Tom Salinsky

TNG S02E07 Unnatural Selection (). It’s an odd way to establish the credentials of your new character – have her go up against Picard and have her proved wrong at every possible turn, endangering the ship and needing rescuing herself, but that’s what they’ve gone with here. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it’s the double-whammy of the old mysterious-disease-which-ages-you-to-death trope resolved by the back-up-insurance-in-the-transporter solution. The science here is even more hand-wavy than usual. The thinking seems to be that since your DNA doesn’t alter for your entire life, it can be used to screen-out pathogens – but in this case it can also reset you to how you were before the disease aged you… even though your DNA doesn’t alter for your entire life. A pattern stored in the transporter’s memory banks could do that, although you would be returned to the exact mental state you were in when that pattern was stored. Oh, and other than establishing Pulaski as stubborn, dumb and ornery, there are no good character beats here either.

TNG S02E08 A Matter of Honor (). All these Benzites look the same to Wesley. Because this version of Star Fleet is basically an elite liberal mid-Western university campus, an officer exchange Programme has been initiated and Picard wonders if Riker would like to serve as a Klingon first officer. Worf assures him that “many things will be different” and that starts with lunch (gagh is always best when served live). The interplay between the Benzite, Worf and Picard is first rate; for practically the first time, these characters start to feel truly lived-in and real. And when Riker is on the Klingon ship it feels different than it would be with, say, Geordi. That was harder to say in Season 1. The hull-fungus storyline is slightly dreary but it’s the far-too-easy-resolution which hurts this otherwise excellent episode (a persistent failing in this era). There is no Discovery-style dedication to subtitles here, so it is explicit that the Klingons are speaking Riker’s language, not the other way round.

TNG S02E09 Measure of a Man (). This fondly-remembered episode starts with the first Enterprise poker game. Continuing the strong character work of the previous outing, here the opening scene is not about aliens with bumpy foreheads, space anomalies, plague-ridden outposts or treaty negotiations. It’s about the guys we hang out with every week – and why we hang out with them. It’s before the poker boom of the early 2000s, so the crew are playing five card stud (until Pulaski gets them to play something even more ridiculous). An old flame of Picard’s shows up and the TOS ahoy-there’s-a-woman-in-shot soaring strings take us into the opening titles. Neither of these scenes are what this excellent episode is really about though. It’s a dissection of Data’s personhood, and as if that wasn’t interesting enough, as a matter of duty, it’s Riker who has to mount the case for the prosecution. Make his argument too weak and he’ll be court-martialed. Win the case and Data is disassembled. Wow. Since you can’t have the Borg threatening to exterminate the entire Federation every week, here’s how you deliver a really high stakes story on a reasonable budget, just using the materials at hand. Fantastic stuff. More absurd admiral’s uniforms this week, although not quite as nuts as in Conspiracy (but then is anything quite as nuts as Conspiracy?).

TNG S02E10 The Dauphin (). Yay, it’s a Wesley episode. Worse, it’s a Wesley in love episode. Sex and romance is major blind spot for TNG and so this is not a promising combination. Whereas the previous two episodes provided great character moments for Riker, Picard, Data – and even Pulaski – this regresses back to soapy clichés involving characters we don’t know and their tiresome treaty negotiations, but this wobbly story-of-the-week is resting on firmer foundations now. Sadly, the same cannot be said for the costumes. If the story were better, the silly monster suit would be easier to forgive (see Devil in the Dark). Here it makes a weak story seem ridiculous.

TNG S02E11 Contagion (). Why is Picard – Picard! – cracking gags and having to be put in his place by another, more serious, captain? Even if this one is in the grip of a demented quest to find a mythical lost civilisation. Moments later, the entire Galaxy-class ship has exploded killing everyone on board. Karma is a bitch, Jean-Luc. This is the first proper Romulan episode in quite a long time – following their brief tease at the end of Season 1. Carolyn Seymour is a bit of a treat, playing Taris, recalling the nameless Romulan commander in The Enterprise Incident. But why isn’t she given more to do? The idea that the Yamato blowing itself up could be a “design flaw” is a little hard to swallow, and so is Picard inheriting his late friend’s crackpot mission. If you can get past the casual slaughter at the beginning and how dumb everyone is being in the face of overwhelming clues as to the source of the problem, then there is some fun to be had here. The all-powerful Enterprise falling to bits is a good way of cutting our sometimes-smug heroes down to size and this is a defining episode for Berman-Romulans, even given their brief screen-time. It’s nifty too that the Iconian computer virus makes Data uniquely vulnerable, when usually he has near-magical plot-resolving powers. Picard orders “tea, Earl Grey, hot,” for the first time.

TNG S02E12 The Royale () opens with an eye-catching teaser (as well as indicating that Fermat’s Last Theorem is still unsolved in the 24th century – in fact, Andrew Wiles cracked it six years after this episode aired) but when the away team beams over, things take a turn for the goofy. This episode was written by staff member Tracy Tormé (although he ended up taking his name off it) but if you’d told me it was a discarded episode from the TOS days, I would have gone “oh, yeah, that makes sense.” Making sense is not something at the top of the agenda of this story, alas, and the regulars seem to have reverted back to their stiff, all-business, Season 1 incarnations. All of this feels lazy, from the inaccurate analysis of blackjack to the lifting of “It was a dark and stormy night,” as shorthand for bad novel-writing. Taking the piss out of a poorly-written story is a bold move, if you’re eighteen months in and still struggling to find your feet as much as this show is.