Get a wiggle on – it’s Craggus’ Trek Trek Phase II Vol 2!
Welcome to Craggus’ Trek Trek Phase II Vol 2, returns to boldly continue going through those early episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, this time episodes 9 through 16!
Star Trek The Next Generation S1E09: Hide and Q
Q returns as a three-headed snake to see if absolute power corrupts absolutely. The episode writes Troi out before it even starts and Tasha Yar demonstrates her continued incompetence as security chief by having a tearful tantrum. It may nominally be about Riker becoming the god of terribly misjudged gifts (and it gets what ten-years-older Wil Wheaton will look like hilariously wrong) but the best bits are Picard and Q quoting Shakespeare at each other. John de Lancie is always worth at least 2 stars on his own.
Star Trek The Next Generation S1E10: Haven
When confessing to her weirdly regressive pre-nup, Deanna calls Riker Bill for some reason. That and Lwaxana Troi’s cougar-prowling the ship are the only things of note which make this forgettable, dull premarital fable almost watchable.
Star Trek The Next Generation S1E11: The Big Goodbye
Who’d have thought it would take ten episodes before we got our first Holodeck-goes-wrong story? Picard puts Shakespeare aside to Private Dick around with some pulp fiction. It’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship (between the writers and the malfunctioning holodeck trope) and ends with Picard greeting an alien race based on the knights who no longer say ‘ni!’
Star Trek The Next Generation S1E12: Datalore
Oh brother! While ‘just in the neighbourhood’ of Omicron Theta, the crew pop back to the planet where Data was discovered and in five minutes find a whole hidden laboratory missed by the official fully equipped survey team. Brent Spiner hams it up as his own evil twin without the need for a mirror universe goatee and Wesley gets ignored AGAIN.
Star Trek The Next Generation S1E13: Angel One
Angel One tells Code of Honor to hold its beer, get in the kitchen and make it a goddamn sandwich as it baffles with an egregiously ham-fisted battle of the sexes. Riker gives us a hairy eyeful while the rest of the crew come down with a random and narratively unrelated dose of the ‘flu as the writers realise that can’t keep the flaccid gender-swapped power struggle plot up for the whole 44 minutes.
Star Trek The Next Generation S1E14: 11001001
Picard finds time for “a tasty debrief” and Riker douches it up by repeatedly misgendering the Binars while asking them to literally pimp out the Holodeck for him so his time off has a ‘happy ending’. Meanwhile, it turns out the Enterprise is really, really easy to steal from a starbase. Kirk and co certainly made a meal of it in The Search For Spock.
Star Trek The Next Generation S1E15: Too Short A Season
Space…the final FaceApp! A doddery old Admiral using a pimped up Pikemobile exploits a fountain of youth in order to deliver a toothless sequel of sorts to TOS’ A Private Little War.
Star Trek The Next Generation S1E16: When The Bough Breaks
The Enterprise crew must deal with super-advanced space nonces who kidnap their children. Fortunately, they also kidnap Wesley and find him so tiresome they quickly agree to hand all the children back and switch off their sterility field so they can have children of their own, which on reflection isn’t that reasurring an ending.
