LogFAQs > #986401035

Justin2Krelian posted...

While Id give it a 7 or so, its really striking how much better it is than the 2-3 episodes before and after

Yeah, a few episodes later is "Justice", which I could see some people giving a worse rating than anything else in season 1. Thankfully, it kind of falls in that "so bad it's good" territory. They even bring Wesley down to the orgy planet for some reason, but instead of getting laid he fucks shit up (because of course he does) and gets put on trial. There is a little bit of preachyness going on about the death penalty and the Prime Directive (which they seemed to violate by coming to the planet in the first place). And, of course, the whole planet and the Edo people are being watched over by some sort of "space God" which just adds to the ridiculousness. It's so crazy you have to watch it.

I've been cherry picking some S1 TNG lately and thankfully for every bad episode there is a good or even great one to be found. I watched "Arsenal of Freedom" this morning and it's a pretty good action focused episode with some low-budget effects. You can tell by this time in the season the actors are clearly owning the material but the writers are still trying to figure things out.

I also watched "Conspiracy" and it's so awesome. From what I gathered from online discussion, the rough draft of the episode was vetoed by Gene because the corruption came from within Starfleet so they changed it (Roddenbery famously hated anything that undermined his "utopia" on Earth). Then the writers strike was about to happen so they couldn't have the script smoothed over. The end result had it banned in Canada and the UK because of the crazy ending. Apparently the aliens were a prototype of the Borg before they became the nameless automatons we know of today.