6:4 Relics – I’ll go out on a limb and say that this episode, with Jimmy Doohan guest-starring as Scotty, works better for me as a vehicle for an original-series guest star than the earlier two-parter with Ambassador Spock. After all, we never saw Spock as an ambassador to the Romulans with dreams of reuniting their cultures in the old series or movies, so his role in the TNG two-parter didn’t really evoke nostalgia; in this episode, Scotty is still the engineering “miracle worker,” except that technology has moved on for seventy years, and he finds himself as unneeded and in the way. It turns into a great send-off for the character. (Of course, it then conflicts with continuity in Star Trek: Generations, but let’s just not deal with that, shall we?)
6:5 Schisms – It probably wasn’t a great idea to begin with, to have a scary “alien abduction” episode in a series where there are new aliens around every week and no one bats an eye… so I guess this episode is pretty good, considering. And we do get an inkling that the subspace domains above normal space can themselves be inhabited, meaning there’s literally infinity to be explored from every point in space. But really, this episode is most important for cementing the idea that “Riker with no product in his hair” = “freaked-out Riker,” an idea which will be used again.
6:6 True Q – Hey remember that really dumb first-season episode where Q offered the powers of the Q to Riker? No? Well, we’ll just remake it, then. But instead of Riker, the focus will be a young medical intern (Olivia d’Abo), and instead of her being offered the Q powers, it turns out that she’s the offspring of two Q members who took human form. But the challenge ends up being the same: Can she hold in her powers and behave as a normal human being?
With d’Abo being blonde and cute, and with the finger motions she makes when doing a Q-ish thing, this episodes being almost a Star Trek/Bewitched crossover fanfic. If you’re looking for a story about a young Q, I recommend Peter David’s TNG novel Q-Squared, in which Trelane from the original series episode “The Squire of Gothos” is very understandably revealed to be a juvenile Q. (Actually, I enjoyed just the premise more than the novel itself. But hey, YMMV.)
Alternatively, we can just write in the novelization of Generations that Guinan (who was there at the time) happens to tell a distraught Chekov that no, really, Kirk’s alive and well in that Nexus ribbon thing they just encountered, and then Chekov eventually passes this on to Scotty before he takes off on that ill-fated trip to Norpin.
Not that it makes those abductions any less scary for the characters, mind. This kind of thing happened on Voyager every once in a while too, and after a while, Captain Janeway’s typical response came to be “Hey, alien-stalkers-and-abductors-of-the-week, if you don’t stop messing around with my crew members, I’m gonna shove a couple photon torpedoes right up your tailpipes!”
As I recall, there was some kind of writers’ strike going on during that first season, which is one of the reasons those early episodes were awfully hit and miss (some critics would say more miss than hit). It’s interesting the writers chose to redo that particular episode’s story here rather than, say, “The Naked Now” or “Code of Honor” or one of the others, though.
As I recall, there was some kind of writers’ strike going on during that first season, which is one of the reasons those early episodes were awfully hit and miss (some critics would say more miss than hit).
I thought it was the second season which had the writer’s strike (the horribleness that is “Shades of Grey” usually gets erroneously blamed on it)? Not that it matters too much; both seasons had their share of really, really awful episodes.
It was indeed the 2nd season; several of the scripts, such as the season opener “The Child,” were recycled from those originally written for Star Trek: Phase II. (Why do you say the blame for “Shades of Gray” is erroneous?)
Why do you say the blame for “Shades of Gray” is erroneous?
I’ve read in a couple of places that the reason for the clip show there wasn’t because they didn’t have a script (I’m not 100% positive, but I think the strike had been settled by that point) but because they ran out of money. “Shades of Grey” would have been what it was regardless of the strike.
Too bad they didn’t have an unaired pilot to draw on, like the original series did. 🙂