Emergence

DVD, TNG S7 (Emergence)

There's a trend towards the end of a Star Trek series, that often some of those final episodes are a bit weak, and this episode continues the trend. It's like they're just waiting for the series to finish, which in this case was probably true since the studio was anxious for them to get the film careers of the ground.

So the story was a reasonably good concept, but the characters seemed a bit slow since I'd never seen this before, yet I quickly realised it must be the ship either communicating for some reason or doing something else (such as creating an intelligence). But our crew take so long to work out what's going on, with such drawn out conversations that it takes away from any impetus that might get going. Feels like so much more could have been done - on DS9 or Voyager I'm sure the concept has been approached more kinetically, with a lot less slow piecing together.

The crew are all utilised, so that's a bonus, but you wonder if the writers are too tired to come up with snappy dialogue or character scenes, anything to make it more than a dull mystery, with a little bit of surrealism. It's that difficult third to last episode.

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