“These are not my stars. Even the heavens are denied me here.”

A favourite of mine, not just of the third season but of the entire run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “The Defector” brings epic badassery to the long-simmering Romulan conflict on Next Gen, delivering a stunning first act and equally stunning climax, and driven by a a terrific guest turn by James Sloyan as the defector in question. It’s A-game material all around, from the entertaining prologue in which Data performs Henry V (against Patrick Stewart, no less, surreptitiously portraying a holographic Williams in a bit of makeup and a wig), to the magnificently delivered visual effects and musical score.

“Parthus à la Yuta!”

Strongly into the gooey middle of the endless run of “The _______” episode titles in the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we find “The Vengeance Factor,” which I’ve never really liked much. I guess it’s an attempt at a Riker romance-of-the-week type episode of the sort that Kirk always got, but a) Will+Deanna4EVR, and also the lead characters – Will and his love interest, Yuta of the clan Tralesta – are really fucking bad.

“Who needs rational when your toes curl up?”

Hump Trek: The Next Degradation! I recall there being quite a flurry of indignation when “The Price” first aired, because it was (supposedly) quite graphic for Star Trek; whatever vanilla era we lived in that could produce such a judgment is long past. Aside from a very long dialogue scene where Troi and her lover, Devinoni Ral, converse in bed about their lives in general while rubbing massage oil on each other, there ain’t much intimate contact at all – although, rightly so, the brief aerobics scene where Deanna and Beverly swap advice on the viability of highly passionate sexual flings is a fan fave.

“I never lie when I’ve got sand in my shoes, Commodore.”

Here’s the second great Geordi episode in a row, “The Enemy,” in which the good chief engineer is stranded on a storm-ridden planet with a single stranded Romulan. It’s David Carson’s first episode in the director’s chair – he would go on to direct “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Redemption,” and Star Trek: Generations – and it’s damned solid work all the way through, a split narrative of cooperation and survival on the surface for Geordi and Centurian Bochra, and brinkmanship and strategy on the Enterprise for Picard and Romulan Commander Tomalak, who appears for the first time here before becoming a (somewhat) recurring favourite.

“My God, I bet I had a Promelian battlecruiser too…”

Against the claim that there are no good Geordi episodes, I stake that there are at least two, and they are (oddly enough) back to back in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s third season. The first is “Booby Trap,” which became rather more… controversial?… in the years since its airing, because it’s the one where Geordi creates a computer-simulated dreamgirl on the holodeck and, y’know, makes out with her.

“Go on. You’ve wanted to tell him for a long time.”

I really hated this episode back when it first aired. It’s better than I remember, but still skeeves me out – something in the execution is way, way off. There’s too much going on at an emotional level, for one thing – three major characters (Worf, Wesley and Beverly) and one guest star (Jeremy Aster) processing variations on the grief of losing a family member on a Starfleet mission; the de rigueur alien-menace-of-the-week driving the back half of the plot; and Counselor Troi flitting about, acting as Greek chorus to the entire affair, describing aloud (often to the captain) what each of the characters is going through.

 “The Mintakans are beginning to believe in a god – and the one they’ve chosen is you.”

This Prime Directive morality play and anti-religious fable doesn’t play as strongly as I remember, although the pieces are all here. Picard and the gang accidentally reveal a camouflaged Federation observation post to a group of “proto-Vulcan humanoids at the Bronze age level” and in so doing, set Picard up as a god figure. The pieces are staged nicely enough (and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first location visit to the Vasquez Rocks, used frequently on the original series, is nice) but all the characters come off more annoying than I recalled. The generally excellent Ray Wise, particularly, seems a downright lunatic as the Picard-obsessed Liko, though Karthryn Leigh Scott’s turn as village leader Nuria is more nuanced. It was a bit of a pleasant shock to realize that Liko’s daughter Oji, quite the Renfaire hottie in her Mintakan dress, is played by Pamela Adlon – Marcie fucking Runkle!

“I didn’t just kill one Husnock or a hundred or a thousand… I killed them all. All Husnock, everywhere.”

Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Four is coming in hot - released in just ten weeks - so I’ll be double-timing it on Season Three, starting this week…

“The Survivors” is a good example of something that Star Trek: The Next Generation did very well: a simple mystery premise, beautifully enlivened by a pair of solid guest stars. In this case, the guest stars are John Anderson as Kevin Uxbridge, and the delightful Anne Haney as his wife, Rishon. The octogenarian botanists, still deeply in love after fifty years together, are the only survivors of an alien attack on their colony. Picard must get to the bottom of the how and the why, as the Uxbridges grow increasingly evasive, and all while Counselor Troi is tortured into insanity by a music box tune that is playing ceaselessly in her head. Which, if you remember the tune, is plausible.

“All field units. Intercept the android.”

There’s a new Star Trek movie in theatres, and I’ve got pretty serious problems with it; which makes this a perfect time to continue my backwards troll through the endlessly problematic Star Trek: The Next Generation feature films, bringing me to Star Trek: Insurrection, a.k.a. Star Trek 9, and – arguably – the origin of whatever problem in the franchise grew so massive that it compelled Paramount to hit the reboot switch, wiping out 40 years of Star Trek continuity. Something about the mood in the room changes with Star Trek 9, and the franchise crosses the border from mainstream fare to fan service, even though the fans didn’t like it much either. This was 1998 – Deep Space Nine was wrapping up (Worf’s presence on the Enterprise explained in a line which is, delightfully, interrupted before finishing, as though to assure the audience that no one cares), Voyager was in the middle of its lackluster run, and Enterprise was imminent. Less than half a decade later, Star Trek would be a dead duck. The tide turned here.

“That’s the short definition of ‘captain.’”

It took 23 years but I finally found out what the title, “The Ensigns of Command,” refers to, which has been kicking the back of my head all this time. It’s a line from “The Wants of Man,” and refers to the ensign as a flag, rather than, say, Wesley Crusher’s rank. I’m sure I’ll forget this again in a day or two, and what the hell it has to do with anything that happens in “The Ensigns of Command,” I’ll never know. Meanwhile, this is an episode in the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I pretty much forgot all about. That’s happening more than I expected.