ST: TNG - Galaxy's Terror Loss

In an effort to relive my early teens, I am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Seriesdate: 4.10
The Loss

Help, we're under attack by a Windows screensaver!

Space invaders! Strafe for your lives!

A shoal of 2-Dimensional fish are migrating toward an interstellar maelstrom, and dragging the Enterprise along with them... to its DOOOOOOOM !

Masters of suspense that TNG's crew were, they cautiously deferred showing us the rubber shark until 15 minutes into the show, and even then sparingly. Deanna instead takes up most of our time with her constant complaints about everyone noticing the fact that she's constantly complaining about the suspiciously coincidental loss of her Betazoid telepathy. On one hand, I appreciate the further corroboration of my oft-reiterated conviction that telepathy is a dead end for Science Fiction.

Deanna: "Right now, I feel as two-dimensional as our friends out there."

Either writers deliberately snuck self-commentary into the script or they accidentally scribbled their way into a vein of irony ore. Deanna Troi was a flat character from the start, partly because she was the show's designated damsel in distress and partly because she was defined by her telepathy, a superpower so super as to efface all other considerations. Though being a central character the progression stood out less from episode to episode as it did for her mother's seasonal appearances, it bears mentioning Deanna's own character growth entailed much the same process of downplaying the mind-reading or coming up with plot devices to nullify it for an episode's duration. No other main character required the same lathing away of their principal attributes. Data didn't need to negate his android circuitry as the seasons wore on. Picard didn't need to lose his captain's pips. Geordi didn't need to forget everything he ever knew about engineering. Guinan didn't need to become less of a font of ancient wisdom. The only characters whose later appearances followed the same pattern in downplaying their core elements were the likes of Wesley Crusher or Q, space wizards completely out of place even among Star Trek's very soft scientific precepts.

But the change in Troi's behavior comes across as much too abrupt. Despite her distressed damsel predilections, as ship's barometer of sanity she should have maintained a great deal more calm in the face of her own incapacitation.
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Seriesdate: 4.16
Galaxy's Child

The one with the baby space whale.

Shall I initiate the harpoons, captain?

The Enterprise runs across a ship-sized space-adapted organism. It attacks. They phaser it to death by accident. Cue "what have we done" speech. But wait, there's more! (Inside the monster's belly that is.) One interstellar Caesarian later, the Enterprise finds itself suckling an infant whatchamacallit off its own power supply. All well and good until the baby starts draining them dry while calling in reinforcements, and it becomes imperative to shake it off by spouting some spectroscopy technobabble.

I love it, and I loved it when I was ten years old too. The special effects were damn good for their day, and the writing doesn't belabor its nonsensical storytelling conventions (like "asteroid belts" so closely packed as to look like gravel driveways) used to prop up the grand image of asteroid-chewing space whales. The "sour the milk" solution stuck with me as a classic SciFi plot gimmick. I'm also amused by some lines' delivery, like Picard's somewhat too decisive response to Worf:

Worf: "What action should we take, sir?"
Picard: "None, lieutenant. None at all."

- exactly 30 minutes into a 45-minute show with commercial breaks. No Jean-Luc, I think you're going to take exactly fourteen minutes plus end credits' worth of action. Or, later:

Data: "At their current speed, sir, the entities will intercept us in: ten minutes, thirty-one seconds."
- delivered seven minutes before the final credits. I wonder if they'll make it!

But what I didn't remember was the entire A-plot unfortunately being sidelined in favor of interpersonal hand-wringing on Geordi's part, as he finally gets to meet the woman of his dreams on whom he based his holodeck houri back in season 3... only for her to pre-emptively put him down at every turn. But that's a topic for another day. Today's all about the space encounters.

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Seriesdate: 4.17
Night Terrors

Another memorable line:
"Eyes in the dark. One moon circles."

Oh, we're eyeing the moon alright...

Stop me if you've heard this one before: a band of brave adventurers find a derelict ship, its crew mysteriously murdered, with a single shell-shocked survivor mumbling gibberish whose deciphering holds the only key to survival. Dun-dun-duuuuuuUUUNNN !
(Also everybody except Troi's turning homicidal from... lack of REM sleep. (Okay, sure, why not. Still beats "subatomic bacteria."))

Once again, as in The Loss, the Enterprise is caught in a gravitational pull with Deanna's personal predicament inexplicably central to the issue. Once again, as in Galaxy's Child, the ship's power supply is being sapped. This time around they need to blow up a paradimensional potluck by pouring acid into water. Or something. Oh, right, one moon circling =  hydrogen! Interdimensional dream telegrams are preventing them from entering REM sleep and only the ship's telepath is receiving on the right dream "frequency" to communicate and coordinate both ships supplying reactive materials. Don't ask me what the telepathy angle adds here that any other "frequency" technobabble couldn't, but the dream sequences (with all that flying and flailing about) did allow the director to remind us that while her character may have been a bit flat, Marina Sirtis certainly wasn't.

Half the charm here stems from seeing the cast and make-up department conveying the crew's neurotransmitter deprivation, from Picard's lidded eyes and delayed reaction time to Troi's frazzled frizzled hair. That, and Guinan pacifying an angry mob by shooting off an absurdly oversized, gold-plated laser rifle she keeps under Ten Forward's counter for just such an occasion.

No, it makes absolutely no sense within the Enterprise's greater, very peaceful social context... but for once that just makes it all the more badass and hilarious at the same time.

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Season four is where things got great. Leaving aside the character development and fleshing out the galaxy's political background, it's also where the show regained a sense of scale to its exploration angle, to those "new worlds and new civilizations" so we're no longer stuck dealing with one omnipotent space-god after another. Telepathic interjections aside, all three present dilemmas are ultimately resolved by material, naturalistic means: gravity manipulation, electromagnetic wavelength modulation, and good old-fashioned hydrogen just like grandma used to make. Apparently they finally secured some technical consulting because they even manage to shoehorn in some fancier real-world technobabble like "isozyme", "polymorphisms" and "Bayesian functions" in nearly appropriate contexts no less! -  a far cry from Q snapping his fingers.

Also, true to its Utopian precepts, all three plots here lack an antagonist. They merely provide challenging phenomena. The space whales and 2D space fish are innocent by dint of lacking consciousness, and the alien telepaths in Night Terrors are themselves trapped and only unwittingly causing harm via their desperate dream broadcasts. In all three cases we're also supplied with a "hero of the week" episodic character to help the crew along: Troi's patient in The Loss, Geordi's imaginary love interest in Galaxy's Child, the shellshocked Betazoid in Night Terrors. This was Star Trek at its best: unraveling the mysteries of space anomalies, not merely personal drama or phaser light shows but object-driven plots delving the galaxy's great unknowns.

But while some of the repetition aided TNG's consistency and its particular thematic identity, it is a bit odd to see several episodes in a row clustered together, reusing nearly identical plot gimmicks. The family themes at the beginning of the fourth season, the Klingon plots toward its end, and here two episodes centering on Troi's telepathy, two with gravitational anomaly traps and two with energy-sapping to cripple the Enterprise's otherwise formidable problem-solving arsenal. Which is to say, its literal arsenal. Even at its best, the repetitive gimmickry of a TV serial asserted itself.