Didn't realise how long it had been since I last posted any views from my ongoing TNG rewatch, apparently the last lot was back in May. I blame the AYAMMM contest for stealing my Trek watching time!
I've now got to the end of season 4 and boy what a ride it has been!
Devil's Due - Picard manages to get a planet off their 1000 year old deal with the devil by using his favourite tool - an arbitration! This was a decent enough episode but lacked anything special to make it stand out. Also Kirk would have totally banged Ardra if it were him in charge when she appeared in the captains quarters to try and seduce Picard, I think that is the primary distinction between TOS and TNG at this point!
Clues - Otherwise knows as "the one where they ripped off Red Dwarf"! This was quite fun even if it didn't necessarily do much of interest with the memory wipe concept
First Contact - Riker goes to extreme lengths to have sex with an alien nurse played by Dr. Frasier Crane's wife. Despite the endeavour causing political disruption to a developing planet and pushing their space program back by generations, resulting in serious physical harm to Riker himself and almost resulting in his own death Riker declares that it was "worth it".
Galaxy's Child - Geordi's whole plot in this is quite creepy to watch here. The guy basically gets annoyed at Dr Brahm's for not living up to his weird holodeck simulated relationship with her and the show somehow awkwardly tries to make this her problem and not his. The stuff with the crew killing the space creature, discovering it had a child and subsequently reuniting it with its own kind is solid sci-fi fare and could probably have carried more focus to dilute the creepy Geordi factor.
Night Terrors - This was a pretty weak episode in all honesty, which is a shame because the central premise had everything needed for a good story. The Enterprise responding to a missing ship and falling foul of the same problem that saw the previous crew go mad and kill each other should have been great and the REM sleep deprivation being the cause is actually quite an interesting one that should have resulted in some more exciting events than just watching Picard get a bit crotchety! Things really go off the rails when we get the magic resolution of Troi decoding the "eyes in the dark, one moon circles" bullshit message from her nightmare - "they obviously want us to explode the rift by flooding it with Hydrogen!!"
Identity Crisis - Another fairly middling episode, albeit far better than the previous effort. Geordi reunites with an old colleague to investigate why the team that they were on years ago is starting to disappear when it turns out that they have all been infected by an alien parasite that is re-writing their DNA! The sequence with La Forge recreating the scene on the holodeck and working out that there was an invisible alien present during their original investigation was quite clever. Ultimately his discovery is too late to save him and Geordi transforms into an alien himself and is drawn back to the planet, fortunately the crew are able to locate him even after he turns invisible thanks to the help of a black light as the aliens show up in ultraviolet light (no explanation is given for why Geordi's visor which allows him to detect things in the ultraviolet spectrum didn't spot the aliens in the first place however!
) Now aware that the Enterprise has access to black light technology and fearing what it may reveal about his personal habits Riker quickly returns to the ship to give his personal quarters a deep clean
The Nth Degree - Reginald Barclay returns to wow us all with his acting, his skill at diagnosing and resolving complex technical problems with little difficulty, his ability to merge himself directly with the ships computer and a casual reluctance to accept the limitations of warp travel! This was pretty fun all in all, Dwight Schultz does an impressive job of portraying the ever expanding powers of Super Barclay without losing that innate "Barclay-ness" of the character. The main issue with this is that the idea an alien race is so curious about the rest of the universe that they will go to such lengths to augment/enhance the technology of other races in order to bring them across the galaxy directly to them rather than just strawberry floating exploring themselves doesn't really make much sense, but other than that this was enjoyable!
Qpid - The obligatory Q episode, and another great one! What more could you want - a returning flame for Picard, everyone playing medieval dress up, Worf moaning about not being a merry man, Troi being gooseberry fool at archery - this episode has it all! Picard is great as always in these kinds of episodes, having that perfect amount of gravitas to carry everything when it could so easily fall on its face.
The Drumhead - Picard exposes Satie as a witchunting moron and does it with his perfect style. A classic, and the sort of episode that we need more of. I'd take a hundred of these over most of the whizz-bang stuff we got in Picard.
Half a Life - Alright, who the strawberry float asked for another Lwaxana Troi episode?!
This is pretty passable to be fair and is the first time that they really bothered to give Lwaxana anything like a real character beyond flirting with the Captain/anyone else currently in range. The level of bond that Lwaxana and Timicin seem to develop in such a short time is somewhat unbelievable but that's easy enough to overlook for what is a good story about relationships, death and the tension between the customs of the various species that make up the universe.
The Host - Crusher develops a crush on a man negotiating a peace treaty between two races, gets confused when he dies and it turns out that she actually fancies the parasite that was occupying the host body, and makes a commendable effort at resisting when Riker becomes the new host for her parasite lover. This story is a bit bizarre and the ending isn't well handled with the parasite moving into a female host which sours things somewhat but it was decent enough overall.
The Mind's Eye - Geordi gets kidnapped by the Romulans and inducted into their own personal Bourne style assassination programming scheme against his will. Using Geordi's visor as an interface they begin to subject him to imagery designed to torment him to the point where he will willingly follow their orders, they test his devotion by simulating one of Geordi's most common fantasies - murdering Chief O'Brien
The Romulans, being led by a shadowy figure (...), are trying to get Geordi to assassinate a Klingon leader to destabilise the shaky Federation/Klingon alliance. TNG seems to be at its best when it is either doing episodes that explore human nature and the flaws of people either as individuals or collectively, or when focusing on the more well developed alien species and interactions like the Klingon's and Romulans and this episode is another excellent example of that.
Biggest issue with this episode is that the Romulans think that they can just send some random black dude in a visor to Risa as a stand in for La Forge, as if nobody is going to spot that they look different!
In Theory - D'Sora falls for Data because lets face it he's pretty adorable. Data gets to implement a detailed wooing subroutine where he seems to have programmed his relationship interactions based entirely off data from 1970s US sitcoms. There's also some stuff about a nebula and Picard decides to pilot a shuttle because he's a control freak. Basically this episode is crap.
Redemption (Part I) - Worf once again demonstrates that he is the TNG MVP in what is an absolutely cracking episode of TV. The Klingon side of TNG and Worf's place within it has proven to be an absolute goldmine for the show by this point and this episode does a fantastic job of pulling on those existing threads to deliver a season finale that is every bit as strong as The Best of Both Worlds from season 3