This is unquestionably a great episode, full of dramatic moral quandries and cool espionage. Here, Riker’s former commander comes aboard the Enterprise to find a ship they seem to have misplaced…one on which they barely escaped a mutiny before the ship disappeared. Riker has to choose between loyalty to Captain Picard and the idea of loyalty that his former captain once represented.

I also enjoy the cat and mouse game between the Romulan warbird and the Enterprise, and the Romulan commander is deliciously smarmy and disconcerting. It helps that he’s a strange shade of gray.

And come on: the episode starts with Captain Picard Day, with Troi and Riker helping him judge artworks made by kids. How awesome is that? Especially when some of those entries were made by children from local elementary schools.

Man, we never got to make pictures of Captain Picard at my stupid elementary school. Robert E. Lee or George Wallace, maybe.

My grade: A+. This is one of my favorites.

[Time on bike: 30 minutes.]

Hey, look: an episode full of all the plot threads the writers were too chicken to pursue: Worf and Troi’s marriage, Geordi’s death, Picard’s death, a Federation overrrun by the Borg, a Cardassian conn officer…

Imagine if they’d let their imaginations run wild like this all the time. Wouldn’t that be a great science fiction show?

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love this episode, and I have an affection for alternate reality stories. This one is a model of its kind, approached only by “All Good Things” later in the season which shares some of its plot elements.

Here, Worf returns to the Enterprise from vacation and passes through some kind of time-space pothole, splitting him into all his quantum variations. For a good third of the episode, it seems he’s going crazy: certain details of reality aren’t matching up with his memories, and he’s got to improvise as best he can…which isn’t always that well.

The alternate realities are fascinating, though they tended to remind me of just how few real chances the writers took with the show.

The only flaw to the episode, a minor one at that, is the mechanism that triggers Worf’s jumping back from dimension to dimension: Geordi’s VISOR seems to put off some kind of field or radiation that does it. That seems weird and weak for an explanation, though it leads you to wonder just what that thing’s doing to Geordi’s brain all the time.

My grade: A, and boy, am I surprised. I’d never seen this episode before.

[Time on bike: 30 minutes.]

Noonien Soong sure built a lot of androids, didn’t he? In this story, the last of the line shows up claiming to be Data’s mother. She thinks she is, mostly because she doesn’t know that she’s an android at all. Dr. Soong built her to preserve his dying wife’s memories, and Data must decide whether to tell her about her true nature or not.

I’ll admit I rather hoped the woman would turn out to be someone crazy who was so desperate to be Data’s mother that she’d convinced herself she was.

This episode works quite nicely as it is, though, and I was pleasantly surprised that it appears during this, the winding down season.

There’s one big plot hole, though. Soong implants a chip in his android wife, explaining why he created her. So far so good. But on that chip, he also somehow explains why she left him. If she’d left him, how did he manage to implant the chip? Did he stalk her? Did he somehow predict she’d leave him?

My grade: B+ because it’s still good, even with that weird flaw.

[Time on bike: 30 minutes.]

Here’s this episode, summarized: “Ha, ha! Spot the Cat is hard to train. Oh, and a woman just blew herself up and formed a rift in space to prove a point. Ha ha!”

Here we learn that warp travel wears out space — “like wearing a path on a carpet,” Picard says — and a pair of alien scientists go to extraordinary lengths to prove it, first through terrorism and then through suicide. Because dramatic suicides increase one’s scientific credibility, the Federation decides to place a Warp Five speed limit on all ships except for emergencies.

Huh. So they’ve used this technology for three hundred years and never noticed this phenomenon? Also, space is BIG: ships are zooming around on all kinds of vectors, except in the little corridor mentioned in this episode; how would so many ships travel the exact SAME vector so often as to tear space? It’s in three dimensions, for Christ’s sake.

This episode was written to talk a little about the desperation behind eco-terrorism, but we get about four sentences of that and about sixty of Geordi and Data talking about how best to train Spot the Cat. Even the writers disliked this one; according to Memory-Alpha, Michael Piller said, “I think this is the worst show I collaborated on this season. It certainly inspired us to have several meetings on where the season was going because I felt we were letting it slip away.”

Uh, yeah. We can tell you all were tired.

My grade: F.

[Time on bike: 30 minutes.]

Hey, Star Trek, way to feebly address the possibility of affection between Picard and Dr. Crusher only in the absolute last season you can…and then make sure nobody ever thinks or talks about it again.

(Yes, yes, they mention a marriage in the fake Q alternate universe in “All Good Things…” but that doesn’t count.)

Here, Picard and Crusher are captured by one of the factions on an alien planet and they’re connected to some psychic doohickey that can read their thoughts. When they escape, they somehow can hear each other’s thoughts…and certain confessions ensue. Being Star Trek, those confessions have no import beyond this episode.

This episode is absolute crap, all too similar to the original series with a silly warring faction storyline and a room full of dumb-looking props. The whole concept of them being stuck together seems too much like a screwball comedy about prisoners chained together during an escape attempt, too.

But then, the performances of Patrick Stewart and Gates McFadden have a real tenderness that is far more sensitively portrayed than the rest of this episode deserves.

My grade: D-, saved ONLY by that brief scene of confession…for all the good it does them.

[Time on bike: 30 minutes.]