Here’s a packed tape of Next Generation episodes, from early in season 4.
First, it’s Brothers. The episode opens with Riker giving a very stern telling off to a young boy after he played a practical joke on his little brother by pretending to be killed by the little brother’s toy phaser, causing the brother to run off and eat a random plant that is horribly poisonous, and means the boy has to get to a starbase medical facility as soon as possible.
Trouble is, something has made Data go a bit mad, take over the ship, and pilot it somewhere else, before beaming himself down to the planet, and meeting up with his creator, Dr Noonien Soong.
And to both their surprise, Data’s evil brother Lore comes as well. Soong had summoned Data because he wanted to give him a final chip to make him perfect, but Lore switches places and gets the new chip, leaving Soong dying.
Riker, Geordi and Worf overcome Data’s computer locks and get to the planet to find Data saying goodbye to Soong, and Lore nowhere to be seen.
This is definitely a character piece, but it also reintroduces Lore, and sets him up for a likely reappearance in future.
The next episode is Suddenly Human. An alien ship is found badly damaged, and the crewmembers on board are young cadets. But one of them is not alien, he’s human, having been taken by an alien captain as his adopted son.
But Dr Crusher is worried that the boy, Jono, might have been abused by his adoptive father. And Picard has to try to be a surrogate father for him while they sort out the situation. He does this by playing Space Squash with him.
The episode takes a surprisingly dark turn when, after some more bonding involving Wesley Crusher getting a faceful of Banana Split, Jono comes into Picard’s quarters while he’s sleeping a stabs him with a large knife.
Jono’s adoptive father is also pushing to have him returned, and because they’re a particularly belligerent people, it might turn into a shooting match.
But Picard resolves the situation by letting Jono return to his father, and acknowledging that their actions in assuming Jono would prefer living with humans than with the people he grew up with was wrong. And suddenly the episode is about fathers, and I’m sitting here in tears, which is not what I expected going in to this one.
Next, Remember Me. The Enterprise arrives at a starbase, one of the models from the movie series.
Beverley welcomes her old mentor on board.
Wesley is doing some kind of experiment with the warp core. Beverley comes to watch him work, but after there’s a strange visual glitch when the experiment is run, she’s gone.
She goes to find Dr Quaice, but there’s no sign of him on the ship, and no record he ever beamed on board. Even Chief O’Brien doesn’t remember him coming on board.
Geordi and Wesley wonder if their warp experiments might have caused some kind of bubble in space time. Meanwhile, other members of the crew start disappearing, first other medical crew. then, she discovers, almost three quarters of the crew. But nobody else on the command crew thinks anything is wrong.
Then Beverley sees a special effect in sickbay.
More and more people are vanishing, including Worf. “Whom did you say?” asks Picard. “The big guy who doesn’t smile much.”
Pretty soon, Picard is the only one left on the bridge, and he still thinks there’s nothing unusual.
There’s a big tease here, as Beverley is just about to tell Picard something very personal about the two of them, when he disappears. Very cruel behaviour on the part of the writers.
There’s another lightshow, and this time we hear something at the other side, Wesley and Geordi’s voices, then we see them working on the warp fields, trying to open up the warp bubble where Beverley is trapped.
Then The Traveller arrives, from a previous episode involving warp drives (Where No One has Gone Before). He helps Wesley recreate the warp experiment, to create a new warp bubble, and a way for Beverley to escape.
But the bubble universe is collapsing.
Beverley has to literally outrun the edge of the universe to get to Engineering and jump through the warp bubble.
I like this episode. There’s a good mystery, lots of Beverley, a spacetime anomaly that doesn’t feel too handwavy, and even an appearance from a character from a previous episode.
Next, an episode called Legacy. It opens with a poker game. I still don’t really understand poker. I can just about get the scoring of hands, but all the variants and rules about betting elude me.
The Enterprise responds to a distress call from a small freighter, in orbit above the home planet of Tasha Yar. An escape pod lands on the surface and is taken by one side of the settlement.
An away team beams down, and meets with the opposing side. It’s all scoundrels and 80s hair.
Not only that, they meet Tasha Yar’s sister, whose hair could not be more 80s.
I really hate they way they fudge the eyelines with the viewscreen. I wish they wouldn’t do that. It just looks wrong.
Sometimes, the effects in this show are really impressive. Here, Ishara gets zapped by a phaser, and as she falls backwards, her own phaser is firing, and causing sparks and damage. It didn’t have to be that detailed. Really nice.
Ishara cozies up with Data and Riker, while helping them to locate and rescue the missing crewmen, but she’s really working for her own ends, trying to disable the security allowing her side to attack the others. Data is sad at the end.
The last episode here is Final Mission. We’ve skipped a couple in continuity. Wesley is told that he’s been accepted into Starfleet Academy, so he’s happy.
There’s a distress call from Gamelan 5 (sp?). How do you eat with a mouth like that?
The Enterprise is sent to help the Gamelans, while Wesley and Picard accompany Captain Dirgo to mediate in a dispute with miners. Dirgo seemed familiar under all that makeup, and at first I thought it was James Cromwell, but it’s actually Nick Tate, alias Alan Carter off of Space 1999. This kind of crossover makes my inner twelve year old very happy.
Of course something goes wrong with the shuttle, and there’s a crash. They land on a desert planet.
Cool hats, dudes.
After a trek to some mountains, they find some water. But it’s protected by a force field. Maybe it was bought by Nestle.
Picard is seriously injured by falling rocks, and Dirgo is killed when he tries zapping the force field again, leaving Wesley alone with Picard, for some heart to hearts, some final sage advice from Picard, who thinks he’s going to die, and finally, Wesley thinks his way through the problem and gets to the water, in time to keep Picard alive.
Kudos to the episode making me cry over Wesley’s exit from the series. I think, at the time this went out, I probably found him annoying, but since Wil Wheaton has become something of a hero of the internet over the years, I find myself being perfectly happy to take the character at face value.
After this last episode, the satellite box flips over to UK Gold, and there’s a brief glimpse of Kenny Everett before the recording stops. Shame, I could watch a bit of Kenny Everett right now.
Surprisingly for a bunch of Sky One programmes, I didn’t capture a single ad break on this one.