Suffering Through TNG: It's time for your oral exam, Wesley!

[Reginald McGraw]

Wesley Crusher is the sci-fi genre's most hated character. 

Jar-Jar Binks?

[nacho]

We had Jar-Jar for two hours.  Wesley clocked in 85 episodes.

[Sirharles]

He was on Criminal Minds the other week.  Some pycho serial killer that lured people to this old motel and then slowly tortured couples for 48hrs till they died.

[nacho]

48 hours of Wesley episodes?  Wesley developes a new warp engine.  Wesley gets caught by an angry alien.  Wesley learns to whistle...

[Sirharles]

Exactly...except he also rapes the wife and smashes the husbands head with a baseball bat.

[nacho]

Which is roughly how I feel after only one Wesley episode!

[nacho]

The Big Goodbye.

This is it... The first of the "holodeck gone insane" shitfest episodes that would mark the modern Trek era. 

The episode won all sorts of awards and, in 1987, is actually quite original and fun.  It's the strong acting arm of the cast -- Picard, Data and Crusher -- in a 1940's mystery. 

What ruins the episode isn't the intervening 21 years since it aired, it's that Trek would overdue the shit out of the holodeck.  Arguably, it's the worst thing that happened to the franchise.

Also, is it upsetting that TNG is 21 years old?  I think so. 

[Cassander]

The Battle.  The Ferengi return.  This time with a stolen Starfleet ship -- Picard's old command.  He's made to answer for past "crimes," but all is okay in the end.  Of course.

why do i still remember that this ship is called the Stargazer?

[nacho]

Because you had a sad childhood.

Quick -- what was Riker's first command?

[nacho]

I like that Starfleet assigns a "fiction expert" to each ship.

[Cassander]

I like that Starfleet assigns a "fiction expert" to each ship.

that's because it's the future and there's no money.  there simply aren't enough "real" jobs for the huge population.

[nacho]

Datalore.

Introducing Data's evil twin, who would come back on occasion in idiot storylines, and eventually be used to write out the Borg...who would then be retconned in First Contact with a queen and a whole new attitude...which would then be retconned again in Voyager.

[nacho]

Angel One.

Ripping off a Space: 1999 episode, the crew must deal with a female-dominated society in order to rescue survivors from a freighter accident.

[nacho]

11001001.

This episode was painful in 1987.  Starfleet hires the computer genius "Bynars" to retrofit the Enterprise while in spacedock, and they steal the ship in order to save their race.

Meanwhile, yes, the Holodeck runs amok once again.  (In Angel One, a virus seemingly originated on the Holodeck that disabled the entire crew, though no one pointed any fingers or worried about the cause...just the very easy cure.)

[Cassander]

They are all holodeck enablers.