5:25 The Inner Light – Captain Picard gets zapped by an alien space probe and lives an entire lifetime among the people who sent it, a civilization that went extinct a thousand years ago. It’s a glorious episode, made even more so by the fact that it very nearly didn’t get made several times.
Although I don’t know that this alien plan was any better than simply sending a Voyager-style probe, with tangible recordings of cultural artifacts. As it is, they went a thousand years without anyone knowing anything about them… now there’s exactly ONE person. And when he dies, we’ll go back to zero again.
(I like to imagine that, after this, Picard took several weeks away from active duty while he came to terms with the experience. In a modern, binge-watchable TV show, this would have to mark a major turning point for the character.)
5:26 – Time’s Arrow Part I – Let’s be honest: this two-part season-ending cliffhanger is fun nonsense. Data’s severed head, time travel to 1900s San Francisco from the far corners of the galaxy, Guinan long before she joined the Enterprise, Samuel Clemens, Data as a fish out of water “inventor” making his money by playing poker… It’s like really good fan-fic, okay?
I suppose they figured “Once somebody discovers our memory-recording technology, they’ll use it to store our memories in their archives the same way we put them in that probe.” Of course, it’s kind of ridiculous that alien technology would be so plug-and-play in the Star Trek universe, but that’s the kind of absurdity you just have to accept to enjoy the show.
I remember in the poker game scene, when Data stakes his badge (revealed to have a fair amount of gold in it) as a “family heirloom” and one of the other players offers “Give ya three dollars for it” I was thinking Three lousy bucks for that? until I remembered that, oh yeah, the guy’s offering three turn-of-the-century dollars in gold, which was actually quite generous; and Data with his perfect memory was going to card-shark that badge and all their money out of them anyway, so how much he initially got for it was rather irrelevant to him.