6:7 Rascals

Aw, yeah: that’s possibly my favorite “bad” episode of the entire Star Trek franchise! As other fans and critics have pointed out over the years, this episode had the characters make a truly awesome discovery (i.e. how to use transporter technology to rejuvenate people) and then the franchise’s writers and characters totally allowed it to go to waste by never following up on it. (Just to rub a little more proverbial salt in the wound, some Trekkie out there then wrote a pretty good fan fiction that totally did follow up on it.) As some of those fans and critics also pointed out, if the characters ever had realized what a fountain of youth they’d just discovered and handed it over to Starfleet’s researchers to work out the kinks (e.g. maybe get the transporter to reduce you to a twenty-something adult rather than a prepubescent child), the whole plot of the Star Trek: Insurrection movie would never have needed to happen.

In case it escaped anyone’s attention, Having children on the Enterprise is a frickin’ bad idea.

Fun fact: this episode’s editor and writer Ronald D. Moore (who really didn’t want to write this story, but did the job anyway) agrees with you! In the scene where the Ferengi Daimon Lurin threatens to kill all the children if Riker doesn’t give him control of the ship and implicitly calls out the Federation for so recklessly endangering those children by sending them out on its flagship on these risky missions along with their parents, that’s basically Moore getting in several jabs at Gene Roddenberry and his fellow executives for insisting on the Federation doing something so obviously foolish as that just so they could have stories about children on the show.

That’s just so… embarrassing. You just know that, when all the officers were free and the crisis averted, they looked at each other and said, “We will never speak of this again, or all of us would be discharged.”

Well, somebody must have blabbed, since Odo later trolled Worf over this when he complained about how comparatively lax security supposedly was on Deep Space Nine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzhgEGeKcbo
Judging by Worf’s reaction, neither he nor any of the others involved in this incident ever lived it down.

My favorite parts of that episode: the awkwardness between the adolescent Picard and everyone under his command, the just kill me now look on his face as he contemplates his prospects of returning to Starfleet Academy to “be Wesley’s roommate,” rejuvenated Guinan telling rejuvenated Ro what a “cute kid” she is (which she totally is!), the prepubescent Keiko O’Brien failing to understand why her husband is so creeped out by her affectionate cuddling with him, Picard having to sacrifice a little more of his dignity by throwing a childish temper tantrum demanding to see his “father” Riker, and Riker totally BSing a Ferengi with a bunch of made-up technobabble.

Honestly, if the writers had scrapped the absurd B-story about the Ferengi taking over the ship with a couple of space jalopies and just focused on all the A-story’s comic-and-yet-sometimes-disturbing social implications of adults being physically (but not mentally) turned back into children, that episode would have been way better. As it is, it’s nowhere near so good a story in itself as it is an inspiration for other better stories like that aforementioned bit of fan fiction.