Clues

DVD, TNG S4 (Clues)

A truer title there could not be. The clues are all there and it becomes a bit of a loop, or could have turned into one. I'd love to know how they sorted things out so there would be no suspicion - what about Dr. Crusher's moss? They couldn't kill it off without her noticing. Admittedly she mentioned she had more samples, so those could have been supplanted for the fully grown specimens, but what about Counsellor Troi? She would still have seen herself in the mirror and had a bad feeling like she was a mask through which something else was staring... That was a great creepy bit, a really chilling line of dialogue, adding to the general paranoia. It's an episode that is absolutely brilliant the first time round because it gets into your head and all kinds of theories spin out, screaming the question that is at the centre of it all: is Data lying?

It's all so well thought out, and although that first time impact is lost on repeated viewings it still has something, especially when you hear Data gladly accept his fate, willing to be 'stripped to his wires' in Picard's words, to find the cause of his deception. He would die to save the ship and crew just as we always thought he would, but here his actions speak louder than words! It does get tricky to explain the crew's eventual acceptance of the facts, when, added to the points mentioned above, it must be two days out of their memories now, which is even harder to disguise. Still, it was accepted and that's the important thing, and there's something heroic and sad about Data carrying the secret to his grave however far into the future that might be. Even Nurse Alyssa Ogawa gets a moment, and O'Brien's newly married life comes into it again. All this and Guinan experiencing the Dixon Hill program too? Season 4 was truly a break out season!

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