This week, Joe and Nathan are woken from 380 years of cryosleep to discover that the world has changed forever: the ship’s captain isn’t friendly and welcoming like Captain Stubing, some of their ports of call have been scooped in their entirety off the surface of the planet, and those people in that scary green cruise ship over there look very unfriendly indeed.
An experimental quantum probability field causes the entire Enterprise crew to completely forget what humour is and how to do it. It’s an agonising forty-five minutes, only relieved by the sight of beautiful Billy Campbell wandering through the corridors dressed as a pirate. (It’s just possible that the same field has caused the writers to forget how human behaviour works as well.)
Our writers are on strike this week, and so we’re just going to mark time until we reach the end of this blurb. When an uncomfortably horny Lwaxana Troi beams aboard the Enterprise, a series of events happen, culminating at last in the episode’s closing credits. Mick Fleetwood guest stars as a fish.
On the ravaged surface of the Federation colony planet Rana IV, the crew of the USS Enterprise are surprised to discover an excitingly modernist Malibu home set in a lush, quadrilateral garden; after landing on the planet with an away team, Will Riker is surprised to find himself dangling upside down by his ankles; soon after that Deanna Troi is surprised to find herself suffering from an unpleasant and potentially fatal earworm. Meanwhile, back in 1990, Nathan Bottomley and a very young Joe Ford are increasingly surprised to discover a new season of Star Trek: The Next Generation which surpasses both its predecessors in both competence and interest.
