For my money, if you chop off the premiere and the finale, Season 5 was probably the best season of TNG. Though it had a few big-time stinkers, the great episodes were really great and even the middling ones weren’t too bad. Plus, one of the all-time best episodes of TNG ever occurred in this season — I’m sure you know which.
Genres: Aliens
Rated 17 and up for sexual situations
Bosch drew deeply on his cigarette and exhaled slowly, watching the smoke paint clouds of tissue paper across the chill moon. If his hard-boned mouth had been capable of smiling, it would have. He’d tried to mimic the gesture often enough. He took one last drag at the cigarette, then flicked it out in a wide arc to scatter sparks against the broad stone steps. It was funny how compelling these human habits could be, even the ones they frowned upon. There was no risk for Bosch, but the humans seemed to like the fact that he had adopted one of their vices. It showed them he had his personal weakness.
Compelling. It was less compulsion than convenient subterfuge, but they weren’t to know that. Smoking, and alcohol, and sex — particularly sex; the examples went on and on.
“Ambassador Bosch, come to escape the crowd?” It was Davy, his shadow, his cultural liaison, assigned to keep him on the straight and narrow.
Bosch turned his head to make eye contact. These humans liked eye contact. He whistled once and snapped his mouth, forgetting for a moment for the hundredth time that Davy could not understand. Quickly, he followed it with a series of signs using his three long fingers. Davy nodded and waited while Bosch withdrew his pad from inside his clothes, slipped the stylus from the carry case and tapped at the screen. Davy craned over Bosch’s shoulder to read, then glanced down at the still-smouldering cigarette end lying on the steps below.
“Yes, I needed some fresh air as well. I think it’s going well, don’t you?” Bosch tapped at the pad once. As well as it could be, he thought, but Davy seemed satisfied.
The smooth, dark-haired human leaned his head back and looked up at the stars. “Yes, a good night for it,” he said.
A good night for what? Often, these little expressions eluded Bosch. Expressions, cultural behaviours, so many things.
(Continue Reading…)
Wil Wheaton, writing for TVSquad in 2006 (later to be reprinted in Memories of the Future), made this comment about “The Last Outpost”:
Data says Ferengi are like traders, and explains this with the most obvious contemporary reference: Yankee traders from 18th century America. This indicates that, in the 24th century, the traditional practice of using 400 year-old comparisons is still in vogue, like when you’re stuck in traffic on the freeway, and you say, “Man, this is just like Vasco de Gama trying to go around the Cape of Good Hope!”
Because of the changing nature of pop culture and fashion, it’s very difficult to include contemporary references in fiction. Some people do it very well — Seth McFarlane, the writers of Psych and Warehouse 13, Joss Whedon — and some don’t. Others just avoid it altogether — for example, Laurell K. Hamilton is very cagey about exactly what type of phone Anita Blake uses. There are positives and negatives to both; catching an old rerun of Family Guy will remind you just what didn’t hold up a mere ten years ago.
Season Four had some pretty high-concept, hard-hitting episodes. It also introduced a war that apparently everyone in the Trek universe either missed, ignored, or forgot about. And it sent Wesley off to Starfleet Academy, so if you weren’t a fan, you were probably thrilled.
But, of course, the big news was that Picard wasn’t dead and Shelby wasn’t sticking around. I’ll talk about that in my top episodes list when we get there. For now… Season Four.
I was really racking my brain for one more article topic*, and this morning (September 14) I was posting something to my quote blog and I realized that each of the stars of TNG have probably had interesting things to say in their lives and careers. So let’s take a look at that.
After the debacle that was Season Two (and the writer’s strike), it really amazed me just how strong TNG came back with the third season. Despite a somewhat-iffy premiere (the baseball references did nothing at all for me), the next ten or so episodes reminded us how good Star Trek can be. Though Five is probably my favorite season, Three is a close runner-up.
While Star Trek: TNG had a strong core cast, sometimes it was guest stars and recurring characters that made certain episodes work. With that in mind, here are the ten that I consider the “best”.
The rules: the character must appear in two or more episodes, and two-parters count as one episode.
Rated 13 and up for language
West London was, as always, abuzz. Even at 4:00 AM on a chilly November Tuesday, electric motorcars whirred down Kings Road, zipping people along, early to work or late from parties. The residential side streets, however, were quiet. Lined with parked cars, occasional street lamps, and darkened flats, they dozed peacefully. Ornate houses huddled in gracefully curving queues, awaiting the sunrise with little attention to the two figures loitering outside their narrow, iron-fenced entryways.
“There it is, innit?” the scrawnier figure said, pointing to a parked car. “D’ya see?”
The taller man stared intently at the vehicle. “See what?” he said, his breath misting in the frosty air.
Their eyes were fixed on a car sitting at the curb of a constricted street in Chelsea, part of the fashionable Kensington district. It was a brown cabriolet with a weather-worn faux leather top. An aging example, its low-light number plates showed it to be registered ten years previously. Its MOT and inspection were up to date, but its bonnet was dented and its windscreen cracked. Such an automobile did not belong in Chelsea. But neither did the two men examining it.
The smaller of the two impatiently tugged on the grey flatcap he wore. “Pay attention, Mik,” he sniped. “We in’t got all night.” Clipped words and rounded vowels marked his speech. The bells of St. Mary’s were ancient history and the East End had long since been gentrified, but he was retro-Cockney.
“I’m paying as much attention as I’ve got, Artie. More, really. I just don’t see it.”
“It’s a slight vibration, see. An ’ologram shift called glitching. The generator keeps the image dynamic, right. So it has to refresh at a specific rate.” He tapped his nose, a signal that he was imparting secrets. “Oy, there it goes again!”
“I still don’t see it.”
“And you fink you got what it takes to be a Techno-Rat?”
(Continue Reading…)
Season Two is generally considered to be the worst of all the TNG seasons, and with good reason: there were some truly atrocious episodes. Of course, the Borg were introduced in Season Two, so it can’t be totally discounted.
Every time I read a YA novel, I wonder why all novels don’t move at the same pace. I’m not missing anything in the YA genre — the characters are just as developed, the action is just as action-y, and the story is just as engrossing. I just don’t have to slog through hundreds of extra pages of tangential plotlines and lovingly-rendered character descriptions to get to the good stuff.
And I think that adequately describes Allen Steele’s new YA sci-fi adventure, Apollo’s Outcasts, which will be published this November by Prometheus Books: for the most part, everything extraneous has been trimmed away, leaving a tightly-written, fast-paced novel that I quite enjoyed.