UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

The Mind’s Eye
Season 4 Episode 24
Original airdate: May 25, 1991

Netflix Synopsis

La Forge is brainwashed by the Romulans and ordered to assassinate a Klingon ambassador.

My Brief Review

This is a pretty great episode that I don’t remember ever having seen before. We haven’t had a lot of Geordi attention in season 4, so it’s nice to have an episode that features him.

It starts off like a number of other episodes, especially in this season: a crew member (in this case, Geordi) is in a shuttlecraft, far away from Enterprise, when a Romulan warbird uncloaks in front of him. Bad news! Why they ever let shuttlecraft fly outside of visual range of the Enterprise, I’ll never understand. Something bad always happens.

The Romulans beam Geordi aboard their ship, send a half-assed Geordi lookalike in a cheap knock-off VISOR to take Geordi’s place on his trip to an engineering conference on Risa (another place where something bad always happens), and proceed to undertake an aggressive behavioral reprogramming process on Geordi, while also hacking his VISOR to allow them to transmit orders directly into his brain.

The intrigue is all focused on getting Geordi to assassinate a Klingon colonial governor (not an ambassador… the ambassador is there, but — spoiler alert! — he’s in cahoots with the baddies), thereby destroying the Federation/Klingon alliance and plunging them into war, to the benefit of the Romulans.

Ultimately Data figures out that Geordi’s shuttlecraft had been tampered with by the Romulans, and he pieces things together — far more slowly than I would expect his positronic brain to be capable of, to be honest.

It’s probably worth mentioning (gasp!) that I’ve never seen The Manchurian Candidate and leave it at that.

Memorable Moment

There are plenty of interesting moments, including when Geordi unknowingly hacks the Enterprise’s transporter system, and then innocently joins in the effort to try to track down who did it. My favorite random bit of weirdness though is when Geordi is summoned to the Klingon ambassador’s quarters, where he tells him how he should commit the assassination. The ambassador is sitting down in front of a massive Klingon feast, and here’s the bit I just can’t get over. He very carefully unfolds a cloth napkin and places it in his lap before digging in. What true Klingon would do that?!

Crew Rando

They aren’t real, but during Geordi’s reprogramming, he’s put into a simulation of Ten Forward, where he is ordered to assassinate Chief O’Brien. After an initial hesitation, he goes through with it, and then asks O’Brien’s two companions if he may join them. They agree without reluctance, Geordi pushes O’Brien’s lifeless body aside, picks his chair back up, sits down and drinks O’Brien’s drink! Damn! (Is that really how the Romulans think humans would react in that situation?)

Distance Rating: 3K

IMDb score: 7.8/10

The Host
Season 4 Episode 23
Original airdate: May 11, 1991

Netflix Synopsis

Dr. Crusher falls for a visiting ambassador, only to discover that he’s not quite what she thought.

My Brief Review

Spoiler: He’s a parasite living inside a symbiont host. The host body dies, he gets transplanted into Riker’s body so he can continue mediating a dispute between two moons, everything works out in the end, and his permanent replacement host is… a woman! Gasp!

Beverly is totally fine falling in love with an alien with forehead ridges… as long as it’s a straight relationship. eyeroll Sometimes Star Trek’s efforts to be socially progressive are a bit ham-fisted, and often they don’t age well, much like their tech. In some ways, we’ve come farther both socially and technologically in 30 years than the writers anticipated in 300.

And in other ways… not so much.

P.S. Yes I skipped another Lwaxana Troi episode. Ugh.

Memorable Moment

That rose Odan gives Beverly is pretty sad, I have to say. At least they show it later in full bloom, and that’s what makes Beverly decide she can… uh… handle a night of passion with Riker.

But I think the most memorable moment for me is when we first see the planetary system where this negotiation is taking place. It’s a planet with two large moons, and all three are class M. The humanoids originated on the central planet but colonized the two moons centuries earlier. It’s a very interesting concept I would like to see more done with, as opposed to the main focus of the episode. Once again.

Crew Rando

Nurse Ogawa makes another appearance in this episode. I think she’s the only non-regular we even see in this episode.

Distance Rating: 2.23 miles

IMDb score: 6.5/10
#irunwithmaud #finishtherun

Over the weekend I ran on the treadmill twice and watched ST:TNG as usual, both times. In this case I watched Qpid (S4E20, 4/20/91, IMDb 7.3/10) and The Drumhead (S4E21, 4/27/91, IMDb 8.4/10).

Both were good episodes that I enjoyed, but my timing was bad, and I did not have a chance to write my blog entries immediately after watching them.

“Qpid” (featuring Q, of course), was the kind of episode I might typically hate, but I actually found it exceedingly entertaining, with Picard as Robin Hood, leading his band of Merry Men to rescue Maid Marian (Vash, from the episode where Picard punches a Ferengi in the face). The episode even pays homage to one of the funniest moments in Animal House.

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And then we had “The Drumhead,” featuring Jean Simmons (who I recognized best from having just seen her in an old episode of Miss Marple that I watched a week or so ago) as a witch hunt-leading admiral. The episode, once again, felt very timely with what’s been happening in the U.S. politically in recent months. When episodes like this originally aired, I saw them as symbolically representing tyrannical governments of the 20th century, but I foolishly maintained an “it would never happen here” mentality. Now I know better. So I didn’t exactly enjoy this episode, but I found it compelling.

Sorry for breaking the formula with this review; I’m just trying to get caught up!

The Nth Degree
Season 4 Episode 19
Original airdate: March 30, 1991

Netflix Synopsis

When assigned to investigate an unknown probe, Lt. Barclay receives an unexplainable boost of confidence and a vast increase in his knowledge.

My Brief Review

I often skip the Lt. Barclay episodes. I just can’t handle his twitchy nervousness and I have trouble believing someone so pathologically insecure could manage to get promoted to Lieutenant and score an assignment on the Federation’s flagship. But this episode stands apart, because for half of it, Barclay isn’t himself.

Who is he then? While investigating a mysterious alien probe that has knocked out a telescope array at the edge of Federation space, Barclay gets blasted with a beam of energy and is suddenly a confident super-genius. Which predictably goes to his head. Eventually he enters the Holodeck, not for one of his typical escapist fantasies, but to have the ship’s computer build a neural interface so his brain can merge with the computer itself.

This kind of thing has been done before (and since), but it’s still a pretty solid episode. I was reminded of Flowers for Algernon as Barclay’s IQ swelled. And there are definitely traces of HAL-9000 in Barclay/Computer’s interactions with La Forge as he’s trying to configure a bypass to the ship’s controls. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Geordi.” OK, he doesn’t actually say that line exactly, but he might as well.

Memorable Moment

There were several moments in this episode that piqued my faded memories of this episode from high school, but the one that stands out the most is certainly when the giant floating head of the aged hippie Cytherian appears on the Enterprise bridge. I feel like the 10 days Enterprise supposedly spends with them would have made for an interesting episode — or at least a few minutes’ worth of this one. But I suppose the writers or special effects designers ran out of ideas for how that all would work.

Crew Rando

Barclay himself, of course! I understand it’s a practical matter in casting and production of a TV series, but it feels weird that Barclay is a full-fledged member of the crew, one of Geordi’s best engineers (according to Geordi himself in this episode), and yet we only ever see Barclay in episodes that are about him. It’s hard to suspend disbelief.

Distance Rating: 4K

IMDb rating: 8.1/10

An interesting take today from Gruber on a concept (Brooks’s Law) that you may not know by name, but may have witnessed in your life.

Personally, I have vivid firsthand experience with Brooks’s Law, from the 7 months I worked at Best Buy corporate in 2000. The BestBuy.com dev team was ludicrously large, and I honestly couldn’t figure out what 99% of them were doing there. Aside from a few project managers, a handful of content writers/editors, and 4 of us on the dev team — 2 front-end devs (including myself) and 2 back-end devs/database admins — I really feel like no one else needed to be there, and the fact that there were so many people made everything take way longer and cost way more than it needed to.

Microsoft contributed $150 million worth of software and consultant time to the project, including a relatively huge team working with some of the other devs at Best Buy who I never had any contact with, all for the process of customizing a 7-figure behemoth Content Management System (CMS) called Vignette StoryServer to suit our needs.

That project dragged on for months, including many months beyond when I left. In the meantime, I spent a weekend building a quick-and-dirty, database-less (since as a front-end dev I wasn’t allowed direct access to databases, because roles!) CMS to allow our writers to load their own content into pages instead of having to send Word docs to the other front-end dev and myself to key in as HTML (stupid!)… and my QDCMS worked so well, they were still using it almost a year after I quit!