7:2 Liaisons – Three ambassadors from a new species demonstrate that they have no idea what “diplomacy” is; they use their designated liaisons from the Enterprise — Troi, Worf, and Picard — to explore some foreign-to-them concepts: pleasure, antagonism, and romantic love. The one with Troi explores pleasure by experiencing desserts (I really don’t think he’s getting the full range on that one), the one with Worf explores antagonism by continually pissing him off, and the one with Picard sets up a huge, complicated scenario with a shipwrecked waif and yada yada yada.
This would probably have worked better if the aliens hadn’t been the standard “funny forehead” humanoids — I mean, one assumes that a being with a working mouth, tongue and teeth knows what “flavor” is.
7:3 Interface – Geordi gets a personal episode, and it doesn’t involve falling in love with the image of someone! No, this one involves Geordi believing that an image is his mom, and that she’s alive after her ship is lost, because he’s being stupid. Because Geordi isn’t allowed to be cool. (Even if Ben Vereen plays his father.)
Right about now, you begin to suspect that this season is going to be filled out by whatever dumb ideas are sitting around in between the more “intentional” scripts.
7:4-5 Gambit Part 1-2 – As an almost unheard-of novelty, this storyline starts in medias res: the entire bridge crew, undercover, noses about a shady bar to find out what happened to Captain Picard while on leave. (And eyewitnesses said he was phasered to death! Cue opening credits!)
The first half of the two-parter ends up multiplying the novelties: interplanetary thieves are plundering seemingly random archaeological sites, Riker is kidnapped by them, he discovers Picard is alive and undercover with the thieves under the name “Galen” (nice callback to his archaeology professor), and just all sort of subterfuge. Fun, right?
The second episode is a bit of a letdown, with the prize behind it all being the reassembling of an ancient Vulcan artifact which is supposedly an invincible mind-weapon that doesn’t seem as lethal as your average phaser. (Also: Robin Curtis here plays a Vulcan disguised as a Romulan. In Star Trek III and IV, she plays Saavik, the Vulcan [according to the novels, Romulan/Vulcan] role originated by Kirstie Alley. If you’ve ever seen Curtis in a role other than a Vulcan, you realize why her best roles were as Vulcans: She sucks.)
Though I can’t remember the details of the Vulcan mind weapon in Gambit part 2, I do remember thinking almost the same thing about its deadliness.
No, this one involves Geordi believing that an image is his mom, and that she’s alive after her ship is lost, because he’s being stupid.
I’ll admit that my reaction here was the opposite: that it wasn’t Geordi but everyone else who was being stupid in insisting that Mom LaForge had to be dead because her ship was (if I recall correctly) something like two weeks late. Given the distances involved, not to mention the weird crap they regularly encounter, this seemed the equivalent of me staying at work late and not noticing that my cell phone battery had run down, getting stuck in traffic, then arriving home to find my family planning my funeral.
I was also disappointed, because it struck me that this could have been a powerful idea. How many times has the Enterprise been in a situation where, if Geordi and Data hadn’t pulled out a technobabble solution at the last moment, the ship would have been destroyed and no one would ever have known what happened? So a story about a character dealing with the other side of that, being forced to accept that a loved one was probably dead but that you could never know for certain, could have been very powerful. But the speed at which they went from “the ship is late” to “let’s have a memorial service” just left me shaking my head and thinking, “Gee, you gave up fast. You didn’t like her very much, did you?”
Considering Levar Burton’s second most famous acting role after Geordi La Forge I find it funny that it took the producers seven years to come up with the idea of using another Roots actor to play his father. Though I think that casting John Amos would have been more spot on.
Of course Geordi (alone among the main characters) was never given any background character development. He was always just the romantically inept, slightly creepy, engineering nerd. Considering the visor and all you’d think they’d have developed his family and past a little bit more.
Philistine that I am, I would have said that Levar Burton’s second-most famous role was “the guy on Reading Rainbow.”
That’s not really an “ACTING” role. (Unless he doesn’t really like books.)
Well, where else would she be able to find a role where the director would be yelling “No, Robin! Be stiffer! Less emotional!” all the time?