momentarily felt I was dealing with real people, and not some sort of utopian satire or something. This ended up playing well comedically. Not the intended effect, I think.

MY FAVORITE SHIRT!!

In summary, this is not as bad as Code of Honor, but is up there with The Naked Now on my all time hate list. It's going to be my mission in life to never subject myself to this episode ever again. I wash my hands of it now, and marvel at its stupidity.

It's sad, a show about getting ultimate power could be very well done, and if memory serves, was explored again in later seasons with Barclay, kinda, and much better. This was a waste of everyone's time. How did this show not get cancelled by now? They clearly had no idea how to do a TV show.

My rating?

1 out of 5

Justice (S1 ep 8)

Back in the late fall of 1987, when this episode came out, I was a strapping lad of about 100 pounds and well into my 10th year of school. At that time I wasn't very sure of myself, but if you were to ask me at that time what are some unassailable facts about fashion I would have said something like this:

• Horn-rimmed glasses were stupid, and would never be popular again.
• Bell-bottomed pants were stupid, and would never be popular again.
• Low-cut pants (or shorts, or bikini's, whatever) were stupid and would never be popular again.
• The mullet was the greatest men's hairstyle ever invented, and would be eternally popular.
• Long shorts (that went past the mid-thigh) were stupid and were a fad that would quickly fade into obscurity.
• Regular shirts with tux tails were the pinnacle of human fashion. Nothing would ever improve on it. 

I'm sure there were others, but those are the things I felt most strongly about at the time. So my point with all that is that Star Trek: TNG seemed to go out of their way to portray men is some nontraditionally male regalia. There were the man-dresses that were introduced in Encounter at Farpoint, but the men of this planet Rubicon III dressed worse than Sean Connery did in Zardoz. What's the man version of camel toe? Whatever it is, the Rubiconians had lots of it.

Sexy?

Sexier?

My point is that this episode looks awful. Reminds me of those late-night skinemax movies I used to sneak and watch late at night when I would visit people who had the pay channels on cable.

The gist of the episode is this: Picard and the gang stumbled onto a planet of beautiful sexy people and decide it's time for some sexy-time. So they immediately beam down Wesley (the one under-age person on the show) and a few others to make sure the partying goes well before sending down the whole ship's crew.

Pretty quickly, after Wesley impresses the locals by running, sorta, and doing cartwheels, and teaching the young teens how to play 'ball.' He gets carried away in his exploits he ends up trashing some plants and is sentenced to death. Because, of course.

At the same time, Picard and Data have made contact with some aliens in orbit that sees the Rubiconians as their children. Those aliens don't talk much, but seem willing to sorta let the Enterprise hang out without killing them all.

But once those aliens learn about the Prime Directive, which roughly is the Federation's rules regarding non-interference in the internal affairs of a primitive world, they seem to think that means that Wesley should not be exempted from the laws of the Rubiconians.

In the end, Picard decides the Prime Directive is stupid and plans on kidnapping Wesley. But the aliens are mighty and won't allow the Enterprise to beam anyone up. So Picard says about two sentences into the sky, dramatically, about how unfair their laws are, and then the aliens release their transporter blockage and let the kidnapping go on unhindered.


Some thoughts:

• Tasha filed a report on their laws and customs. Seems like she did a shitty job considering.
• It looks like the entire advance party had an orgy of some sort when they visited the planet. It struck me as odd that Dr. Crusher next commented that it would be a great place for kids.
• The aliens here are EXACTLY like sexy humans. I just noticed that of the aliens we've met so far, a significant percentage of them are 100% human in appearance. 
• If I were Wesley, I would have said please treat me just like an adult. I mean, he was a teenager. They have hormones in the future, right?
• The running thing. That's pretty weird. Wesley seems really excited to show them he can run (at a very leisurely pace)
• Wesley says 'watch this!' and does a cartwheel. Is he supposed to be 8?
• And the teenage girl says, 'will you teach me to play ball?' I know she must have been sexy flirting, but that is embarrassingly bad. 
• Wesley might not have deserved death, but he was very unaware of his surroundings when he trashed the plants. He should have been spanked or something. 
• Wesley is with Starfleet and doesn't lie. Just FYI.
• Tasha had to examine the syringe before deciding it was a syringe. If she made that sort of careful study of their laws maybe they wouldn't have been in this mess. 
• The Prime Directive. Ugh. Is it ever accomplish anything good? 
• Picard moralizes about how evolved humans are again. He's really into how awesome humans have become.
• On a side-note to these random thoughts, godlike aliens are judging humans, AGAIN. This is at least the Third time this has happened. Sheesh.
• Dr Crusher finds out Wesley (her son) is about to be killed and when she confronts Picard about it he shooshes her and walks away. That's badass.
• Rewetching this episode, I just realized that these Rubiconians might be future Nazis. You know, after all those blonde-haired blue-eyed eugenics programs have run their course. Hitler would be proud.

In all, aside from the pretty ladies, there is little to like here, in my opinion. Wesley is written like he's a 8 year-old and the crew shows an incredible lack of due diligence in investigating the planet before letting children run around on it.

The Prime Directive is horrible as a plot device in this episode, because it's pretty stupid sounding as it's half-heartedly explained. And the inexplicable aliens that serve as the 'god' to the people of Rubicon III are really not that committed to making sure Starfleet follows their own Prime Directive after Picard give such a short rebuttal those unseen aliens seemed to have shrugged to themselves and been like, 'who cares?'

Seriously, this was pretty bad.

My rating?

1 out of 5

The Naked Now (S1 ep 3)

Something about this episode struck me as familiar when I watched it the first time. We'd moved into a new house that we'd built earlier that summer. It was big deal for me. I was in high school, 10th grade, I think, and I'd spent the previous couple of years helping out building this place. It was a the first house we'd ever owned. My previous years were mostly hopping around from place to place - military housing, apartments, staying with extended family, a trailer for several years.... this was the only house I'd ever lived in that was mine.

Well, as a 10th grader, it wasn't really mine. But it sure felt that way. My mother and step-father both worked the graveyard shift and I would spend my nights at home alone. The place was out in the country and very close to an actual graveyard. Basically, I was a kid that wanted to pretend he was all big and brave and grown up, but I read comic books and watched my new favorite show Star Trek, and cowered in fear of all the awful things that could happen to me all alone in this new house.

I mentioned previously that I'd watched the entire run of The Original Series the summer prior to TNG's premier. So when this episode aired I was really pretty sure I'd seen this before. Turns out, I was right. The second episode (look, this could get confusing, but Encounter at Farpoint was a two-parter. So it's labeled as the first AND second episodes of the show, so week two is actually airing the third episode. Whatever. It's pretty standard of a practice. So even if this is technically considered the third episode, in my mind, it's number two) was a callback to the TOS episode, The Naked Now.

That's really all I remember about back then. Well, that and that Tasha bangs Data. Upon my epic quest to rewatch I was looking forward to the banging.

Turns out, there was 40 some-odd minutes of other stuff that happened too. My short recap goes something like this:

Space drunkenness strikes when an atom of carbon bonds to water (what?!) and it spreads by contact with already infected people (um, what?!). So when the deceased crew of a derelict  Federation vessel contaminates the Enterprise, it's time for a party.

Meanwhile, Wesley, who was fine in the previous episode, finally shows that he really is batshit insane when he sheepishly reveals that he role plays with a perfect facsimile of Picard's voice praising Wesley for being so great. Seriously, that is messed up.

Slowly the infection spreads throughout the ship and Wesley locks himself in engineering where Picard commands Chief Engineer MacDougal (who?) to fix that mess. All sorts of bad things happen.

In the end, Crusher comes up with a cure after Riker, Data, and Picard, discover the exact same thing happened on the Kirk era Enterprise (yes, yes it did) so they sorta copied Bones' cure and everything was fine. Also, a star exploded.

Oh, and Data and Tasha do smash (that's new slang for having sex, just learned it from my kid. Sigh), but it was very weird.

So, here are some thoughts:

• Seriously, Wesley went from being fine to being an awful character in one episode. Not a big fan of the shirt either.
• Troi was better - way less crying.
• Tasha Yar, um, so far, she's been mishandled as a character. And again with the rape gangs. Look, I'm not sure how it is in the 24th century, but in the 21st, smashing (ugh, I hate that term, I'll never use it again) a clearly drunk girl is at least worthy of mentioning as being unethical, and in some circles, considered rape. Data, who did get space-drunk after his play time with Tasha, was in his right mind when he decided to pleasure her. I don't know, the whole thing made me feel funny, and not in a sexy way.

  

  See? Superman hair

• Also, not a friend of sexy Tasha's hair. It would have looked fine on Superman though.
• Speaking of Data, his 'positronic' brain can get space-drunk too. Huh.
• So a drunken Wesley is capable of taking over the ship? Imagine what a sober bad guy can do.
• That exploding star. What the crap? I have no idea about that giant blob of star matter hurtling at the enterprise. Somebody explain that to me, because it sounds stupid.

In all, I hated this episode. It was bad bad bad. I would not recommend it to a friend, and cannot believe that I ever got past it to watch another one. Or anyone did. I have high hopes that Code of Honor will turn things around.

Rating?

1 out of 5