Future Imperfect

You think Wesley Crusher is amazing? Will Riker gets married, has a kid, becomes captain of the Enterprise, and makes peace with the Romulans – all in one afternoon! It all seems too good to be true. Mostly because it is. Who is behind it? And how does Riker get out of it? Find out when we put Future Imperfect in the Mission Log. I will be thrilled when this theme of family and faux-family episodes finally ends. It’s becoming trite and maudlin. 1) Where is Wesley? Shouldn’t Bev mention him when the subject of tough parenting comes up? 3) Everyone in the galaxy knows the details of the Enterprise. I think it’s Sergey Rozhenko’s fault for leaving “all the specs and diagrams of the Galaxy class starships” on his coffee table where anyone can see. (Actually the worst example of this is TOS’ “Mark of Gideon.” 4) Did Carolyn McCormick just show up for an afternoon to shoot that home movie? I love that they dug deep into continuity, but kinda wish they’d given her just a little more to do. 5) This is one of MANY TNG eps in which the whole thing hinges on aliens who are not revealed until the very end. This one works, imho, but others will just be lousy. “Hey! It was wacky aliens all along!” waaa-waaa-waaaaaaaa. cue up I Love Lucy Theme. Nice podcast, though! “Geordi, I’ve got an idea for you: Cloned eyes.” “Hey, yeah, that’s great, dude. And the neural pathways? Are we just hooking them up to the things on the side of my head?” “I’ll get back to you on that.” “I’ll always remember you as Jean-Luc.” “Remember who as Jean-Luc?” “Yeah, I have no idea who you’re talking about.” The neural scanners act like a kind of GPS: Every time he goes off script, it has to recalculate his route. In this case, the route to how to get Riker and Barash to play together. Great show! I always enjoyed Future Imperfect, but at the same time it’s the tip of the iceberg of the overt, last-minute reset-button thing that I grew very annoyed with further down the road in TNG (and later in Voyager). I always look forward to you guys tackling some of the episodes that I didn’t like so much, because chances are you’ll find something I missed. Really appreciated the whole interactive fiction/NPC element you found here; I’m always fascinated by the many, many takes on holodeck “game theory” that cropped up over the course of 24th century Trek. Going by the TNG Writers’ Bible, it seemed like the jumping-off point for the holodeck was the old text adventure games (i.e. Zork, Planetfall, and Riker’s fave, Leather Goddesses of Phobos), but different holodeck episodes handle game theory differently – sometimes it’s an open sandbox, sometimes it’s very rigid, keep-your-hands-inside-the-rails-at-all-times – more like the old laserdisc arcade games of the ’80s where there were pre-recorded courses of action from which it was impossible to deviate. Reminds me of the note in the TNG writers’ tech manual about the tricorder’s sometimes seemingly near-infinite abilities: its limits in a given episode are governed by dramatic necessity! One very weird thing I distinctly remember from the original satellite promo feed was that Riker pronounced charade as “sha-ROD” in the promos, but in the finished episode prounounced it “sha-RAID”. (The promos accompanied the previous week’s show on the satellite feed in two forms, one with whatever background music Paramount preferred, and one with no announcer or music, nothing but the show dialogue and sound effects, for local stations to dress up how they wanted if they preferred their own announcer or standard music bed. I’m guessing they had Frakes re-loop that line of dialogue before sending the episode itself up a week after the trailers.) I remember Lincoln Enterprises very quickly made the rank-on-either-side-of-the-Starfleet-delta pins available after this episode; totally got one of those. (Found it just recently, in fact.) I remember that Sha-ROD line as well. but we were also watching from satellite wild feeds Dudes, th