The Golden Age of Star Trek: we had the 6th Season of The Next Generation and the 1st Season of Deep Space Nice on our televisions, Generations on view in our cinemas and First Contact due out soon. This season of TNG contains some excellent stand-alone episodes and several spectacular two-parters, with only the occasional make-weight. Despite the length of time it had already been on the air, it still represents some of the highest standard of television Science Fiction ever broadcast.
This is a very good Science Fiction story if you can get over the idea that Counsellor Troi is going to get her mind taken over AGAIN. This time she gets to play a sexually aggressive harridan who insults her patients and then begins to age rapidly. Apparently, it's all because she agreed to perform a weird ceremony with a guest alien who then used her as a receptacle for all his "negativeness" so that he could concentrate on his mission to bring about world peace. Stay with me here.
The alien mediator, Jarth, who sports a light tattoo instead of the usual latex forehead, was played by Rick Scarry, who made a very convincing villain in that he sincerely believed he was doing great deeds on a planetary scale and couldn't comprehend Picard's squeamishness over the occasional bit of collateral damage. The woman that he introduced as his mother (actually his previous girlfriend/receptacle) was played by 80 year old screen veteran Susan French. She gave us such intense suspicious-minded venom in her brief scenes that she perfectly foreshadowed Counsellor Troi's ultimate fate.
Blink and you'll miss him but Admiral Simons was played by George Wallace, Commander Cody of 1952's Radar Men From the Moon; confirming him as a legendary television Science Fiction hero who predated the Kirk and Spock era by more than a decade.
Senior Trekker scores every episode with a 5.
This is a very good Science Fiction story if you can get over the idea that Counsellor Troi is going to get her mind taken over AGAIN. This time she gets to play a sexually aggressive harridan who insults her patients and then begins to age rapidly. Apparently, it's all because she agreed to perform a weird ceremony with a guest alien who then used her as a receptacle for all his "negativeness" so that he could concentrate on his mission to bring about world peace. Stay with me here.
The alien mediator, Jarth, who sports a light tattoo instead of the usual latex forehead, was played by Rick Scarry, who made a very convincing villain in that he sincerely believed he was doing great deeds on a planetary scale and couldn't comprehend Picard's squeamishness over the occasional bit of collateral damage. The woman that he introduced as his mother (actually his previous girlfriend/receptacle) was played by 80 year old screen veteran Susan French. She gave us such intense suspicious-minded venom in her brief scenes that she perfectly foreshadowed Counsellor Troi's ultimate fate.
Blink and you'll miss him but Admiral Simons was played by George Wallace, Commander Cody of 1952's Radar Men From the Moon; confirming him as a legendary television Science Fiction hero who predated the Kirk and Spock era by more than a decade.
Senior Trekker scores every episode with a 5.