I've been hanging off that cliff for a while now, so it's probably time to treat myself / waste more precious time watching and rating another classic run of episodes, probably. I hope Jean-Luc's okay.
Key:
Klingon episode
Trill episode
Cardassian episode
Romulan episode
Borg episode
Q episode
Likely the worst of the Q episodes (even season one's 'Hide and Q' has delicious cheese going for it), this starts out amusingly enough as a Jean-Luc love triangle before all the lame Robin Hood antics of the second half. I wanted to watch Star Trek.
It's not the episode's fault that the Trill were unrecognisably retconned in Deep Space Nine, but that's the least of its problems. The ending wasn't as bad as I remembered, shame about the rest.
It's not like I was expecting the proto-Voyager ravioli baby episode to be a high point of the season (and I was a little disappointed that they changed the iconic primitive CGI in the remaster, though understandably), but I wasn't prepared for how painful Geordi's creepy rejection plot would be. What have they got against his character this year?
Even dead characters are getting family reunions now. Besides screwing around with Data, this is mainly a throwback to season three's gang fixation, but I don't mind a bit of 80s neon grit between space phenomena.
Not an especially gripping instalment with Troi's regression to incompetence and the dreariest technobabble resolution since 'Transfigurations,' but the disability analogy still makes it worthwhile and the two-dimensional aliens have always been memorable in concept, if not execution.
Continuing the season's family theme and dredging up old lore (and Lore), this is a pivotal moment in Data's personal history, but quite a boring episode after the initial fun of him hijacking the ship, untroubled by useless security guards.
Geordi turns into an invisible alien, but he gets better. The pseudobiology's as silly as in Voyager's despised 'Threshold,' but the systematic holodeck investigation recoups some points.
They're obliged to explore these uncomfortable domestic frontiers every so often. This is made more awkward than it needs to be with Beverley jumping to unfounded conclusions and Picard squirming as desperate comic relief, but it works out in the end. Compared to some of the keeper races introduced this season, there's minimal effort to make this week's old enemies the Talarians distinctive.
I enjoyed these run-ins with impostor gods and technology indistinguishable from magic in the 60s show, but it's an odd throwback by this point, especially after the superior 'Who Watches the Watchers?' and seeing the same type of parlour tricks with Q. Still, it's one for the atheism boxset.
Interchangeable anomalies and derelicts of the week, made memorable by being creepy and kooky. This episode taught me about REM sleep and hydrogen atoms as a kid, and it's strangely gratifying that the typo on the ship model is preserved in the remaster.
Lwaxana's Run. It took them long enough, but revealing a sympathetic side makes the annual Mrs Troi episodes less like irritating flare-ups (although saying that, I've just remembered what next year's is, and it's putting me off continuing). As Mrs Roddenberry, there's also personal resonance we can read into this exaggerated ageism fable if we choose.
Two bleak stories: one to pad out time, one more meaningful than these temporary survival plots usually are for being the real send-off of the teenage cast member. Fortunately, there's some light relief in the word 'Gamelan' being considered exotic enough to be an alien star system and its inhabitants' evolutionarily-questionable facial structures.
A tonally bizarre instalment with no coherence between its dual plots of Data's cute romcom and a randomly destructive anomaly that results in the unseeable image of a crewmember fused between decks, but both are good episodes.
Guest nutter of the week gets calmly told off. A less interesting courtroom counterpart to 'The Measure of a Man,' though as a fan of conspiracy theories from a safe distance, I enjoyed the twisted tapestry of back references and keeping the Klingon-Romulan intrigue simmering.
It's no Best of Both Worlds, but explosive developments in the Klingon drama are rewarding after all the build up, and will resonate for years to come. The attention-courting cliffhangers of Worf's departure and the return of a familiar face are less effective for being too temporary and weird, respectively.
The Klingon soap opera reaches its dramatic peak and isn't quite the highlight I remembered, which isn't great news for diminishing Cornish pasty antics to come. Being more used to the cosmopolitan DS9, it's weird seeing events of galactic magnitude filtered through this one reluctantly meddling crew. They don't do much exploring these days, do they?
There's no ambiguity about Riker's Truman Show experience being credible, but it's fun watching the fanfic play out. The bigger twist is that it isn't the obvious culprit, resulting in a classical Star Trek ending, complete with a creature suit they really shouldn't have rolled out in the 90s. Is Riker really back in reality, or is Barash taking the piss?
O'pocalypse Now. I hadn't noticed how O'Brien suddenly gains prominence after Wesley leaves, though they probably didn't want to make one of the regulars racist. The Cardassians make a strong first impression, even if they mainly come off as reptilian Romulans. What with it not having been invented yet, it's easy to forget they're retroactively occupying Bajor at this point.
The La Forgean Candidate. Season four shits on Geordi once again, but at least this time it's entertaining. This tense conspiracy thriller is reminiscent of the forthcoming Star Trek VI and paves the way to Deep Space Nine.
I can look past the cheek of a fan passing off Red Dwarf's lesser-seen 'Thanks for the Memory' as his own script and selling it to Star Trek (and the further cockiness of having the characters say they'll "get it right" this time), because it's about results at the end of the day. Data being seemingly compromised is good misdirection the first time around.
Data gets a sitcom, introducing Keiko, Spot and the Bolian barber. What's not to love? The serious side story isn't as interesting, but it gets funny at the end when they surprise the Romulan commander while he's apparently playing with a plasma ball.
Reg Barclay's second outing isn't the prescient classic of his first, but it's a very fun remix of classic Trek riffs and helps keep the wonder of the cosmos alive amid all the danger. More superficially, back-to-back ultraviolet episodes is rad.
4. The Best of Both Worlds, Part II (4x01)
Character growth, consequences and serialisation for a day! Doesn't it feel good? It's also true that most episodes couldn't be like this, so it's gratifying that they nailed this one. Likely the definitive episode that can be appreciated more with age, if only there was an available metaphor for that.
Wesley's getting a bit old for these science project screw-ups, but it treats his mother to her best episode of the series. The mystery of the vanishing crew ramps up from creepy to hysterical, and her comrades' trust despite her seemingly deranged conspiracy theory is touching. I'd forgotten that there was a median Traveler episode and that there were so many back references by this point generally.
This inverted perspective is exactly the kind of next-level episode The Next Generation should be doing, complete with diverse characters who behave like real people for a change... aside from a bizarre WTF jolt that threatened to derail it in the middle, but it stayed on track. Eleven-year-old me never would have believed that he'd one day prefer this random talkie episode over its exciting movie namesake.
