6:25 Timescape – The first half of this episode is truly nifty — coming back from some dang conference or another (isn’t it amazing how so much “exploration” is replaced with “bureaucracy”?) on a runabout (which is NOT a shuttlecraft, so it’s not a designated Death Trap), Picard, Troi, LaForge and Data encounter localized time distortions — so localized that one of them will suddenly be frozen for minutes at a time, or the bowl of fruit on the table will suddenly be all moldy. Then when they get back to the Enterprise, they find it frozen in the middle of some sort of operation with a Romulan warbird — and a warp core breach is in its first microseconds.
The second half is mostly technobabble, but yeah, that first half is nifty.
6:26/7:1 – Descent Parts 1 & 2 – There has to come a time when someone in Starfleet makes a cost/benefit analysis: Does Data’s penchant for saving the Enterprise equal out his penchant for putting the ship in danger? We’ve already demonstrated that under the influence of his “homing” programming, he’ll lock out all of the ship’s controls just to return to Dad. This time we find out that, apart from Lore’s feeding of negative emotions to him, Data has an “ethics program” that can be shut down, leading him to snarl things like, “The sons of Soong will destroy the Federation!” Seriously, if Lore can figure out how to shut down Data’s ethics (which need not be a part of Dr. Soong’s unique emotion chip), someone else would be able to; and if ethics is a defeatable part of Data’s psyche and not a fundament of his personality and self-image, that’s a big fricking problem.
Also: While Data is under the influence of the emotion chip, Deanna exclaims, “Data, I can sense feelings from you!” Really? Are programmed emotions in a positronic brain that close to “real” biologically-caused emotions that a half-Betazoid empath can sense them? Does that mean that a full Betazoid, or any other fully telepathic race, can read Data’s mind? Could Data mind-meld with Spock? Can of worms: Unlocked.
(This story leaves unanswered whether the disruption to the Borg hive mind cause by Hugh’s sense of individual identity is Collective-wide, or localized to the specific Borg ship that retrieves him; the next time we see the Borg is in the feature Star Trek: First Contact, which shows it to have been a localized disruption.)