Good scenes in mediocre episodes

Not sure it qualifies as a 'scene' but I always liked the first sentence of Half a Life, exterior shot of Enterprise, voice-over:

Counsellor Deanna Troi, personal log, stardate 44805.3. My mother is on board.
<meaningful silence before scene in interior starts>

 

"Samaritan Snare"

All the scenes with Picard and Wesley were great, particularly when he tells Picard he would have made a good father.

 

Totally agree, those are both winning moments from this episode, feeling genuine and heartfelt.

 

Yep, great stuff indeed, although the Pakled plot during the rest of the episode has memorable for its own weird reasons!

 

This post is inspired by another thread to which I just replied.
While I like 'Imaginary Friend', everyone seems to.. well, not like it.
Like it or not, the discussion Picard has with the alien creature in the end of this episode is great, right?
Also, Guinan and Clara talking about Razorbeasts and other things in Ten Forward is good stuff.

 

Fine points all around! I'll take another look at this episode again soon, just to check out those scenes you mentioned.

 

I’ve always enjoyed the Klingon Tea Ceremony scene in “Up The Long Ladder”— even though it doesn’t seem to serve any purpose in the larger plot.

 

I also like Picards "Sometimes Number One, one simply has to...bow to the absurd" moment.

Over in TOS, I always loved the "Risk is Our Business" speech in Return to Tomorrow.

 

I wouldn't call "Half a Life" mediocre. It's really quite good.

 

It's tough but when the holographic ninja guy kicks the alien's butt is probably the best scene. Picard screws up the century of the gift to Lutan, saying 14th century and Data corrects him. Seems silly now because Picard was in line to be the greatest human archaeologist of his generation. Riker comes off sounding like a pretentious jerk in the beginning of the episode.
Justice...when Worf says when in Rome. That's the best I can come up with for that one although I haven't watched it in years.

I haven't watched it in a long time, but I cannot remember any good scenes from Datalore. It is one of the worst written episodes of any television show. The dialogue is absurd and awful.

 

Honestly, Unification is kind of a mediocre episode. I mean can anything where Sela is the crux of the plot be anything but? It's at the very least rather disappointing, considering the potential. However, Data's Scene with Spock talking of humanity & their opposed perspectives on it, is a pretty great moment for the show... that & well, Sarek's incredible final moments.

 

"Unification" also had this amusing exchange (paraphrased):
Sela: I quite like to write; I don't get to do it very often in my job.
Data: Perhaps you would be happier in a different line of work.

Perhaps I find that more amusing than most because I'd ideally like to do more writing myself.

 

Perhaps I should rewatch it, then. Until now, to me, it always came across as a preachy, thinly veiled (exaggerated) metaphor of how we treat our older people, and how we attribute a diminished value to them in our Western societies.

 

I never thought it was preachy myself, but it is a "message episode".

It also features Michelle Forbes's first appearance in Trek though.

It's also one of the few(?) TNG episodes that doesn't go for the happy ending.

 

David Ogden Stiers' performance is what brings that episode home. It's a pretty cut & dry moral allegory otherwise. He unsurprisingly imbued it with a lot more gravitas than might otherwise have been

 

Well, as I said, I'd really have to watch it again, it is a long, long time ago I saw it for the last time. My memory is faded and quite possibly it's significantly better than I remember. I do appreciate them trying to finally use Lwaxana in a less silly role, rather than her eternal (and annoying) Picard hunting (though of course, this is a story of her being after a man again).

 

Riker says "When in Rome". Worf responds "When in where, sir?"...which is odd. Was Worf making a joke? I can almost buy that they didn't teach anything on Gault (maybe there weren't many humans on that farming world?), but surely he would've learned about Rome after his family moved to Minsk.

 

Perhaps it is just Worf challenging Riker's earthcentric attitude It's likely Rome survives until at least Phlox' time (as he visits st' Peters Basilica to attend mass), so presumably it's still there in the 24th century, too, so it would be unlikely he never heard of it, even if he wasn't interested in history.

 

Worf's backstory as having been raised by humans hadn't been established yet in Season 1. So at that point he was just a Klingon in Starfleet who really had no reason to be familiar with Rome.

 

No, he tells his origin 10 episodes later in Heart of Glory.