Author: robert

Star Trek presents ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. OK, so the ‘Picard sees an event from the past, and we discover that the event was pivotal to the man that he became’ is a little reminiscent of a certain Jimmy Stewart movie. But it’s superbly done, and the best use of Q so far (so much…

As I may have mentioned, I love a good courtroom scene. It took eight episodes, but Deep Space 9 has finally knocked one out of the park. This is a nicely constructed episode, that manages to reveal a lot about Dax’s past and character, while at the same time keeping her off screen or not…

By far the most Troi heavy episode the show has ever done. And despite most of the past evidence, it works (with a misstep or two along the way). The episode is, more than anything, evidence that Marina Sirtis is a pretty good actress when she’s given something to work with. She does a pretty…

Q comes to visit, hijinks ensue. This isn’t that bad an episode, but its not really much of a Deep Space 9 episode. Most of the plot development is dominated by Q, Vash and Quark, with the main crew relegated to not finding out what was going on until the last minute. The interaction between…

I blame this episode for me being so far behind. I started watching on the plane to San Francisco, but it was so dull I fell asleep part way through. And then I could never quite rouse the interest level to get back to it until today. All of the skeleton of a good episode…

There’s a very good story lurking somewhere under this episode, but it just doesn’t show up enough in the final product. Miles’ relationship with the strange alien is nice, but the episode founders on the lack of moral ambiguity. It’s pretty clear to everyone who the bad guys are, as they have no redeeming qualities.…

For a while it looked like the Holodeck was going to get badly overused in Star Trek. A lot of that was probably due to the fact that the first ‘good’ episode (The Big Goodbye) was a holodeck one. But it’s been used sparingly enough that the teaser make you glad its back. Moriaty’s trick…

The good old ‘epidemic sweeps the station’ one. There’s a nice twist here with the virus being the responsibility of Bajoran terrorists, but that’s never used for anything particularly interesting. There’s a bit too much ‘plot convenience’ going on, with Sisko, Kira and Bashir all among the last to succumb, and Odo and Quark the…

I love a good locked room mystery. But while there was a locked room involved, this one wasn’t that good. The mystery relied a little bit too much on silly technobabble, and it just didn’t feel realistic that the population of the station would turn into a mob so quickly. Not a terrible episode by…

This episodes seems out to prove a point – this is not the old Star Trek. This is the new Star Trek, where characters have a past, where sometimes they disagree with each other on fundamentals, and the plots aren’t just wrapped up at the end of the previous episode. The major failing is that…