Don’t let the door hit you on your way out of Craggus’ Trek Trek Phase II Vol 13
Craggus’ Trek Trek Phase II Vol 13 bids farewell to Season Four of Star Trek The Next Generation and embraces a season five that sees old faces returning and new ones debuting.
Star Trek The Next Generation S4E24: The Mind’s Eye
Unrepentant sex pest Geordi LaForge is off duty and heading to Risa for what Picard has told him is a few days of R&R before an artificial intelligence seminar but I suspect is really a long-overdue intervention and emotional intelligence course run by Starfleet HR. Unfortunately his itsy bitsy teeny weeny shuttle is intercepted by a Romulan warbird where he’s given the full Clockwork Orange treatment and becomes a Manchurian engineer as he’s sent back to the Enterprise to assassinate a Klingon Governor and further foment discord between the Federation and the Klingons. We’re fully leaning into the season’s arc now as we barrel towards the season finale and there’s even a tease of a quasi-returning villain who remains hidden in shadows and uncredited here as the Romulans and their sympathetic Klingon faction plot their coup.
Star Trek The Next Generation S4E25: In Theory
The Next Generations follows up ‘Data’s Day’ with Data dating as our favourite android decides to try his hand (and, I guess, other fully functional parts) at a relationship. When Ensign D’Sora splits up with her boyfriend, she’s hardly the first to seek temporary romantic solace with something battery powered but in this case, she rebounds straight into the positronic arms of Lt Commander Data. When, to Data’s surprise, she gives him ‘a passionate kiss in the torpedo bay’, it not only coins a new euphemism but also leads to Data deciding to create a new romance subroutine. Unfortunately, Data knows next to nothing about romantic relationships and demonstrates this by turning first to notorious strike-out king Geordi LaForge for advice before canvassing the rest of the main cast, including renowned horn dog Commander Riker and deciding to create an algorithm seemingly rooted in 1950s sitcoms. Meanwhile, the rest of the crew eventually find themselves dealing with a random subspace nebula problem which opens up gaps in the fabric of space as the writers struggle to fill gaps in the running time of the episode. In theory, this could have been a good episode but in practice, it feels like a hastily rewritten Wesley episode, pivoted to feature Data for more ‘amusing’ misunderstandings of human nature but by the end of the episode it hasn’t made any difference to the character at all. The b-plot is so poorly developed it practically screams afterthought and is littered with carelessly apocryphal occurrences such as Picard, for some reason, being the one to pilot the shuttle which leads the Enterprise out of the dangerous nebula. It would all be fine if this were a lightweight, inconsequential episode but the story kills a crewmember by phasing them halfway through the deck and makes ‘In Theory’ a romantic comedy with far too little comedy and altogether too much body horror.
Star Trek The Next Generation S4E26: Redemption
The culmination of a season’s worth of teasing, hinting, foreshadowing and – occasionally – overt exposition comes to fruition as the Romulan plot to destabilise the Klingon Empire enters its endgame. As the Arbiter of Succession, Picard is invited to oversee the installation of Gowron as leader of the Klingon Empire but is informed that the House of Duras intends to put forth a challenger – the dead Duras’ illegitimate son Toral, in reality a callow youth being manipulated by his aunts Lursa and B’Etor who in turn are mere pawns of the Romulan leader Sela – who bears an uncanny resemblance to the late Tasha Yar. Unlike the previous season spanning cliffhanger, this story has clearly been written as a cohesive arc, with the result that this episode is pretty much all set-up for the season five opener to deliver the payoff although Worf’s send-off from the Enterprise after he ‘resigns’ is genuinely touching. Given this would be the one and only time the series would make a serious attempt at a season-long arc (future season cliffhangers would be effectively standalone stories), it does just about enough to justify the storytelling investment and while the cliffhanger is massively less charged than season 3’s, it still has enough going for it to bring you back for season 5. Qapla’!
Star Trek The Next Generation S5E01: Redemption II
War! The Klingon Empire is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Duras sisters. There are heroes on both sides. Evil is everywhere. In an action-packed opening, the sons of Mog use the sun and warp to defeat their pursuers while Picard pleads with Starfleet Command to intervene to prevent the Romulans from exploiting the Klingon civil war for their own ends. Picard suggests a blockade and Starfleet reluctantly agrees, providing our heroes with the standard assortment of vessels in various states of disrepair. Data bucks for promotion when he’s overlooked for a temporary command and has a nice storyline throughout as he proves his mettle against one of Starfleet’s surprisingly common surly senior officers. It’s a nice touch that Worf and the Romulans are both impatient with the Klingon tradition of drinking with your enemies in neutral territory and if you keep your eyes peeled you’ll see Friends‘ superintendent Treeger pop up as a Duras loyalist. The Duras sisters set out to try and seduce Worf, to no avail, and when Picard’s net catches a shoal of Romulan, the day falls to Gowron. It’s a rousing and energetic season opener with plenty of incident and action to keep you occupied. The Picard/ Sela meeting is a particular highlight but its something of a teaser for the confrontation yet to come.
Star Trek The Next Generation S5E02: Darmok
A poetic, poignant and wonderfully cerebral episode of Star Trek, it’s a superb palate cleanser after the dingy and dense Klingon political soap opera. Featuring an alien race who communicate only in metaphor and cultural references, this episode foreshadowed the rise of meme culture in real life. It’s a perfect Picard episode, bolstered by a wonderfully exasperated guest performance from Paul Winfield. The bittersweet ending just adds to the power of this episode which somehow manages to marry classic mythology to high concept sci-fi and, for once, puts our intrepid crew on the back foot as they turn out to be more belligerent and ignorant than their Tamarian counterparts. Star Trek and great writing at the start of season five. This viewer, his eyes wide.
Star Trek The Next Generation S5E03: Ensign Ro
Coming aboard at a Space Doc’, Ro Laren arrives on the Enterprise and she’s not bashful about being grumpy. She’s been put there by a sneezy Admiral who’s planning to use Captain Picard and his crew to manoeuvre the Federation into siding with the Cardassians against the Bajorans. Riker might be less than happy to have Ensign Ro onboard but she’s just the kind of presence needed to help thwart the Cardassians’ dopey plan when a visit to a sleepy colony of Bajoran refugees reveals the truth. Although it hadn’t yet been commissioned, this episode ended up inspiring a lot of Deep Space Nine. Michelle Forbes is a great addition to the cast, bringing a needed touch of friction to the snow-white do-gooders about the NCC-1701-D. It’s not every show that can introduce a new alien race and two of the most significant supporting characters in TNG’s storied history in one go. That’s right, this episode also sees the debut of Mr Mot, Bolian barber.
Star Trek The Next Generation S5E04: Silicon Avatar
The episode might begin with old smoothy Riker making a dinner date with a would-be colonist but he ends up dining on ashes when the crystalline entity attacks. It turns out to be the same crystalline entity which attacked Omicron Theta, the colony world where Data was first discovered. As the Enterprise tracks the lifeform across space the crew are joined by Dr Marr, a xenologist who’s made a lifelong study of the entity after her son was killed during the Omicron Theta attack. It’s a solid if a little underwhelming episode but it succeeds thanks to its willingness to embrace a darker ending that you might be expecting from TNG. There’s some good work by guest star Ellen Geer as she goes full-on Ahab in her quest to destroy a unique alien lifeform but it’s hard to ignore that much of the regular cast pretty much just stand around and watch.
Star Trek The Next Generation S5E05: Disaster
Having flirted with the trappings and tropes of the genre time and time again, Star Trek finally goes all-in on the Irwin Allen-isms and turns the Enterprise’s tangle with a quantum filament into a Poseidon Adventure clone, with entertaining results. Ensign Ro makes her second appearance, deliberately paired with Chief O’Brien to see how well the two characters worked together with an eye to their transfer to Deep Space Nine (although Ro turned out to be a no-go, d’oh!) and the cast and crew have great fun splitting up the regular characters and distributing them throughout the ship to deal with the various interlinked crises that have occurred. Picard stuck in the turbolift with some kids is a particular highlight as is Worf becoming a midwife to Keiko’s baby but everyone gets a fun moment in a fun-packed episode. It’s a very different type of episode but thanks to that it feels fresh and, in amongst all the fun, it doesn’t forget to move some characters forward in important ways, especially Troi. Oh, and Happy birthday, Molly O’Brien!
