Tag: TNG Season Six
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Birthright”
“Data – you are the bird.” With a flourish of Deep Space Nine’s main title score, we arrive on the first glimpse of the space station and its characters in high definition in “Birthright, Part I,” and the world feels consequently bigger. Can you tell I’m a DS9 geek? I love Dr. Julian Bashir’s crossover…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Tapestry”
“Your life ended about five minutes ago, under the inept ministrations of Dr. Beverly Crusher.” After “Face of the Enemy,” Season Six’s other best episode is “Tapestry,” which ends up on more top ten lists, although I like it slightly less. Still, there’s little arguing against it. It’s the series’ last great Picard episode before…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Face of the Enemy”
“Hod’laii.” This is easily my favourite episode of Season Six; and it’s certainly, far and away, the best Counselor Troi episode in all of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s such an achievement over its sixth-season running mates that I actually find it startling. I mean, last week we were on “Aquiel,” and the season…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Aquiel”
“Lt. Aquiel Uhnari.” The ceaseless romantic tribulations of the perennially hapless Lt. Cmdr. Geordi LaForge reach their dizzying zenith in “Aquiel,” where Geordi falls in love with a dead woman. Who turns out not to be dead. It’s a terrible episode, as boring as they come. At least Geordi gets the girl – although I…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Ship in a Bottle”
“My past is nothing but a fiction.” I didn’t have much use for this episode back in the day; it played into my various “meh” factors at the time like holodeck conceptual mysteries; weak use of Barclay; the Sherlock Holmes fantasy; and Data. I’ve come around on some of those, and I’ve nursed a suspicion…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Chain of Command, Part II”
“THERE! – ARE! – FOUR!! – LIGHTS!!!” The history of Cardassia, some of it anyway, is laid out in miniature over the course of Gul Madred’s torture sessions with Captain Picard in Part II of “Chain of Command.” We learn that it was a civilization of deep history and art, that fell to poverty and…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Chain of Command, Part I”
“A challenge. You should prove an interesting challenge.” We have arrived at, arguably, the apex of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s pop cultural power: the week it gave birth to a spin-off. I can’t recall if “Chain of Command” coincided with, or immediately preceded, the launch of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, but it was…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “The Quality of Life”
“Commander – is it your intention to continue to grow your beard?” Time for your annual reminder that Data is a person – by proxy this time, but the principle is the same. Data determines that a group of industrial mining robots called Exocomps have developed some of the criteria for life, and the usual…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “A Fistful of Datas”
“Felis catus, is your taxonomic nomenclature an endothermic quadroped, carnivorous by nature?” We’re going to be called upon to ask what was in the water at the Star Trek: The Next Generation writers’ offices this month. Last week, the crew got turned into kids, and this week it’s a spaghetti western on the holodeck –…
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Blogging the Next Generation: “Rascals”
“I assure you, I am Captain Picard.” Well here it is, the got-dang silliest premise in the history of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the one that should have been this series’ “Spock’s Brain;” an idea so stupid you’re amazed any credible professional actually said it aloud in a story meeting. The one where the…