I’ve been able to structure my life so that I can review a TNG episode on a weekly basis now, for the first time since season one. It’s a nice feeling to be able to get further along at a faster pace, especially when I’m reviewing two duds like Homeward and Sub Rosa.
Homeward is a candidate for worst episode of the season. It is about Worf’s brother, as the lame concept of relatives we don’t care about keep occurring. It’s not Kern by the way, but his human brother from the Rozhenko’s, Nikolai. He’s a cultural observer for a primitive society, but the planet is losing its atmosphere and everyone will soon be dead. Worf gets surgically altered to look like a native, to find out Nikolai has gone native. Nik’s plan is to transport his village onto the holodeck of the Enterprise and transport them to a similar world. That’s exactly what does, the entire crew powerless to stop it.
This is Dorn’s only appearance on TNG where he wears no Klingon makeup at all. Did you put together that it was the premise of this episode–transporting an alien race without their knowledge to safety–would be re-used in the film Star Trek: Insurrection? If you recognize the actress in this episode but can’t place her, I tell you where you recognize her from in my full review.
I wish I could say Sub Rosa is better, but it’s not. This is now the fourth episode where we have relatives of crew members nobody cares about, and it’s another candidate for worst episode of season seven. This time Beverly Crusher’s grandmother has died. The crew go to her colony for the funeral, only for Beverly to get swept up in a gothic romance with an anaphasic ‘ghost.’ A family heirloom, a candle, evidently holds an entity that has joined with all of the women in her family going back to the 1600s, and Beverly falls in love with him too. She resigns from Starfleet to go live with her ghost lover, and at the end the snaps out of it and phasers him. The end. I guess she returns to Starfleet too.
To quote Gates McFadden, “I was basically in love with a lamp.” This is the last episode of TNG where we are never given a stardate. Ron Moore and Michael Piller, two of the best writers, warned Jeri Taylor not to do the story as it’s really a romance novel in space, but she went ahead anyway because “I just knew it would work.” Oh really? Want to know what famous book this episode is based on? Read my full review to find out.
I’m moving at a good pace now, and hope to complete reviews for the next two episodes, the tremendous Lower Decks and the mixed bag that is Thine Own Self by the end of the month.