Synopsis:  Q comes back to taunt Picard, as does his ex.

Memory Alpha Summary: Picard of Thieves?  Steal from the Ferengi, give to the…nah, I got nothing.

Review:  A really silly, pointless episode that is pretty good fun anyway.  The beginning is a bit dull, plodding, and pedantic until Q arrives and reminds Picard that he’s dull, plodding, and pedantic.  And Vash’s whining is wholly unbecoming of her and I don’t blame Picard for being annoyed.

Nottingham is where it’s at.  Costumes, fighting, the whole works.  I just wish the two actors who actually were trained in swordfighting (Gates and Marina) were allowed to do so instead of fighting with clay pots.

A huge laugh out loud moment goes to Worf.  It’s sad he’s used for one-liners in most episodes, but this one was worth it.

Sir, I must protest!  I am not a merry man!

Synopsis:  Troi goes blind, becomes a raging bitch, becomes whole again, and then nice again.

Memory Alpha Summary: As if she had much empathy to begin with.

Review:  While nothing in this episode feel disingenuous (in fact, it really is a hard and honest look at what it’s like to be disabled), I just don’t care about Troi, so I don’t care about her plight.  The scene that really makes this episode not suck is when Riker confronts her, calls her aristocratic and a control freak. Granted, this is also the same guy who pouted every time Troi had the nerve to date someone in the first three seasons.  They really were made for each other.

Money Quote (after Riker hugs a very depressed, isolated Troi)

“Is this how you handle all of your personnel problems?”

“Sure. You’d be surprised how far a hug goes with Geordi…or Worf!”

Synopsis:  Lore tells everyone that his brother Data cannot use contractions (except for when he did before this episode, and except for when he’ll slip up later) and otherwise is found to be kind of a meanie-head.

Memory Alpha Review: The Parent Trap…in space!

Review:  Spiner gets to shine, playing two characters at the same time.  The crystalline entity also gets to shine, literally.  And, once again, the bridge crew wave their collective dicks at Wesley, a fellow bridge officer, and refuse to listen to anything he says.  Seriously, what is up with Tasha Yar?  She’s head of security, yet Wesley makes some glaringly obvious observations and precautionary recommendations that she fails to?  Ugh.  You know, I used to hate Wesley.  Now I kind of like him.  He actually stands up to Picard, which apparently nobody else has seemed willing to do since Farpoint.

Synopsis:  When the Edo aren’t making love at the drop of a hat (any hat), they are trying to execute Wesley for disturbing some plants.

Memory Alpha Summary:  Rhu_Ru’s favorite link on the internet.

Review:  For me the most bipolar episode of the series, with some of the worst and some of the best moments in season one.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first.  This entire episode is Picard’s most blatant, inexcusable violation of the Prime Directive in the entire series.  He makes first contact with a society that is obviously in early stages of development and have never been in space before.  As if their arrival didn’t disturb them enough, he takes an Edo girl upon the ship to face her own god, scaring her to death.  When she says she’s afraid, Troi, the ship’s COUNSELOR, tells her there’s nothing to worry about.  You’re a FREAKING PSYCHOLOGIST, and you’re telling this innocent girl that beaming onto a starship and seeing her god is nothing to worry about?  As a licensed social worker, I say “Fuck off, you patronizing windbag.”

Also, I am getting really tired of everyone calling Wesley, “The boy.”   It must happen at least four times in this episode.  It was cute in the beginning, but he’s since been promoted to an acting ensign.   The disrespect his own crew shows for him is sickening, and it does nothing but put a divide between him, the crew, and the viewer.  When his superiors dismiss his desire to give his opinions on the matter of his own execution, he essentially tells them to bugger off, and I did a little cheer for him.

I get all this out of the way because there are a few things that make me smile here, and so far during the first season I’ve been crabby.  It might be the only episode of the whole series that Crusher acts like she cares more about her son than her hair.  She shows some real emotion and yells at both Picard and Data, and both of them deserve it.  At least Picard doesn’t talk down to his bridge officers in this episode (well, except Wesley of course).

Speaking of Data, his realization that he babbles is freaking gold, and the funniest scene during the first season.  The one expected difficulty with working with an android is managing social etiquette, and Brent Spiner is able to encompass this perfectly into his character.

The final conversation Picard and Riker have with God is pretty good.  “When has justice ever been as simple as a rule book?” is a salient point that is pretty basic but very relevant still in our times.  Black and white lenses neither dominate our society nor the Federation, and this crew will eventually improve at looking at things in shades of grey.

One thing that bugs some people and not me is how Wesley acts in this episode.  When propositioned by a barely clothed Edo girl, he gets bashful and scared.  When caught damaging the flowers, he proudly stands up, puffs out his chest, and says, “I’m with StarFleet.  We don’t lie.”  Yes, these things make him seem like kind of a douche, but they also make him sound like a normal 15-year old boy who has led a pretty sheltered life.  It’s much better than the precocious, know-it-all twit we usually see.

The writers took a ton of chances during season one and they misfired quite a bit.  While Justice is not even in my top half, it ranks this high because it avoids the one thing I criticized Too Short A Season of being, and that’s boring.  And it avoids it in spades.

Synopsis: Betazed prodigy Tam Elbrum goes looking for a heart.

Memory Alpha Summary:  And some courage by the looks of it

Review: I’m reminded of our scientist from Evolution who told Troi to stop looking into his soul.  He would not have been a Tam fan, who can not only read all thoughts, but can’t stop reading them.  Naturally, he has great difficulty in social situations.  Naturally, he makes a friend in Data, whom he can’t read.

Unfortunately, despite a race with the Romulans to find Tin Man, an organism that doubles as a human spaceship, there is not a lot of heart in this episode.  The script is decent, and the conclusion is tidy, but it’s not really all that tense and not really all that moving.

I do like when Picard changes his intended time for a briefing just because Tam read his mind.

Synopsis: What if Jesus came back…as a clone?

Memory Alpha Summary:  WWKD?

Review:  TNG tackled religion in general in Who Watches the Watchers.  Here they specifically tackle Christianity.  While it’s a bit heavy-handed (and a bit on the nose) for my taste,  Dorn does a wonderful job of maneuvering Worf through the emotional rollercoaster that comes from having serious tests of faith.  I also like the episode’s general moral, which is that the words can be just as important as the man.  If you believe in something, and it is just, I don’t care where your inspiration came from.

Synopsis:  Data’s family keeps getting bigger and bigger…

Memory Alpha Summary:  Imagine How I Met Your Mother with Data as narrator

Review:  In season one, Data found out he had a brother.  In season three, he found out his father was still alive.  Now in season seven, he finds out his mother is still alive.  It’s a good thing Data doesn’t have an emotion chip at this point, because he’d probably be a shriveling pile of neuroses.

Data has some touching moments with his mother, especially when dancing around the abortion/abandonment topic, but it gets a little cloyingly sentimental at the end.  It’s also hard to buy into, as it’s nearly impossible to believe in the past decade or so when Julianna was an android that neither she nor anyone else had suspicions that she was different than when she was human.

Synopsis: Beverly reveals her long time lust for Riker while we learn she is not bi-curious.

Memory Alpha Summary:  So I got this nagging pain in my side…

Review:  The Trill, much like the Bajorans, are a race that become much more developed during DS9.  However, their introduction is plausible and successful enough to create an interesting story.  The dispute Odan has to resolve from this never before seen planetary system is just a distraction from the love story.  Some people find it objectionable that Crusher was immediately turned off when Odan became biologically female but was able to overcome her discomfort when Odan was in Riker’s body.  I say hogwash; human attraction always starts with the physical and it becomes part of the person we come to cherish.  Crusher just doesn’t dig chicks or her mate changing bodies every two days for that matter.  What I find objectionable is that Crusher fell in love with Odan in the span of a week.  Perhaps it’s what happens on deep space assignments when you don’t use the holodeck enough, but I’m tired of it being used to create plots that last only one episode.  It feels very high-schoolish.

Also, why do Beverly and Odan sneak around Data?  The best way to safeguard a romance from the rest of the ship is to tell Data and tell him to keep his mouth shut.  If you make him guess he’ll start asking everyone else questions.

Synopsis:  Where Troi tries to make us care about suicides and murders of crew members we never met, or her own suicide, which we don’t care about either.

Memory Alpha Summary:  Spoiler Alert–Troi lives

Review:  The suicide discussion at the beginning is pretty shallow.  It’s a very worthwhile subject to discuss for 24th century humans, but they didn’t dig deep enough.  Then we get “It’s not like Don to take his own life.”  Right, because he’d never done it before.  What an awful line.

At least once that part is out of the picture, the episode is fun.  Watching Troi slowly become more paranoid is entertaining, and it was a better vehicle for her than Man of the People.  It’s kind of annoying, however, that we later find out most of the episode was Troi’s hallucination (not that it should be a surprise in season seven), yet in this hallucination we see some scenes from other characters’ points of view.  That’s a little dishonest to me.

Synopsis: The Enterprise has to freight a deadly plague while Troi gets knocked up by an energy force (no, not Worf).

Memory Alpha Summary:  Better than the movie Jack

Review:  I love the opening moments of this episode.  The music is triumphant, like “Yeah, we sucked in season one, but we’re back!”  (Like the Romulans).  We also have the promotion of Geordi to chief engineer and Dr. Pulaski making her one-year tour of duty.  I think both developments were great.  Muldaur is a better actress than Gates, and she actually has a personality.  She reminds me of Bones in that he had irrational distrust of Vulcans, while Pulaski shares the same distrust of androids (they also both hate transporters).  As for Geordi, I’m glad he’s no longer on the conn.  He acted like a ten-year old kid pretending to be a cowboy and had no reason to be important other than his visual acuity.  As chief engineer, he eventually grew confidence and felt like he belonged with the bridge crew.

As for this episode, it takes another chance and broaches abortion, though unfortunately in a rather over-the-top manner.  Worf, of course, wants to kill everything, so he recommends Troi abort her baby.  Sirtis actually plays this role fairly well, even if I will never be convinced by her crying.

Data does a fantastic job at handling Pulaski’s prejudice, especially when she calls him Dah-ta.  “One is my name.  The other is not.”  I have felt this way many times when people butcher my name.

Picard:  “I’ve never played with puppies.”  Really?  Wow.

I almost forgot to mention that Riker now has a beard (great move) and we have another new character in Guinan.  She winds up giving a lot of sound advice to the crew over the seasons.  And it’s a good thing because in this episode she convinces Wesley not to leave.  Whoops!

An okay episode, which could have been pretty good if Sirtis was better.