Too bad they didn’t have an unaired pilot to draw on, like the original series did. 🙂

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.

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?)

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.

(Of course, it then conflicts with continuity in Star Trek: Generations, but let’s just not deal with that, shall we?)

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.

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…

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!”

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.

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.