Chain of Command, Part I & II – This is an unforgettable two-part episode, so much so that most people forget about the dumb Picard/Crusher/Worf covert mission that gets them into all of this trouble. (It isn’t until years later on DS9 that Starfleet’s covert ops arm becomes canon, but even so, you gotta assume that there’s someone better for this mission than the captain of the Federation’s flagship — or at the very least, someone better to accompany him than the not-terribly-physical Chief Medical Officer.)
Picard’s physical and psychological torture updates for a new generation (ha ha) the mental-coercion motifs of 1984. His declaration that “There are FOUR lights!” is a companion pop-cultural meme (in the original sense, not the “internet kitties” sense) to “take the red pill” in resisting the consensus reality propounded by monolithic “thought leaders.” (I used it myself in a post not so long ago.) And the fact that Picard is on the verge of breaking when rescued shows just how hard it is for the individual to stand up indefinitely. “Who are you gonna trust — your benevolent overlord or your own lyin’ eyes?”
The other great part of this two-parter is the case study of Bad Command in Captain Jellico, Picard’s temporary replacement, who manages to alienate everyone under him by not trusting them to be competent at their jobs. Even just a crew-wide announcement would have helped: “I know I’m coming on in the middle of a crisis. I don’t have time right now to get to know and trust each of you. We’re going to have to operate in ‘yes-man’ mode until we’re off alert. Don’t hold it against me and I won’t hold it against you.”
Ship in a Bottle – Calling back to the second-season “Elementary, Dear Data,” in which the holodeck was shown yet again to be a deathtrap by summoning a sentient version of Dr. Moriarty to best Data… Well, Barclay accidentally revives Moriarty, who’s pissed that he’s just been stuck in a memory bank for all these years.
Aside from the problems inherited from the original episode, that the Enterprise computer can just create sentient sub-programs willy-nilly, I’ve never understood the reluctance of TNG scripts to define “holodeck matter.” As I recall, an episode of Voyager managed to do it succinctly in a single sentence: A combination of holography, transporter/replicator technology, and force fields. (Probably the only net positive of the years I wasted watching Voyager.) Frankly, everyone watching Moriarty walk out of the holodeck should instantly have known that they were still in the holodeck — “Cogito ero sum” be damned, he’s gotta be emitted by something. (And the inherited idea that holodeck characters “can’t exist” outside of the holodeck admits a mistaken premise, since holodeck characters and objects don’t “exist” in the holodeck, either; they’re a projection, contingent entirely on the technology in the walls. It’s like speaking of a character on your TV as being unable to exist outside of the TV… but they don’t exist inside the TV either.)
But hey, we have Moriarty, an entirely holodeck-based sentient being, interacting with Barclay, the most holodeck-involved member of the crew, so that’s fun.
Yep; as ever, Star Trek has all the senior officers doing the jobs that real command structures always assign to the lowly underlings.
As most fans agree, the one thing he did do right was finally getting Troi to put on a proper officer’s uniform: oddly enough, once she covered up her cleavage, she started looking way hotter even as we started respecting her personality a little more.
We also have everybody leaning hard on that fourth wall in talking about how their entire universe might just be a simulation running in a little box sitting on someone’s table somewhere; I loved that little bit at the end with Barclay telling the computer to end the program and then heaving a little a sigh of relief when nothing happens… and then the screen blacking out and going to the credits.
Of course, TNG taking so long to have a follow-up to that earlier episode, like so much else that doesn’t otherwise make sense in television shows, was due to a real-life licensing dispute that took several years of negotiations to resolve. If we were in a simulated world, what would give it away would be stuff like that happening in our world: “Well, we can’t ever have anybody in these stories mentioning Donald Trump is still President until we finish negotiating the licensing fees for that character with the Douglas Adams Estate… so, until we do, just have everybody forget about that for a while.” “Forget that he’s supposed to be running the whole friggin’ country during our ‘nationwide pandemic’ arc? How’s that supposed to work?” “I don’t know; make something up! That’s what we pay you scribblers to do! Besides, it’s only television!”