Captain Picard, Ensign Ro, Keiko O'Brien and Guinan are traveling via shuttlecraft back to the Enterprise after attending a conference (apparently geared towards starship captains, disgraced ensigns, bartenders and civilian botanists.) As the shuttle nears the ship it enters a spatial disturbance and begins to break-up. Riker gets the ship in range in time to transport the shuttle occupants onto the ship before it's destroyed but a problem has occurred during transport. All four characters arrive on the transporter pad as pre-teen children.
A quick evaluation in sickbay shows that everyone retains their original knowledge and experiences, the changes seeming only impacting their physical appearance. Picard, intent on staying in command, resumes his duties and has the ship proceed to a distress call it received earlier. The bridge-crew shows some struggles in accepting orders from a 12-year-old boy and a conversation with Crusher convinces Picard to step-down from command until more is known about his condition.
Chief O'Brien struggles with how the marriage between him and Keiko can continue as he shows great discomfort in sharing in marital familiarity with youngified-Keiko and shows more of a parental concern towards her. Molly, the O'Brien's child, also doesn't recognize young-Keiko as her mother.
Young Ro also struggles with her changes, reflecting too much on her experiences as a child in Cardassian Bajoran concentration camps and spending her life as a refugee.
Guinan, perhaps, adapts the best to her changes and simply sees the change as something to deal with and she has no control over. But, also, for her childhood is centuries behind her and not a decade or two.
As the ship arrives at the source of the distress call it finds no signs of trouble and is soon attacked by two Klingon Birds-of-Prey. They try and to retaliate but the ships overwhelm the Enterprise's defenses and eventually the ship is boarded; only not by Klingons but by defectors from the Ferengi Alliance.
Before the boarding party and completely claim the bridge Riker manages to look out the command-functions to the computer. The Ferengi have the adult crew members, other than Riker, transported to the planet's surface and the children are rounded up in the ship's schoolrooms.
The leader of the Ferengi defectors claims the ship under "salvage rites" and plans to use the adult crew, as well as the colonists on the planet, to mine a precious ore for trade. The ship will be sold to Romulans. But none of this can happen until Riker releases the main computer.
In the schoolroom Picard meets with the other former-adult shipmates in order to formulate a plan but finds his hands tied by his child body and the computer's refusal to give him the right permissions in the schoolroom.
Instead he comes with another plan to reclaim the ship. He sends Keiko, Guinan, Ro and Alexander off to around the ship to run certain errands. Chiefly to recover some hypos from sickbay and to get a guard out of the transporter room for a moment.
Picard feigns a fit at the classroom guard in order to get sent to his "father" (Riker) on the bridge where he covertly tells Riker of his plan and need of the computer. Riker agrees to teach one of the Ferengi how to use the computer and while giving a technobabble-heavy explanation is able to release command functions to the schoolroom.
Once in control of them, Picard is able to set his plan into motion by using a remote control toy, and sneaking up on Ferengi guards to tap them with com-badges; causing them to be transported to a shielded transporter chamber.
Picard then takes his phaser to the bridge to reclaim his ship.
Beverly has discovered the anomaly the shuttle passed-through interfered with genetic sequences in the patterns of the adults, these sequences responsible for aging a person. Without them they were reconstructed as children. She's able to use previous transport patterns to re-construct these genetic sequences and restore the group to their adult age. Though Ro delays it a bit after realizing that childhood isn't quite as bad as she had remembered.
Sort of another meh-episode and part of it's formulated on a pretty terrible premise.
There's nothing too bad with exploring the notion of our adult characters having to re-experience childhood for a short-time but the show doesn't do quite as much with it as it could have and then we get diverted into this absurd story with the Ferengi.
The best of the childhood-stories is probably with Keiko and Miles. It's an interesting scene as the two struggle with how they're going to deal with their marriage should Keiko's "condition" be permanent. (It's not yet known at that point whether their condition is permanent.) And it creates the interesting, if uncomfortable, question if it would be "wrong" if the O'Briens were able to continue their marriage and relationship if Keiko couldn't be restored to adulthood. The young actress does a good job playing Young-Keiko (hell, I'd say she's better than the adult actress!) the way her and Colm play off one another, particularly when Keiko exerts herself a bit, is really well done. The dialogue between them rightfully "uncomfortable" and touching in realizing these two characters are married but in an odd circumstance.
Next is Ro as she deals with struggling with her regained childhood in the wake of the real one she had and how, in the end, she finds childhood to be better than she remembered. If I'm not mistaken this is the last we see of Ro until near the end of Season 7. Really, I think it would have been interesting if Ro had decided to remain a child in-order to relive her life. The young actress, again, does a good job here. Though sometimes her movements and vocal inflections seem a bit too animated for Ro.
Young Guinan does a good job in showing our wise bartender taking the events in stride. The young actress does a good job but, while it may be nitpicky, I wish makeup or some other effect was used to cover her eyebrows. (Adult Guinan has none. So it's either a trait that El-Aurians don't have, a trait adult El-Aurians lose during puberty or Guinan shaves her eye brows.)
The young actor who plays young-Picard I'm less impressed with. I know he played Picard's nephew in "Family" but he just overall doesn't "fit" or work for me as young-Picard. His voice is a bit annoying and just doesn't strike me as very Picard-like or even all-that British sounding. Young Picard's story though does play out well as he ponders what to do with his life should it not be possible to restore him to normal.
But the big-hurt in this episode is the stupid story about the Ferengi taking over the ship. And this is the slide of Riker-as-a-commanding officer. Riker has the ship under his watch for, like, a day and it gets taken over. By Ferengi. Ferengi with Klingon ships, sure, but still...
It seemed terribly easy for the Ferengi to pull this off and they would have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids!
The episode should have focused more on the drama of our characters coping with their condition instead of this absurd sub-plot with the Ferengi which only made Riker, the ship and the whole crew look lamely incompetent.
