Okay, so I'm rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first time since it aired in first run and I've gotten to Season 5.
I think this may be the season that I stopped watching regularly and just caught episodes here and there afterwards. Now true confession, I'm an original series Star Trek fan so while I have fond memories of the better TNG shows, it isn't my touchstone of Trekkiness and has always had things that I didn't like about it. YMMV.
The season started concluding the "Redemption" cliffhanger, and it wasn't a bad conclusion to that story, and "Darmok" and "Ensign Ro" tried some interesting things, even if I'm not sure they worked 100%.
"Disaster" was awful, particularly the part where everyone - including Troi - is surprised she's the next in line for bridge command. Surely this was mentioned at some point prior to people agreeing to these positions? And instead of giving Troi a chance to rise to the occasion, she's shown as a weak and indecisive leader. How can someone who is so inept at decision making be a counselor? Certainly she has to have some insight, logic, training in problem solving that could have been used? And putting Picard with the kids seemed like an excuse to have the viewer sit through Picard being uncomfortable with kids.
"The Game" is a bit better. It doesn't work, entirely, IMO, but its an improvement. To be honest I can't remember what I didn't think worked, something about the last minute plan, but still I enjoyed it.
"Unification" shows that not even Leonard Nimoy as Spock can improve everything. First off what a sad send-off of Sarek that his death scene doesn't exist on screen. And second, pretty much everyone involved in the mission (including Spock) had to be stupid not to see what the Romulans were up to.
"A Matter of Time" has Matt Frewer in it which is a plus. And it was a good idea, its just that fell flat in the end.
Then we get "New Ground", "Hero Worship" and "Violations".
In "New Ground" we see Worf uncomfortable as a father. This is a good idea, and an interesting position for the character. But the scenes themselves make no sense. Why would Worf need to physically enroll his kid into classes on the Enterprise? Is there like 3 or 4 schools being run on the ship that the kid has to be accepted to? The teachers don't seem to have made any accommodation to try to understand Klingons, but surely this is SOP for a ship with multiple cultures/alien races on it? Sure you could argue that it was short notice, but it didn't seem like they didn't even try. What was Alexander's obsession with the creature in the class about? Its like the scenes happen, but there isn't an internal logic to the story that allowed me to get into the plot. The plot was an excuse to have Worf and Alexander bicker, but there's not ultimate point or revelatory moment for the characters, I felt.
And yet the episode worked better than "Hero Worship". First, the school in "New Ground" is miles above what is presented in "Hero Worship". Here the school seems to be a classroom to teach banality. The teacher seems to have no real desire to integrate Timothy in his class, and Troi's suggestions of how to help the boy don't ring true, and seems to exist solely to serve the plot - namely to fob the boy off on Data. Which could work, but the episode takes a story of a boy experiencing, processing and recovering from trauma into an episode about Data's awkwardness of having to deal with the boy. I understand the appeal as everyone likes Data, but even if you wanted Data to be impactful of the story, the focal point of this story is the kid. its like telling Don Quixote from the perspective of the windmill. Thus the resolution of the story is for Data, not the kid, which undercuts the premise of the episode.
And finally there's "Violations", an episode that wants to bring up the subject of rape. It doesn't want to actually delve into the subject; you're not going to see a motivation as to why the psychic attacker is doing what they do; nor are you going to understand why they pick the memories they do or anything close to a motivation. You're also not going to see how their actions relates with their family, friends, co-workers, larger society or anything. Nor are you going to see how the victims cope with the trauma that has been inflicted to them. Nope, this episode is perfectly content to bring the subject up and stop there.
I hope the back half of the season makes up for this. Looking at the titles, I'm pretty sure there are at least 2 episodes I liked and 1 I disliked in the back half, the rest I'm blank on without spoiling the episodes. And I hope we don't see episodes where Riker, La Forge, O'Brien, Ro, Crusher, et al, are forced to deal with a kid for an episode. Did the producers get to season 5 and think - "Hey, lets create a bunch of scenarios where one of the cast has to deal with a kid! It'll be great!". Surely the production - even if they wanted to make these stories and thought they were worth doing in the same season - should have realized that having 3 episodes within 7 involving the major cast being put into uncomfortable mentorship roles with kids was a little much? You've got 26 episodes this season to spread that out!
