UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

Pen Pals
Season 2 Episode 14
Original airdate: April 29, 1989

Netflix Synopsis

Upon arriving at a newly identified planetary group, the crew finds that the entire region is unstable.

IMDb Synopsis

Data befriends an alien girl in distress, breaking the Prime Directive, while Wesley commands his first team.

My Brief Review

I’m posting both the Netflix and IMDb synopses here because they’re so extremely different. In many cases, the two have almost word-for-word identical synopses, but in this case there’s a huge difference between the two. And if I had checked IMDb before watching this episode, I would have remembered exactly which episode it was before I started watching.

(As an aside: I’ve noticed that when Netflix doesn’t almost exactly replicate IMDb, its synopsis tends to mainly describe just what happens in the cold open, before the opening credits. Which leads me to believe that whoever Netflix hired to write their synopses is incredibly lazy; when they’re not just watching the first minute of the show, they’re straight-up plagiarizing!)

Star Trek episodes tend to fall into a few different categories. This one is a bit of a grab bag of all of them: mysterious space phenomena, interpersonal drama, philosophical/metaphysical struggles, and even the Holodeck.

Overall it is not an amazing episode, but it is pretty solid, and Sarjenka, the orange, long-fingered alien child Data befriends via radio transmitter, is a memorable character.

Memorable Moment

Data beaming down to Sarjenka’s home, finding her, and beaming back to the ship with her, massively violating the Prime Directive, certainly stands out. Picard spits at Riker, “He has brought a child onto my ship. Onto my bridge!” (If there’s one thing Picard hates, it’s having children on the bridge.)

Crew Rando

Ensign Davies, the geologist Wesley Crusher picks for his survey team, who challenges the young Wesley’s authority initially, but when Wesley, after consulting Riker, grows a spine, he immediately and joyfully complies with Wesley’s order to conduct a time-consuming scan. (Which, of course, is pivotal to saving Sarjenka’s planet.)

Distance Rating: 5K

IMDb score: 6.8/10

Time Squared
Season 2 Episode 13
Original airdate: April 1, 1989

Netflix Synopsis

The Enterprise comes across a Federation shuttlecraft that is floating in space and without much power but does exhibit life signs.

My Brief Review

In some ways this episode is similar to the previous one. It’s almost as if the writers of the two episodes were given the same minimal premise and asked to create competing stories. This one is definitely the better of the two, but it still has some significant flaws.

Here, the Enterprise retrieves a derelict shuttlecraft that, eerily, bears the exact same identification as the craft sitting next to it in the shuttle bay. And when they open it, they discover an unconscious Picard on board!

Long story short, time travel, energy vortex, freewill vs. determinism. “Our” Picard ends up killing the “other” Picard and choosing to fly directly into the vortex instead of trying to distract it by sacrificing himself in a shuttle. It works, but it is never explained, and a lot of the story just doesn’t hold water.

In particular, I struggled with Picard’s uncharacteristically hot-headed behavior when attempting to interrogate the “other” Picard in sick bay. The writing isn’t just out-of-character, it is extremely sloppy, because when Picard leaves sick bay he orders Deanna Troi to stay with the “other” Picard, but she immediately gets into an argument with Dr. Pulaski and then storms out.

Memorable Moment

The episode begins in Riker’s quarters, where Riker is apparently demonstrating his culinary skills, using a weird alien egg to supposedly make “omelets” for his guests (Data, Worf, Geordi and Dr. Pulaski). When he starts preparing it, at first he appears to be actually making a crêpe, not an omelet… but then he just tosses it all up and serves them scrambled eggs. I should have known I was in for a sloppily-written episode right at that point, but I was most distracted simply trying to figure out if the writer didn’t know what an omelet was, if Jonathan Frakes was too unskilled to even feign preparing one, or if no one involved even cared about the inconsistency.

Crew Rando

The “other” Picard, of course!

Distance Rating: 5K

IMDb score: 7.6/10

The Royale
Season 2 Episode 12
Original airdate: March 25, 1989

Netflix Synopsis

The Enterprise investigates strange debris in orbit around a nearby planet only to find a piece of a NASA spacecraft emblazoned with the US flag.

My Brief Review

I feel like, if I had read the IMDb synopsis instead of the Netflix one, I almost certainly would have skipped this episode:

Worf, Data and Riker find themselves trapped in a recreation of a poorly written novel.

Recreating 20th century scenarios is old hat for Star Trek, going back to the original series, and while the best of those episodes can be highly effective as metaphor, they’re usually weaker episodes because first off, the sight of Star Trek crew members wandering through anachronistic settings is only amusing once. Second, it’s an especially lazy way to write a TNG episode because so many feature the Holodeck anyway. (And I hate Holodeck episodes for the same reason.)

This episode starts off with a very intriguing premise. O’Brien beams aboard a piece of debris that is emblazoned with a NASA logo and a US flag displaying 52 stars. (The number of stars is not mentioned until later in the episode, but I’ve learned to always immediately count the number of stars on a US flag that appears in sci-fi.) But that interesting premise ends before the opening credits.

The rest of the episode takes place inside what appears to be an early 21st century Las Vegas casino (judging by the ’90s-ish but slightly futuristic attire of “Mickey D.” and the Texan gambler describing his 1991 Cadillac has having “only” 80,000 miles on it). And the episode excuses its own weak writing as being the result of its source material — a “second-rate” novel aliens found aboard the 21st century NASA ship the piece of debris was from.

Somehow the aliens created a Holodeck-like world on an inhospitable planet, and kept the sole surviving member of that NASA crew alive for 38 years. Who were they? Why did they do this? How did they do this? How did the NASA ship get way out here? Not only are none of these things explained, the episode doesn’t even try to explain them, although at one point it does acknowledge that they’re questions we might be asking.

In the end, Picard is uncharacteristically accepting of the lack of an explanation, weakly tying up the episode by referring back to a discussion he had with Riker of Fermat’s Last Theorem.

As bad as this episode is, it is still occasionally entertaining, and does present a few interesting ideas. When the away team discovers the mummified body of the NASA astronaut in a room in the hotel (having died 283 years earlier), they clarify that 52 stars on the US flag dates between 2033 and 2079. Will we have granted statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico within the next 13 years? That seems promising. But the astronaut’s mission, launched in 2037, was Earth’s third attempt at manned travel beyond the solar system. Considering that’s just 17 years away, and we haven’t even traveled farther than the moon yet, I doubt this one will come to pass.

Memorable Moment

Data playing craps is entertaining, but I think my favorite moment is when Picard and Deanna Troi are reading the novel the Holodeck-ish hotel is based on. It of course begins, “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Crew Rando

No crew randos to speak of here, but there’s a notable guest appearance by familiar character actor Sam Anderson as the assistant manager of the hotel.

Distance Rating: 3K

IMDb score: 6.7/10

Contagion
Season 2 Episode 11
Original airdate: March 18, 1989

Netflix Synopsis

Capt. Picard and the crew respond to a distress call from the Enterprise’s sister ship, the USS Yamato.

My Brief Review

Boy, the Yamato had a troubled and brief existence. In my first review, it featured — merely as an illusion — in a surreal sequence where it was destroyed, and in this episode it is destroyed for real. But its demise leads to an intense and exciting episode, wherein the Enterprise travels deep into the Neutral Zone, pursued by angry Romulans, as it attempts to uncover the mystery of a series of system failures that led to the Yamato’s explosion.

A mysterious probe launched from the ruins of an ancient, highly advanced civilization was the source of the problem, and the contagion — a computer virus, of sorts, not a biological one, for once — spread from the Yamato to the Enterprise and to the Romulan ship. Picard leads an away team along with Data and Worf — no red shirts dying today! — to the site where the probe was launched, where they discover a portal that the ancient society had used to teleport instantly between worlds.

This kind of episode may not be everyone’s cup of tea (Earl Grey, hot), but I love it.

Memorable Moment

Speaking of Earl Grey, hot… this was the first episode wherein Captain Picard ordered his signature beverage from the replicator. Only, due to the computer virus, he is served a potted plant instead.

Crew Rando

Ensign Williams. She isn’t really that memorable, but hey, a crew rando who actually gets a named, credited role! At least she wasn’t sacrificed on the away mission.

I should also note that I skipped an episode here, S2E9, “The Dauphin,” which Netflix summarizes thus: “Wesley Crusher suffers from the pangs of first love when the Enterprise is tasked to transport a young woman, Salia, back to her home.” No thanks.

Distance Rating: 5K

IMDb score: 7.7/10

The Measure of a Man
Season 2 Episode 9
Original airdate: February 11, 1989

Netflix Synopsis

Data resigns his commission rather than be dismantled for examination by an inadequately skilled scientist.

My Brief Review

This episode has a strong premise, but is hampered by clumsy dialogue and two entirely unlikable guest characters — Captain Louvois, the JAG officer assigned to the new star base Enterprise is docking at (who we are preconditioned to dislike because we’re introduced to her as the prosecutor of a court-martial against Picard several years earlier), and Commander Maddox, a cybernetics researcher who wants to disassemble Data and study “it.” The episode centers on the trial at which Captain Louvois will determine whether Data has rights, or is the property of Starfleet.

As if things weren’t getting heavy-handed enough already, after asking for a recess in the trial, Captain Picard, who is acting as Data’s defense, consults Guinan — in the epitome of her role as the show’s “Magical Negro” (a term I use here reluctantly but with careful intent) — who helps him to see that the vision Maddox has of creating thousands of Datas, all property of Starfleet, is tantamount to slavery.

At the end of the episode, in a final failure of quality writing, Maddox inexplicably has a change of heart after Captain Louvois rules in Data’s favor, and refers to Data as “he” for the first time, instead of “it.” He might has well have handed him a trophy and declared “You’re all right, LaRusso!”

Still, the episode deals with some serious moral and philosophical issues, on a level that would seem elementary to a college freshman but is fairly sophisticated for a syndicated TV series. It’s a strong episode, but it loses marks for the issues outlined above.

Memorable Moment

There are several memorable moments — Data carefully removing wrapping paper from a gift so the paper can be reused; Data’s reluctant admission during the trial that he and Tasha Yar had been “intimate”; but none can surpass our introduction to the officers’ poker game, where Data wears his ridiculous visor for the first time, and also learns what a “poker face” is when Riker successfully bluffs him, beating Data’s three queens with a worthless hand.

Crew Rando

Not really a crew member, but since there are no crew randos to speak of in this episode, the award goes to Commander Maddox, for being one of the few Star Trek characters you wish was a “red shirt.”

Distance Rating: 4K

IMDb score: 9.2/10

(Bonus points for myself: this review contains three 70-plus word sentences.)