Thoughts on Season Seven

The series gets a dignified final bow. Too bad it comes
at the end of a desperately uneven final season!

All Good Things Must Come to an End...

And in the case of Star Trek: The Next Generation, they probably should have come to an end a season earlier. Despite a handful of bright moments and a genuinely superb series finale, the iconic science fiction show's final year is largely flat and stale, to the point that it's often a chore to plow through it.


THE FLAT EARTH SOCIETY

In my look back at Season Six, I observed that the series had not gotten stale yet, but that it was showing signs of doing so. Well, Season Seven sees the series grow as stale as a crust of a cheap bread left out for a week on a kitchen counter. Most of the episodes are so dramatically flat, I half-expected Christopher Columbus to sail off the edge.

There are echoes here of TOS' third season. The first half of the season is weaker than what preceded it, but not disastrously so. There are a few very strong episodes in the mid-season... and then it collapses into a sustained rut of shows that are downright awful, with only a scattered few rising to the heights of mediocrity.

I will say that the last regular episode makes a stab at recovery, and the series finale is genuinely fine television. But this dignified final bow is preceded by a full third of a season of dross, with the series too often seeming to be wheel-spinning while waiting impatiently to take the crew to the bigscreen.

When you've run out of ideas, that's when you turn
one of your regulars into a ghost-sex maniac.

CHARACTERS

In defense of the production staff and writers, I'll acknowledge how difficult it must have been to do much with characters already so thoroughly explored. But for the most part, the season doesn't even try to do anything new with them. Geordi feels bad when his mom dies, but that reveals nothing about him unless you were under the impression that he was the android regular instead of Data. Worf continues to struggle with his son's resistance to Klingon ways, but that is also nothing new. And Worf's not-quite-relationship with Troi is something that comes out of nowhere and never feels convincing - Just a desperate attempt to try to do something different with the characters.

A few episodes try to get around this by doing downright wacky things: Data gets possessed by an entire race's consciousness; Dr. Crusher is transformed into a ghost sex maniac; Troi becomes a hyper-jealous murderess; and the entire crew embrace their inner animals. I suppose when you can't think of anything to do with your characters, making them behave out of character is one solution... Though given how poorly all of those episodes are regarded, it doesn't seem to be a very good one.

Riker is unhappily reunited with his former captain
in The Pegasus, one of the season's best episodes.

FLECKS OF GOLD IN THE MUCK

Faring better are those episodes that reinforce and build on the characters' established attributes. Attached revisits the Picard/Crusher attraction that had been prominent in Season One, folding their unspoken mutual feelings into the "trusted friends" dynamic that had built up in later seasons. By working with what had already been established about the characters and and allowing the actors some mature and intelligent conversations within the framework of the story, it quietly emerged as an enormously entertaining piece.

Even better was The Pegasus, the mid-season Riker episode. A conversation between Picard and Admiral Pressman calls back to the very first Picard/Riker scene, in which Picard pressed his new first officer about overruling a previous captain's orders. That early scene is given new context, as we learn that the very thing Picard seemed irritated about was, in reality, the reason he had requested Riker be assigned. This adds a new level to their heated exchange in the pilot, making it a stronger scene in retrospect than it was at the time.

Thine Own Self proves to be a solid Data-centric episode (though the less said about the subplot, the better), simply because Data is so perfectly written that even a predictable story ends up being enjoyable. Pre-Emptive Strike brings Ensign Ro back to complete her arc from outcast to Starfleet officer in a way that isn't what most contemporary viewers would have expected, but that fits perfectly with who she has always been.

Basically, when the episodes don't try to push the characters in bizarre directions and just take them as they are, they tend to work. When the writers try to compensate for us already knowing the regulars by presenting bizarre situations for them to deal with, then the results tend to be a lot worse. The obvious exception is the excellent Parallels - but that one gets the characters so right that the strangeness is grounded in a way that isn't true in, say, Genesis or Masks.

Data gets possessed in Masks,
one of the weirdest episodes... well, ever.

FINAL THOUGHTS

I'm not quite done with Star Trek: The Next Generation, because there are still four TNG movies to review. Though I saw all four at the time, none of them is fresh in my memory so I will be able to rediscover them as new.

I won't write up a wish-list for them, save to hope that the lessons of Season Seven will be applied: That the drama works best when the characters are comfortably in-character, reacting to situations that have been well thought-out; and that it works much less well when the characters don't feel like themselves and are left to react to scenarios that have been poorly thought-out, that are bizarre with minimal explanation, or that are just plain dumb.

Basically: More flecks of gold, please, and a lot less muck.

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7-25, 7-26. All Good Things...

Picard is jumping back and forth through time...

THE PLOT

Jean-Luc Picard has become unstuck in time.

He is jumping between three time periods: The present; the past, at the very point when he first took command of theEnterprise; and more than 25 years in the future, when he is an old man who has been diagnosed with Irumodic Syndrome, a degenerative neurological disorder. The time jumps happen at seemingly random intervals; and after a moment of disorientation, Picard feels completely of that time period, with all the memories and characteristics that suit him in that time and place.

In both past and present, a large spatial anomaly has appeared, with the Enterprise sent to investigate. Convinced that the same anomaly must exist in the future, Picard convinces his old shipmates to join him in traveling to the Devron System - a region of space that, in this future, is controlled by a now-hostile Klingon Empire.

That's when Q appears, returning Picard to the Trial of Humanity that was their first meeting, and informing the captain that humanity has been found guilty. [I]"You are to be denied existence. Humanity's fate has been sealed. You will be destroyed." He adds that it is not the Q who will cause humanity's destruction.

The human race will end because of one man: Jean-Luc Picard!


CHARACTERS

Capt. Picard: This story's Picard isn't "present" Picard transported to other time periods; as is spelled out early on, we are jumping between three Picards: the Picard of the present; the younger, less experienced pre-series Picard; and an elderly and infirm Picard. Stewart's performance differentiates these three incarnations. Past Picard was already a seasoned officer, so differences between him and "our" Picard are small and subtle, but there isn't quite the same sense of confidence to him. Future Picard is noticeably different, and it's here that Patrick Stewart gets his most memorable moments. He has the knowledge from the other two time periods, but his mind struggles through the fog of age and illness to make the connections. He sometimes stammers while trying to force out some kind of clear explanation, and he can't quite keep his temper when he sees the others doubting him. It is a great performance, equal to Family and The Inner Light as Stewart's very best.

Riker: The Riker of the future has risen to the rank of Commodore. He first seen dismissing the elderly Picard's pleas to investigate the Devron System. By initial appearances, he's become the "pompous bureaucrat" figure. When he re-enters the story in the second half, however, we get a fuller picture. He has made the Enterprise his flagship, saving the old ship from being decommissioned because of his great fondness for it. He may have appeared to have dismissed Picard, but he did investigate - He just didn't want to make public knowledge of a crossing into Klingon territory. He carries bitterness over a feud with Worf, an argument based around the bizarre triangle their present-day counterparts have formed with Troi, but it's clear that he is very ready to make peace with his old friend. Jonathan Frakes is very good in these "future" scenes, reminding us for the first time since The Pegasus how good he can be when given strong material.

Geordi: The "future plot" is kicked off when Geordi visits the elderly Picard. Their banter reveals that Geordi ended up marrying Leah Brahms, and we can see that his visor has been replaced by implants in his eyes, presumably allowing him more normal vision. Even after connecting with Data and Dr. Crusher, Geordi continues to feature prominently throughout the "future" scenes, which goes a long way toward making up for the sparse material he's been afforded the past two seasons (this season especially).

Dr./Capt. Crusher: The future timeline that we see is one in which Picard and Crusher married... and then divorced. Beverly continues to have fondness for her ex-husband, though, keeping the Picard name and agreeing to transport him to the restricted sector. When Geordi admits to her that he's not certain this isn't just a delusion, a result of Picard's neurological disease, she replies that it doesn't really matter. "He's Jean-Luc Picard. And if he wants to go on one more mission, that's what we're going to do."

Tasha: The "past" Enterprise timeline is immediately pre-series, which means Tasha is the Security Chief. With no Riker or Geordi, and with Data still in his early, overly literal stage, this leaves her effectively acting as Picard's First Officer. Denise Crosby gives a much better performance here than was her average, showing her concern over Picard's increasingly strange orders without overplaying it. The moment in which she finally questions Picard, insisting that while they have followed his every order no matter how strange, they need something more from him before putting the ship at risk, is one of the best moments given to a character who got far too few such moments back when she was a regular.

Q: First appears much as he had in Encounter at Farpoint, sitting in scarlet robes on a throne that hovers in the air, mocking Picard while pronouncing judgment against humanity. Unlike in the series' premiere, this is an act he's putting on, keeping up appearances for the Q Continuum. Q is strictly an ally in this episode. He only appears a handful of times; but every time he shows up, he gives Picard some vital clue to push him toward the solution. It's his intervention that allows Picard awareness of the time jumps, giving him a fighting chance to put all the pieces of this temporally fragmented puzzle together. Q reappears at the end, giving Picard congratulations as well as a mix of warning and promise: That the challenge to prove that humanity deserves its place is a "trial (that) never ends." Which is as much a statement of the franchise's own philosophy as a question of this one episode's plot.


THOUGHTS

Coming up with a suitable finale to Star Trek: The Next Generation had to have been a daunting task. By the end of its run, TNG had already become an iconic series - at the time, even overshadowing the original Star Trek (an imbalance that would slowly correct itself in the following decades). It was a rare genre show whose appeal had extended into the mainstream. Even if its final season had fallen short of the quality that viewers had come to expect, its final bow was not just a television show; it was an Event.

Writers Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga turned to literature for inspiration: To Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut's best-known science fiction novel. In that novel, Billy Pilgrim is a World War II soldier who becomes "unstuck in time" after being taken prisoner by the Germans and transported to a labor camp in Dresden. Throughout the novel, Billy jumps forward and backward between various points in his life, including his own death. There is even a central cataclysmic event: The infamous bombing of Dresden.

The form may be borrowed from Vonnegut, but the spirit is uniquely TNG. Whereas Billy Pilgrim is a very passive protagonist, doing little to affect his situation, Picard insists on acting on his bizarre predicament - with the actions he takes actually creating the very problem he's trying to solve! A common interpretation of Billy's time-jumps is that he's suffering from PTSD and not time-jumping at all.  Picard's time jumps are definitely real, with Dr. Crusher medically verifying his story early in the episode, and we learn exactly what (or who) is causing them.  It's all part of a puzzle to be solved, with everything made clear once the pieces are put together. 

The time jumps allow the finale to look backward at the series' origins while simultaneously giving viewers a look at one possible future for the characters. The series opened with Picard having only recently taken command of the Enterprise before being captured and put on trial by Q. This episode's "past" plot flashes back to immediately before that, with Tasha giving the new captain his first look at the vessel he will come to call home. The present plot shows a crew that trusts Picard without question. The future plot shows a crew that desperately wants to trust him, and at the very least indulges him because of the man he used to be. Meanwhile, the crew of the past isn't quite sure what to make of him, his bizarre orders leaving them quietly wondering if they are now in the care of a madman.

The ending sees Picard finally joining the crew's regular poker game. His presence makes things awkward for a moment. But everyone quickly relaxes as he takes his seat and begins dealing, observing that he should have joined them in this a long time ago even as Troi replies, "You were always welcome." The camera rotates as it pulls back from the poker game, showing the captain and his crew gathered at a round table, like a futuristic court of Camelot. The rotation of the camera move transitions perfectly into the pull-back from the Enterprise itself, making the final fade to black almost cinematic.

A perfectly-judged ending to an ideal series finale.


Overall Rating: 10/10.

Previous Episode: Preemptive Strike

Season Seven Overview

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7-24. Preemptive Strike.

Ro Laren is assigned to infiltrate the Maquis.

THE PLOT

The demilitarized zone along the Cardassian border has been destabilized by the Maquis, the resistance group formed by Federation colonists whose worlds were repatriated to Cardassia. With many in the Federation sympathizing with the Maquis, the group has grown in numbers and in access to Starfleet weaponry.  This has in turn renewed tensions with the Cardassians.

Picard turns to Ro Laren (Michelle Forbes) to infiltrate the Maquis. Her background, both as a Bajoran and as a Starfleet outsider, will make her apparent defection convincing. Ro has little difficulty ingratiating herself with the Maquis cell run by the kindly Macias (John Franklyn-Robbins). She volunteers to use her knowledge of the Enterprise's security systems to steal medical supplies, and the success of that mission gains the confidence of the entire group.

Which is when Picard proposes the next step. A convoy will be planted as a target, with intelligence spread to indicate that the ships are transporting components of biogenic weapons. The potential threat will be too great for the Maquis to send anything less than its full force to combat - allowing the Enterprise to cripple the resistance group in a single devastating blow!

It's a good plan, and with Ro's help its success is all but assured. But Ro is uncertain about betraying a group whose motives strike so close to home...

CHARACTERS

Capt. Picard: When he sees Ro overwhelmed by the effusive welcome of the full command staff, he sends an official call for her to report to the bridge to allow her an escape. He understands that while she wants to catch up with everyone, she prefers to do so "one at a time." He is very proud of her achievements, and acts as something a father figure for her in the episode - an authority figure who has nurtured her, and whom she desperately doesn't want to disappoint. He remains fiercely dedicated to duty, however.  When he sees Ro beginning to question her assignment, he does not hesitate to outline the damage to her career if she sabotages the mission.

Lt. Ro: This is very much Ro's episode, as she agrees to infiltrate the Maquis. It's easy enough to predict the story trajectory, as she bonds with the members of the Maquis cell and starts to question her assignment. It is a combination of Michelle Forbes' very good performance with writer Rene Echevarria's understanding of the character that makes the drama work as well as it does. Her final choice is extremely easy to anticipate, but her progression to that point is so convincingly played that the journey remains absorbing.

Cardassians/Maquis: As was the case in DS9's two-parter, The Maquis, we see that the Cardassians are deliberately and repeatedly violating their agreement to respect the rights of the Federation colonists. Gul Evek (Richard Poe) insists to Picard that the Cardassian government is doing all it can to stop these abuses, but his assurances ring hollow - though, to the episode's credit, so do Picard's return assurances about Starfleet's efforts to curtail the Maquis. The episode does stack the deck, in that the Maquis we meet are all clearly decent people - It would be more interesting, and ring truer, if there were a few criminals or fanatics in the mix. Still, the script makes clear that both Cardassia and Starfleet have elements who are sympathetic to the supposedly unauthorized actions of individuals, which lends some enjoyable moral complexity to the situation.

THOUGHTS

Season Seven's otherwise mediocre Journey's End concluded with Picard negotiating a settlement that allowed Federation colonists to remain in territory that a peace treaty had ceded to the Cardassians - a far from ideal solution, but the best of the bad options available. The direct fallout was saved for Deep Space 9. That series' very good 2-parter, The Maquis, showed the escalation of tensions on those colony worlds, leading to the formation of the Maquis.

Preemptive Strike bounces the Maquis thread back to TNG, as Picard attempts to deal with a Maquis that is on the rise, gaining strength and growing ever more aggressive in its fight against the Cardassians. As if conscious of picking up where Deep Space 9 left off, writer Rene Echevarria creates an episode that feels closer in tone to DS9 than to TNG - and in so doing, he manages to deliver something that I haven't seen since Lower Decks and didn't expect to see again until All Good Things: A genuinely good episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

As a writer, Echevarria has always been particularly good at character material, and he plays to that strength here. He opens the episode by focusing on Ro's return to the Enterprise, signaling that this story will center on her. He allows a couple of scenes to lay out the "big picture" issues of the Maquis conflict: The Cardassian abuses of Federation citizens, the tensions flaring up between Cardassia and Starfleet over the rise of the Maquis, and the fear that it might spark a new war between the two powers. This shows us why Picard is so focused on stopping characters we will soon see as sympathetic, while at the same time acknowledging the Cardassians' bad behavior and the legitimacy of many of the colonists' grievances.

Then the episode returns to Ro and stays almost exclusively with her until the (very effective) tag with Picard and Riker. Ro is a character particularly well-suited to the Maquis arc. Her background as a one-time prisoner of the Cardassians, someone who watched as they murdered her father, makes it a given that she sympathizes with the Maquis. Her rising Starfleet career and her respect and gratitude for Picard leave her torn. But Ro has always been led mainly by her emotions. She sees people who have genuinely been oppressed, much as her own people once were, and quickly finds herself balking at the thought of stopping them from fighting back. Through this filter, the focus becomes the decision she must make - a decision that's all but a foregone conclusion, but that still feels earned by the end.

It's not quite as sharp as the very best Trek stories: There isn't much negative shown about the Maquis; the viewer doesn't directly see that their actions might harm innocents.  Sure, Admiral Nechayev (Natalija Nogulich) talks in vague terms about their increased aggression and worries about a new war - but nothing is demonstrated to show a dark side to what is, in effect, a terrorist group. This keeps the story from being as morally complex as it should be, though it is still far above-average for the series in this respect.

Mostly, I'm just relieved to be able to give a good review to TNG's final single-part episode. After the creative death march that has been the last third of the season, it's good to remember the kind of storytelling the series is capable of.

Overall Rating: 8/10.

7-23. Emergence.

Data suspects the Enterprise is developing its own intelligence!

THE PLOT

The Enterprise is on a routine mission, surveying potential sites for new colonies, when the ship suddenly goes to warp, seemingly of its own accord. Geordi has no idea why this happened, but reveals that it's lucky it did: The area of space the ship was in was subject to a "theta flux distortion." Had the Enterprise remained there for another 1.7 seconds, the ship would have been destroyed.

As Geordi and Data continue investigating, they discover new circuit nodes, protected by force fields and connecting ship systems that had previously been separate. The nodes are connected through the holodeck, which is running on its own, combining multiple holodeck programs into a single simulation. The result is a combination of Wild West gunfighters, armored knights, and Chicago gangsters, all riding on the Orient Express to "Keystone City," the place "where everything begins." When Data attempts to tamper with a node on the train, the characters turn hostile and the Enterprise crew are forced to leave.

As the nodes continue to appear, Data develops a theory: The nodes are forming a neural net. The ship is developing its own intelligence!

CHARACTERS

Capt. Picard: When Dr. Crusher reveals that the Orient Express came from her holodeck program, Picard begins talking about the history of the line. He is actually surprised when Crusher explains that the history is not her interest, but the atmosphere and the varied people who traveled in the train. When it becomes clear that the ship has come to life and has a purpose, Picard is less interested in stopping it than in understanding it. He insists that if there is an intelligence at work, the crew needs to respect it as they would any other life form. He adds that he is inclined to trust any intelligence formed from the Enterprise: "It came from us. From our mission records, personal logs, holodeck programs, our fantasies. Now, if our experiences with the Enterprise have been honorable, can't we trust that the sum of those experiences will be the same?"

Data: As an artificial intelligence himself, he recognizes the nodes' resemblance to a positronic brain, and thus he is the one to recognize what is happening. He takes the most active role in investigating the holodeck situation, and his android strength allows him to deal with the intelligence's attempts to stop him. Unfortunately, despite Data's prominent role, no attempt is made to create some meaning, either in theme or plot, out of an artificial intelligence investigating an awakening artificial intelligence.

Troi: The script makes a big deal out of Troi going into the holodeck to try to understand what the various characters' roles in the situation mean. The episode then proceeds to do absolutely nothing with the concept. For all the story difference that Troi's presence makes, Riker might as well have led all of the holodeck expeditions.

Worf: The one halfway interesting thing Troi's presence does is to show the building relationship between her and Worf. On two occasions, after some incident occurs on the holodeck, Worf asks if Troi is all right. In both instances, the question is very specifically addressed to Troi, not to others, and in both instances the emotion in Worf's voice is audible.

THOUGHTS

Joe Menosky's last TNG script is, unfortunately, closer in quality (and content) to Masks than to Darmok. The plot ends up acting as a sort of hybrid between a "bizarre things happening on the ship" episode and a holodeck episode. As with Masks, it's clear that this episode really wants to be intriguing and thought-provoking. But, as with the earlier episode, it just doesn't quite come off.

I actually liked Masks better. That episode was so completely off-the-wall, I was hooked in spite of myself, wanting if nothing else to see what weird thing would happen next. Here, the proceedings are just kind of... dull. There is very little atmosphere, even to the "Orient Express" scenes. Worst of all, as my unenthusiastic take on the episode's use of the characters shows, this story does nothing at all with the regulars.

The characters are so passive as to be completely ineffectual. The episode's structure, such as it is, consists of: a team of crew members goes into the holodeck, observes strange behavior from the characters, then are menaced and forced to leave; stir and reheat as necessary. Sure, there are token gestures made by the crew to try to deactivate the nodes, but this just feels like a holding pattern.

Even when the crew is allowed to truly act at the end, it's in a manufactured third act crisis that is resolved by Geordi making a blind choice that fails to generate either interest or tension. Geordi can choose to hunt for Technobabble Particles in either a nebula or a pulsar. We are not told what the advantage of one choice over the other might be, or what the risks are. Picard just asks Geordi, "Nebula or pulsar?" Geordi picks, he's right, and the day is saved. Had we been presented with some risk in Geordi's decision, or had the final attempt seemed at risk of failing, then there might have been a bit of... well, drama in the drama. As it stands, it's just stuff happening with minimal context.

Which, unfortunately, describes the entire episode all too well. A few nice Picard bits aside, TNG's final holodeck episode has extremely little to recommend it.

Overall Rating: 3/10.

Previous Episode: Bloodlines
Next Episode: Preemptive Strike


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7-22. Bloodlines.

Picard discovers the son he never knew he had...

THE PLOT

Bok (Lee Arenberg), the Ferengi Daimon who was stripped of his rank and imprisoned after attempting to take vengeance on Picard for the death of his son years earlier, is once again free - and he still wants revenge! This time, Picard is not the target. Bok has found another way to make the captain feel what he felt. He sends an unmanned probe to the Enterprise, with a message that Bok intends to kill Jason Vigo (Ken Olandt) - a colonist in the Camor system who Bok identifies as Picard's son!

A genetic test confirms that Jason is Picard's son, and from there the plan is simple: Keep the young man safe on the Enterprise until such time as they can find Bok and resolve this issue. Then Picard is awakened in his quarters to find Bok standing in front of him. The Ferengi repeats his threat, then vanishes before Security can arrive. Bok has somehow acquired an advanced transporter, allowing him to beam right through the Enterprise's defenses. And if he can beam himself in... He can also beam Jason out!

CHARACTERS

Capt. Picard: Any Picard-centric episode gets a boost from Patrick Stewart's considerable screen presence and his by this point instinctive command of the character. It's just a shame that Picard's response to this situation is so generic. He is startled to hear this stranger named as his son, but frankly acknowledges that it is possible the young man could be. When a test confirms it, he tries to be a part of Jason's life and wrestles with whether to force his friendship or whether to respect Jason's wish for privacy. He does get one good scene, climbing with Jason in the holodeck, but even that is disappointingly standard fare, given life more by Stewart's performance than by anything in the script.

Riker: Respects Picard's privacy enough that he doesn't ask for details when Bok names Jason as Picard's son. He listens as Picard gives the backstory on his relationship with Jason's mother, but doesn't push for information; he just accepts what Picard wishes to tell him.

Dr. Crusher: As Wesley's mother and Picard's old friend and flirtation partner, she of course is the one Picard goes to for advice on parenting. It might have been more fun if Picard had also collected advice from Worf and Data (the other parents on the crew, albeit only briefly in Data's case)... but then we might have had less time for Dr. Crusher to be Very Earnest.  Gates McFadden and Patrick Stewart retain a steady screen chemistry in their scenes together, but with Crusher reduced to simply "the voice of motherhood," there's no chance for any more interesting character interplay to occur (as happened even this very season, in Attached).

Ferengi: Ferengi prison apparently works a lot like old debtor prisons: The convict is jailed until he is able to buy his freedom - which is what Bok did. Though Bok was able to buy his freedom, it was not enough to secure his old title as "Daimon," and the loss of that title is something that stings. Much as was the case in The Battle, Bok's goal of revenge ends up undermining his standing with his Ferengi accomplices. Ransom is fine; but revenge is a pursuit that carries no particular profit.

THOUGHTS

With the series in its dying days and story ideas running scarce, I suppose it's understandable that the production team would look to old episodes for inspiration. But of all the old episodes to revisit, I cannot fathom why they would choose the first season stinker The Battle as being worthy of a sequel. What next? The Wrath of Lutan?

In any case, Bok is back to once again seek revenge against Picard for putting the Ferengi's belligerent and suicidally stupid son out of the galaxy's misery. Somehow, despite having lost his title and presumably most of his influence, Bok is able to get his hands on transporter technology that, Geordi's Technobabbling about its inefficiency aside, appears to have real value as in inflitration and attack tool. Bok can beam onto the Enterprise at any time, and can beam anyone off the Enterprise at any time. Which, of course, means using that technology to goad Picard, thus advertising his one great weapon and its capabilities, thus giving the ship's crew a generous amount of time to figure out how to counter it before the climax. Unlike most Ferengi villains, Bok is not played for laughs... making his extraordinary stupidity all the more toxic to any attempts at drama.

At least this episode has the sense to make Bok's machinations the "B" plot, with the focus really being on Picard and the son he never knew he had. If Jason was a more interesting character, his rebellious streak perhaps reflecting Picard's own less-than-stellar youth, this might have had potential. Instead, we get very generic interactions between the two characters (and not very much of that), before Technobabble and Medo-babble combine to nullify any chance of this episode having any point at all.

In the end, Bloodlines is too flat and generic to work as a character episode; and it not only fails to redeem The Battle, it fails to be any better an episode than that one was. TNG is looking creatively dead at this point, and it's actually a relief that there is very little of the series left to go.

Overall Rating: 3/10.