By Title: The Naked Now
Airdate: 10/5/1987
Plot Summary
The Enterprise comes across a federation ship, the Tsilkovsky. They appear to be having a major party but before they can figure out why they are acting like this, the crew pops the escape hatch and most are blown out into space. What’s left are frozen to death. Geordi contracts a disease that spreads quickly through the Enterprise. They begin experiencing symptoms of inebriation. Riker recalls that the original Enterprise had a similar incident. Crusher works on a cure but the original formula is not effective. Meanwhile Wesley and a number of other crewmembers take control of engineering. The star they are orbiting ejects a massive bit of matter heading directly to the Enterprise. Can they get the cure and fix the Enterprise in time to avoid catastrophe?
Make It So
Picard finally gets it from Crusher. No not THAT, the infection. Wait, that doesn’t sound any better. Point is he had to fend off her advances but once he’s drunk, he tries to advance himself with her. Unfortunately he forgets why he came down there in the first place.
Number 1
Somehow Riker really fights this thing. He does get it but manages to avoid the whole mess for most of the show. He also remembers the incident that happened on the original series.
Fully Functional
Data gets laid! He also gets some pratfalls.
Today Is A Good Day To Die
Worf wisely just sits at the ops station and doesn’t ever come into contact with anyone that’s drunk.
Phase Inducers
Geordi is the first one to get the disease. He has a moment whining about his eyes and then spends the rest of the time in sickbay with a nice flop sweat.
Counselor Cleavage
Deanna gets it from Yar and immediately heads to Riker to bang him.
Dancing Doctor
Doctor Crusher is able to find the cure even though she’s completely drunk off her ass.
Security Chief Dead Meat
We find out Yar was abandoned at 5 years old and wasn’t rescued off that planet until she was 15. She also gets to wear an outfit that would’ve made the 60s show proud. She’s the one who lays Data.
Shut Up, Wesley
Wesley gets really drunk and takes over engineering. He suggests that Data is the one who can replace all the chips and makes the tractor beam a repulsor beam to send the Tsilkovsky into the star matter.
Canon Maker
Data starts out in the Ops position and Geordi at the helm, as it should be.
The SS Tsilkovsky is basically the USS Grissom from Star Trek III.
Canon Breaker
Unfortunately by the end of the episode, Worf is at ops and Data is standing back where Worf usually stands. No one knows where the hell people are supposed to be yet.
Deanna calls Riker “Bill.” At no point in the rest of the show would anyone refer to Riker as “Bill.” It’s always “William” or most likely, “Will.”
No way would this disease affect Data. Just no.
They call the ship the SS Tsilkovsky, not the USS Tsilkovsky. Typically that means it’s a civilian or science ship but it has a bunch of Starfleet personnel on board. Maybe that’s ok, just seemed kinda canon-breaky to me.
A Little Bloody Nose
Most of the Tsilkovsky is killed. But no one on the Enterprise dies.
Technobabble
The isolinear chips, or control chips can be pulled out of engineering and effectively disable the Enterprise.
Data’s speed is seen here for the first time.
I Know That Guy:
Benjamin W.S. Lum plays Jim Shimoda, an engineer who pulls out all the chips. He’s never seen again.
Brooke Brady plays the first of a revolving door of Chief Engineers before season 2. She was in a couple of Nightmare on Elm Street movies and did some Days of our Lives work but didn’t do much beyond the 80s.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Phew what a shit show of an episode. One of my gripes with The Naked Time was that is was an episode where everyone is out of character so early in the run. We haven’t had a chance to know the characters well enough to have an episode like this. Instead of taking my advice (hindsight though it is) they do the same damn thing in the second episode of the entire series! Not only has the audience not had a chance to get to know this crew but the writers are still figuring them out, many of which they won’t get locked down until season 3.
More than anything though, this is probably the episode that started the “hate Wesley” bandwagon. You only get one chance to make a first impression and this was really the first time we got to see Wesley do anything, too much was going on in the pilot. He’s so smart that he can just see how to do incredibly complex shit in his head, he makes a voice box to pretend he’s getting orders from Captain Picard which is childish to say the least, and of course he fixes everything by suggesting Data put the chips back together and pushing the Enterprise off the other ship.
All this together in the second episode was too damn much. I don’t think his character recovered from this episode and at least the first half of the season didn’t do him any favors. It wasn’t until nearly the end of the season you got a good episode with Wesley. By the second and third seasons he became an actual three dimensional character. But this episode damaged Wesley more than any other.
The rest of it is just irritating. Though I’ll admit that Denise Crosby in her prime in that outfit helps a bit. Data getting the disease makes me want to throw shit at the screen. Picard and Beverly’s vaudeville act is cringe beyond belief.
This is a terrible episode and if you started with this one, you’d be hard pressed to believe the show became what it was.
The post Trek On: THE NAKED NOW appeared first on Last Movie Outpost.
