Wow..... this is gonna be fun.
So I just got finished watching a run of three episodes, two of them being just great episodes and one an all-time classic. I feel slightly overwhelmed right now, but I'll give you my thoughts on each of them anyway. Enjoy...
I, Borg
I was super excited to watch this. It'd been nearly two seasons since we'd seen the Borg, and I was anxiously waiting to see the Borg cube come back, blow some shit up, and assimilate a few people here and there. Now while that didn't exactly happen, I got something just as good in a much more grounded and personal story with the Borg after
Q Who and
The Best of Both Worlds. First of all, the guest actor for Third of Five/Hugh, Jonathan Del Arco, did a great job, as well as the rest of the main cast as a whole.
I love how Geordi seems to get along best with android-like characters such as Data and Hugh, better than he has with any human character on the show. He taught Hugh how to be an individual, and for the first time ever, when Picard first met Hugh, I felt legitimately angry at the captain. Looking back now, I think he might have been testing Hugh to see if he had fully transitioned from the ways of the Borg or if this was just a temporary thing. Commendable, but at the time, I felt like shouting at him for trying to undo the work of everyone else on the ship. Hugh is innocent, dammit! Leave him alone!
Enjoyed this episode a lot. I hope this isn't the last Borg-centered episode of
TNG, they're pretty fucking awesome
The Next Phase
This was quite an interesting episode. Written by Ronald D. Moore and directed by David Carson, I had a feeling going in it was going to be a good one. Carson's episodes I've noticed tend to stand out a lot, for good reasons. They have their own sort of visual flair that you don't see with the other episodes. I see now after looking him up that he's the director of
Star Trek Generations, so maybe the producers had the same feeling as me. They look more... professional, I guess, I don't know.
Anyway,
The Next Phase was an episode all about death. In the beginning, Geordi and Ensign Ro Laren transport over to the Enterprise from a Romulan ship and are lost in the transporter beam, presumed dead. Little does Picard and the rest of the crew not only know that Geordi and Ro are still alive and well, but they're actually still on the ship, but are cloaked and carry no substance. We get to learn more about Ro and Bajoran culture, we get to see more sneaky Romulans, and we get to see an interesting problem Geordi and Ro have to overcome.
Just a fun episode. We even got some action chases to rival J. J. Abrams's
Star Trek 
The Inner Light
Aaaand, this is it. This is the reason I've gone through eight seasons and six films of
Star Trek. Not because of cool starships, not because of wacky aliens or big explosions, but for inspiring and touching stories like this.
After watching
The Inner Light, I have a new favourite episode. Episodes like
The City on the Edge of Forever,
The Trouble with Tribbles,
The Measure of a Man,
Yesterday's Enterprise, The Best of Both Worlds,
Darmok... they are all surpassed by this, the best episode out of the franchise for me so far.
The performances, writing and music in this was phenomenal. Margot Rose plays Eline, the wife of "Kamin", and she manages to steal whatever scene she's in, holding her own perfectly well up against Patrick Stewart and his, as always, strong performance. This was a deeply personal story for Picard, in 25 minutes for everyone else on the Enterprise, he goes through multiples decades in a whole new life.
I don't ever cry or get too emotional watching movies or TV shows, but Eline's death scene was definitely enough to make tears well up in my eyes. That ending too, when Kamine is finally told how and why he's there, and his reaction is just too much, man
Imagine waking up from that, I'm still curious how Picard could even remember anyone on the Enterprise's names or even how to captain a starship after going through so much for
so so long. His family, his kids and grandchildren which he saw grow up from babies to adults, all gone forever, never to be seen again in just a split second. That is torturous, so much worse than any Borg assimilation.
Ugh, there's so much more I can say about this episode. How about the music!? That flute melody, while so simple, is yet so gorgeous. I've been listening to
this while typing out this full post, and it sounds like something right out of The Lord of the Rings. Beautiful. I remember sitting still for about five minutes after that episode ended, staring at a blank screen. Him playing that flute one more time leading into the credits, such a perfect ending.
Anyway, that's that done. The season five finale,
Time's Arrow, is up next, and I'll probably make a post on my impressions for that too later. Hopefully we can reach
Chain of Command and get
DS9 started by next weekend. We still have quite a lot more to go for now though, so let's keep going.
