the enterprise visits an arms dealer planet looking for a lost federation ship. no life signs on the planet, a team beams down and it’s all overgrown forest. soon, a robot captures riker inside a force field and separates the away team into 3 groups and cuts off their communications. picard and dr crusher are trapped in a cave; crusher’s injured.
picard finds a computer in the cave and discovers the ai weapon salesman is fighting the enterprise as a way of showing its capabilities, for sales purposes. it’s also sending a neverending stream of floating robots to shoot lasers at people on the surface. he’s able to stop the attacks by agreeing to purchase the system.
geordi commands the enterprise admirably in orbit, fighting the planet’s defense system. a guy we’ve never seen before tries to take his command, but he keeps his cool. picard is proud of him, when he gets back on the bridge he lets geordi command enterprise a little bit longer.
Summary
s1e17 When The Bough Breaks
s1e1, s1e2 Encounter at Farpoint parts 1 and 2
s1e20 Heart Of Glory
s1e8 Justice
s1e10 Hide and “Q” s1e21 The Arsenal Of Freedom
s1e9 The Battle
s1e13 Datalore
s1e18 Home Soil
s1e11 Haven
s1e6 Where No One Has Gone Before
s1e19 Coming Of Age
s1e12 The Big Goodbye
s1e15 11001001
s1e7 Lonely Among Us
s1e14 Angel One
s1e4 Code of Honor
s1e16 Too Short A Season
s1e5 The Last Outpost
s1e3 The Naked Now
according to patrick stewart’s memoir, he was super stoked to work with whoopi. she was already established at this point as a film and broadway star, and it surprised him that she would choose to join this show that wasn’t very good yet. whoopi told him that seeing a black woman represented on the original series inspired her personally and professionally, and she wanted to be part of the show so she could give some of that back for the younger audience. a big victory for dei.
two small groups of aliens visit the enterprise and we learn about the special relationship between their two races. one race dedicates their society solely to the production of this particular type of medicine, which treats a deadly disease that only affects the other race. and that other race does literally every other job to make money to pay for their medicine.
a couple of the worker aliens are near death, and enterprise begs the other aliens to give up two doses out of their stash of billions of doses, and they’re like, “no. why would we give this away for no money?”. crusher does a little bit of research and discovers the disease was wiped out hundreds of years ago, and the worker aliens are just suffering from opiate withdrawal type addiction symptoms.
picard negotiates with the exploiter race and they reveal they knew it’s an addiction drug. he says the prime directive prevents him from just telling the worker race that they’re being exploited, but at the same time prevents the repair of the drug-carrying freighter. forcing the planet to endure withdrawals but hopefully, in time, breaking their chains
s1e17 When The Bough Breaks
s1e1, s1e2 Encounter at Farpoint parts 1 and 2 s1e22 Symbiosis
s1e20 Heart Of Glory
s1e8 Justice
s1e10 Hide and “Q”
s1e21 The Arsenal Of Freedom
s1e9 The Battle
s1e13 Datalore
s1e18 Home Soil
s1e11 Haven
s1e6 Where No One Has Gone Before
s1e19 Coming Of Age
s1e12 The Big Goodbye
s1e15 11001001
s1e7 Lonely Among Us
s1e14 Angel One
s1e4 Code of Honor
s1e16 Too Short A Season
s1e5 The Last Outpost
s1e3 The Naked Now
tasha yar is from some kind of planet resembling 1970s new york city. poverty, violence, drug addicts, rape gangs. all her flashbacks are of her cowering in the sewers. wesley is a certified supernatural savant and he failed his entrance exam to starfleet academy, so how does tasha yar get from there to the bridge of the enterprise?
episode starts with worf and tasha yar talking about the upcoming kickboxing tournament, and how tasha is the #1 seed. she kicks the most ass and everyone knows it. tasha asks worf if he bet on her, and he just says it’s the smart money. there’s clear sexual tension. i think these two have a potential future romance brewing. also, how does a society without money have gambling? this point is unexplained.
enterprise is responding to a shuttle crash on an uninhabited planet. the landing party sees a black puddle moving around the crash site suspiciously. they scan it and don’t recognize anything in it, there’s no explanation for it having intelligence. it then turns into a humanoid sludge monster and murders tasha yar. dr crusher runs over and confirms she’s dead. picard orders them to beam up and crusher does some more stuff in the medical bay but she’s too dead to bring back, this is not one of those times when they can reverse death.
troi is still trapped in the crashed shuttle, and the sludge monster is menacing her through the walls; explaining that it is an entity of pure evil. its motivations are fully focused on torturing enterprise crew members. it drags riker into the sludge and fully envelops him for like 10 minutes just to give the crew a scare
picard beams down and negotiates the release of everyone except him troi and another shuttle survivor who’s not in the main cast. troi psychoanalyzes the sludge monster and picard talks it into a point of momentary distraction, and they’re able to beam out.
tasha’s funeral features a hologram speech of tasha saying a final goodbye. i think this was a prerecorded thing she made because her job is so dangerous, but people are gonna be doing this exact thing with ai pretty soon.
s1e17 When The Bough Breaks
s1e1, s1e2 Encounter at Farpoint parts 1 and 2
s1e22 Symbiosis
s1e20 Heart Of Glory
s1e8 Justice
s1e10 Hide and “Q”
s1e21 The Arsenal Of Freedom
s1e9 The Battle
s1e13 Datalore
s1e18 Home Soil
s1e11 Haven
s1e6 Where No One Has Gone Before
s1e19 Coming Of Age
s1e12 The Big Goodbye
s1e15 11001001
s1e7 Lonely Among Us s1e23 Skin Of Evil
s1e14 Angel One
s1e4 Code of Honor
s1e16 Too Short A Season
s1e5 The Last Outpost
s1e3 The Naked Now
A pretty poor episode, really. It was notable that they established some actual stakes for away missions by killing Tasha, but otherwise the episode is stupid. The alien has no character to speak of. She might as welll have beamed into a vat of acid by mistake or something.
Yes, that’s my recollection as well and it is what Wikipedia says too. It’s just that the manner of doing it - a “random” death - was I guess supposed to be a profound statement about the risks or exploration, but it comes across as just lazy writing. They could have made her die for a reason, not because they just happened to beam down to a planet that just happens to have a completely undevelopment murder alien there. They could have also had her transfer to another ship because that’s a normal thing. Her death was pointless and stupid.
i think on one hand, it honors the ultimate asskicker character to be singled out and murdered by a being so powerful that the whole enterprise can’t even kill it with planetary bombardment from space. on the other hand, denise crosby is leaving the show because it’s extra dumb, so to have her character killed by a supremely dumb villain character is an interesting kind of meta fuck you/good point superposition
