[For my daily workout, I'm pedaling on a recumbent exercise bike while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I'm posting my reviews here.]
(195.2 pounds)
Riker declines the first of several chances at his own command, perhaps because it is his pompous father who arrives with the mission briefing. Fortunately, there’s a fake and silly martial art they can use to settle their differences, one in which they wear cheap plastic armor and blindly swing sticks at each other. Ironically less bone-headed, Worf meanwhile gets to celebrate the tenth anniversary of his Age of Ascension with a torturous ceremony.
I’ll admit I tend to enjoy episodes in which the characters behave geniunely as friends, and those scenes are the stronger ones here: Wesley and Data and Geordi trying to figure out why Worf is upset, Picard offering his support and advice to Riker, Worf asking to go with Riker, and so on. There was plenty of that to enjoy in this story.
Of course, the former Pulaski-Father Riker romance is inherently terrifying, mostly from the image of rolling over in the morning to have her beaming at you with her cigarette-wrinkled lips. And the Riker family combat might well have been written by someone similarly blinded and wielding a clumsy pen. But I guess you can’t win them all.
It would have been interesting to know a little more about Riker’s decision to stay on the Enterprise. He calls it “motivated self interest,” three words that I thought were forbidden in the Federation utopia. Almost any sentence would have been better than that one: “I like the food here better,” “I want another chance with Troi,” “None of you would be there,” “The leprechaun told me I had people here to murder first,” anything.
My grade: C-, mostly because 80% of the interpersonal scenes are done quite nicely, and we should encourage them.