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MiraTheOwl
Reviews
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Naked Now (1987)
A truly awful way to follow up on the pilot
This is where the badness of TNG season 1 really rears its ugly head. It was of course a fundamentally stupid idea in and of itself of having the second episode of the show be both a blatant rewrite of a TOS episode, and one in which all the characters you've yet to really introduce and endear to your audience act out of character, but furthermore, everything about the execution of it is bad. Many of season 1's hallmarks of annoyance like Wesley's being a smarmy little prick or Data being little more than a punching bag for easy jokes are brought into their true awful fruition here, and the script is full of contrivances: things like Data getting drunk or him finding out about what's happening to the crew by looking up information about people showering with their clothes on are just unfathomably dumb.
Quite possibly the worst of the whole series. Skip this one at all costs!
Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Measure of a Man (1989)
A highly ambitious concept, masterfully executed.
I have long been skeptical of people claiming that artificial intelligence or neural networks constitute life, and I refer people to the Chinese Room though experiment whenever the claim is made. Similarly, Data's own testimony cannot be considered reliable proof that he possesses self-awareness or consciousness: he could merely be reciting generated words that he himself doesn't actually understand because he's just running a program. The scenario in this episode turns the experiment on its head though: perhaps Data's experience really is just a highly advanced simulation of life, but the stakes of the argument have become so high that the burden of proof no longer lies with him or his advocates but with those (inadvertently) seeking to condemn him and all those who follow him to servitude and slavery. Can we know if Data has a consciousness? Is he himself actually capable of knowing, any more than any human can know it of themselves? Data's acquittal at the end is therefore not an admission that he represents life (whatever that means), but rather that the technology behind his intelligence has outgrown our capability of understanding and can in its functioning no longer be meaningfully distinguished with any certainty from the organic brain of any advanced species. Under Starfleet's own moral code, the court ultimately has no choice but to give him the benefit of the doubt. It's an enchantingly written and acted battle of words and ideas; one of the most inspiring and optimistic episodes of the entire series and a shining beacon of quality within an overall rocky season.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Matter of Honor (1989)
Star Trek at its best and most idealistic
Star Trek episodes centred around a convincing process of reconciliation and/or bonding among races are always a guaranteed win for me; those among them that involve relations between humans and Klingons, a species with a nearly incompatible moral system, are certainly the most ambitious of these. It would have been so easy and predictable for the a-plot, centred around Riker as an exchange commander on a Klingon ship, to consist of him stumbling around committing one faux pas after another struggling to keep his hosts happy. Instead the premise is played completely straight: Riker performs outstandingly as a Klingon commander while retaining his human principles and the Klingons' respect for him by the end feels completely deserved.
Philosophically, episodes like this one do however bring up the contentious subject of cultural relativism. By any acceptable human standard, the Klingon Empire is a ruthless and savage kratocracy. If it were a human society then it would hardly warrant any more normal courtesy than, for example, Nazi Germany, but the fact that it's an alien society muddles the issue: maybe the Klingons are just so fundamentally different as a species that their current society really is the most fit for them. Future episodes do suggest that they are more receptive to kindness and compassion as a species than their society allows, but for now that all lies in the future and when it happens it comes about precisely through their positive experiences with humans. For the time being, this is just a hopeful tale about the prospects of lasting peace and mutual understanding between mankind and a species that served more or less as one-dimensional villains in the original series.
Star Trek: The Next Generation: Time Squared (1989)
A frustrating bunch of nonsense
It's one thing for me to suspend my disbelief when it comes to the many questions about details of a story as opaque as this, such as how Captain Picard travels back in time, what the vortex is, why it wants to capture the Enterprise and how the Enterprise escapes it in the end, but for me to suspend my disbelief on the irrational actions of the characters on top of that is just asking too much. The notion that the ship is caught in an inescapable time loop turns out to be (mostly) correct but is pulled completely out of thin air by the crew, as is Picard's idea that changing any detail of the events previously unfolded will lead to escape; even then that doesn't explain why he thinks letting alt-Picard leave would doom the ship, and EVEN THEN, killing his double in cold blood is not only needlessly drastic but also just cruel and plain un-Picard-like. The concept of trying to escape from a time loop was later revisited with way better execution in the season 5 episode Cause And Effect, so this episode might as well be obsolete as far as I'm concerned.