My latest novel, Bog Queen, comes out in paperback on October 13. I will be going on tour, starting in Brooklyn on October 14. More dates coming soon!

To read previous editions of this newsletter, go here.

When I started talking about recapping Star Trek: The Next Generation for this newsletter, several friends advised me to skip Season 1 entirely. I now see why. 

I stand by the first episode of the season, “Encounter at Farpoint,” as fun and innovative television. Episode 2, “The Naked Now,” by contrast, is — well, it’s a lot of things.

Our heroes’ mission this time around is to help another ship, the SS Tsiolkovsky, which is monitoring a collapsing star. Counselor Troi gets to wear pants, which look more comfortable than her previous mini-skant uniform. Everything is good so far!

However, the Enterprise soon gets a transmission from the Tsiolkovsky. The transmission is weirdly sexual. Then there’s an explosion.

When Geordi, Lt. Tasha Yar, and a few other crew members go over to the other ship to investigate, they find evidence of what I can only describe as an ice orgy. Everyone is dead. 

As the Enterprise crew tries to figure out what happened to the Tsiolkovsky, Geordi starts behaving strangely. He’s very sweaty, he kind of seems drunk, and he starts talking about how he wishes he could see like everyone else (for the uninitiated, Geordi is blind and uses a special visor that lets him see electromagnetic radiation). I find the focus on Geordi’s eyesight in the first two episodes reductive and one-note, but rest assured, his character gets fleshed out as the series goes on.

Drunk Geordi visits Wesley Crusher in his quarters in a scene that is deeply uncomfortable because Geordi’s weirdness seems vaguely horny, and Wes is a child. Wes shows Geordi his science project, which is basically a Talkboy that plays Capt. Picard’s voice. 

Nothing actually untoward happens, but things are about to get worse, because the drunk behavior is spreading. Soon pretty much everyone in Engineering is making out or breaking stuff, enabling Wes, who is also drunk now, to take control of the ship and declare himself captain. 

Amid what is basically a sex party, Wes (again, a child) declares that the Enterprise will now serve dessert before and after every meal. My notes say “weird weird.”

Did I mention that Tasha Yar also gets drunk? Her intoxication leads her to dress hot and open up about her past, which is surprisingly dark and includes avoiding “rape gangs.” This episode is tonal chaos.

We also learn that Data, as an android, is very much not immune to the drunk thing, and can have sex, which honestly is nice for him. His human crewmates keep smirking behind his back at his android-y speech quirks, and I was glad to see him have some fun here. Data is complicated for me on this rewatch because he has always been one of my favorites, but the cultural valence of the robot who wants to be human has changed a lot since the 80s. I’m sure I will write about this more at some point.

Anyway, the crew figures out that the energy from the collapsing star is somehow altering the water in people’s bodies to make them behave as though intoxicated. And it all happened before — to Capt. Kirk and the original Enterprise crew, all the way back in the 2200s.

Dr. Crusher tries to recreate the antidote the crew discovered then, but it doesn’t work. Then she somehow improves the formula and everyone goes back to normal, just in time for the Enterprise to avoid a fatal collision with part of the collapsing star. 

Wes helps too. A tractor beam is involved. Yar and Troi return to the bridge together in a way that, to me, implies they hooked up, a development that would be cool for their characters and that will sadly never rise above subtext.

Picard closes out the episode by proclaiming, “I think we shall end up with a fine crew.” This is your takeaway here?

The outside force that disinhibits or otherwise weirds the main characters is a common trope on Star Trek, and in sci-fi more generally, but it’s strange to see it so early in the TNG series arc. We barely know these people, so we have no frame of reference for their odd behavior — while it might be satisfying to see Geordi or Data or Lt. Yar loosen up after a season of repression, here it’s just confusing. 

I was surprised to learn that “The Naked Time,” the original series episode on which “The Naked Now” is based, was only Episode 6 of the first season, and was apparently an attempt “to quickly introduce the wants and needs of new characters.” I had plans to watch this episode as research for the newsletter but, reader, I failed. If you have seen it, let me know how it is. If you have not, don’t. Do not watch “The Naked Now” either.

Next time we’ll be watching TNG Episode 3, which cannot possibly be worse.

Stray thoughts

— Near the end of the episode, Picard gets the star-water-drunkenness thing, and it is absolutely unbearable to watch. Patrick Stewart just cannot figure out how to make his character flirtatious this early in the series. I say this with love: His scenes with Dr. Crusher here are an utter humiliation.

— I’ve been making a particular “wom-wom-wom” sound whenever I want to represent a laser beam to my children. This comes up with surprising frequency — for example, in the excellent The Rock from the Sky. Turns out that sound is just the TNG tractor-beam sound. I feel sort of embarrassed that my performances have been so derivative.

What I’m reading

— My little kid has been enjoying I Broke My Butt, the sequel to I Need a New Butt. I do not like it as much as the original. I Need a New Butt is fundamentally a work of realist fiction, while I Broke My Butt violates the laws of physics and biology in ways that are never satisfactorily explained.

— I have not been reading for pleasure much recently, but I am excited to get into Téa Obreht’s Sunrise.