| Review : |
Quite a clever episode. It started with a curiosity, the derelict ship, which we later learn is 1,000 years old (adding to the running notion of the Milky Way having a rich and varied interstellar history). The booby trap itself was quite clever, being both self-sustaining and with the instinctive reaction to try to power out of it only making it harder to escape from - as simple and as clever as a plain old snare. I have to say, my immediate reaction was 'turn everything off' - although that was mostly to buy time rather than an escape route. Building on that as a way out of the trap was very neat, and gave us a much better feel of real spaceflight. The whole sequence was almost perfect, with some 'sideslipping' but the slingshot manoeuvre was slightly off on detail. There was also the B-story. Why are chief engineers always unlucky in love? Somehow, this was not only convincing, it contributed several possible solutions, including the final counter-intuative one. The one annoyance was the incidental music, but that happens a lot in TNG anyway, and I'll forgive them that as a matter of taste. The problems with radiation are also forgivable, mostly because it would be hard to do on a TV budget and fits the usual (slightly annoying) dramatic convention. Overall, this was a decent episode. |
