Move Along Home (DS9)

Usually, bad Star Trek episodes fail on execution. The episode might be really badly written, it might have huge plot holes or inconsistent characterization, but at least the heart of the story is something that makes you say "Yeah, I get why the writing staff accepted this pitch."

 Not so "Move Along Home," at least as far as I can tell. The plot bears more similarity to "Labyrinth" than to Star Trek. But it's labyrinth on a TV budget without David Bowie or Muppets. And considerably less aware of it's absurdity.

Aliens from the Gamma Quadrant, the Wadi, come to Deep Space Nine to establish first contact. Everyone gets dressed up in their finest, but the aliens are more interested in gambling at Quark's than in even meeting the Federation delegation. Despite Sisko's warnings to him about not screwing this up, Quark tries to cheat them after they have an unnaturally lucky run at the Dabo table. He gets caught, of course, and the Wadi challenge him to a new game. And that's where the plot goes from boring to wonky.

 The new game is a board game, but it also automatically captures Dax, Sisko, Bashit, and Kira and transports them to the Wadi ship, where they go through weird trials that match up with what's happening in the game as Quark plays it. Odo mounts an ineffectual rescue attempt, but eventually falls back on glaring at Quark, which more or less seems to solve the problem.

Oh yeah, none of it matters at all because, as Kira puts it "We were never in any real danger!?" The crux of this episode's failings are the impossibly low stakes. The audience knows nobody's going to die, the Wadi know no one's going to die. The characters think they might die, and that's where the episode tries to find tension, but it just doesn't land. The game is too silly to be terrifying, and it doesn't make any sense for the Wadi to come from the Gamma Quadrant and initiate first contact by killing four high ranking officers in a convoluted and random manner. A thinking viewer has no reason to fear that's what's happening, and every reason to include that, in fact, the game is just a game.

 Maybe the problem is that, in a world of holodecks and safety protocols, our first assumption should really be that an elaborate simulation is safe. In the Star Trek universe in general, usually our cue that something is deadly is when they throw a redshirt at it and he dies. It's clumsy, but it works.

And then on top of that, the challenges within the game are totally uninspired, and they don't bring out very much interesting in the characters. They just sort of wander through the game out of a vague, loosely articulated sense that it's what they are supposed to do. It's like the framework of a good adventure story, without a goal of any kind or character agency that makes it worth caring about. 

Sometimes I forget to talk holistically about shows, because I'm quite fixated on writing and plotting. So I will give the show kudos here on sets, props, and makeup. The Wadi have a very consistent aesthetic that connects the game Quark is playing to the labyrinth Sisko and company are trapped in, and even to the colored tattoos the Wadi wear. For a one-shot race with a remarkably flat characterization, the Wadi are at least interesting looking.

 The B-plot is that Jake is interested in girls. It would have been a more interesting B-plot if Jake were interested in boys. But really not that much more interesting. You can hardly call it a B-plot, actually. It's just sort of the writers desperately trying to find things for Jake to do in this show, because he's in the credits. Eventually the writers on this show decide to write for whoever and not care who's in the credits, which I find refreshing. The pattern with Jake in Deep Space Nine is that he gets a handful of his own stories/father-son stories and they're mostly good, and the kid acts them well. He gets a handful of quirky B-plots with Nog, which are hit and miss. He does not really participate in the ensemble shows, with a few exceptions. The show hits its stride when it just embraces it.

Random Observations: 

 - Bashir is not getting less annoying yet.

 - O'Brien isn't in this episode. This is another reason not to like it.

 - Kira makes a really out of character outburst about being an administrator and thus ill-suited to go on adventures, which is just totally at odds with her action hero past. Similarly, this is the second time Dax has espoused an "I've had seven lifetimes, I'm ready to die" attitude as opposed to the "I have an obligation to protect the symbiote" that seems more appropriate.

 - The climax of this episode is supposed to be the moment when Quark breaks down and begs for the other characters' lives. Armin Shimmerman tries his best, but it's a mess, actually. Possibly because of the whole "we know they're not gonna die" thing. But also because, as a character moment, there's no legwork done. He comes off as "petty criminal in over his head" moreso than "bad guy growing a conscience."

 - Lt. Primmin is back! But he doesn't really do anything except be astonishingly negligent re: the disappearance of four senior officers. Someone's got their eye on an ill-gotten promotion!

 - Speaking of which, I'm going to take this opportunity to air a grievance that I have with Star Trek all the time. The computer can tell you at any time where somebody is. It is apparently constantly monitoring everyone's movements and life signs. But when someone is abducted, they never know until they look for someone. How hard would it be to set up an automatic alert when people leave the station in some manner other than the station's transporters or the airlocks? Why don't they do this on any ship or station on the show ever?

Hide and Q (TNG)

            “Hide and Q” is, for the most part, an exceptionally poorly written episode. It does a terrible job of maintaining any sort of dramatic tension and also frequently seems like it was written by someone who had watched a little TNG but wasn’t intimately familiar with the characters. This is odd because one of the writers credited with the teleplay is Gene Roddenberry.

            None of this is earth-shattering. First season TNG has lots of stinkers. But I think this particular one bears further examination, for several reasons. It has some stuff going for it. The premise is vaguely compelling, and Q’s character does start to develop in an interesting direction. But on the whole it fails spectacularly, for a few very easy-to-understand reasons.

           

Or just hold a child and look distraught.

            First, let’s talk about dramatic tension. Any good hour of television, or more generally speaking, any good story, needs to have stakes. Something needs to be on the line, something that will be lost if the characters fail and/or gained if they succeed. “Hide and Q” tries way too hard to raise those stakes, to the point that all it does is draw attention to their flimsiness. The Enterprise is trying to save a colony from a mysterious disaster! If the rest of the away team doesn’t follow Q’s arbitrary rules, Tasha will die! If Riker is tempted by omnipotence…

            What exactly? What exactly is the bad thing that happens if Riker accepts Q’s offer of immortality and omnipotence? The episode is trying to tell this story about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, but it never actually shows us Will being corrupted. It fails to offer any arguments as to why Will allowing Q to make him a Q would be anything but awesome (unless you count “Picard would lose a bet” as an argument.)

            Power does change Will, but not in ways that make any sense. The scene where Riker offers to grant everybody wishes is inconsistent to the point of being disturbing. He makes Wesley a grown-up (or at least strands him in a grown-up body) offers Geordi his sight (seriously, when is Geordi going to get any characterization other than “the blind guy?) and… makes Worf a Klingon girlfriend in fishnets?

            Wait a minute, hold that thought. This is isn’t the Holodeck. When Q makes things, they’re real. So when Riker snaps his fingers and makes Worf a special friend, he’s making an actual flesh-and-blood person. And when he snaps his fingers and she goes away, she just ceases to exist. Now, when Q pulls these shenanigans, it’s skeezy, but Q is basically an amoral being. Riker is one of the good guys.

Oh right. It's still the eighties.

            I will admit that women who exist only to be sex objects or fantasies is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. But this is such an egregious example I can’t wrap my head around it. And of course, it comes in a Roddenberry-written episode. The man is the most misogynistic feminist I’ve ever encountered. I’m sure it’s just a joke, but it’s a cheap joke that in the current age reads incredibly creepy, especially the fact that no one objects to the fact that Riker just made and then unmade a person, or asks him where she came from or what happened to her.

            I mentioned good points earlier. I really like how Q’s character is shaping up. The idea of this race of omnipotent beings who are terrified of stagnation is fascinating, and that angle doesn’t really come back until Voyager. The scene where Picard and Q quote Shakespeare back and forth is awesome, but that’s mostly because 1. Patrick Stewart is quoting Shakespeare and 2. Stewart and DeLancie have some of the best chemistry on the entire show. It’s a blessing that the writers realize this, and from here on out stop trying to pair Q with anyone else.

Random Observations:

Q wears the admiral’s uniform in this episode, and eventually the French Field Marshall, so he can outrank Picard. In later appearances, he will always wear a Captain’s uniform identical to Picard’s. You could read a lot into this.

Picard and Tasha is a terrible ship. Let us never speak of it again.

Troi doesn’t appear in the episode, explained by a throwaway line in the captain’s log. The ship’s productivity suffers not at all.

Q taunts Picard by not letting him record a log. This cracks me up for some reason, possibly because being denied the ability to monologue is a horrible punishment if you’re Patrick Stewart.

Worf is actually competent in this episode. That’s nice. It’s nice to see the warrior being allowed to war.

Really, it’s killing Wesley that makes Riker snap?

Geordi/ Tasha is also a bad ship, and it comes out of nowhere here.

The actor playing grown-up Wesley has 14-year-old Will Wheaton’s speech patterns down cold.

The Man Trap (TOS)

Yes, I get why NBC pulled this episode into the number two spot, skipping the ones we've hit so far. It's probably the strongest TOS episode yet (though believe it or not, we're 5 in).

What's really nice about this script is how it does a couple of things that The Original Series isn't always great at: it uses the whole ensemble, and it lets them have some fun. The main plot with the salt vampire succubus was ok, I'll get to it in a second. But the bits of this episode that would have had me tuning in next week are things like Uhura trying to flirt with Spock or Sulu and Rand shooting the breeze in the arboretum. There are a lot of ingredients in the formula that makes Star Trek Star Trek, but one of them is definitely family and that sense of fun.

And it's not like "The Trouble With Tribbles", which is just a fun, goofy episode. This is an episode where several people die and in the climax McCoy has to shoot his lost love with a phaser. And it's also a fun episode.

Ok, so the downside is that the Salt Vampire loose on the ship masquerading as different people was a little reminiscent of Evil Kirk loose on the ship just last episode. At some point it's just like "Hire a security force already." But I digress.

In this episode, the Enterprise is conducting the somewhat bizarre duty of giving an annual physical to a scientist on a strange backwater planet and his wife, who also happens to be, as Kirk's voice over puts it "that woman" in Dr. McCoy's past.

But strangely, Nancy Crater looks like three different women to the three different members of the landing party. And the blueshirt Lt. Darnell gets led off into the desert by the vixen he sees her as and turns up dead with red rings all over his face.

It turns out he's had all the salt sucked out of his body by a shapeshifting salt vampire, who later ends up sneaking on board the ship. It's the last of its kind, like the buffalo (as Dr. Robert Crater says in a painfully strained analogy).

After a game of cat and mouse, and a lot of shots of crewmen stalking and seducing their way across the ship in search of delicious delicious salt, the monster is caught, and McCoy has to shoot it. But he's totally convinced that it's his ex-girlfriend. The anguish is a little too manufactured, maybe, but it makes for a pretty good climax. It's good to see someone other than Kirk having to make the tough decision and save the day, and there's a bittersweetness to the way the crew has to kill an animal that isn't evil to save themselves.

I've berated other episodes for not being Star Trek-y enough in terms of having a real cerebral problem at their heart, and this one might fail on that score, to be perfectly honest. But when an episode is fun enough to watch, it's much easier to forgive that particular failing.

Random Observations:

-- This week's redshirts were actually blue shirts, which if it weren't the very beginning of the show would be a real twist on the formula.

-- A little bit of flirtation between Rand and Sulu here.

-- Of course, Uhura hitting on Spock also -- could this be the seed that led to the full on romance in JJ Abram's version of the story.

Cheesy thing of the week: (Because Nathan's Voyager counts look fun.) Beauregard the Plant is ridiculous, has a ridiculous name, makes a ridiculous sound, and is so obviously a guy in a glove. Love it.

The Passenger (DS9)

Some of the most watchable, and yet most forgettable, early Deep Space Nine episodes feel like solid Next Generation episodes. I love DS9 primarily because of the ways it differentiates itself from its predecessors (and even from its successors). I'm not as impressed by an episode that rides on guest stars, that doesn't enrich or develop the characters of any of the regulars, even if it's well done, even if it's entertaining and it works.

"The Passenger" is one of those episodes. Possession is very, very well-trodden Star Trek territory, for one thing. Off the top of my head, there's TOS's "Turnabout Intruder", TNG's "The Schizoid Man" and "Power Play", DS9's "The Assignment", Voyager's "Warlord" and "Cathexis" (the former of which is really very close to this premise). I'm certain there are quite a few more. So if you're going to return to that well, you'd sure better be bringing something new and innovative.

This episode at least doesn't follow the typical possession formula, where the possessor jumps from body to body. But the possession does serve as a twist ending in the story, and it's a little too predictable to be a good one.

Ok, he doesn't completely lack his own face.

Everything sort of leaves "The Passenger" as another Deep Space Nine episode that executes well, but there's no there there. The cop who's chased the fugitive for her whole life has the potential for a sort of Les Mis story about obsession, but Vantica, the criminal, is such an obvious, non-gray baddy that that doesn't take. Besides that, he's barely seen throughout the episode, and lacks his own face, which makes it hard to build a character.

Most of the plot is the crew working together to catch the bad guy, with the help of guest-star cop lady. And, of course, since a conceit is needed to keep the action on the station, the bad guy is not just trying to get away but to pull off a heist. A heist of ... a mysterious technobabble material, I guess? The word forgettable keeps coming back.

But the idea of attacking whole systems to get at protected files, and the battle-of-wits aspect to the chase are nice touches, with a little more thought in them than the typical shield modulation shenanigans these chase scenes usually entail. The pacing is good, the tension builds nicely. I have no complaints, per se, but nor was I blown away by anything.

One thing that works here is the subplot with Lt. Primmin, the Starfleet security officer who butts heads with Odo. It works because Primmin is surprisingly deep (and upon his introduction seems like he's going to be VERY one-note) and because neither of them is entirely right or entirely wrong. Odo's fear of being replaced is understandable, but it's his pride that keeps him from working with Primmin. And Primmin can't work with Odo until he gets over his own prejudices and stops thinking of him as a country bumpkin. This idea of Bajor as the boonies, the bible belt to Earth's east coast, is one that hits some good notes and isn't always explored enough. It's too bad Primmin never comes back, but the tension does - we'll see the same struggle play out with Michael Eddington and, to a lesser extent, Worf.

Maybe the story fails because it leans too heavily on Bashir and Dax, who, at this point in the series, are still the weakest regulars, both in their own acting and in the writers not knowing how to use them. Alexander Siddig plays Vantica with all the subtlety of a large mallet, and I couldn't help but think "this is not his best work." Maybe it fails because there's just nothing in it interesting or innovative. Either way, it is what it is: a pleasant, enjoyable, bland background episode that will stand out as no one's favorite. But hey, they can't all be.

 Random Observations: 

- One small blessing of this episode is a famous Odo line. In response to Kajara's "What kind of idiot are you?" he smugly replies "My own special variety."

- Deep Space Nine, moreso than other shows, has almost The Office-like cold opens, especially early in the series. These are really fun and give a slice of life that often gets lost in the action later in the episode. Here it's Bashir being way too obliviously smug in front of Kira. It's just a shame the distress signal comes before she gets the chance to give him the earful he deserves.

- Up until now, doctors in Star Trek have played the role of sages, more or less. McCoy and Crusher's status as healers also allowed them to stand as Captains' consciences and confidantes. So, as much as Bashir's early characterization is 2-dimensional and oh-so-irritating, as a subversion of previous shows it's quite clever. He's a very good doctor, but so naive and socially oblivious and self-centered he's a very poor confidante. I don't mean to hate on Bashir. I think Siddig is wonderfully talented, and by the end of the show Bashir becomes one of my favorite characters, and frankly one that I see a lot of myself in, especially in his flaws. But boy does it take a while for him to get there.

- Feel free to list possession episodes I forgot about in the comments. Would be good to have an exhaustive list. In fact, you know what, I'm adding a tag for it.

Emanations (VOY)

It's been a busy week, so we're switching around the schedule. Jonah's next DS9 review will run on Friday.

            On the whole, I have been enjoying season one of Voyager more than season one of TNG. First seasons are pretty much always awkward, and it’s much harder to tell good stories before you’re familiar with the cast and the world you’re working in. But Voyager has mostly been aware of the kinds of stories you save for when you’ve got a pretty good handle on things and the stories that help you get to that point. On that level, “Emanations” is kind of a miss.

            The beginning shows a lot of promise. Voyager discovers an asteroid field with a naturally-occurring compound that has all sorts of amazing properties and could revolutionize something. When they get to the surface, though, it becomes clear that the asteroid belt is a burial ground of some sort. Chakotay is adamant about not disturbing it, which is a little bit of a stereotype, but consistent with his character. Janeway ultimately agrees, and they’re about to go on their way when subspace vacuoles start to open up all over the asteroid, and Harry Kim gets sucked into one. Meanwhile, a dead alien gets beamed to Voyager in his place.

She's not dead, Jim.

            The alien just died, and B’Elanna realizes she could still be resurrected, so the Captain orders it done, over Chakotay’s objections. I’m reasonably certain this violates the Prime Directive, and it’s a huge about face for Janeway from her position five minutes ago, but she is very protective of her crew, and I think Harry Kim especially she feels responsible for, so its not a huge stretch that she’d be willing to bend the rules if it meant some hope of finding him.

            Speaking of Harry, he wakes up in a coffin on an alien world. It turns out the Vhnari send their sick through the subspace vacuoles just before the moment of death, and their religion tells them they are reborn in the “Next Emanation”. Without physical bodies to make them question it, the Unari’s belief about death is taken more factually than any human religion. In fact, their culture often kills people it otherwise wouldn’t, like Hatil, who has been disabled in an accident. Since everyone is so certain about the “Next Emanation”, moving on early isn’t considered suicide.

            Harry is horrified by this practice, and the Vhnari are terrified of him, because his report, that the Vhnari who come through the vacuoles stay dead, threatens to destroy the fabric of their society. It’s unclear whether the Vhnari have warp travel, but it takes Harry a good ten minutes to realize he’s trampling all over the big PD. To his credit, he figures it out before Janeway does.

            Janeway opts to revive the alien woman, Ptera, who is shocked to find herself not in heaven and quickly undergoes a perfectly reasonable existential crisis. Kes is detailed to help her get a handle on things, which is a smart move on Janeway’s part, given the Ocampa’s unfailing optimism and rare gift for actually thinking of the person she’s talking to as an actual person with feelings.

Harry and Hatil have a heart to heart.

            B’Elanna comes up with a plan to get Ptera home and maybe get Harry back, but of course it doesn’t work, and Ptera ends up conveniently dead. It’s unclear whether she would have survived if she’d wanted to. Meanwhile, Harry and the doomed Hatil realize they can solve both their problems – Hatil can run away and start a new life, while Harry get in his coffin transporter and beams back to the asteroid belt. Harry has to die for a few minutes, but it works and the crew goes on their merry way, having wrestled with moral quandaries but never actually having been forced to face any.

            And therein lies the essential problem of the episode. It’s afraid of its premise. It wants to ask a lot of big questions – about what happens when we die, about when it’s okay to interfere with another culture, about how much of a role religion is allowed to play in our moral systems – but it’s scared of the answers, so it skirts around them. TNG, in its prime, isn’t afraid to get its hands dirty. If Voyager wants to succeed, it has to start doing the same.

The other problem here, and it’s related, is one of focus. Like “Justice”, “Emanations” sets up several interesting concepts without taking the time to explore them. It could be about euthanasia, but it never really delves into that. It could have been a great character piece for Chakotay, if the conflict between his religious beliefs and Janeway’s pragmatic course of action had been more at the forefront, but that whole angle melts away halfway through the episode. The core of the plot is Voyager’s need to rescue Harry/ Harry’s need to get home, but the philosophical and emotional heart of the episode is missing. It makes a lot of promises, but fails to deliver on any of them in a satisfying way.

Random Observations:

I continue to love the B’Elanna/ Chakotay relationship. B’Elanna and Harry are starting to develop decent friend chemistry, but the writers have finally figured out that this is not where romantic sparks are going to fly.

Paris and Tuvok, having been in the spotlight last week, basically take the week off. Neelix does not appear at all. I didn’t really miss him.

Hatil and Ptera are both very well cast, and their actors do a great job making us empathize with them under all the make-up.

Most humans in Starfleet are portrayed as being atheists, but Harry seems to be more of an agnostic. He doesn't discount the possibility of God or souls or heaven he just doesn't see a reason to believe in them. Janeway, on the other hand, is a straight up atheist.

Speaking of Harry and Janeway, their mentor to student/ mother to son relationship is very sweet, and I like that the episode ends on it.

Minor Character Watch: Lt. Seska is back, now working in the transporter room. She still hasn’t gotten a name or much of a backstory.

The make-up on the Unari is mostly uninspired, but I love the extra nostrils.

Harry Kim Death Count: 1 (Trust me, we’ll need this.)

The Battle (TNG)

Picard encounters ghosts from his past. Literally.

            

We aren’t to “good” yet.

 
             I don’t know what the first “good” episode of TNG is. I have a feeling the first excellent episode is “The Measure of a Man”, but maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised before then. “The Battle” is not cringe-inducing. Like so much first season TNG, it reeks of unused potential. I will say, however, that “The Battle” is an episode that experiments with a lot of elements that are necessary for TNG to become the good show we know it will eventually become.

            We open with a captain’s log, and the promise of a new encounter with the Ferengi. At this point, they’re still supposed to be Picard’s main adversary, and I guess “The Last Outpost” wasn’t bad enough to discourage the writers from this plan, so I guess it’s as good a time as any to bring them back for another go. Given that the Klingons served as a sort of an allegory for Cold War Russia in TOS, I have to actually admire Roddenberry for trying to make the flagship villains of the new series a caricature of American-style capitalism. Combine this with their extreme misogyny, and we can’t shake the idea that the conflict of the Federation vs. the Ferengi is a conflict between humanity’s better nature and society as it is now.

There was no money in the budget for a background for him.

            That conflict isn’t at the center of this episode, though, because Daimon Bok doesn’t have any problem with the Federation. His beef is with Picard himself, and his motivations have nothing to do with Ferengi worldview or philosophy. Picard killed his son – and he wants revenge.

            This is the first potentially awesome thing this episode does – it delves into Picard’s past, giving us a glimpse of how he got to be the man he is today. Many of the best episodes of TNG and Star Trek in general rely on developing a character’s backstory, and this is TNG’s first foray into that. The story is that he lost his first command, the Stargazer, in battle with an unidentified ship. Though his ship was lost, he managed to destroy the alien vessel before abandoning ship. Unfortunately, the vessel was Ferengi, and its Captain Daimon Bok’s son.

            But Bok does not swear revenge on Picard right away. Instead, he offers the “Hero of Maxia” a gift – much to the chagrin of his own first officer, who wonders why they are not trying to make a profit off the exchange. The gift is Stargazer herself, recovered after the battle by Ferengi patrols.

            After that the plot sort of stumbles around for a while. Data discovers sensor logs suggesting that rather than acting in self-defense, Picard fired on the Ferengi ship unprovoked. Riker debates the merits of turning his Captain in, but before he really has to wrestle with that decision Data and Geordi discover that the logs are a forgery. It feels like filler, but it’s not bad filler, and Riker does get a cute scene with the Ferengi first officer where they try to piece together what’s going on.

            The most glaring plot hole in this episode is how trusting the crew is of the Ferengi’s good intentions. Everything we know about these people says that wooden horse is probably full of soldiers, but they happily drag it through the gates anyway. In fact, even though Picard is acting increasingly weird, it’s not until boy genius Wesley Crusher notices some odd sensor readings that they start to suspect something is wrong.

This goofy-looking thing.

            By then Picard has already been driven thoroughly batty by Daimon Bok’s “thought-maker”, and he beams himself aboard the old ship, believing he is back at the Battle of Maxia and the alien ship is the Enterprise. Riker and Data have to devise a way to defeat their old Captain without killing him, which is just an excuse to give us a space battle, because we haven’t had nearly enough of those in the first eight episodes.

            I think the inconsistencies in the character’s behavior combined with the terrible pacing of the second act keep this from being a solid script, but the attempt to glimpse into our main character’s past is appreciated, and trying to give him a connection to the show’s new villains is a good idea. Unfortunately it doesn’t work. Bok isn’t charismatic enough to make a compelling recurring villain, and the Ferengi are too goofy to be particularly intimidating. But the seeds of greatness continue to be planted, and I’m excited for where I know we’ll get eventually.

Random Observations:

Apparently by the 24^th century the common cold and headaches are a think of the past. I’m pretty sure later in the series people complain of headaches and it’s not nearly as big a deal.

This episode blatantly contradicts the rest of the series in that Troi can read Daimon Bok’s mind. The rest of the time, Ferengi are immune to telepathy.

Kazago says that he’s “all ears”. Suppose it was only a matter of time.

Patrick Stewart’s acting goes a long way towards selling the weaker aspects of the script. I’m amazed he didn’t get fed up and quit halfway through season one.

Picard has a much larger fish tank in his quarters. It occurs to me that taking care of tropical fish is a lot of work and we never see or hear about him attending to them. I wonder if they’re holographic?

The scenes with the ghost officers are really cheesy, but I kind of like them.

This is the third time Picard has been possessed or otherwise mentally compromised. Beverly needs to learn to trust her judgement about her old friend/ Captain a little better. She could save the ship a lot of trouble.

I really wish those weird sensor readings had been detected by Geordi or Data or Worf or anyone but Wesley. He keeps saving the ship, and its not so much that, but he’s just getting so damn smug about it.