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.

7-9. Force of Nature.

Two alien scientists deliver a dire warning.

THE PLOT

The Fleming, a Federation medical transport, has disappeared in the Hekaras Corridor. The corridor is the only safe path to travel through this region of space, which is characterized by intense tetryon fields. The Fleming isn't the only ship to experience issues. During the search, the Enterprise encounters a Ferengi vessel whose warp drive is offline and whose systems are crippled.

After Picard assists with repairs, DaiMon Prak (Lee Arenberg), the Ferengi captain, admits that they observed the Fleming traveling through the corridor and provides Picard with the ship's heading. But the Enterprise arrives too late. All that remains of the Fleming is debris.

Just then, the Enterprise is struck by a verteron pulse, taking the ship's warp drive and shields offline... at which point Hekaran scientists Rabal (Michael Corbett) and Serova (Margaret Reed) beam onto the ship with a potentially devastating revelation!

CHARACTERS

Capt. Picard: Though he is not pleased at the tactics of the Hekaran scientists, their claims are serious enough that he immediately agrees to let Data review their findings. He states that he considers it part of his job to keep an open mind, even when he's annoyed. When the rift opens near the end of the episode, complicating the ship's rescue mission, there are two obvious options - both of them bad. He tells his officers that he wants them to find him a third option, and trusts Geordi and Data to do just that.

Data: Has allowed his cat, Spot, such a degree of free reign that Geordi finds the cat unmanageable and "out of control." We see that whatever difficulties Data may face in training Spot, the cat has certainly trained Data, who feeds and plays with the animal on cue. In the "A" plot, it is Data who figures out how to complete the rescue mission without using warp engines in the rift, calculating what to do to the exact second.

Geordi: His engineering acumen gives him enough knowledge to improvise when Data's rescue plan gets thrown an unexpected curveball. His basic decency is such that, despite Serova displaying no sympathetic traits whatever, he still feels guilt when she is driven to rash action.

THOUGHTS

Force of Nature is TNG's environmentalist episode. It's the one in which warp drive turns out to be damaging the fabric of the universe. I'd love to say that this idea has potential. The truth is, it was a lousy idea from the start. With warp drive so integral a part of the Star Trek franchise, it was inevitable that the limits put on warp travel in this episode would never be enforceable across multiple series. The only possible result was what happened: The limit was paid lip service to a very few times before being utterly ignored thereafter.

Which... Fair enough. It's an episode that exists entirely in isolation, because it cannot affect the wider franchise. Fine. After all, Ethics paralyzed Worf, ended with us being told that he had a long, slow road ahead of him, and then saw him 100% recovered by the next episode with the incident never even mentioned again.  None of which prevented it from being a worthy episode in its own right.