By 
Title: Lonely Among Us
Airdate: 11/2/1987
Plot Summary
The Enterprise has picked up delegates from two warring factions, the canine Anticans and snake like Selay. On the way to Parliament, a neutral planet, they encounter an energy cloud. A bit of energy from the cloud hits Worf through a panel he was working on. While trying to figure out what’s going on, the energy leaps from Worf to Crusher. Worf awakes with no memory of what happened while Crusher makes her way to the bridge. The energy creature then goes into the bridge station while Crusher is mystified why she is on the bridge.
Meanwhile the Anticans and Selay keep hunting each other on ship while claiming they aren’t doing nuttin. Riker is trying to keep the peace while trying to figure out the systems failures with his senior staff and Picard getting more impatient with the malfunctions. While working in engineering, the energy hits a crewman killing him. The mystery deepens when the ship drops out of warp. Picard looking at a console gets the energy transferred to him. Now taken over by an entity, he orders the Enterprise to turn around to the cloud.
The crew is now suspicious that he isn’t in his right mind but before they can do anything, he emits a large energy discharge on the bridge and heads to the transporter room to beam out to the cloud as energy to roam the universe. But it doesn’t work and Picard is trapped out in the void. Can the Enterprise save him?
Yes.
Make It So
Picard switches from stern and irritated to weird pretty wildly thanks to the creature. Since the merger didn’t work, he’s still able to make his way back to the ship. Somehow he makes a big letter “P” on the helm console and then move to the transporter where Data is able to reintegrate him.
Number 1
Riker isn’t clear on Picard’s behavior and has to have a meeting with most of the senior staff on whether or not to mutiny, or at least relieve Picard from duty. It’s not something he takes lightly. He also almost gets caught and cooked for dinner by the Selay.
Fully Functional
Data is first introduced to Sherlock Holmes and is immediately fascinated by him. He even goes so far to get a pipe and smoke it in the conference room. Man I miss the 80s. This will be a defining trait of Data’s moving forward.
Today Is A Good Day To Die
Worf gets good and fried in the very beginning. He also refers to himself as a junior officer, meaning he’s going to move up quite a bit in rank over the course of the show(s).
Phase Inducers
Geordi is there when Worf gets baked by the console and has to restrain him until Crusher can administer a sedative.
Counselor Cleavage
Troi is the first to realize that Picard ain’t right. Unfortunately her feelings is just not enough for Riker to pitch Picard out of the center seat.
Dancing Doctor
Crusher gets taken over by the entity and then later has to try to make a medical diagnosis of Picard. He refuses and orders her to take one. She correctly realizes he’s not himself and gets the entity to admit it.
Security Chief Dead Meat
Yar has her hands full dealing with the Anticans and Selay.
Shut Up, Wesley
Wesley mostly does homework and has a moment with his mom where she has no recollection of talking with him earlier, because someone else was at her steering wheel at the time.
Canon Maker
We see the dress uniforms for the first time, which Worf is right. They look like dresses. They’ll get some better ones in one of the movies but I’m pretty sure they look like this throughout the show. Really bad.
Canon Breaker
I don’t believe you can just get someone back from beaming them out as energy. Picard was completely fucked.
A Little Bloody Nose
Mr Singh in engineering is electrocuted. Very sad. Talked about for at least 30 seconds.
Technobabble
Crusher gets to wear some sort of ridiculous medical head piece that thankfully is never seen again. We also see the biobeds have a cover that goes over most of the body except for the head and below the knees.
I Know That Guy:
Colm Meany makes his second appearance. Though he still doesn’t get a name, he does have on gold instead of red.
Kavi Raz plays the doomed Mr. Singh. He was most known for a recurring role on St. Elsewhere.
What It Means To Be Human – Review
Man this episode is absolute shitshow. First off you have the Anticans and Selay. While I appreciate the makeup department didn’t just do the lazy bumpy foreheads and noses routine, the make is extensive, their role in the episode is annoying to say the least. Why they need to be there at all doesn’t make any sense. You could’ve said they were transporting delegates that we never saw and it would still be the same episode.
Then apparently at the end, Yar basically finds out that one of the delegates was murdered and being cooked for dinner at the end, and it’s all played for laughs. Oh those goofy diplomats. While they didn’t come out and straight up say he was killed, finding a large pool of blood and someone getting cooked seems like a reasonable conclusion. That’s usually kind of important.
Then this entity can take over people. Or the ship. Or people. Make up its damn mind! It takes over people and they seem to not know what’s going on, certainly have no memory of it. Some people just wake up and go “what happened?” Some people get killed. Why? Don’t know. But when it takes over Picard, the two become one and Picard is all too happy to become energy?
They know this shit is happening, they should’ve moved on Picard way earlier but instead they wring their hands until Picard shoots lighting out of his hands.
Finally I guess beaming out as energy is no big deal? Just work your way back to the ship and make your initials on the helm console. That will get you back to the transporter with the transporter trace or the framistat filter being purposely misaligned or some shit.
I will admit that Spiner does a nice Sherlock Holmes. It’s about the only bright spot and even that was inappropriate for seriousness of the situation.
Just lousy.
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