Tom Salinsky

TNG S06E12 Ship in a Bottle (). As we’ve seen, these later episodes of TNG are keen to go back and revisit past triumphs and stumbles, to play the hits or to make amends. The Season 2 episode Elementary Dear Data is about as good as we could have expected, but you can almost see the creative team banging their heads on the limitations of the understanding of what is possible in this narrative world. By the sixth season, the writing staff is functioning as a precision-engineered team and the regular cast are all in complete control of their characterisations. Moriarty’s rebuke to Picard that he’s been abandoned and left to rot feels a little like the fans talking to the producers. And they’re both right. Picard should have tackled the problem sooner, but while this episode could have been made sooner, it’s hard to imagine it being made better. Moriarty’s key deception is brilliantly-handled – second-time round, the clues are all there – and it makes perfect sense that Picard would be able to use that same trick against him. Picard understands far more about how 24th century technology works than ever the savviest of computer-generated 19th century supervillains. If this was just a faultlessly-constructed puzzle-box, that would be satisfying enough, but this doesn’t miss the opportunity for great character beats, some lovely faux-period flavour and a playful treatment of the theme as well. Outstanding stuff. In barely a handful of years, walking talking holograms will be standard-issue on board ships in the form of emergency doctors. Possibly Lt Barclay continued working on the problem?

DS9 S01E06 Captive Pursuit (). O’Brien saves the life of a nervy-looking fellow who comes careering through the wormhole and won’t say what he’s there for. The resolution presents a fairly standard issue Prime Directive moral dilemma, resolved with a little more insouciance than is typical for Trek of any kind. There’s some decent Quark and Odo stuff here as well, but Dax and Bashir remain stubbornly bland for now. But after four regular episodes, what’s the engine for this new series? If we’re just going to sit and wait for another alien-of-the-week to drop in with the kind of ethical conundrum you can solve in 45 minutes then how is this different from the shows it spun-off from? What benefit are we getting from being stuck on a space station? This is a fine enough hour of television but it doesn’t point the way forward in any meaningful way.

TNG S06E13 Aquiel (). It’s been a while since an away team beamed down to a research station / ship drifting in space / remote colony / Federation outpost and found it deserted, but here we are again, with only a little doggie remaining alive on this subspace relay station. (There is no money in the 24th century, so we must assume that the people staffing these facilities are there by choice. It would not be my choice.) Geordi is attempting to puzzle out what happened by reviewing logs from one of the crew, a young woman named Aquiel, and of course he falls in love with the recordings of her because this-is-the-story-we-tell-with-this-character. While Geordi is mooning over the pretty Lieutenant, Picard barely breaks a sweat outmaneuvering the Klingons and meanwhile, the damned dog keeps snuffling around, virtually screaming “I will turn out to be the solution to the mystery!” This is pretty thin stuff, by recent standards, a mix of old tropes and idiotic surprises. Again, the beam from Worf’s phaser emerges at a sharp angle to the barrel, which just strikes me as sloppy.

DS9 S01E07 Q-Less (). One way to discover what makes this show different from its progenitor is to make a direct comparison. We haven’t reprised The Naked Time (at least not yet) but we can send Q over to the worm hole to see who this crew respond to his smug provocations. His arrival is foreshadowed by the reappearance of Vash, trapped in a stricken shuttle when the docking doors won’t open. (Did no-one think to beam her off?) It turns out that even Vash finds Q irritating given enough time and now she wants to be shot of him. Last time we saw these two, Vash and Picard were attempting to replicate screwball comedy dialogue and falling a long way short. This time round, no-one can be bothered even to make the attempt. Meanwhile, Bashir is given Geordi’s role of unlucky in love, which does little to further define his character. “My God, you’re an impertinent waiter,” is the kind of line which makes me want to never see him again. It’s the sort of dialogue you’d give to the bad guy in an eighties family comedy to make sure we all hated him and would enjoy seeing him humiliated. Meanwhile, in a directed comparison with Picard, Sisko looks childish and petulant – much easier to provoke as Q astutely determines. This new series is not so much suffering from growing pains as it is terminally stunted, feebly aping the tropes of its now-legendary progenitor.

TNG S06E14 Face of the Enemy (). As previously noted, I do love a good teaser, and this one is an absolute cracker. Troi wakes in the middle of the night and when she looks in the mirror, she sees Romulan features staring back at her. Now, it’s true that not all of the explanations given for this make a whole lotta sense, but who cares when we’re having this much fun. It’s also a cracking episode for Marina Sirtis, barely adequate compensation for six years of saying “I sense frustration Captain,” but nice to see nonetheless. She gets to go toe-to-toe with Carolyn Seymour which is a far more equal battle than you might expect. This late in the game, you might expect TNG to be running out of ideas. Even though it’s riffing on story ideas set up in Unification, this story feels amazingly fresh and bold, while the punky young spin-off seems overly cautious, afraid to try anything new lest they break the show. Guys, you need to drive it like you stole it. Worf is now sporting a pony tail which hangs down the back of his neck. Before long, he’ll be eating avocado toast and buying antique typewriters.

DS9 S01E01-2 Emissary (). Paramount wanted a new show and Berman and co. didn’t want to send another ship with another crew out exploring. If the original series had been Wagon Train to the Stars, the new show would be Border Town in Space. Various tendrils connect the old show to the new show, although not quite as many as hoped. Michelle Forbes was asked to return as Ro Laren. When she declined, I think I read somewhere that the part of Kira was offered to Suzie Plakson. In the end, it went to Nana Visitor. Colm Meany turns up as Chief O’Brien and Captain Picard passes the baton in early scenes.

The big question mark hanging over TNG was: could they get lightning to strike again with the regular cast? And it took a while. By the time DS9 was being planned, the TNG regular cast had been thinned out to just seven. I rate these actors as world class (Stewart), excellent (Spiner, Dorn, Burton) and good enough (Frakes, McFadden, Sirtis) and by now all seven of these characters have become fan favourites. That’s not a bad track record. This first episode of the new show counts eight actors in its titles. None of them can hold a candle to Stewart, but at least four of them can easily take that “excellent” tag (Auberjonois, Meany, Shimerman, Visitor) and Farrell, Siddig and Lofton will get better as the series continues. Avery Brooks I find a bit of a mystery. Many fans think he’s wonderful, but his style of delivery never strikes me as entirely natural and I find he’s stuck between wanting to emulate what worked so well for Stewart and the need to create a new character. The scenes between him and Picard want to be able to distinguish between two equally-capable yet profoundly different leaders. In fact all they do is distinguish between a supremely able actor who’s incredibly comfortable in his role with one who is still feeling his way.

The other contrast is in their uniforms. The Enterprise crew stick in the same togs until Generations (and more on that wardrobe shit-show when the time comes) but Star Fleet officers on the space station wear all black with coloured shoulders and a purple undergarment peeking through a small v-neck. I’ve really enjoyed watching TNG’s colourful episodes, the images beautifully restored from the original 35mm film elements. Watching DS9 means watching smeary NTSC video which even modern AI algorithms can’t do much to clean up, and so it really doesn’t help that almost everyone is inky black from the collarbone down, without even a proper belt to break up the monotony. And those coloured v-necks flop about in a very un-military way. Alas, Voyager will inherit the same look (and not get the upgrade that comes around the time of First Contact).

What is welcome is an even greater commitment to diversity and complexity. Of those eight regulars (and the cast of recurring characters will grow and grow) only four are Star Fleet. The others are a Bajoran major, a changeling security guard, a human child and a Ferengi bartender. This widening of the number of viewpoints is crucial to what makes this series work and one of the reasons why it’s so many people’s favourite. It’s also the only show never to have the airwaves to itself. These four episodes were shown in January 1993, after TNG went off the air for Christmas (following the mic-drop of Chain of Command). Thereafter, both shows aired new episodes until TNG wrapped up its seventh season, whereupon Voyager kicked off. So, DS9 became the “deep cut” show which marked out the connoisseur fan from the casual viewer.

I don’t remember when I saw these episode for the first time. I think DS9 was first shown in the UK on Sky. Possibly I watched it there, maybe I caught up with it when the BBC was finally allowed to air it. I remember trying to follow it, and admiring it greatly, but now I can only call to mind a very few episodes, mainly concerned with key events in the war. Wanting to watch the whole show through from the beginning was one of my main motivations for starting this project and I’m thrilled that the moment has finally arrived.

We open with the Borg attack on Wolf 359, referred to but never depicted in The Best of Both Worlds, and now seen from Sisko’s perspective. This is followed in short order by the fridging of Sisko’s wife Jennifer. Most of this I think is model work, but the wormhole which is the main MacGuffin of these early episodes is primitive but effective CGI. That’s why these episodes look like crap compared to TNG. Everything in the earlier show was shot on film, even the spaceships. But so much of DS9 was created digitally, and at 1990s TV resolution, that it would all have to redone from scratch to create a Blu-ray master. The relatively poor sales of the TNG remasters didn’t inspire Paramount to spend even more money on a less popular series.

The titles are only so-so as well. Visually, it’s just a montage of shots of the space station for the most part, and the title music keeps threatening to arrive at a really good melody and never quite gets there. What’s far more effective is Sisko’s initial tour of the space station. After the gleaming newness of the Enterprise for more than five years, the grime and disrepair of this environment is quite a tonic. We’re also introduced to our regulars more smoothly than we were all those years ago in Encounter at Farpoint. Familiar Miles O’Brien shows Sisko (and us) around and introduces him to Major Kira. Nana Visitor makes an instant impression, immediately dispelling any regrets about Michelle Forbes. She’s electric and her character is fascinating. O’Brien later gets a whole scene in which he formally leaves the Enterprise which feels unnecessary and poorly placed. Acting royalty Rene Auberjonois is next, his highly impressive Odo taking on a small gang of bandits including Nog – a series regular in all but name – who in turn brings us to Quark, already spouting aphorisms but these are not yet dubbed “rules of acquisition”.

In amongst all this, there isn’t much room for a story. When we first meet him, Sisko seems just as fed up with his job as Pike was in The Cage but he rapidly ends up more like Picard than anyone else: pragmatic, compassionate, prone to giving inspirational speeches. He also comes up against a Bajoran high priest who recognises him as The Emissary of their legends. So, he’s either Diet Coke Picard or The Second Coming of Space Jesus – take your pick. He gets the chance to revisit his first meeting with Jennifer (so this is the kind of fridging where you’re really saving something for later). Sisko, having been charged with keeping the peace by Picard, is now charged by Kai Opaka with finding Bajor’s Celestial Table. Big day for Sisko who takes the flashback machine with him for safekeeping (and the supplying of backstories).

As noted when I wrote about The Host, the Trill get reinvented here. Jadzia Dax is still the same old Dax, more or less, unlike Odan who was exactly the same mind but in a different body. Terry Farrell doesn’t get much to do, but seems happy enough to do it. Dr Bashir is keen as mustard, which is something we haven’t seen much of in adult Star Trek characters, but the actor seems a little uncertain at this early stage. It’s also in this first episode that we meet recurring villain Gul Ducat. Marc Alaimo was the original Cardassian, but following David Warner is no easy task, especially when he’s given the series-sell speech in the middle of the episode. Like so many others, he’ll grow into the role as time goes on.

Before long, Dax and Sisko find themselves on Planet Blue Screen in the centre of the wormhole. The trippy visuals here are quite a treat but the concept of non-linear time is one of those things that you really don’t want to interrogate too closely. Why do beings which exist in all points in time fear their own demise? And why don’t they know that the Federation is coming? At one point, one of the wormhole dwellers pretty much says “What is this thing you call love?” for crying out loud. Moving the station to the edge of the wormhole is a great sequence for O’Brien (virtually mirroring the saucer-separation procedure from Farpoint) but not many of the other characters get moments as revealing as this. Kira pops, Odo is fun, Quark shows promise but (despite getting the lion’s share of the screen time) Sisko is all back-story and no personality so far, and the others just get TNG Season 1-style functional dialogue.

Compared to the TNG pilot, this has the advantage of taking place in a universe that’s already five years old, and all of the additions to the lore work well. Ultimately though, this is trying to keep too many balls in the air to be truly satisfying as a ninety minutes of television drama. It’s a overly-complex guided tour of a place stories will take place in, rather than a narrative in its own right, but never dull for all that.

DS9 S01E03 Past Prologue (). Virtually the first thing we see in this episode is Garak the Cardassian “tailor” who will prove to be one of the most fascinating and enduring members of the supporting cast. It’s very clear what Andrew Robinson thought the subtext was, but it was never allowed to anything more than a hint. For the full sorry story, see this fascinating YouTube video. Meanwhile. Sisko and Kira are in (whisper it) conflict once more as she attempts to go over his head regarding his dealings with a Bajoran “freedom fighter”. And – hey! – it’s the Kleavage Sisters again, being made to surrender their weapons to Odo. Speaking of which, he seems to be able to morph into the shape and size of a rat, which either means that that’s an incredibly heavy rat which would probably overstrain the floor structures, or that his shapeshifting is little more than magic and he doesn’t have to maintain the same mass. The Klingons are in league with the freedom fighter, who isn’t nearly as reformed a character as he maintained, so the Federation is proven right and the Bajoran liaison proven wrong, which is probably inevitable, but does make the balance of power on the station a little more stable and thus a little less interesting. This episode doesn’t screw anything up but it isn’t terribly interesting on either a plot or a character level. It feels like more table-setting, a continuation of the pilot rather than a bold new leap into a fresh world of storytelling possibilities. In the pilot, I’m pretty sure people called the Ferengi bartender “Quark” to rhyme with bark, lark, stark, park, hark and – as the word’s inventor James Joyce had it “Muster Mark”. Now people are starting to rhyme it with pork, dork, fork, cork and so on. This is going to piss me off. Speaking of Quark, this is the first mention of gold-pressed latinum, needed to solve the problem of a profit-oriented culture in a post-currency society.

DS9 S01E04 A Man Alone () opens with the limpest, most nothing-burger of a teaser we’ve seen in ages, with the two least-well-defined characters playing a video game for a while before deciding not to. SMASH CUT TO TITLES. The interplay between Odo and Sisko is more interesting. The most senior authority figure and the head of security and they – gasp! – don’t trust each other, or at least not yet. While Gene Roddenberry gets over his attack of the vapours, there’s yet another shady Bajoran dude sneaking around the station while Nog and Jake are making friends and the O’Briens are doing their best to stay married. So, again, this feels low-key, soapy and I’m still waiting for the show to earn its keep as a syndicated science-fiction adventure series, since the characters aren’t nearly well-defined enough or being put through enough for this to qualify as prestige drama. First appearance of Morn whose presence will soon become a very funny running joke.

DS9 S01E05 Babel (). Hey! An actual science-fiction plot with the potential to deeply affect our characters. Some kind of bug is going around and first O’Brien and then Dax lose the ability to process language. This results in their speech coming out as word salad – a challenge which the actors rise to very impressively. Odo tries to organise a lockdown, but you know how well that kind of thing goes down. So, although the symptoms are frighteningly novel, this is that familiar Star Trek cliché, the virus on the loose, complete with mutating strains, the regular cast dropping one-by-one and a last-minute cure which works almost instantaneously and leaves zero ill-effects. But it is at least exciting, which is more than can be said for the last couple of episodes, although the most exciting moment – the ship trying to pull away from the docking clamps – barely registers because the show can’t afford to show us what’s physically happening.

Stray remarks

• On the basis of these early episodes, the nay-sayers were right. A regular group of characters crewing a space station, waiting for adventure to come to them just isn’t as exciting as exploring the unknown. With the exception of the bonkers drug trip in the pilot, this is all pretty mundane stuff.
• Which is doubly a shame when the setting feels so fresh. Seeing different cultures living, working and playing alongside each other is genuinely exciting. Very different from seeing a Klingon on the Enterprise, with all of the hard edges sanded off.
• The standing sets are also gorgeous – handy, since we’re spending so much time here. And Nana Visitor, Rene Auberjonois, Armin Shimerman and Colm Meany are all enormously watchable but the series either needs to figure out how to put these characters through the wringer or find some proper science fiction adventure stories, and fast, because at the moment this is handsomely-mounted televisual Ovaltine.
• Dax, Bashir and Jake are just job titles and/or one line of backstory (“Doctor”, “Symbiont”, “Sisko’s kid”). The writers are leaving it up to the actors and the actors are leaving it up to the writers. That can work, but it takes time and it’s a risky strategy.

TNG S06E07 Moppets Rascals (). So, for this one, you kind of have to accept that the transporter is magic. It might have been better to give one of those Q-like omnipotent beings that are always hanging around credit for this. A transporter is essentially a 3D photocopier. What happens here is the equivalent of trying to photocopy a page from a book and because of a fault, the machine produces the author’s preliminary notes instead. It’s complete bunk from beginning to end. We also take four fine actors (at least one of whom, Michelle Forbes, we haven’t seen nearly enough of) and have to spend the great majority of the time watching awkward and unconvincing pint-sized substitutes instead. Facing the most daunting task is poor David Birkin as Picard, who rushes through all of his lines at the same pace and with the same (lack of) intention. He was better as Picard’s nephew in Family, playing an actual child. Most successful is probably Isis Carmen Jones as Guinan, who does manage to evoke fragments of Whoopi Goldberg’s wry serenity. So there’s some fun to be had with the what-if nature of the story, but the downside of the problem being scientific gibberish is that the solution is yet more gibberish and so it’s hard to be terribly invested, especially when Riker making up gibberish to fool the invading Ferengi is a plot point. Leonard Nimoy’s little boy Adam directs in what’s a pretty funny piece of stunt-casting.

TNG S06E08 A Fistful of Datas (). Now, this is what confidence looks like. The Holodeck-goes-wrong is one of the clichés minted by TNG and the western setting calls to mind one of the more fondly-remembered TOS episodes Spectre of the Gun. But, with Brent Spiner’s versatility now established, the creative team finds the thinnest of pretexts on which to have him play every part and put Worf, Alexander and a few others in mortal danger. None of this should work, and it all absolutely does. Patrick Stewart directs and conjures some lovely shots of the backlot. They even let Troi have some fun. It’s a bit of a shame that we leave the Holodeck on a homosexual anxiety gag but any points docked for that get put back on with that gorgeous final image of the Enterprise gliding off into the sunset.

TNG S06E09 The Quality of Life (). Oh dear. Yes, The Measure of a Man is a wonderful episode, and I’ve no doubt that further riffs on that theme could be highly entertaining and thought-provoking. But this one is almost entirely undone by the prop design of the Exocomps which look like they could have come from the set of Lost in Space or Buck Rogers. As Data pleads for their right to determine their own futures, all I can hear is Mel Blanc going “wibiwibiwibiwibiwibi” and when they’re hoisted up on wires and start wobbling around the set, they look like something from Doctor Who. To be clear, the problem is not simply that it’s a poorly-executed prop – although it is – it’s that making them cute little robots with big feet and little sticky-up arms was a terrible plan in the first place, which doesn’t mesh with the high ideas the script is going for. I don’t know whether this was director Jonathan Frakes’ error of judgement or whether he had his head in his hands when he saw them. Either way, the script doesn’t have enough new ideas to survive this blunder, but it does build to an effective climax.

TNG S06E10 Chain of Command, Part I (). You know I like a good teaser and this one is absolutely gangbusters. It lasts about 45 seconds and it punches like a jackhammer. “I’m here to relieve you of command of the Enterprise.” Wow. While Picard, Worf, and for some damn reason Crusher are sent off on a secret mission against the Cardassians, now fully established as the resident big bads of the galaxy, Captain Jellico takes over the centre seat. Fans have debated for ages whether Jellicoe is an incompetent hardass who assumes none of the senior staff of the flagship of the fleet have anything to contribute or whether he’s a shrewd operator, deliberately shaking things up to keep the crew on their toes. I appreciate the ambiguity (and Ronny Cox knows exactly what he’s doing) and it’s thrilling to see our cosy family denied their avuncular leader, even if it’s hard to believe it will be in any way permanent — although once Jellico takes over reciting the captain’s log, it does seem that way. I can’t speak to whether four shifts is in any way better than three, but I do greatly appreciate seeing Troi in uniform — she stays that way for the rest of the show’s run. This all feels unbelievably high stakes and exciting, the disruption on board the Enterprise balancing the more significant jeopardy faced by Picard’s team. The chartering-an-under-the-counter-ship sequence feels a bit second hand, but it’s still fun seeing Picard out of his element. This is somewhat all set-up, no payoff, but it’s a pretty faultless set-up.

TNG S06E11 Chain of Command, Part II (). In the third and finest of his three Star Trek appearances, the late and much-missed David Warner is given what looks at first glance like a fairly standard-issue moustache-twirling torturer, but like the wonderful actor he is, Warner’s characterisation flows into the gaps left in the script (let’s generously assume on purpose, to avoid over-writing) and he creates an indelible villain, whose point of view, although abhorrent to us, is not impossible to see. And Patrick Stewart has never been better, not just for mastering the technical challenges of rendering the character so damaged by his brutal treatment but in accurately charting the rise and fall of Picard’s fear, confusion, dignity, intransigence, hope, dismay and eventual seeming capitulation.

The other strand of this story, taking place on board the Enterprise, is more complex in plotting, but far simpler in tone, offering its balancing share of triumphant punch-the-air moments, and paying off all sorts of set-ups from part one. But it’s not without subtlety and complexity either (Jellico continues to reveal layer after layer) and if the reset button is hit fairly hard at the end, it never even threatens to make the journey feel any less than thoroughly worthwhile. This is about as good as this, or any other iteration of Trek is capable of.

TNG S05E19 The First Duty (). Yay, Wesley’s back, victim of an accident too expensive to portray on-screen. High class guest star Ray Walston (My Favourite Martian, The Apartment, Silver Streak) appears as Boothby the gardener and future Voyager regular Robert Duncan McNeill makes his Star Trek debut as Tom Paris Nicholas Locarno. Picard’s chats with Boothby are detailed and well-acted but seem irrelevant as they don’t impact the present. Wesley’s handwringing over whether or not to listen to Tom Nick also doesn’t play particularly strongly as the outcome is never in doubt (“I know you were telling the truth, but the satellite data makes it look as if you were lying,” bleats Beverly inanely). I honestly fail to see what’s so special about either this character or this actor, but we’ll get to Voyager another day.

TNG S05E20 Cost of Living (). In an almost James Bond-like move we join the bridge crew in the middle of their last mission and smash into the titles as soon as they’ve finished the job. The real story is about Lwaxana who is taking Alexander under her wing, and planning her wedding onboard ship (because this is the story we tell with this character). Marina Sirtis has developed an easy chemistry with Majel Barrett who always brings her A-game. But in a trope that goes back to the very earliest episodes of TOS (and which we’ve seen more than once this season) a visual effect has snuck on board the ship, no doubt with malign intent. While we wait for them to get up to their pixelated mischief we have to suffer through Lwaxana and Alexander’s sojourn on the Holodeck which is aggressively tedious. “The higher the fewer” is Carroll-esque nonsense from late 19th century Britain. Troi’s parenting contract sounds like the kind of thing a male writer with no kids would come up with.

TNG S05E21 The Perfect Mate (). Whew, it’s all go for the Enterprise. Warring factions, distressed miners and a Ferengi shuttle seemingly in distress. One of the rescued Ferengi is Max Grodénchik who we’ll be seeing more of before long. Ambassador Briam of the Zagbars has brought some valuable cargo on board with which to broker the peace with the Zoobles. This cargo turns out to be Xenia Onatopp who is being offered as a mate to secure the agreement. This is obviously ick, and luckily the bridge crew seem to understand this and raise some (fairly feeble) objections to this kind of “human” trafficking before Riker shows her to her quarters – what could possibly go wrong? Cue much handwringing and soul-searching about whether she is a victim of exploitation or a willing participant in a necessary political alliance. The usual patriarchal bullshit is all present and correct (Famke’s trip to Ten Forward would make Sean Connery look politely deferential), and the debate is given a token amount of depth and complexity. There’s precious little drama though and it is hard to avoid just how ick it all is. Famke Janssen was offered the part of Dax on DS9 but turned it down, although Terry Farrell ended up inheriting her makeup.

TNG S05E22 Imaginary Friend (). Moppets. Now stop me if you’ve heard this one, but one of the Enterprise’s youngest inhabitants is having mild emotional issues when a strange glowy thing that looks like Automan’s cursor appears on board and suddenly what were previously just fantasies become real and solid while the Enterprise’s systems start behaving oddly. While new combinations of old ideas can feel fresh and exciting, this has a real “will this do?” energy to it, which I haven’t felt before. Early episodes failed sometimes because they were trying too hard. An episode which has dated badly like The Perfect Mate at least has its heart in the right place. This isn’t trying to do anything except use up another 45 minutes. After the shot of vinegar which I so appreciated in the first episodes of this season, the mawkish sentimentality of this outing is even more disappointing. I’m tempted to mark it down even further, but it’s competent enough and if you picked an episode of TNG to watch at random, you probably would like it more. I just feel let down because of how few new ideas are present and because of how strongly this season started.

TNG S05E23 I, Borg (). In a reversal of my feelings about the previous episode, here we have an idea which now feels like it’s been done to death – actually that implacable foe, the very essence of evil, turns out to be a future ally we just haven’t made friends with yet – but which at the time, Klingons notwithstanding, still felt very fresh. The real achievement of this outstanding episode is humanising the Borg while not reducing the threat which they represent. It’s a remarkable piece of storytelling which portrays the Borg as both victim and aggressor, while positioning Picard as pulled between his compassion and his personal hatred in a genuinely fascinating way. In fact, almost everyone on board has an interesting reaction to the presence of a tame Borg, from Crusher to Guinan. “Hugh” calls himself “Third of Five” which prefigures the name of a regular character on Voyager, but she was “Seven of Nine” not “Seventh of Nine”.

TNG S05E24 The Next Phase (). Once again Ro Laren is pissing off everyone around her before a rescue mission to bail out some Romulans goes pear-shaped and she and Geordi are seemingly lost beaming back on board the ship. In fact, she and Geordi are “out of phase” with the Enterprise and the rest of the crew, able to walk its corridors but not be seen or interact with anyone. If you think this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a virtual remake of the TOS episode The Tholian Web, even down to funeral arrangements being made for the two missing crew members. The choice of Ro is an inspired one. By this stage, she feels like a regular member of the crew, but by the rules of television she could die and that raises the stakes enormously. You do have to wonder why people “out of phase” are solid to the Enterprise’s floors (and shuttles) but not its walls or view screens, but that seems like an uninteresting thing to worry about when the story is this good, with the resolution provided by a very nifty twist that’s hard to seeing coming. About the only thing I don’t like is how professional everyone is. I thought we’d got to the point where we could see our characters let the guards down a bit more under extreme stress (like losing two colleagues or being thought dead).

TNG S05E25 The Inner Light (). It’s barely a minute before the bridge of the Enterprise vanishes and Picard finds himself in a domestic setting he doesn’t recognise. On its face, this is another one of those “cover of a comic book” set-ups which we know can’t be the truth. But the details of Picard’s new life as he gradually learns to forget the man he was are intricately woven. It’s almost a loss when he does snap back to Star Fleet and it’s easy to imagine that the life he lived over several decades is going to be something he carries with him forever – indeed, future episodes show him playing that flute. I’m only mildly disappointed that we cut back to the bridge and see the crew desperately trying to recover the captain at all (I’d forgotten that this happened), but this is still a truly remarkable hour of television. I’m amazed that anyone pitched it and I’m astonished that anyone as risk-averse as Berman allowed it to proceed, but I’m incredibly grateful that they both did. By any measure, this is a masterpiece.

TNG S05E26 Time’s Arrow (). How about this for a teaser? Picard and Data are poking about in a cavern on 24th century Earth, looking at relics from the 19th century. Among the haul – Data’s lifeless disembodied head! Boom. Inevitably, the crew’s attempts to unravel this mystery cause the circumstance they are desperate to avoid to come about. Data is translated to San Francisco of 1893 and there’s some budget left at the end of the season to give us some lovely-looking location filming. His adventures in the past are highly entertaining – “I am a Frenchman” – and it’s one of those great intractable problems that are so much fun. It’s a different approach to the end-of-season cliff-hanger as well. Instead of massive jeopardy for people we care about, it’s just a question of “Gosh, what will happen now?” Which is cool if a little bit under-powered.

TNG S06E01 Time’s Arrow, Part II (). Compared certainly to The Best of Both Worlds, this feels far more purposeful and planned with arbitrary details in part one that don’t pay off at all until part two (like that couple who go around zapping vagrants with a handbag) and the general tone of levity is engagingly maintained. Picard, Riker, Crusher, Geordi and Troi have integrated into 19th century society with appealing ease (Geordi’s visor notwithstanding) and it’s great fun to see for example the doughty landlady not taking any more nonsense from that silver-tonged “Mr Pickard”. However, the writers of this episode seem to have forgotten that Sam Clemens not only overheard Data and Guinan talking about their true origins, but also that he fessed up to them immediately. Additionally, the final act depends enormously for its impact on the about-face performed by Clemens, but this isn’t really given the space or time it needs, what with all the other time-hopping and technobabble. Ultimately, while it’s enjoyable enough, it feels a bit low-key for both a season opener and a resolution to an epic two-parter.

Season 5 wrap-up

• This season got off to a very strong start with some well-remembered episodes, a new darker tone and the return of Spock all in the first third. The rest of the season isn’t quite so consistent, with an over-reliance on moppets, some attempts to confront social issues which have aged very badly, and a slight feeling of exhaustion creeping in towards the end. The upshot of all of that is the season average comes in at 3.5, about the same as 3 and 4, and still not eclipsing that epic first season of TOS.
• Despite that, there’s definitely a greater complexity and imagination on display in the best of these episodes: successes like Ensign Ro, Unification, Cause and Effect, Conundrum and even Darmok don’t feel like anything the series has done before, and if most of the regular characters have “topped out”  by now, there’s seemingly no limit to the depths of Jean-Luc Picard as episodes like I, Borg and The Inner Light
• But it’s disappointing to be still getting limp outings like Hero Worship, The Game and Imaginary Friend. While it isn’t true that there are no successful episodes in the first two years, it also isn’t true that everything from Season 3 onwards is a banger and Violations is criminally bad.
• Where now? Will the series keep doing what works, or start shaking things up even more? And what’s this about Paramount worrying about rising costs and thinking about a TNG movie…?

TNG S05E10 New Ground (). Geordi can’t wait to see the newfangled Spore Drive Soliton Drive in action. But meanwhile, plot threads from earlier episodes are being gathered up. Worf’s mum is paying him a visit and has brought Alexander with her, now played – as he will be for his remaining appearances – by Brian Bonsall. And we smash into the titles on the revelation that he’s here to stay. The sight of the burly Klingon negotiating his way through domestic and educational matters is well-handled, amusing and affecting without being cloying – you know my feelings about moppets. Troi virtually bounds up to Worf, delighted that she might be useful to someone for once, but all she does is point him towards a field trip, where Alexander lies about stealing a toy. The apparent low stakes of these scenes is at odds with the dramatic music, but actually, this is an engrossing exploration of Klingon honour codes – and you know my feelings about those too – shown through the eyes of a child. Michael Dorn plays all aspects of this with deceptive delicacy and it’s kind of amazing that a syndicated science-fiction adventure show is willing to attempt this kind of character drama at all, let alone pull it off with as much clarity and depth as this. Last appearance of Georgia Brown as Helena Rozhenko, she died within six months of this episode’s broadcast.

TNG S05E11 Hero Worship (). Continuing the theme of families, both biological and found, Data becomes the focus of attention for a troubled moppet who can’t process the grief he’s experiencing and so begins to emulate the android’s emotionless demeanour. 14-year-old Joshua Harris does a splendid job copying Brent Spiner’s tics and quirks and even manages his eventual catharsis with Troi without too much cringe. Even more so than last week’s story with Worf and Alexander, this is a story which only this show could tell, blending science fiction concepts about artificial intelligence and where emotions come from with deep (for a syndicated television show) insights into loss, childhood and parenting. As good as this is though, along with the previous episode, it still feels like it’s playing in the shallow end of the pool. We aren’t really putting our characters through the ringer, we aren’t putting the Federation or even the Enterprise up against any implacable foes. So, this gets a four because it’s extremely well-handled, but I don’t regard it as an all-time classic. And I nearly knocked off half-a-star because it’s the second A-plot moppet, B-plot wavefront-in-space episode in a row.

TNG S05E12 Violations (). In a particularly grim example of this-is-the-story-we-tell-with-this-character, a trio of telepaths roll onto the ship and before you know it, Troi is having nightmares of being raped and minutes later is lying in a coma. Riker is the next to succumb, having nightmares of an accident in engineering. It’s nice to see Crusher getting something to do, but she’s all business here. And even in an episode which (briefly) centres her, Troi still remains the thinnest of characters. Her conversation in the turbolift about her mother sounds quite similar to something one real person would say to another, but not enough to be mistaken for it. Watching Levar Burton and Majel Barrett’s computer voice exchange the names of made-up compounds isn’t thrilling drama either, but it least it isn’t nauseating I suppose. Crusher is next, facing the horrifying sight of Patrick Stewart in a hairpiece. There’s little drama here, what there is is unpleasant and there’s basically no mystery as the bad guy’s identity is essentially given away at the end of the teaser. So, this is a poor episode in many ways, but I’m knocking it all the way down to 1.5 stars because it’s so ick, and that’s before we get into the real-world cases of practitioners who implant false memories, either through clumsy questioning, or as deliberate manipulation.

TNG S05E13 The Masterpiece Society (). In what feels like a familiar trope, a tiny human colony, its existence hitherto not even suspected, refuses to be evacuated when a passing technobabble threatens to destroy them. To add to the fun, they’re eugenicists. Whereas TOS kept revisiting the gilded cage, TNG tends to play with the variation: the paradise that isn’t, and so it is here. Picard, quite rightly, strongly opposes their plan for genetic superiority, but Troi seems to think there’s something in it, which undermines her character to no particular purpose, especially when the anti-eugenics argument tips over into an anti-abortion rant. That’s the second time in two episodes the show has taken on a subject matter it’s completely incapable of engaging with. Let’s please go back to space adventures and character stories, even if that does mean more moppets.

TNG S05E14 Conundrum (). “Chess isn’t just a game of ploys and gambits. It’s a game of intuition,” observes Counsellor Troi, wholly inaccurately. It’s been a bit of a rough ride lately, and this silly opening doesn’t fill me with confidence. But the rest of the teaser is one of those great covers-of-a-comic-book scenarios where the entire bridge crew is suddenly struck with total amnesia, unable to recognise their colleagues or recall their own identities. It’s a truly fascinating exploration of what makes these people who they are and what makes this crew function. Riker identifies Picard as the leader, but Worf wonders if his sash makes him top dog. Without access to his full faculties, the captain seems faltering, uncertain. Once again, Patrick Stewart shows his class. It’s a wonderfully detailed rendering, full of subtleties and grace notes. Worf meanwhile cheerfully occupies the captain’s chair, but who is this executive officer who has slipped into the next seat? And what is this war they seem to be embroiled in? Troi and Riker’s scenes together are highlights of a very strong episode. It’s possibly the first time I’ve really believed in their relationship and it’s a series-best performance from Marina Sirtis who finds a depth to Troi which has often eluded her in the past. Deliciously, Ro Laren is there to screw everything up. The final scene of the three of them is quite delightful. “Scanning intensity has increased by 1500%” says La Forge, who means “increased 16-fold”.

TNG S05E15 Power Play (). Troi detects life-signs on a barren moon, so she joins the away team as they shuttle down to the surface of Strobe-lighting IV and they get stuck there. O’Brien insists on trying to beam down through the storm with a “pattern enhancer” to get them back. All of this is pretty woolly plotting, where stuff happens on the thinnest of pretexts just to make the story work. That story is that the away team (Troi, O’Brien and Data) have been whammied and are now trying to take over the Enterprise. I always enjoy seeing this (or any) regular cast taking on different roles or playing against type and that’s the chief pleasure here, as well as the details of the takeover campaign. There are two or three successive explanations for what’s really going on, each sillier than the last. And Picard bunging the antagonists back on the moon at the end is uncharacteristically heartless, but overall this is a fun, if rather nonsensical, adventure. Phaser beams almost never leave the barrel in a straight line, which is odd given that the camera angles mean we generally don’t see the weapon and its target in the same shot. Data reverses the polarity of the force fields, which is lovely.

TNG S05E16 Ethics (). When Worf is injured in the most banal way possible (moving some boxes – seriously, couldn’t they have had him saving some kids or something?) he ends up paralysed and wants to kill himself. Crusher brings a crackpot specialist onboard who has Pulaski’s bedside manner and Hilary Clinton’s haircut (and has never heard of a double-blind randomised clinical trial). It beggars belief slightly that 24th century can’t rustle up some adequate bionic legs, but while it’s a shame that more care wasn’t given to patch these holes, the fact that they would be easy fixes also means they’re fairly easy to ignore. The question is: how will this series tackle the right to die? Given its recent lack of success with adoption, sexual assault and eugenics I’m not hopeful, and of course there’s a pretty nauseating ableist reading of this plotline too. In practice, of course, we all know that by the end of the episode, Crusher is going to give Worf two reset pills and have him call her in the morning, so the stakes never feel all that high. I admire the refusal to introduce too many silly sci-fi elements, and there is interesting drama to be mined out of the euthanasia debate, even within the confines of episodic television, but this never quite finds the, er, spine of the story. On the upside, as usual, Patrick Stewart makes even the thinnest material seem like spun gold and it’s series-best stuff from Michael Dorn as well. What’s most disappointing about this is that Crusher gets so little character development, when this seems tailor-made to dig into her personality a bit more. Those Dead Ringers red surgical cowls are back.

TNG S05E17 The Outcast (). As previously noted, Roddenberry was keen for there to be gay characters on the Enterprise but Berman felt he couldn’t take the risk. We’ve been treated so far to Beverly Crusher recoiling in horror when the love of her life turned female. Now Riker stumbles his way through a conversation about being non-binary which today sounds like Look Who’s Coming to Dinner with gender instead of race, only with less good acting. Soren, his androgynous sweetheart, is of course played by a conventionally attractive cis-woman who’d just come from playing a recurring pretty-girl character on The A Team, which kind of undermines the whole thing. Strictly as a piece of sci-fi “what-if”ing it’s not bad, but it’s impossible to overlook the well-meaning but clodhopping social commentary. Depressingly, for a show about how the battle of the sexes should be a thing of the past, it reiterates over and over again that the Federation is a strictly binary society with no crossing-dressing, gender fluidity or anything like that – even the skant is nowhere to be seen these days. At the time, it probably would have been read as an allegory for homophobia but actually having gay characters would have been far, far preferable. In what might just be Steven Moffat-esque joke about passing, Geordi has a beard.

TNG S05E18 Cause and Effect (). One thing which I really noticed watching TOS is how strong and punchy the teasers were. Week after week, usually in less than two minutes we had the eye-catching premise of the episode, or a really exciting bit of jeopardy and sometimes both and then – smash into those iconic titles. There are some great TNG teasers as well, but sometimes it’s just checking in with a couple of different departments, meeting a guest star and then, ho hum, time for the credits I guess. Not here. The ship is tearing itself apart. Crusher seems to be at tactical and then the motherfucking Enterprise explodes. C’mon now, people. You have my attention. You have 100% of my attention. When we come back after the teaser and everything’s okay it seems like a cheat, but we inexorably make our way back to that devastating teaser and then the other shoe drops. It’s Groundhog Day but nobody is Phil Connors. Everyone is stuck repeating the same doomed actions. It looks insoluable and miraculously it isn’t. The resolution is clever, unexpected and it makes sense. And then Frasier turns up. This might not be the greatest, most profound episode ever, it might not shed any new light on any of our regulars, but it’s as exciting as hell and it doesn’t put a foot wrong. That’s got to be worth five stars. Credit where it’s due: Brannon Braga wrote the script and Jonathan Frakes directed.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country ()

Star Trek V had been given a drubbing by the critics, was wildly disliked by fans and hadn’t made the kind money it was supposed to (it cost more than the previous film and made half as much). Possibly, if it had been a smash, there never would have been a sixth film with the original cast. But 1991 would be the 25th anniversary of the franchise and Paramount wanted to commemorate it in some way. Not for the first time, a Star Fleet Academy story was pitched which would have seen a reckless young Jim Kirk meet a stuffy Vulcan named Spock and gradually the two of them would learn to get along. Sounds ghastly, right? And although TNG had proved that there was life beyond Kirk, nobody thought that there was an audience for the same characters but without those iconic actors. Meanwhile, Harve Bennett had gone, the ordeal of cranking out four movies in seven years having taken its toll, and nobody had an idea for how the old crew could compete with the new televisual upstarts.

Nobody, except Leonard Nimoy. He had two ideas. Idea number one: what if the Berlin Wall fell in space? Something must have happened to put Lt Worf on the bridge of the Enterprise by TNG’s time. Idea number two: send for Nicholas Meyer. Meyer’s working title for Star Trek II had been “The Undiscovered Country” which of course means death. Apt for a story as steeped in loss and death as Star Trek II. Now, Paramount would ret-con Shakespeare and claim that it referred to the future.

Is the resulting film any good? Well, the plotting is generally solid, nowhere more so than in the first third, which establishes Sulu as the captain of the Excelsior and puts him in a position to see the Klingon moon Chernobyl Praxis blow itself up. Now Spock is attempting to broker a peace, and it seems only fitting that the crew of the Enterprise be brought out of mothballs and sent to escort the delegates through Federation space. Robin Curtis being unavailable, and a second recasting of Saavik not to anyone’s liking, a new character was created who could fulfill the role of spunky young Vulcan woman who quotes regulations at Kirk. Shatner’s beaming grin as he tells her where she can stick her rule book is him at his most punchably smug.

Shatner was deeply unhappy at having to play Kirk’s anti-Klingon sentiments, hating the line to Spock “Let them die.” And – you know what? – I think he was probably right. Yeah, Kruge killed his son, but don’t forget that a week earlier he had no idea he even had a son. It’s hard to connect the bitter, angry old man in these early scenes to the stoic captain who stamped out racist sentiments when his crew saw Romulans for the first time. Trouble is, it’s also hard to connect these early scenes to later scenes in which he’s doing everything he can to fight for peace. Meanwhile, poor Bones just traipses around after him, getting – yes sure – more screen-time than Scotty-Uhura-Chekov-and-Sulu but never getting anything at all in the way of character development. Looking at the trio of Spock, Kirk and McCoy the question “Who would be most likely to give in to knee-jerk prejudice about former enemies becoming new allies?” seems to be to be best answered with “The bad-tempered one who keeps making grouchy remarks about pointy ears and green blood, not the calm and practical negotiator.” That would preserve the dynamic of logic and emotion vying for the Captain’s decision, which was the very essence of TOS.

So, as usual (in every film bar II) there isn’t much in the way of depth to any of these characters, and what little there is doesn’t really work, but it’s still a pleasure to see especially Nimoy and Shatner together again and whenever one of the others gets a line it’s warmly nostalgic – even Janice Rand pops up for a split-second. Much of Kirk and McCoy’s adventures on the prison planet are exciting and funny with the interplay between Kirk and his shape-shifting doppelgänger a particular highlight. Meanwhile, on the Enterprise there’s a rather low-stakes and long-winded Agatha Christie play being enacted, which naturally ends with the only expendable cast-member turning out to be the traitor. It also surely cannot have been a surprise to anyone that the bad-guy on the Klingon side turned out to be the cackling bald-headed one with the eyepatch. I’m only surprised they didn’t give him a cat to stroke.

But despite all these structural and character flaws, it’s a very easy film to watch and a very easy film to like. As director, Meyer keeps it light and fast-moving; as screenwriter (with Denny Martin Flynn) he keeps the jokes and call-backs coming and if Cliff Eidelman’s music can’t approach Jerry Goldsmith or James Horner’s majestic compositions, it is at least a step up from Leonard Rosenman’s plinky-plonky score for Star Trek IV. And I haven’t even mentioned the rest of the guest cast. As well as a scenery-chewing Christopher Plummer, here’s late lamented David Warner having the time of his life, here’s Kurtwood Smith as a Klingon version of a Kung Fu master from a Shaw Brothers movie, here’s Christian Slater of all damned people. And here’s Michael Dorn, connecting the old show to the new one, playing Worf’s great-grandfather. This film is so stacked, they shot scenes with René Auberjonois and cut them before release. René Auberjonois!

What doesn’t work is the appalling mind-rape of Valeris which is presented without any comment. Spock smacking that phaser out of her hand is perfect, but what happens next is just horrible and I think if the film were being made in less of a frantic hurry to slide in before the end of 1991, it might have been re-thought. So, for me this one ends up in the middle of the pack somewhere. It’s about on a par with Star Trek III but it doesn’t have the problem of undoing the plot of something as perfect as Wrath of Khan. In fact, it’s something of a relief that it’s as enjoyably watchable as it is, following on from Star Trek V and that might earn it an extra, illogical half a star.

But it was definitely time to stop, as what Meyer and co had taken two years to do on the big screen, Rick Berman and team were doing every week in syndication, with higher concepts, greater depth, a more fleshed-out supporting cast and nearly as much visual polish. This is the end of a lot of things which started on NBC in 1966. It’s the last appearance in any professional Star Trek production for Nichelle Nichols (who has also now left us), George Takei and DeForest Kelley. It’s the last movie centred on the original cast and the last set entirely in the 23rd century until JJ Abrams shows up. Shatner even signs off by altering the famous catch-phrase from “no man” to “no one” as Patrick Stewart had been saying for five years.

Star Trek was dead. Long live Star Trek.