How strange.
I’m going through “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and reviewing every episode, complete with commentary and a grade from A-F. I’ve also included a score and comment from my wife, who has never seen the show before. There are SPOILERS for each episode below.
“Gambit Part II”
Plot
Khan, I mean Arctus Baran, continues doggedly attempting to track down some unknown artifact. He attempts to pit Picard and Riker against each other, not knowing that they are actually allies from the Enterprise. Picard finds the artifact that Baran is looking for, but is suspicious about its nature. The crew of the mercenary ship gets on board the Enterprise to steal another piece of the artifact, then flees toward Vulcan, where the artifact is supposed to work. Once there, however, Picard is able to overcome the device’s power as a weapon by remaining serene.
Commentary
Okay, there is way more to the plot than that but I figured I should probably not have the summary take up half of this post. The Vulcan weapon is surprisingly… logical. (Sorry.) But really, it kind of makes sense for them to have created a weapon which would only act against hostile enemies. It also was neat to get another piece of history about the Vulcans, who have been largely untapped in their potential throughout TNG.
The climactic confrontation between Picard and the Vulcan/Romulan (I can’t remember which, it was all too convoluted) was a little silly, though. Yes, the weapon makes sense for a Vulcan to have made it, but the way the scene was portrayed was much campier than TNG tends to do.
This is an episode that would fall apart if pressed on the edges too hard. There are several parts that don’t make a lot of sense, but it is also one of those episodes that manages to be so much fun to watch that as a viewer I didn’t much care about the holes. I mean, these are basically space pirates, right? But they’re not just space pirates; they are space pirates who go about seeking out booty that is archaeology. I was a social studies major in college and I gotta say it doesn’t get much cooler than that.
Grade: A “An all-around enjoyable episode.”
Wife’s Grade and Comment: A “With a Khan-lookalike and a triple-timing Vulcan, what could go wrong?”
“Phantasms”
Plot
Data is having dreams again, and they are getting weirder and weirder. Indeed, they begin to impinge on everyday reality for him. There doesn’t appear to be any explanation for these nightmarish turns in his dreams, and he goes to the holodeck to talk to Sigmund Freud about them. It turns out that there was no help there, either. It turns out that the nightmares and Data’s odd behavior were caused by some correlation between creatures that were clinging to the different crew members.
Commentary
I gotta admit that part of the reason I didn’t enjoy this episode as much as I may have otherwise was Sigmund Freud. I think he was a bit of a quack, myself. Of course, this episode makes him look a little bit like a quack, so maybe I should have liked that part more… and hey he did help develop psychology as it stands today. Oh well, I still thought that part was just weird.
Weird? Yeah, this episode was surreal. It was never creepy, and it didn’t really push the boundary so far as mystery was concerned either. It just felt… strange. That was the main problem with this episode, really. There wasn’t enough here to get a strong feeling of mystery, nor was there as real a sense of foreboding as there has been in other episodes that focus so much on the strange. I don’t know if I’m conveying this as well as I would like in this review. It’s one thing to be weird in order to have it shrouded in mystery, or to throw the viewer off and make them uncomfortable in a kind of horror type experience. But this was just off-putting. Especially Troi as a cake.
It did, however, give a sense that there are probably more awful things out there in the universe that the crew of the Enterprise has yet to encounter.
It was surprising to me to see the wide grade difference between my wife and I. Apparently she liked the weirdness more than I did.
Grade: C “Data’s dreams are weird.”
Wife’s Grade and Comment: A- “It was quite enjoyable, though a bit strange. It didn’t quite feel like Star Trek.”
Links
J.W. Wartick- Always Have a Reason– Check out my “main site” which talks about philosophy of religion, theology, and Christian apologetics (among other random topics). I love science fiction so that comes up integrated with theology fairly frequently as well. I’d love to have you follow there, too!
Be sure to follow me on Twitter for discussion of posts, links to other pages of interest, random talk about theology/philosophy/apologetics/movies/scifi/sports and more!
Star Trek: TNG– For more episode reviews, follow this site and also click this link to read more (scroll down as needed)! Drop me a comment to let me know what you thought!
SDG.
Eclectic Theist 