Sub Rosa... um... (and they say season 1 is littered with clunkers?!)

[Geetha Stachowiak]

Season 7 also had All Good Things, Pegasus, Lower Decks, Parallels, Gambit.

You can skip bad episodes. At least in season 7 you have better episodes to skip *to*.

I’m not sure season 1’s best episode is even in the highest quartile of the series.

Season 7 had 'Masks' which was brilliant.

 

[NCC-73515]

and thine own self, pegasus, parallels - some of the best of all of trek (for me at least)

 

[Phoenix219]

Braga wrote the teleplay.
I think this would have been an ideal series finale instead of the typical character shifting through time/realities that seemed to be every Braga script.
Maybe it could have been Crusher shifting through time in the bodies of all her ancestors and getting it on with Ronin in all the different time periods she travels to.

Did all the Howard women not have a husband/partner for most of their lives? The script could have made the case that Ronin had drifted around the Howard women and murdered all their husbands throughout time. And he was responsible for Jack's death.
What would he have done had Beverly died? Wesley...

That could have shifted the episode from one of the worst ever, to one of the most discussed, deeper things ever done in Trek....

 

[Geetha Stachowiak]

Braga wrote the teleplay.
I think this would have been an ideal series finale instead of the typical character shifting through time/realities that seemed to be every Braga script.
Maybe it could have been Crusher shifting through time in the bodies of all her ancestors and getting it on with Ronin in all the different time periods she travels to.

Did all the Howard women not have a husband/partner for most of their lives? The script could have made the case that Ronin had drifted around the Howard women and murdered all their husbands throughout time. And he was responsible for Jack's death.
What would he have done had Beverly died? Wesley...

An interesting idea, but I don't see how it would have added much to the story. I am a woman and to me the point of the episode was how Crusher overcame a powerful addiction enough to get rid of an a*hole in her life. But, the intrigue of the husbands passing with Ronin lurking about all those decades would have added a bit of intrigue.

 

[eschaton]

There was a lot of shit in the 7th season besides this episode (Liaisons, Interference, Phantasms, Force of Nature, Homeward, Masks, Genesis, Bloodlines, Emergence, etc) But what makes Sub Rosa stand out is basically that it's not a TNG episode. It's a Gothic romance story which is (very awkwardly) shoved into the series.

 

[Geetha Stachowiak]

There was a lot of shit in the 7th season besides this episode (Liaisons, Interference, Phantasms, Force of Nature, Homeward, Masks, Genesis, Bloodlines, Emergence, etc) But what makes Sub Rosa stand out is basically that it's not a TNG episode. It's a Gothic romance story which is (very awkwardly) shoved into the series.

'Masks' was brilliant.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I have never managed to watch the episode in full. I just stop at the middle

 

[gakelly]

The production values are so much better in season 7 than the first 3 or 4 seasons. The music is much better, the sets look better, the characters are better developed...
It's much easier to watch Masks than it is, say, The Outrageous Okona (which is my pick for worst episode of any Star Trek series, although I never watched Enterprise.).

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

The production values are so much better in season 7 than the first 3 or 4 seasons. The music is much better, the sets look better, the characters are better developed...
It's much easier to watch Masks than it is, say, The Outrageous Okona (which is my pick for worst episode of any Star Trek series, although I never watched Enterprise.).

Enterprise is good

 

[Lance]

The production values are so much better in season 7 than the first 3 or 4 seasons. The music is much better, the sets look better, the characters are better developed...

I would easily take the more dynamic music of the first three seasons, any of it, over the emotioness 'tonal wallpaper' of Seasons 4-7, particularly in Season 7, where Rick Berman's edict that the music never sell the emotions of a scene led to some of the worst scores in the show. In fact, Berman's viewpoint was a fundamental misinderstanding of what film scoring *is*. Occasional gems like Inner Light hardly make up for the fact that the music in those later seasons doesn't so much not make any impact, as it actually drags down a few episodes with it's 'harmless' generic tinkling.

 

[jaime]

It’s clearly a Tori Amos tribute, since it’s called Under the Pink. XD

And of course we haven’t mentioned the Anne Rice connection at all (since it’s basically very very similar to her Mayfair Witches stuff, which was popular at the time.)

It’s really no worse than any of the ‘crew members go on leave and end up with romantic partner who endangers stuff’ or ‘crew member gets partner who endangers stuff’ which happen all the time in TNG.

The worst you can say of it is, it’s a bit meh.

 

[gakelly]

The music from season 1 was horrendous. Listen to When the Bough Breaks. ugh.