7.6 — “Phantasms”
Plot: Data discovers that he is having nightmares, during a week in which the ship is installing a new warp core, and Picard is expected to attend an Admirals’ Banquet.
Thoughts: This episode has so little main plot that it sets a new record in quantity of subplots and filler. An ensign has a crush on Geordi, Picard wants to avoid the Admiral’s Dinner, we make fun of Sigmund Freud, a bunch of invisible, intangible alien parasites start eating everyone, AND there are three scenes featuring Spot.
In case you forgot, Data’s dream program was first discovered in TNG 6.16, “Birthright, Part I,” also scripted by Brannon Braga. This is the first time it’s been mentioned since then.
I’m not usually fond of dream sequences, especially when the best surreal scenes you can come up with involve… yellow cake? Pretty weak, guys.
The threat of the invisible parasites is that the crew will lose all their cellular cohesion and collapse into a few pounds of chemicals. That’s bad, I agree. I guess the chemicals will still have cohesion?
Data stabbing Troi in the elevator is, well, certainly a scene. It gives the impression that Brannon Braga might have his own issues needing analysis. sunny jim points out there’s really no way Worf, Riker, or Troi could have physically stopped Data unless he let them. The thin story reason given to support the scene does not explain how Data appears in the turbolift out of nowhere, the more to terrorize Troi, or why it always has to be violence against women. Why?
I look forward to Randi Cohen’s impressions of the therapy scenes and Freudian satire. What I see here is a mess, leavened by cute scenes with Spot.
1.5 of 5 black lights that reveal secret alien parasites you can’t see or feel until they eat your cellular cohesion.
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