5:13 The Masterpiece Society – The Enterprise discovers an otherwise unknown human colony in the path of a destructive stellar core fragment, and contacts them. It turns out that this colony was engineered to be the “perfect society,” with a balanced gene pool set within a controlled environment (both physically and socially), and the Enterprise‘s contact is enough to tip things out of equilibrium.
Perhaps it wasn’t good planning on someone’s part to broadcast this episode, where Deanna slips and sleeps with the charismatic “perfect administrator” of the colony, immediately after the last one, where she was mind-raped by a pervy psychic. It makes it seem too much of a needy-rebound thing.
(All of Geordi’s talk about how he would have been terminated as a defective in his infancy, had he been born in this “perfect” world, probably wasn’t meant to sound like a cogent argument against abortion, but…)
5:14 Conundrum – Everyone on the ship — including Data! — has their memory wiped, and has to learn their positions and roles again… but something has modified the ship’s computer records, so that they believe they’re on an important military mission. Also, Riker and Ensign Ro get all torrid while they can’t remember that they hate each other.
I’d like to think that a third-rate alien civilization with the power to mess with both biological and computerized memories so easily wouldn’t have to hijack the Enterprise to do their dirty work, but hey.
(And because I’ve been looking at these stories through the lens of Having children on the Enterprise is a frickin’ bad idea… How panicked were the children when they couldn’t remember who Mommy and Daddy were? How did unknowing parents react when the personnel records assigned children to them? How frickin’ bad is the idea of having children on the Enterprise?)
The last couple of minutes have some fun at Riker’s expense over his abbreviated relationship with Ro, but I like to believe that she kept milking it for the rest of her assignment to the Enterprise — every time Riker starts to come down hard on her, she says, “Hey, remember that one time…?”
5:15 Power Play – Let’s see, whose turn is it to be taken over by aliens? How about Data, Troi, and… hmm… how about O’Brien? And then let’s not talk about how disembodied alien entities could take over an android just as easily as meat beings. And whatever you do, DO NOT bring up the fact we just established a couple of weeks ago that the computer can shut down individual hand phasers, okay?
The “is it a good idea to have children on the Enterprise” question even comes up in episodes where they do not appear. Thus (for good reasons) we don’t see kids playing the brain orgasm game or devolving into giant wood lice. They should have a small army of child psychologists on the ship.
(…but that’s totally what it is; also a pretty good broader argument against things like eugenics and euthanasia in general.)