I’ve been reviewing TNG series for several years now and have just started season 3 – meaning I am actually writing these reviews more slowly than the episodes were originally made. So that’s … an accomplishment.

Evolution

This one has Dr Kelso from Scrubbs in it, which is nice. Also, anyone whose Star Trek bingo card had “the entire plot revolves around a piece of Wesley’s homework going wrong” scratch that off if you haven’t already.

So, yes. In this episode Dr Kelso from Scrubbs is on the Enterprise because they’re helping him do Science to a weird stellar phenomenon, where, like, a solar flare goes into a black hole or something, and this only happens once every hundred and twenty-four years so if he doesn’t do it now his entire life’s work will be ruined. I mean, I do have to wonder what he’s been doing his whole life if it all comes down to this one thing. Like most academics I know kind of work on more than one thing and also don’t devote their entire lives to the study of a single time-critical event that they’ll only get to observe once. Like, how did this guy even get a doctorate if the thing he studies could not previously have been studied, including by him. Also how is anyone going to replicate his research?

Anyway, the plot kicks into gear when the Enterprise starts experiencing unexplained malfunctions and it turns out that these were caused when Wesley took two nanobots from sick bay and decided to let them modify each other to see what happened.

Which I suppose sort of makes Wesley God?

What happens, of course, is that they immediately become sentient (sentience evolves incredibly fast in fictional universes. If real biology ran off Star Trek principles we’d be overrun with sentient bacteria) and when Dr Kelso from Scubbs tries to wipe them out so he can carry on doing his experiment they get personally offended and try to kill the Enterprise.

Because this is TNG, not TOS, the solution to this is, of course, for them briefly inhabit Data’s body, then have a diplomatic exchange with Picard in which he apologies, surrenders, and gives them everything they want. Although given what they want is just to … leave the Enterprise (and also, thinking about it, a whole planet) this is kind of fair enough (apart from the planet thing, which Picard was able to swing surprisingly easily).

This is actually quite a good episode. The core nanotech principle is sound(ish), there’s a very Star Trekky bit where they all sit around and debate What Life Is TM, and I’m always here for episodes where the solution is Picard makes a diplomacy check. That said, I giving it an extra bobbin for being a Wesley’s Homework episode.

Three bobbins.

The Ensigns of Commands

I’m not sure why this episode is called what it’s called, partly because I only really know the term ‘ensign’ as a rank on a ship, although from context or etymology it seems like it mean signs or symbols?  

Anyway, this is a Data Has No Game episode—which are surprisingly common because everyone wants to do Data. This is also one of those episodes that makes you ask what the fuck is going on in the Star Trek galaxy.

The core conflict is that there a planet called Tau Cygni V which a decades-old treaty signs over to a species of enigmatic murder aliens called the Sheliak.  (Also I just want to take a moment to note that my completely unmodified copy of Word apparently recognises ‘Sheliak’ as a valid proper noun. Do I think someone at Microsoft just dumped the whole of Memory Alpha into the dictionary? Yes. Yes I do). This should have been fine because Tau Cygni V is bombarded with generic Star Trek radiation that should make it impossible for humans to live on it, except it turns out some humans are living on it.

Sidebar: this is going to come out as quite a low bobbins episode because I genuinely like it but it will gain at least one bobbin for how handwavey this set up is. Like, the conversation goes roughly “How can there be humans on it, it’s bathed with radiation so deadly that it will kill anyone who goes down there?” / “I dunno, they’ve adapted I guess?” Basically it’s a premise designed specifically to make it so that only Data can go down the planet’s surface because a human away team would be killed by the radiation. If the radiation is that dangerous there is no way a off-course colony ship could possibly have survived.

This episode has quite a nice A plot / B plot structure, or I suppose really a split A plot structure in that half of it is Data on the planet, trying to convince the Tau Cygni V-ians that they really do seriously have to evacuate because the Sheliak will just nuke them from orbit, while the other half is Picard negotiating with the Sheliak for time to complete the evacuation.

Second sidebar: although what the hell kind of treaty is this where one of the clauses is apparently “and if you do find humans on any of these planets, you’re just allowed to kill them all?” I’m going to come to back to this next episode but there are some elements of TNG’s moral relativism that have dated quite badly, and I think “we just have to let them commit actual genocide because it’s their culture” is very … 1990s liberalism.

Anyway, Data enlists a hot chick (who is like super into robots, like really super into robots) to help him with the negotiations and, tragically, he never tells her how fully functional he is, despite having ample opportunities to do so, and her being clearly up for it. There’s one scene where he basically does the Mark Anthony speech from Julius Caesar in a really “no this is really just the Mark Anthony speech from Julius Caesar” way, but I sort of enjoy that the final solution to the stand-off is for Data to just blow up their aqueduct with a phaser and then be all like, “bro seriously, I’m one guy with one gun and you couldn’t stop me, what the fuck are you going to do about an army of murder aliens frying you from a low earth orbit.”

Picard’s plot, meanwhile, hinges on the fact that the Sheliak, as well as being murder aliens, are also one of those obsessively legalistic alien races who will insist on the absolute letter of the treaty being applied in all contexts. Of course, because this is Star Trek, the fact that being extremely legalistic and digging into the minutiae of complex treaties is literally this thing this species are best at Picard beats them at it. In particular, he demands third party arbitration, then selects as arbiters from a species that is currently in the middle of a six-month hibernation cycle. And, you know what, I bet when Picard was in school they did the lesson about how the Grizzelas hibernate for six months of the year and I bet he was like, “urgh, when are we ever going to use this in real life.” Pay attention in school kids.

I will also say that Picard is a total dick about the treaty loophole, knows he’s being a dick about it and is not only fine with that but actively relishes it. Which is awesome. I mean, well awesomely petty? Like basically what happened here was the Sheliak showed up and said “hi, we’re going to kill fifteen hundred people and there’s nothing you can do about it” and Picard was like, “oh yeah, well I’m going to very mildly annoy you.” Like, honestly he was this close to just telling them ambassador that his name was Admirable Butts.

Two bobbins (because of the aforesaid plot radiation).

The Survivors

This one is really sweet in admittedly quite a gender and heteronormative way. The Enterprise arrives at a planet that is under attack by an unknown alien threat to find the whole place dead except for an old man and his wife, who live basically in a nice house with a picket fence in a couple of acres of garden. Deciding that this is ever so slightly suss, the Enterprise hangs around to investigate.

Although I like this episode, I think it does have a little bit of the problem that you get in some RPG scenarios, where while the solution to the mystery is interesting there’s not much of a way for the players (in this case the crew of the Enterprise) to actually find it other than just wait until someone explains it to them. Because, sure, it’s weird that this old dude and his wife are all that’s left on this devastated planet but there’s nothing Picard can really do about it, he’s not willing to take them off the planet without their consent and they don’t want to leave. Plus, the one person who could figure it out—which is, of course, Troi, because Troi is amazing—has been incapacitated by a magic psychic earworm that, for some reason, no-one notices for ages. So you’ve got this incredibly weird dynamic where Troi is put in coma by exploding brain music and Picard ignores that while finding other excuses to keep bothering an elderly couple.

Of course, Picard does eventually work out what’s going on, which (spoiler) is “it’s an omnipotent being episode.” But it’s hard not to feel he does it primarily through genre savvy. Like, maybe it’s me but if I showed up at a devastated planet and found two survivors and, when an alien starship showed up to try to destroy me but mysteriously stopped short of destroying me and fled, keeping just ahead of me at all times, I don’t think go immediately to “omnipotent pacifist”. Unless I also knew I was in an episode of Star Trek. To be fair, Picard has spent way more time hanging out with Q than I have. So maybe he’s just used to assuming that an immortal dickhead is a viable hypothesis in any situation.

Anyway, this episode is a kind of melancholy romance if you are willing to gloss over the fact that the female character in that romance was fridged before the episode began and is an illusion that her husband created with his omnipotence powers. But I find it rather lovely that, despite being an all-powerful energy being who could have created literally anything and gone literally anywhere, the guy in this episode, on losing his wife, immediately recreates her exactly as she was. As a woman in her 80s who lives in a little house with a little garden. I think we’re so used to the idea that romance belongs to people in their 20s that it’s almost subversive that with the whole span of his relationship and, indeed, any other possible relationship he could imagine, to choose from he decided to go for a time in their lives when they’ve … already done it all? And are just living in quiet retirement on a planet somewhere.

Oh, also the twist of this episode is that omnipotent guy was an absolute pacifist so wouldn’t fight to defend the planet from the invaders. But when his wife was killed he had a moment of grief and rage in which he annihilated literally the entire invading species (which also neatly explains why we’ve never encountered them before and will never encounter them again). Picard’s response to this is “we don’t have a court that’s qualified to judge this” and, y’know what, fair enough? Because, don’t get me wrong, this gets really difficult in that genocide is simultaneously a real thing that happens in the real world and that ordinary people are complicit in for shitty reasons and for which, let’s be clear, ordinary people absolutely can be prosecuted. But in this context, it’s a lot more abstract and is kind of more about how you deal with an omnipotent being. And, yeah, it is reasonable that the Federation isn’t set up with an omnipotence court. Although they probably should because the Star Trek universe is fucking filled with omnipotent creatures.

Two bobbins. I’m afraid omnipotent energy beings automatically incur a one bobbin penalty.

Who Watches The Watchers

You know what’s a really good thing to talk about in a series of light-hearted reviews of 1980s science fiction shows? Colonialism.

A sort of joke but not really joke I often make about Star Trek is that it’s sort of utopia as imagined by a white American liberal man in the 1960s. Which is to say, it’s extremely progressive in some areas (especially when you get into the post-scarcity 24^th century) but sometimes betrays assumptions that I think it’s important not to leave unchallenged.

In particular, TNG is the era in which the series formally codified the prime directive (something Kirk cheerfully ignored as he went around punching and doinking his way across the galaxy) and I think the thing about the prime directive is that it’s very easy to assume that it’s a good idea. When, actually, when you really really think about it … it’s, well, it’s a bit patronising and colonialist, isn’t it?

To be more specific, it’s what you might call second-iteration patronising and colonialist. I don’t want to oversimply an incredibly complex topic but the thing about the prime directive is that it seems enlightened when it’s actually just really Enlightenment. The idea behind it is laudable and well-intentioned, and it seems to have been intended to address the problematic implications of a series that has its entire premise that it’s about a group of people whose culture looks really western/European/American going out, doing exploration and interfering with other cultures.  I mean, Rodenberry always described the original series as “Wagon Train to the stars” and the thing about Wagon Train is that it wasn’t exactly set in an uncomplicated era of history. The Federation are supposed to be the good guys, but if the good guys just go around imposing their values and beliefs on other people then, even in the late 80s / early 90s, that was beginning to be a bad look. In the 60s, sure, Picard could get away with blowing up a God computer because “man was meant to march to the beat of his own drums”. Twenty years later that seemed a bit gauche.

The problem is, the prime directive is grounded in some really specific, unexamined assumptions about why contact between European imperialistic powers during the age of exploration and indigenous cultures tended to be so bad for indigenous cultures. In particular, it’s fundamentally grounded in the assumption that there are “advanced” cultures and “un-advanced” (which is probably a better word to use than “primitive” here) cultures, and that the reason interaction between “advanced” cultures and “un-advanced” cultures is harmful to the “un-advanced” cultures is because they aren’t ready for the “advanced” ideas the “advanced” society exposes them to.

This, let us be very clear, is wrong.

We actually saw this idea in the Season 2 episode, Samaritan Snare, where there’s the race of “unadvanced” aliens who have stolen technology they weren’t ready for and that’s why they’re bouncing around space in a broken down ship and need to abduct Geordi. Again, it’s this really unexamined conflation of progress in very specific areas of technology (mostly long-distance travel and warfare) overall “intelligence” and moral worth. Which is … when you think about it … incredibly gross.

In this episode, there is a Federation anthropological team hidden by a holo projector observing a species with around about a Bronze age level of technology (although it’s hard to tell because everybody outside the Federation dresses exactly the same: leather waistcoats, grey puffy trousers).  There is an accident, one of the inhabitants of the planet gets injured, Crusher teleports him to the Enterprise to heal him, then they send him back. They do at least remember that the mind-wipe thing from Pen Pals exists, but it apparently doesn’t work because handwave handwave differences in neurophysiology handwave handwave and he, of course, immediately decides Picard is a God.

And don’t get me wrong, the episode does actually engage with this topic in an interesting way. There are discussions of the advantages and disadvantages of several different approaches, and the episode does ultimately show the Mintakans are capable of accepting the reality of the cosmos in which they live. Which his, yeah, there are people out there who’ve got spaceships. What it never quite challenges is the underlying assumption that this “okayness” is unusual. Or not to be expected. They make a big deal earlier in the episode of how the Mintakans are kind of like Vulcans so they’re a remarkably logical people who gave up religion centuries ago, and therefore have the “right” set of values to be able to “cope” with … not being treated like children?

I appreciate that this review is mostly about the prime directive, rather than the episode, but this is a very prime directive focused episode and I’ve been wanting to talk about the prime directive for a while. It’s actually a really good episode, if you take it on its own terms. It’s just that its own terms, when you stop and think about them, includes the assumption that anyone whose boats aren’t as big as yours needs to be deceived about reality for their own good. And that it is the responsibility of the people with the biggest boats to make that call on behalf of everybody else. And that’s—as ever, not super my place to make this diagnosis as a white English person—but that still feels like a colonialist mentality to me?

But, of course, this rating system isn’t about what the implications of the world-building elements explored in this episode are. It’s about whether the episode is bobbins or not. And since this episode takes the prime directive seriously enough that you can meaningfully ask “hang on, shouldn’t you just be telling these people the truth?” And since it contains absolutely zero energy beings, holodecks, pieces of science homework gone awry or Ferengi it actually gets a 1 bobbin rating.

1 bobbin.

Hello hello, I’ve been really bad at updating this blog due a combination of general busyness and pandemic brain. I am, however, hoping to get back into the saddle, including Things I like and Rating Star Trek episode By Bobbinsness. On which subject

Q Who

This is a Q episode and a Borg episode.

10/10.

Basically in this episode, Q shows up and is all like “you need me Picard baby, tell me you need me” and Picard is “go away Q” and then Q is like “fine, in that case I’ll teleport you to the other side of the galaxy, then sit back and laugh as you all get murdered by creepy space robots.” And then Picard is like “fine, I do in fact need you in this specific context of needing you to get me out of the problem that you got me into.” Foeyay intensifies. And now I’m trying to work out if Picard/Q is my favourite Star Trek ship. Or if I prefer Sisko/Gul Dukat. I mean, Sisko/Gul Dukat is just constant toxic mind games with each other. Whereas Picard/Q is Q being incredibly needy and Picard being like, “I’m trying to read Proust.”

ANYWAY, Picard/Q emotional dynamics aside, it’s interesting to see the early iterations of the Borg because, in some ways, they changed even more than the Ferengi over the course of the series. It’s really notable in this episode they have no interest whatsoever in the actual crew and seem to particularly want to “assimilate” Federation technology, rather than Federation peeps. Hell, we even see baby Borg, which is a) adorable and b) a strong implication that they were originally envisioned as a specific species that augmented itself with cybernetics rather than a kind of invasive cyborg hivemind.

It’s also kind of impressive how far in advance the Borg get set up. My limited understanding of what went on behind the scenes is that there was kind of a power struggle between Gene Rodenberry who very much wanted the over-arching villains to be the Ferengi and literally everyone else who wanted them to be literally anything else. And, thankfully for space opera fans everywhere, we got the Borg instead of antisemitic stereotypes in space.

This is a fully 1 bobbin episode. It’s great.

The Samaritan Snare

And from the highs to the lows. This episode is, um, in the words of its antagonists, not smart. Basically the crew of the Enterprise encounter … I don’t know how to describe this. Like, members of an alien species whose whole thing is that they are either congenitally or culturally “not advanced” with all the either ableist or colonialist implications that carries but who have elevated themselves beyond the level they are “supposed” to be at by nicking other people’s tech and abducting people. This is not quite as terrible as Code of Honor (from Season 1) in that they at least aren’t coded as a specific human ethnic group but it’s really not good.

Also the one aspect of this episode worth commenting on, which isn’t really about this episode at all, so much a sort of a meta-observation, is that it’s another good example of Troi getting an undeservedly bad reputation for being rubbish. Because they really specifically had to keep her off the bridge here because otherwise having a highly trained psychologist with literal psychic powers sitting there saying “no, they’re up to something” would have blown the plot wide open in the first ten seconds. As it is she comes in about halfway through and Riker’s like “hah hah, look at these comedy aliens” and Troi’s like “dude, they’re totally going to screw you, what the hell are you doing.”

Actually, in order to avoid having to talk about this terrible episode (although I will come back to Picard and his artificial heart subplot) I might talk about Troi for a bit. Because I strongly remember thinking in the late 90s / early 2000s that having a counsellor on the bridge of what, despite protestations, is clearly a warship would really date the show and Troi as a character as a character has received quite a kicking down the years. But, looking back, it’s really interesting to see that, perhaps unintentionally, the show ended up making a woman doing emotional labour quite an important part of the functioning of the Enterprise’s mission. Like, she is genuinely useful and good at her job if you accept the premise (which in the 21^st century we’re slowing beginning to) that people’s emotional state is important to their wellbeing and job performance, and supporting people emotionally is both valuable and a specific skill. Which should be recognised not just assumed to be something that certain types of people (usually women) generically do.

Anyway, Picard’s heart. Picard has an artificial heart as a result of an act of youthful badassery that he is now embarrassed about and Wesley has to take him to hospital in the most uncomfortable shuttle ride in Federation history. This is by far the best bit of the episode. Indeed, I would watch an entire bottle episode of Picard and Wesley having awkward silences in a runabout.

That does not, however, save this from being a full 5 bobbins episode.

Up The Long Ladder

Oh my God. So the one saving grace of the previous episode is that the offensive stereotype aliens weren’t based on a specific human ethnic group.

In this one, there’s a bunch of comedy Irish people who are always drunk and/or horny, have basically no technology, and are surrounded by farm animals at all times unless they’re the hot one who is banging Riker. To be fair, the hot one is very, very hot. Although she’s also a sharp-tongued, red-headed Irish farmgirl who is constantly going on how useless men are. Basically, she’s a very specific type of histrom heroine.

The plot of this episode is that there were two colony ships that left Earth centuries ago and got separated. And one them is all rural and back-to-the-soil and drunk and Irish, while the other is this highly technologically advanced group of science clones. And, oh do you see, they have to come together because something something strength through diversity something something.

Like a lot of science fiction stuff from the 90s with progressive intent this series goes to some fucked up places. The core message that these two very different societies are stronger together is nice, don’t get me wrong. But, well, one of those societies is a ludicrous ethnic stereotype and the other is really creepily acephobic. You see, the technologically advanced society suffered massive casualties when their ship crashed and have been kept alive only through cloning, as a result of which they basically don’t reproduce sexually and they find the idea of having sex a bit weird and gross. The show makes it very very clear that finding the idea of sex weird and gross is bad and wrong and will destroy society, and people who are like that have to change.  

There’s also the fact that the eventual union of the two cultures very specifically delegates to the women of the racist Irish stereotype culture the responsibility to repopulate a planet. Which the attractive redhead very briefly objects to but then she decides she’s fine with as long as she gets to bang a hot guy. And don’t get me wrong, I’m all for women who like to bang hot guys, I think that’s an important thing to see on TV, especially in the 90s, but going from “I didn’t sign up to be Eve” to “three husbands, you say?” in the space of two minutes seems to elide a whole lot of issues. Because fundamentally liking sex and wanting to be constantly pregnant for as long as is technologically feasible are very much not the same thing. Also, I’m not convinced one hot woman gets to consent to this on behalf of every woman in her society.  

Anyway. This is another 5 bobbins episode for reasons I think are self-evident.

Manhunt

So there are some elements of the Star Trek universe which make it incredibly obvious that it was originally invented in the 1960s. One of those elements is the … kind of default assumption of a ludicrous level of sex positivity just being what stuff is like in a utopian future but in a way that is often played for laughs and/or shock value if it transgresses any of the still quite socially conservative norms of mid to late 20^th century America.

You see this early on in Angel 1 where you have the very sex positive society where they bonk all the time but, oh my God, it’s female dominated and Riker has to wear a skimpy outfit like a girl. And you see it again in the character of Lwaxana Troi who is an older woman who likes sex and this is hilarious. Plus it sort of double dips on the 60s sex vibe because it’s very specific that a lot of her rampant hornyness is inherent to the Betazoid species (at least the females of the Betazoid species) which is relevant when you remember that Troi was originally conceived as a four-breasted nymphomaniac.

Anyway, the premise of this episode Betazoid females (I can never tell if the term women is correct for non-humans, it tends to vary from episode to episode) go through sort of a menopause analogue called “the phase” where they they just get mega mega mega mega mega mega mega mega randy. And this entire episode is Lwaxana Troi trying to bone down on Picard, and Picard not being up for it. Which is extra funny because not only is there an older woman who wants to have sex there’s also a man who doesn’t. Lol lol lol lol lol. Sigh.

The thing is, I do love Lwaxana Troi because it’s always great to see Majel Barrett getting work and she’s clearly having a fabulous time with the character. And in some ways it is quite a liberating character because Lwaxana Troi tends to come out on top (so to speak), is genuinely respected for what she does (although that does raise some fucking weird questions about how Betazed is governed) and clearly gives no fucks what anyone thinks of her.  Besides, if you let yourself ignore the fact that her sexuality is constantly played for laughs it’s actually really nice to see a woman in a late-50s who is allowed to be beautiful and flamboyant and unabashedly sexual.

Unfortunately I don’t think there’s a single episode where the idea of Lwaxana Troi being attracted to you isn’t presented as a bit gross. Which is particularly annoying when it’s Picard because he’s only about eight years younger than her and has had repeated plotlines where he is romantically involved with women who are shall we say somewhat more than eight years younger than him. And that have been presented in a very positive light. Not to bang on about this too much, Majel Barrett was born in 1932, Patrick Stewart was born in 1940 and Gate McFadden was born in 1949. So, actor-wise, Picard is slightly closer in age to Lwaxana Troi than he is to Beverley Crusher but the show frames Lwaxana/Picard as weird and inappropriate but Picard/Crusher as totes cool to the extent that there’s a fan theory that he’s Wesley’s real dad.

ALSO, at the end of the episode Lwaxana pwns everybody by casually explaining that two fish people ambassadors are actually assassins intending to blow up a peace conference, and one of the fish people in their giant fish people costumes is Mick Fleetwood from Fleetwood Mac.

Mick Fleetwood and Majel Barrett between them save this from being a 5 bobbins episode. 4 bobbins.

The Emissary

KLINGON EPISODE KLAXON.

Worf’s ex shows up, they argue, then bang, then argue some more. There’s some kind of plot about frozen Klingons who think the war is still going on and Worf has to pretend to be in command of the Enterprise. Honestly, I don’t care. This is just fabulous.

I love this episode that I’m not even going to fine it a bobbin because I know that K’Ehleyr gets fridged in a later episode.

1 bobbin.

Peak Performance

Ferengi episode klaxon? That’s a way less happy Klaxon than the Klingon episode klaxon. It does get happier in DS9 because we all love Quark but this was from the era where they were still trying to make the Ferengi scary villains and it was still super not working.

Also was Armin Shimerman, like, the only person who fit in the Ferengi costume? Because he’s played at least two Ferengi prior to playing Quark.

Anyway, thanks to the sudden revelation of the Borg threat (check out the continuity) the Enterprise (which is definitely not a war ship, despite the fact it carries loads of torpedoes and has massive phaser banks) is a participating in a simulated war game exercise type thing overseen by the campest alien. I’m going to talk about The Campest Alien later, but for now let’s talk about the war game. The setup is specifically that Riker, along with forty members of the Enterprise crew, will be given command of a derelict ship with no weapons or engines and required to fight the Enterprise.

How is this supposed to work?

Obviously it does because Riker is a major character on Star Trek and so you could give him, to take a completely random example, nothing but a piece of crystal and a bed spring and he’d be able to make a completely functioning laser pistol out of it. But, like, the structure of this exercise implies incredible genre awareness on the part of Star Fleet. Because it seems to suggest that they specifically train their officers to improvise bullshit solutions to obviously unwinnable situations. And, to be fair, that is how their universe works so … I guess they’re onto something?

Where was I? Ah, yes, The Campest Alien. The Campest Alien, like most Star Trek aliens, comes from a culture that values exactly one thing: in this case, strategy games. I mean, how does that society even work? Then again, how does Klingon society even work? How do you buy peas in Klingon society?  I assume you have to go into a shop and say “I’d like to buy some peas” and the shop keeper says something like “you are a patak, you not deserve peas” and then you have to, like, punch him in the face. After which, you both laugh uproariously and he claps you on the back and says “you have spirit, you may have all the peas you wish.” So anyway, The Campest Alien hates Riker because Riker keeps smiling at him, which leads him to conclude that Riker is a dangerous maverick instead of a serious strategist. Like all alien cultures that only value one thing The Campest Alien’s culture apparently hate innovation in the field of the one thing they’re supposed to value.

Riker does surprisingly well in the war games because he and his crew essentially cheat (Worf hacks the Enterprise’s computers and Wesley nips home to grab his science homework which is a fully functioning matter anti-matter reactor because of course it is Wesley) but in the middle of this Armin Shimerman shows up and is all “why are you fighting this Federation vessel and why are you now protecting it” and then tries to blow the Enterprise out of space for no clear reason.

So the Enterprise crew and Riker’s motley band have to team up and use the very improvisional tactics they’ve just been training to defeat the Ferengi. Which, I suppose, immediately validates Star Fleet’s decision to train all of its officers to fight exclusively with technobabble and plot devices.

There’s also a side plot with Data and The Campest Alien where Data challenges The Campest Alien to a game called something nonsense like Strategema…? Like apparently in the 24^th century people say “What should we call this strategy game? Strata … game … ah? Yeah that’ll do.” Loses, has a crisis of confidence, which is fixed in large part by Troi (Troi is amazing) – although in what I suspect of a realistic depiction of 24^th century gender roles, the strategy she does have to use is to tell Data something, realise he’s not going to listen to her, then get Picard to tell him the exact same thing.  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. And finally Data realises that he can’t “beat” The Campest Alien, because the Campest Alien is inherently really good at Strategma, but he can … like troll him into rage quitting?

So basically this is the episode where Data invents Xbox Live.

I’m really torn on this episode because it’s really enjoyable to watch but it has so many classically bobbins Star Trek things in it. I mean the Ferengi are bobbins, monocultural aliens are bobbins, Wesley having a ridiculously sophisticated and specifically useful homework project is bobbins, the Enterprise solving a problem with a trick that they should just be able to do all the time on anybody but never reference again is bobbins … Ahhh. I think 3? Maybe 3 and a half?

Shades of Gray

This is the episode where the show ran out of money. It’s an honest-to-God clip show shot on two recycled sets and the premise is that Riker is dying because he got a booboo from an evil plant. The thing that acts as justification for most of the episode being material from other episodes is that Riker is in a coma because the evil plant booboo is binding to his neural system (on the “molecular” level, which is why the biofilters can’t fix it, seriously why do they even have those biofilters) and suppressing his brain activity. So Noted Robot Racist Dr Pulaski in what is fated to be her last appearance sticks acupuncture needles into his brain to keep him alive by making him hallucinate clips of old episodes.

What is this, I can’t even. In a way, I feel bad dunking on this episode because they did genuinely run out of money so they’re clearly doing all they can. But it’s the little things, like the way it feels like everyone is … talking … slightly … slower … than they usually do because they’re aware that they’ve got to make this scene fill the time and they’ve got nothing to actually do in it. And all the dialogue is just exposition clumsily split up between characters as they narrate to each other why they’re doing the slightly tenuous thing they’re now doing.

The two weirdest parts of this episode for me were the bit in the transporter room where O’Brien has bants with Noted Robot Racist Dr Pulaski, despite a) there being a medical emergency on and b) his knowing that she’s nervous about using the transporter. I just feel if I worked in a transporter room, I’d be more sensitive to people who aren’t comfortable having their atoms split up and blasted across space—although I suppose, to be fair, it’s quite well-established technology by the TNG era so maybe being anxious about transporters is the TNG equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer. Although, even with that analogy, I think the big difference is that I’ve never heard of a vaccine having a malfunction that causes you to, say, become two people or manifest your negative and positive qualities as different versions of you.

The other scene I found odd, amongst all of this oddness, is the scene where Noted Robot Racist Dr Pulaski randomly decides to make Riker horny to see how it will affect the evil plant booboo. Unsurprisingly, it makes the evil plant booboo worse. Also, blimey, there are lot of scenes of Riker being horny.

In terms of bobbins, while this might seem like a classic 5 bobbins episode, I actually feel 5 bobbins requires effort. This is just 4 bobbins of what the fuck, oh my God I’m embarrassed for you right now.

And that brings us to the end of Season 2. Only 5 more to go! Which, at this rate, means I’ll be finished by the early 2030s.