Star Trek: TNG 4x24 Full Reaction!
Added 2025-09-27 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
Comments
The boldness was strong with the plot set-up. Effective bait-and-switch with the opening, much though you would have loved to see the Geordi on Risa plot. LeVar does exceptionally good work with the facial acting compensating for his eyes not being visible, and he’s got it down to an exact science at this point. Not seen Murder One, though what you described sounds amazing. Probably for the best that we don’t see the images of the Ludovico by way of Dr. Gorst torture. Similar thought on the needles, and that is a small favor. They hit the good Hitchcockian political thriller tone, complete with old Hitch’s bomb adage. Tension gets bad enough that you just wish it was at the seventh inning stretch so that Enrico Pallazzo could act with the cufflink darts. The rewatch bonus is great with Kell as yes, first time viewing, you wouldn’t catch the careful maneuvering. On a second watch it stands out more. A terrific misdirect. Adds to the feelings of wishing for Kell to be taken down, and although Picard tragically does not say the one line, he probably did offer the proposal that from this day forward, all the toilets in the Klingon empire shall be named after Kell. Ending with that great Geordi and Deanna scene with LeVar and Marina doing very good work. Though the road to recovery is long, you know Deanna will put in the work for she will ensure that the Romulans’ links, the beautifully conditioned links are smashed. They’re smashed as of now because Deanna says so, because she says they ought to be smashed. She’s busting up the joint, she’s tearing out all the wires, she’s busting it up so good all the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men will never put ol’ Geordi back together again. (For purposes of Romulan plots, that is.) And if anybody invites Geordi to a game of solitaire, he’ll tell them, “Sorry, buster, the ballgame is over!”, and since this is Deanna, her success is assured. There’s still the one little problem that is unbeknownst to the crew, though knownst to us, (See the big announcement this week has you in a good mood.) there are the Romulans that got away. Shame that Jess could not jump through the screen, and chase after Taibak and Mary. (We’ll call her “Mary” for now as the episode did not provide her real name, and the hd master showed her face a bit which was unknown to me, leaving us with the fun little mystery.) Imagine if Jess sees them again, she’ll sound like Colonel Jessep, yelling, “I’m going to RIP the eyes out of your heads and PISS in your dead skulls!! You FUCKED with the WRONG chief engineer!!” Of course, if we want that by season’s end, the clock is ticking. We’re running out of time.
Thomas Corp
2025-09-27 21:11:11 +0000 UTCWhat kind of plot setup could get you even more more invested than stopping Geordi from turning into an invisible monster? Well, this is certainly a bold attempt at it. The opening scene certainly takes us very off guard for what's to come, with Levar getting to give a tour de force demonstration of how he's learned to use every other part of his face to make up for not having his eyes as part of his performance. You 100% buy how he's struggling to come up with those answers. But it can't last long and soon he's captured by John Fleck, one of those constantly working character actors who you saw all over the place if you were watching TV in the '90s. He played villains more often than not thanks to having such evil-looking cheekbones, though one of his few major roles was the office secretary in the legal drama Murder One, a stunningly normalized LGBT character for the time where he especially crushes an episode with Richard Schiff as his closeted friend who's arrested as a sex offender. The scene is made even more disturbing by not letting us see any of the images forced into Geordi's head so our imagination has to do the work, and I'm just glad for your sake those contact points weren't needles like I first thought. And from there we're thrown into an agonizing political thriller where the show's crew has way too much fun with how they know we know Geordi's going to do something very bad eventually. It's the classic Hitchcock trick of showing a bomb under a table so we have to sweat through people having a casual conversation at it with no idea the danger they're in, and the shot of him seemingly about to shoot someone with the rifle before it turns out he's just testing it is especially a jerk move. Eventually you just have to shout "Can someone just tell him to try a nice game of solitaire so we can get this over with?" And the plot structure holds up perfectly to a rewatch as you can see Kell maneuvering everyone plus indeed being there all three times Geordi got an order. Very slick to let us assume we know the whole plot in advance just from how we saw the stuff with Geordi and the rest can be straightforward, only to blindside us with the seemingly nice guy being behind it. I also can't help being amused by his resemblance to the hugely controversial redesign of the Klingons in Discovery which the franchise soon backed out on. That sense of betrayal adds a ton to how much we viscerally want to see him taken down, and you just wish Picard would say "Put him in the Tower of London. Make him part of the tour." There are eight million stories of the starship Enterprise. This has been one of them. Except that's not quite it, because much like the iconic shot of Picard at the window after coming back from the Borg, the show has the guts to say Geordi's in for a long, hard road to recovery after this violation, and Levar and Marina play the whole thing beautifully from totally different directions. And that's still not all, because unbeknownst to the crew (but knownst to us) there's that female Romulan where you have to imagine there was a reason her face was kept totally in shadow unlike the others. For a show not typically known for its noticeable camerawork, shots like Geordi reflected in the monitor as he leaves the room with a gun and the fisheye lens of him going down the hall make clear we're dealing with a very deliberate director here who wouldn't do something like that without purpose. Well, they'd better hurry up with how little time is left this season.
Ryan
2025-09-27 20:30:07 +0000 UTCPretty big trigger warning with this one. Rewatching it, one question was how bad it was compared to how I remembered it. Turns out it was worse, though I suspect part of that was Jess being on the mind, knowing how she’d feel about this one. Hopefully the Klingon high council arranged things for Kell so that they ensured his death be a particularly unpleasant and humiliating one. Could see the thought with the drink. Rather like how it’s vague enough to let us have our own reads on it.Yeah, it has been over two years now since Farpoint. Time flies.
Thomas Corp
2025-09-27 19:05:39 +0000 UTCThis episode should have come with a trigger warning for you, Jess. At least we know the ambassador who was a Romulan collaborator more than likely died a painful death for his crimes against the Klingon empire. I think that scene where Geordi pours his drink on O'Brien was the Romulans testing their link with Geordi without him actually killing anyone. That's my guess anyway. Yeah, it's crazy we're almost on season 5 already. I still remember watching your reaction to Encounter at Farpoint.
Geordie Joe
2025-09-27 18:57:43 +0000 UTC
