Originally posted at Recaps in Hindsight. Check out the season 1 Next Generation recaps here!
The short recap:
Nothing happens and Picard thwarts a cloud by threatening to kill everyone.
The long recap:
We open with a gripping scene of action and terrible soundstage scenery.
Worf and Riker are on the holodeck fighting against some extras from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which makes you think this is going to be a Klingon-focused Worf-character-development episode.

So threatening. Much scare.
But no! The Enterprise instead flies into a big black cloud and is rigorously tested by the omnipotent being within which is fascinated by our “limited existence” (you can tell I’m a DS9 fan at heart because I just yelled “you are not linear!” at the TV). It wants to find out how many ways mortals can die, in a creepy sociopathic scientific-method kind of way.
Eventually, Picard saves the day by setting the self-destruct and letting it run down to the last ten seconds so the cloud-thing knows he’s talking serious business.
And that could sound vaguely interesting if literally nothing happened for the first 40 minutes of this episode. The testing isn’t even that rigorous. Things disappear. Space loops back on itself. Romulan ships menace the Enterprise then randomly explode. For a story which could be a little bit dark and grim and actually feature people dying … there is not a lot going on.
Admittedly someone does die, but it’s literally a black guy in a red uniform who we’ve never seen before, so no one gets to act traumatised.
Honestly, original series did it better, and that is not a good TOS episode I’m talking about.
Other items to note:
- Dr Polaski’s defining feature is definitely that she Doesn’t Get Data. It could be interesting in a marks-her-as-an-outsider way but doesn’t really work when she’s also basically the chief science officer.
- Deanna vanishes at random points in the episode. She starts on the bridge, looking utterly, utterly bored, then the next minute she’s gone so Polaski can have her seat when she comes to the bridge for no apparent reason, then she reappears so she can use her Betazed powers to figure out they’re in trouble.
- Geordi also pops up to the bridge for no apparent reason, because the writers haven’t quite figured out what to do with him.
- Featuring Colm Meaney!
- The alien intelligence is confused by the existence of male and female beings aboard the Enterprise but makes no comment on the presence of a Klingon, and we’ll discover later in this series just how messed up Klingon biology is.
- Apparently auto-destruct sequences now require only a voice print, not any kind of security code. And apparently the cloud entity was just going to sit back for twenty minutes while the countdown goes off instead of starting to kill people immediately.
Points:
- Deanna: 1 for mystically sensing the giant omnipotent consciousness
- Worf: 4 for having a super-aggressive episode
- Wesley: 1 consolation point for actually being helpful
- Polaski: 1 for being a dick to Data
- Data: 1 for … my notes don’t say
MVP:
This episode was so dull I started checking my emails partway through. Nobody wins.