TNG Rewatch: 7x23 - "Emergence"

[Trekker4747]

Okay, know how I keep saying TNG’s seventh season is largely about dealing with family members of the crew? We deal with Troi’s mother and forgotten sister, with Worf and his son as well as adoptive brother, Picard and a presumed son; hell the season starts off with Data dealing with Lore, his brother.

Well, the season takes this concept so far that we even deal with the Enterprise’s family, namely its offspring. In effect.

We open on the holodeck where Data is putting on a performance of The Tempest for the entertainment of Picard who’s currently unmotivated by Data’s performance. Data takes note of this and Picard complains how Data’s set the lighting of the scene too realistically, lit only by some medieval tiki torches, so he cannot see enough to get much out the performance. Data remarks how he felt the lighting was appropriate for the scene he’s performing as well as being realistic for the setting but Picard points out that it’s a play so Data needs to be seen. This seems like a sort-of back-handed explanation for all of the times in Trek we have characters in caves or isolated areas with little to no lighting, yet we can see the scene just fine. Way to meta, TNG.

Data takes Picard’s advice and asks the holodeck to increase the lighting which it does by appropriately making the flames on the torches bigger thus making the scene notably brighter. Data takes this down time to get Picard’s thoughts on the character of Prospero from the play. Data is uncertain on where the character is coming from. Picard speaks of how Shakespeare himself witnessed the end of the Renaissance and beginning of the “modern era” (for all it was in the 17th century) and how the character Prospero is going through much the same. Witnessing the end of his era where his usefulness is no longer needed while at the same time lamenting the opportunities in progress.

Their conversation seems to trail off and get interrupted by something in the holographic distance, Picard wonders if it’s part of Data’s program, Data confirms that it isn’t as the oncoming object would be an anachronism for the setting of the play. The object is an 19th Century/early 20th century steam train barreling down a set of tracks blowing its whistle. The computer doesn’t respond to Picard’s commands to end the program (of course) as the train nears Data quickly pushes Picard off to the side before leaping away himself. The train and the passenger coaches rattle by on the holodeck tracks, the area around Picard and Data seemingly having taken on a trackside appearance of a far more “modern” era than the one Shakespeare witnessed as the tracks are lined by powerlines.

They exit the holodeck, Picard has a superficial scuffing on his right cheek, which Data shows concern over like an over-protective mother and Picard, as the kid who wants to be left alone, says he’ll get it looked at and Data need-not bring out the Bactine. Data looks over the holodeck’s control panel and says the train was from one of Crusher’s holodeck programs/novels, one about the Orient Express, some malfunction has caused the two holodeck programs to become momentarily linked. Data is uncertain if other holodecks will be impacted so Picard recommends turning them all off until Data can run his diagnostic.

In sickbay Picard gets his wound attended to and takes Crusher’s interest in the Orient Express as being one in trains so he starts rattling of cold facts about the train like a cross between Data and that weird kid at your grade-school bus stop who was way into trains. Crusher says she’s less interested in the train itself and more about the romance and experiences of the train. Their conversation is interrupted by Riker saying the ship has reached its destination and is ready to begin a survey.

Before he leaves the room, Crusher reminds him to try taking a trip on the train himself, you never know who he might meet. She knows the train in the holodeck and the people in it aren’t real, right?

The ship has just weathered through a space-storm of some sort and the ship is continuing a search for Federation colony sites as Picard and Riker go over a survey the ship suddenly lurches, it has gone into warp and it seems to have done so on its own. Everyone is at a loss as to why this has happened so it’s recommended to do a core shutdown, leaving the ship without warp power for a week, just as Picard gives the order to begin the ship lurches again, now dropping back down to impulse, the ship is about 30 billion kilometers from where it was. Without doing the math and looking into the numbers this seems about right for the time we experience the ship at warp and the speed of Warp 7. Geordi says he can’t take credit for the end of the crisis as the event stopped just as suddenly as it began. Given how the ship lurched violent both times it changed propulsion methods I’m guessing the anomaly is unfamiliar with using the ship’s transmission.

As they analyze the apparent malfunction they’re unable to determine a cause but remark how fortunate it is that it had happened. The sensor logs show that a space distortion was occurring in their previous position, a distortion they don’t normally scan for, had the ship remained there for a second longer the distortion would have ruptured, destroying the ship.

So…. Wait, there’s this phenomenon out there that can destroy a ship in an instant and it’s not something that’s routinely scanned for?

Data and Geordi are in a Jefferies Tube talking about the “malfunction” and how it coincidently coincided with the potential disaster. Data, remarkably, suggests that they were to separate incidents that just happened to coincide stating that it’s improbable but possible. Seems to me that the huge improbability of it should be enough to make it impossible. I mean, it’s “possible” for me to take a deck of cards and shuffle them back into order there are, however, 2.3e71 ways a deck of cards can be shuffled. Meaning though it’s “possible” to shuffle them back into order it’s at the same time pretty much impossible due to the simple numbers we’re talking about. In “Clues” Data suggests some radical “possible but improbable” idea on why the ship is experiencing the episode’s phenomenon (he’s really covering up the real events the crew are unaware of), Geordi remarks that he’s surprised Data made such a suggestion and it’s one of the many things that puts the crew on Data’s tail; seems like this is another case where Data is suggesting something so ludicrous people should be suspicious of him. Geordi, however, just casually dismisses the suggestion by saying he doesn’t believe in “luck.”

Data also offers that the ship may have detected the anomaly and a safety feature kicked in to protect the ship. You’d think this is a feature the ship would have already, and one the crew would know about so Data’s being a bit ridiculous here still, even more so when Geordi points out there’s no link between the sensors and the warp core which…. Seems dumb? Does this mean that when at warp they could crash into something because there’s no way for the sensors to pick up something suddenly happening and take the ship out of danger? The deflector can only do so much and there must be navigational sensors to give the helmsman something to do with a lot of warning time but it seems like there’s some things that’d need to be there for things the crew can’t react to.

If we can build cars that brake themselves when you get to close to a car in front of you or something jumps out in front of you, then certainly Starfleet can build ships that drop out of warp when something suddenly happens the crew can’t react to.

They pull a panel of the bulkhead wall and inside the find a glowy thing sitting inside the panel. It sort-of looks lie…. Remember those goofy “kinetic toys” you’d get in the 90s at places like Spencer’s Gifts or some other niche toy store? One of them was a sphereoid thing that was made of various levers and such linked together that could expand and contract to various sizes. It sort-of looks like that.

Geordi notices it’s connected to various systems, including linking the sensors and warp drive, he tries to mess with it using a tool but he hits a forcefield, they try again and it’s still protected by the field. Data and Geordi seem to think it doesn’t want anyone messing with it. They later tell Riker they’ve found the nodes all over the ship linking various systems and even linking to one another and they’re multiplying. It’ll become progressively difficult to control the ship if they continue. Riker wants a way to get rid of the nodes which Geordi says will be difficult given the forcefields around them, but they all some to be communicating to a convergence point in a holodeck (because of course); they think they can go there to begin working out how to regain control of the ship.

They find the holodeck already running, even though it’d been shut off, and is running several programs at once. They enter the holodeck in find themselves inside the lounge car of the Orient Express with characters from various other programs running. There’s a midlevel knight standing cutting something out of a newspaper, a Depression-era looking farmer or something standing against a doorway, a 1920s looking gangster and some flapper girls are at a table assembling a puzzle with an image of one of the nodes on it, and soon walks in an Old West black-suited gambler who puts a piece of the puzzle from his pocket into place.

Worf, Data and Riker continue with their mission to get to the source of their problem, soon the conductor walks into the car asking for tickets, giving them a punch as they’re presented by the holodeck characters. He doesn’t seem to acknowledge the “away team,” the ticket he punches for the knight is in what the knight was cutting on, a chain of paper dolls.

The farmer says he’s never been on a train before and now he gets to go to “Vertiform City,” Data finds the source of the disturbances behind one of the train’s walls, Data says it can be taken care of through a panel in the floor, before they can get to it the conductor takes notice of them, ordering them to not mess with the train, and demands to see their tickets.

Riker tries some quick shuck-and-jiving by saying they left their tickets in their compartment and chides Worf for not bringing them. The conductor doesn’t buy it and says he doesn’t think they belong on the train, suddenly the train’s engineer enters the car and tells the conductor to leave the away team alone, they’re just trying to help. The conductor orders the engineer back to the locomotive’s engine, the engineer is defiant but is soon shot in the back by a 1940s looking gangster.

The engineer’s body is laid out on one of the benches in the car and the gangster reaches into the bib of the engineer’s overalls and pulls out a golden brick. The conductor walks to the side of the car and pulls on the brake/stop cable. In engineering a panel Geordi is working at explodes, he’s unhurt but says the ship’s navigational systems are now burned out and the ship has put itself back into warp.

In the holodeck, to the pleasure of the other holodeck characters in the car, says that they’re now headed in the right direction, they applaud. He then threatens the away team to either leave or be forced off the train, Data notes the holodeck safeties are off so they decide to exit the holodeck.

 

[Trekker4747]

In engineering the talk over events, and put together that events in the holodeck seem to be reflected by the ship and the holodeck itself is acting to protect the ship. When Data tried to mess with the program in the holodeck they were stopped by the conductor, and the engineer shot when trying to protect the away team. The conductor’s signaling for the train to stop/change direction was reflected by the ship itself going into warp and changing direction. Looking over the scan of the ship it’s felt that the various nodes, now causing many of the systems to work together as well as independently without the main computer, and their connections resembles Data’s neural net. It’s believed the ship is forming an intelligence.

Data shows a scan of a humanoid synaptic system, his own neural net and net now forming around the ship and points out how similar they all are, though the ship’s is more primitive (though also growing more complex each passing minute)

It’s thought that something in the anomaly the ship passed through before the beginning the episode is causing all of this to happen, and that the ship is showing and emergent property. Data explains this by saying that the physical makeup of a complex system cannot quite explain what’s deeper about it. Saying how the humanoid brain is made up of chemicals and electrical impulses but that doesn’t explain or even make sense of the notion of consciousness, consciousness is an “emergent property” of a complex system.

I think what, in effect, he is talking about is “macro evolution” something that just occurs that causes a large change in a complex system to make it even more complex. He thinks the complexity of all of the ship’s systems has somehow created an “emergent life form” and that the holodeck represents the ship’s subconscious/imagination trying to make sense of everything around it and that the answers to their questions lies in there.

Troi offers to go with Data on their next trip to the holodeck, thinking her psychological training will offer some use. Picard agrees and sends Data, Worf and Troi back to the holodeck. In true Picard, TNG and Trek manner he reminds them that if the ship is an emerging consciousness they should treat it with the same respect they would any other lifeform.

In the holodeck Troi looks over the knight, who’s having his helmet tapped on by one of the flappers holding a metallic chalice, the gambler, tied to a chair, sits with the gangster playing cards, the other flapper and the farmer sit at the table working on the puzzle.

Data tells Worf and Troi to distract the characters while he works on the node, Data approaches those working on the puzzle and asks them if they’ve finished it yet -when it’s clearly not finished. The jovial farmer tells Worf not yet but they’re getting close. Worf and Troi don’t recognize what the image on the puzzle is, and the holodeck characters don’t seem to know either, but Worf offers to help finish it. (The puzzle is finished enough that it’s obviously one of the “nodes”, granted we’ve not seen Troi or Worf seen an image of these nodes but you’d think somewhere in the briefings they’d seen one.)

Troi sits with the men playing cards and asks to be dealt in, the gangster -with all of the charm a 1940s man would have towards a woman- tells her it’s a two-man game. Troi asks what the brick is and reaches for it, only to be stopped by the gangster and told to leave it alone.

She asks about the brick and the killing of the engineer and the gangster says he had to do it because the brick is worth a lot and he has to get it to Keystone City; Troi asks what that is and the ganster says it’s where everything begins before declaring gin and lays his cards out, all with the image of one of the “nodes” on it, and the image on the puzzle.

Data is getting ready to access the power coupling or whatever, when the conductor comes through again saying the train is nearing its next stop (Keystone City.) He notices Data and Worf and again challenges them for tickets, when he gets no response her promises to kick them off at the next stop, as we hear the train’s brakes activate and venting steam the gangster grabs the brick and begins to depart the train, Troi says they should follow him.

The gangster emerges from an underground subway station (?!) and the away team follows; but don’t see the man right away. Data walks over to a manhole and says he can access the power node there, taps some buttons on the device he’s carrying and the manhole dissolves to reveal a piece of 24th century equipment, Data begins messing with it.

Down the street a bit Troi sees the gangster and goes to follow him and Worf follows along as Data continues to work on the node, as he does a 1940s cab screeches around the corner and nearly runs Data over but Data quickly movies out of the way before resuming his work on the node as the cab leaves his view.

Troi and Worf follow the gangster as he walks along the sidewalk, under some scaffolding, and up to a brick wall with a missing brick in it. He pulls the brick from his pocket, places it in the wall, where it merges seamlessly with the look of the wall. Troi and Worf watch in confusion as the gangster excuses himself to a train he has to catch.

On the bridge, Geordi talks about how one of the cargo bays suddenly depressurized and there’s increased activity there from the various ship systems, Picard sends him down to investigate, there Geordi finds a larger version of one of the strange nodes.

Back in the holodeck, Troi and Worf talk about what the gangster character was doing and “laying and foundation.” They’re at a loss as to what it means so they check in on Data to see how he progressing with shutting off the power to the nodes. Data says he encountered a problem but dealt with it, and is ready to proceed. We see that the car came back around for another attack but Data has stopped it and is holding it in place with his arm, the car revs and squeals its tires trying to move forward.

They monitor the nod in the cargo bay, suddenly the ship begins to shake, Geordi says they’re losing structural integrity. In the holodeck, the shaking comes across as an earthquake which causes the brick wall to collapse on Troi, revealing a doorway, Data is told to stop and reverse what he is doing, when he complies the shaking stops. Troi suffers minor injuries.

Crusher tends to Troi’s injuries as everyone discusses the latest on what is happening, Troi further takes the interpretation of the events in the holodeck as being an infantile emergent intelligence trying to make sense of what is going on around it, while not being fully aware of what is going on. She wants to go back to holodeck, despite the risk, and see if they can gain more information. Picard notes that every time they’ve tried to hinder the efforts of the characters in the holodeck they’ve gotten aggressively defensive, Picard suggests they now try and to work with them.

Back to the Orient Express train car, the conductor challenges the away team’s presence but this time Worf has brought along three tickets to “Vertiform City”, the conductor accepts them and says he was wrong about the group. The lights on the train flicker a bit and the conductor says they’re having power problems, he hopes they can get to their destination on time. Troi wants to know how they can help and the conductor says they could use some help in the locomotive. Troi tells Worf to go see if he can help. Worf seems to sort of rolls his eyes and begrudgingly follows the conductor to the engine. The hayseed asks for Troi’s affirmation that they’ll get to their destination okay and she seems to think they’ll be fine, she asks for details on Veriform City, they hayseed says that they have an all-you-can-eat all-day restaurant there. Data and Troi don’t seem to know how to take this.

In the train’s boiler room the conductor opens the hatch to the furnaces and points out to Worf where coal is funneled in from the train’s tender and a shovel. Worf, reluctantly, picks up the shovel and begins throwing coal into the furnace, the conductor expresses gratefulness for Worf’s help.

Worf’s feeding the furnace seems to translate into increased warp power for the actual ship, Riker calculates their heading as being for a nearby White Dwarf star.

As Worf continues to shovel the conductor offers shallow advice and encouragement to Worf who doesn’t seem to take it very well as he continues to shovel with an annoyed stance.

The ship approaches the star and sends a beam out into it, on the bridge they say the ship has sent out a “modified tractor beam” to collect “vertion particles” from the White Dwarf these particles are being converted into energy and sent to the object in the cargo bay which is increasing in activity and generating its own energy, but things quickly go wrong as the power levels start to drop off, the crew concludes that they’ve already exhausted the particles from the dwarf (in a matter of seconds?) and the object is now dying.

In the holodeck the conductor says something is wrong and feels they’re reached the wrong destination and he pulls the brake on the train. It lurches to a halt, becoming derailed.

The ship itself is experiencing power and system failures as the object in the cargo bay appears to be dying, the ship soon rumbles back to life and jumps to warp again, the crew determines the ship is enroute to another White Dwarf star

The ship is putting all of its resources into propulsion, thus, taking some away from other systems like life support, there’s not enough in the system for the crew to survive to the dwarf star. Picard says they have to regain control of the ship and find some other source for the particles the ship seeks. Geordi says the particles can only be gotten from White Dwarfs but Picard asks that they look into artificial sources that are closer by.

In the holodeck the away team tries to take control of the engine room but are stopped by the passengers.

Another potential source for the particles are found if a modified torpedo is detonated in it, they choose to try for it and tell the away team they need to take control of ship/train to get them to the new destination.

The passengers are reluctant to let them do so, but Troi insists they’re friends wanting to help, they allow data to go into the locomotive alone.

Inside the locomotive’s boiler room he convinces the conductor and the gangster to allow him to help them get to “New Vertiform City” sooner, when Data gets control he takes suggests from Geordi on how to control the ship through the holodeck (like reducing the engine’s speed to get them to impulse.)

The ship approaches a nebula and Geordi launches a modified torpedo, it reacts with the nebula on detonation, generating the particles the ship seeks. The holodeck characters celebrate as the ship begins to drain the nebula.

The nodes all around the ship begin to deactivate as the object in the cargo bay continues to mature, Crusher equates this to species whose only role is to procreate, dying when the next generation has developed. The object in the cargo bay lifts up and flies out of the ship into space.

The crew has regained full control of the ship, and Data and Picard muse over the events of the last few days; questioning any responsibility they may have in creating this life and it going free. Picard figures the object was born from the logs and experiences of the Enterprise crew and that the crew is good enough to have produce a life form that can be trusted.

A sort of bizarre episode, but not one that’s all that bad. It certainly suffers from some of the plot problems common to Trek at this point and afterwards, particularly when Braga was involved. A lot of this being “last act occurrences” happening rapidly without much cohesion. The crew seems to too easily get the ship under control enough and directed towards the nebula. It seems “convenient” that the ship going to Warp 9 puts all of the other systems in danger which…. How?

And while the end result has something of meaning to it, an offspring being the sum of the parts that created it, the episode doesn’t seem to do with as much with that as it can. Memory Alpha says that this episode was created because Braga wanted to do one more holodeck episode before the end of the series (which, of course) but couldn’t come up with one that’d be interesting enough. So as far as holodeck episodes go we came out okay here. But it’s a fairly tepid episode for this late in the series and is just really a sign of the staff either running out of ideas, the better writers having gone to are or working on other projects or just the creative erosion that began in TNG S7 and continued through Voyager and Enterprise’s first 3 seasons. Luckily DS9 got off mostly unharmed.

So-so episode.

Til next time.

 

[JesterFace]

The thing that bugs me about this episode is that near the beginning Data says there was a build up of (don't-remember-what) on the warp drive and she ship would've been destroyed had it not jumped into warp. That weird build up of (apparently dangerous things) was never detected because sensors weren't desingned to detect them. What? Aren't sensors desingned to detect, well, everything..?

 

[suarezguy]

Ugh... this episode was really WTF coupled with a lot of listlessness coupled with just a bit of pretentiousness.

 

[Paradise City]

I liked the episode. It's a worthy episode. But it's not that original in that repackages various elements we've seen before. It has a kind of Data dream-episode vibe and the whole process of deducing that this is a lifeform is a pedestrian process with a predictable outcome. But some of the interplay between our heroes and the holodeck ensemble are amusing -- as are some of the parallels between what is going in space and on the 'deck with the train.

 

[Trekker4747]

The thing that bugs me about this episode is that near the beginning Data says there was a build up of (don't-remember-what) on the warp drive and she ship would've been destroyed had it not jumped into warp. That weird build up of (apparently dangerous things) was never detected because sensors weren't desingned to detect them. What? Aren't sensors desingned to detect, well, everything..?

Yeah, that bugs me too. It went over it a bit in my recap but I'll elaborate some here. It seems suggested in the episode that this space anomaly was about to occur and if the anomaly ruptured it would have happened close to the warp core and destroy the ship. This anomaly isn't normally scanned for and there's no connection between the sensors and the warp drive. So it seemed that not only did the ship self-detect the anomaly but saw and knew the danger in it and jumped to warp.

If this anomaly is something that can happen why *isn't* it scanned for? You could probably argue and equate it to present-day problems, hundreds of people are harmed or killed every year in fires caused by a static electricity discharge at the gas pump. We put up warning signs and tell people not to re-enter their cars or to touch something metallic other than the pump before handling it to discharge, but we haven't modified vehicles or gas pumps to make this event almost impossible to occur. even though there's probably easy ways to do it, like placing a grounding clamp or wire or something on the fuel pump.

We don't make these modifications because even though a couple hundred people die every year due to static discharge that's nothing compared to the billions of times use gas pumps over a year. The problem doesn't justify doing anything about it because the cost and expense isn't worth it. We either overhaul an entire industry and wait years if not decades for it to completely covert 100% and spend millions and billions of dollars or we just cope with a couple hundred deaths a year and chalk it up to Darwinism.

But in the 24th century, with such a mastery of matter and energy the economics wouldn't be a factor, and energy is something they can conjure up in vast quantities every second. So there's no real "expense" in having the ship always scanning for these anomalies that could destroy the ship even if the chances of it happening are extremely remote. (Considering the vastness of space and the volume of it occupied by starships is a infinitesimal number it can't be that common) But there's no cost in always having the ship on the look-out for these things. Here the ship was doing it and no one seemed to notice it having any impact on their systems so it must not be that much a drain on them. So why isn't the ship scanning for this all of the time and have this "safety feature" built in where the ship jumps to warp when it detects this problem and gets them out of harms way. The crew came just over a second close to blowing up and they were saved because for a time being their ship had awareness.

Seems like this is a feature all ships need, like auto-breaking on cars. Something for the ship to do to protect itself and the crew because in some cases it can react quicker than the crew can.

 

[Paradise City]

In the first Barclay episode there's the same thing. We have a substance that the sensors can't detect making the ship launch into high warp on its own volition and experience various other malfunctions. Our heroes in engineering are able to ask the computer about the substances the sensors can't detect and from that list they are able to narrow it down until they find the culprit. That's kind of what I mean when I say that this is a reheat of various other episodes.

 

[tomalak301]

I guess Season 7 has the most guilty pleasure type episodes because this is one of mine. Yes it's preposterous and kind of corny, but I like the thought of the ship having a mind of it's own, and the stuff on the Train was a nice comparison to what was going on outside the holodeck.

 

[Trekker4747]

In the first Barclay episode there's the same thing. We have a substance that the sensors can't detect making the ship launch into high warp on its own volition and experience various other malfunctions. Our heroes in engineering are able to ask the computer about the substances the sensors can't detect and from that list they are able to narrow it down until they find the culprit. That's kind of what I mean when I say that this is a reheat of various other episodes.

In that episode it was some-type-of corrosive substance that had leaked from a broken cannister (which even today if a shipping company receives a broken cannister they look into instead of shrugging it off) the substances was being spread around the ship, damaging systems, and caused the matter/antimatter injectors to become "stuck open" hence them trapped in warp. They were able to clean up the substance and get the injectors to close before the ship over-sped into destruction.

It wasn't quite the same thing, the substances they talk about causing the problem was one with a very short half-life (so it couldn't last long enough to cause the problems), one that was highly toxic (presumably to the point where detecting it is pointless because by the time it's around it's too late) and the remaining substance was obsolete and not highly in use except in this one case of these canisters made/used by some alien culture.

So, slightly different circumstances it seemed a lot of dominoes had to fall in the right place for that to happen. It's hard to say they should scan for absolutely everything at all times, but some random event that can occur without warning and destroy the ship? I say that's something to always scan for.

 

[Timo]

The cost might be way too high, though. I mean, there are plenty of ways to make the scanning dangerously counterproductive. Dedicating the sensors to keeping watch over this phenomenon might mean they miss the next cloaked Romulan ship. Installing a sensor capable of sensing the phenomenon might not leave room for more useful things. Running the sensors on a mode that can spot this phenomenon might harm space mollusks.

Yet this sort of misses the point - it's established the E-D can't scan for the phenomenon, routinely or otherwise. The sensors simply aren't equipped to detect it. Since there's a record of the phenomenon in the sensor log nevertheless, and the sensors didn't put it there, the natural assumption then would be that the emergent lifeform forged the records, pretending that there was a theta flux buildup when there was none.

Our heroes initially believe the ship has developed the ability to protect herself, but that's just plain silly. That the ship would suddenly develop the ability to protect herself against the extremely rare phenomenon right when there is such a phenomenon is a coincidence exactly as ridiculous as the ship randomly going to warp at just the right moment.

Odds really are, there was no danger, and the ship was just flexing her muscles and (being aware that the crew would be on her tail) inventing excuses for doing so.

Timo Saloniemi

 

[RAMA]

One of the worst Star Trek episodes EVER, period. Utter pointlessness and bordering on offensively awful. This is season 3 TOS bad. Whew. I feel better.

I can't even bring myself to watch it on Netflix so I can review each intricate detail because I'd rather be left ignorant.

So there was a story here somewhere about the computer AI becoming sentient. Cool. Great. STNG's computers are woefully under-advanced so I would already expect them to be borderline sentient or at least much more interactive than they are in the show..but the episode does nothing with it. It floats off. Cue me wanting to punch Brannon Braga in the face. Joe Menosky better not write this crap in Discovery.

Do you know how some fans think they did holodeck episodes just of the sake of it? Well this one actually was. It's only reason for being was to have a last holodeck story.

RAMA