We're on to two episodes I know very well, Many moons ago my parents bought me the video with these two episodes on for Xmas. Bit of random selection on their part but it was the only TNG I had on video at the time so they got watched a lot.

Evolution

Or Wesley engangers the entire ship, risking lives and an experiment and no-one is remotely annoyed. The peisode has a nice idea in it, and I remember the stellar thingy they were investigating looking quite pretty. Wasn't sure about Dr Stubbs and his mental re-creations of Baseball games from bare statistics. One hell of an imagination. We also see a few tweaks from Season 2, The main cast have new uniforms which look a lot better and more comfortable. Aside from the complaint that Wesley escapes any punishment or reprimand for something taht was entirely his fault simply because it made a new species, we also see how poor security is on the Enterprise, an armed civilian gets into the computer core. Good thing he just wanted to kill nanites.

The Ensigns of Command

Some nice ideas in this, considering its the B plot the whole idea of a potentially more advanced non-humanoid species who consider the Federatuon primitive is quite exciting but under-used. On the other hand we do get to see Picard working out a loophole in a treaty. Its a great scene when he finally gets one over the Sheliak. The A plot has Data dealing with some really irritating colonists. The fact that Data has to go beserk with a phaser to prove that these aliens are just going to blow the colonists away from orbit shows at least the leader isn't the brightest. Still we get Data and the Female robotics enthusiast's woefully ham fisted reverse psychology effort for laughs. I may have a rose tinted view of this one as I did enjoy it at the time. I do remember some very iffy acting from the colonists, clearly many of the good extras were busy.

Not too familiar with these two episodes.

The survivors I remember having a decent story and an intriguing mystery. After finding out one guy wiped out an entire race I did like Picard leaving notes that its probably best to leave him alone.

Who watches the watchers features the "Duckblind" operation we later see in Star Trek: Insurrection and I quite like the idea of starfleet anthropologists watching developing species for science. Was it clarified why they were Vulcan-like? old colonists or just random coincidence. Also, they were pretty lucky that someone was dying in sickbay so Picard could convince the local he wasn't a god.

See you next time. Keep up the good work

All being well we'll be recording Thursday of this week, covering The Bonding & Booby Trap.

Thanks,

First, on the issue of why they don't travel at warp 9. I'm almost sture its mentioned in the Technical manuals that running the ship faster can damage the drive, but who reads them eh. ahem. Anyway, in show it may have been mentioned in Encounter at Farpoint, but I could be wrong. Data spends a lot of time at the beginning telling us how dangerous various actions will be to inject tension. High warp may have been one of them. It is mentioned later on, In "Best of Both worlds" they can't keep pace with the Borg Ship, and in "The Chase" at the end of the episode Picard does say that due to overuse of high warp they are making minor repairs. As a final grab at this, in the game "A Final Unity" if you go everywhere at maximum warp after a while you damage your warp drive and are stuck at warp 3 until you can repair it.

Anyway, don't remember much about the bonding so I'll go straight on to Booby Trap, because I really liked this one. As problems of the week go its a good one, and its pretty tense towards the end. I also like the idea of finding ancient dead races who aren't absurdly powerful for a change. We get to see Geordi's poor luck at dating which he eventually gives up on and just sticks to dating holographic engineers. In fact this gets referenced in a later episode when the real Dr Brahms turns up and isn't at all like Geordie's holographic, umm, Chum. Hooray for TNG continuity. I do like the brief exchange about ships in bottles between Picard, Data, Worf and O'Brien. Finally the episode has some very nice music. The TNG soundtrack can be a bit too background and generic, but this episode has a distinctive trumpet theme for the derelict battlecruiser which I rather liked. As far as I know never been released on CD though.

Finally as a Minor point, why destroy the ship at the end. It's an important museum piece and picard should know this. Surely some warning Buoys and a not to starfleet to try and find a safe way of dismantling the trap and retrieving the cruiser would be better. On the other hand perhaps it had been a bad day for Picard and he really wanted to blow something up.

Hopefully see you all in a couple of weeks.

Fortunately for everyone I have not appeared as a holographic engineer near chez org.

Anyway, enough of that.

The Enemy

Or indeed the enemy mine. Ok it isn't as blatantly an "Enemy Mine" episode as some others, but it is using the trope as far as I remember.

It is a pretty good LaForge episode, you do get a good idea of his ingenuity and resourcefulness. Similarly it was unexpected when Worf wasn't eventually convinced to undergo the blood transfusion and therefore overcome his hatred of Romulans, very unlike TNG. Finally we see Andreas Katsulatus as Tomolak, who was so good he got to be a reacurring romulan before he changed species and franchise.

The Price.

I remember this quite well, not a massively exciting episode but a nice idea of what are meant to be tense negotiations for a useful resource. There was a troi subplot perhaps? it was forgetable, unlike the Aerobics of the Future, which I seem to remember being cringe worthey despite essentially dressing teh two female main cast in spandex. It was awful spandex though.

The Barzan wormhole and the two unfortuante Ferengi turned up in the Voyager Episode called something like "False Profits" (Definitely had some form of pun on Prophets/profits) which proved that Deep Space 9 did better ferengi episodes.

Keep up the podcast and hopefully Pick TV and my children's TV schedule will untangle enough for me to be able to follow better. Alternatively I may try and talk my ever tolerant wife into buying a PVR of some description.

Hope I'm not too late. But now that Pick TV has caught up I couldn't resist the opportunity to refresh my memory.

The Vengence Factor

Sue to an overrunning child's bed time I missed the beginning, but at least saw the episode which I really didn't remember much about. I could see what they were trying to do but it was a bit dull. On the upside we do get to see the 24th century does indeed have unrealistic blade runner style photo extrapolators. The gatherers in general have the slightly naff sub-Mad Max baddies look, and the head guy looks like he was trying to act in a swashbuckling buccaneer style, but was not allowed to play it full Pirate. They did try for a dark ending, but really, why didn't Riker tackle her in the incredibly long wait between his repeated shots "I don't want to kill you but this uniform is clean on and I don't want to get it dirty" similarly the assembled gatherers do nothing to stop someone attempting to kill their boss. Can't be that popular.

The Defector

I sat down to watch this but for some odd reason it featured none of the cast and was set in a dreary part of the East End of London. The Mrs was watching EastEnders so I didn't get to catch this one. A shame because I remember it was brilliant.

For starters, This is the episode I use when people say Picard never kicked ass. Picard standing on the bridge facing down Tomalak with "Shall we Die together" is up there with any of Kirk's best bits and the Klingon ships decloaking is a real punch the air moment. The episode itself I remember as tense and the mystery of Setal/Jarek develops well. I like how this ties in with "The Enemy" as an idea that the Romulan command are trying to goad the Federation into a war. I don't remember anyone really going further with this plot which is a shame. Still over all great stuff.

Hopefully I will be able to rely on much more recent memories for future podcasts. Thanks again and keep it up.

Yay- more PieMan feedback
You're not at all late as we're recording a week later this time due to me being away for the weekend.
Thanks again sir

Recording this Thursday, all being well.
We'll be covering The Hunted and The High Ground.
All feedback most welcome

A quick reference to last week's feedback. Yes I do have TNG replaced with Eastenders at times, but it is the life I chose. What I really need is to either teach my wife to use iPlayer or buy a second TV, and it could be worse, I could be missing TNG for river City (Outside of scotland you're lucky you don't get this, a 1hr long glaswegian Eastenders)

Anyway, to more joyous things

The Hunted.

I rather enjoyed this, it had a decent concept with the Super-Soldiers and I'm guessing the story was a general analogy for the treatment of the Vietnam war veterans, Had Iraq war 1 happened by this point? Hard to remember. Anyway, Danar's escape is pretty exciting and the way he repeatedly foils the Enterprise security is a good way of convincing us that this is a living weapon. I did enjoy Picard's solution, id seemed brought on when the agnosians admit that they aren't de-programming the soldiers in case they need them again. Picard more or less leaving the governemnt to deal with its own problems always raises a smile, quite atypical for trek but in line with the prime directive.

The Higher Ground

This episode Eludes me. Like everyone without sky I missed it first time round because the BBC in its infinite wisdom decided to cut the entire episode for around 1 second of dialogue. Since then I have tried to catch the episode and continously miss it. (This time it was an over-running Spot the Dog DVD. Once again, need a second TV) so I am looking forward to the podcast to see if I'm missing anything. Keep up the good work

The next bOrgCast records Wednesday 7th, covering Deja Q and A Matter Of Perspective.