The Naked Now - S01E02

 

This is what I was waiting for, and it happened sooner than I expected. A flood of disconnected memories that I imagined happening in much later seasons and episodes. Let's take a look at this "wacky" episode. Just weeks after the Farpoint incident, the crew of the Enterprise find themselves responding to a distress code from the science vessel Tsiolkovsky, which received a hull breach while observing the collapse of a giant star. After beaming over, the away team discover the entire crew dead, frozen from exposure caused by the hull breach. Something strange was going on though, because one of the frozen crew members seemed to have been showering fully dressed. (Hmm. Didn't this happen in another very similar TV show once?)

According to my visor, this woman needs a blanket.

When they return to the Enterprise, LaForge, who was on the away team, is sweating like mad and complaining that everything is too hot. He's ordered to sick bay where Dr. Crusher tells him to stay put until she knows what's wrong with him, but he sneaks out and goes to visit his little pal, Wesley. This is only the second episode, but it clearly put a "hate me" sign on Wesley's back very quickly. He's portrayed as the ever-eager little kid, excited to show LaForge his homemade tractor field toy. It might also be the episode where Wesley was pegged as "that kid with the ugly sweaters."

LaForge manages to infect Wesley by patting him on the shoulder. You'll notice here that the infection is telegraphed with a chime sound. Was it necessary to make it that clear to the audience that the infection was passing from person to person?

Riker and Data do some research, and discover that the same strange occurrence of a person showering fully clothed happened with the original Enterprise. The disease is passed through physical contact, and makes its victims act like they are drunk. 

Eventually, everyone starts getting infected. Tasha Yar gets especially interested in robotics suddenly, and manages to pass the infection even on to Data, after he famously reveals that he is "fully functional." 

I was completely surprised that this happened in only the second episode, seeing as how it became such a big joke among Trek fans. I remembered this being at least halfway through the first season. Wrong again! Something I completely forgot about Yar telling Data that she was just five-years old when she was abandoned, and she spent her youth trying to survive and avoid "rape gangs." Good god, there's some dark stuff plopped in the middle of this laugh fest. She tells Data that she just wants gentleness and love, and he let's her know that he's been programmed with multiple techniques. Dr. Soong, you sick bastard. 

Fully functional? Can you chop? Can you dice? Can you... julienne?

Clever little Wesley, now running hot with infection, manages to take control of the engine room, and basically commanders the ship using a voice recording of Captain Picard. Drunk with power and the virus, he rigs his toy tractor beam to make a forcefield that prevents anyone from getting into the engineering room. Picard is pissed, and rightly so. Wesley's engineer friend, who he let in, pulled out all the chips from what I assume is engineering's main computer, and plays with them like toys, incapacitating the ship.

I'm helping.

Things get really bad now. The supernova explodes and sends a massive meteor hurtling toward the Enterprise. A crew member manages to disable Wesley's forcefield, and Data starts trying to put all the chips back in place, but says it's impossible to finish it in time, since he's cyber-drunk.
Our little genius Wesley realizes that he can reverse the ships tractor beam which is holding the derelict ship, to give them a push away from the meteor. This gives Data just enough time to finish replacing the chips, and the Enterprise barely escapes the burning fury of a supernova.

Dr. Crusher, having finally found an effective cure, starts administering it to all the crew. Tasha Yar angrily tells Data that this evening of excitement never happened, and Picard begrudgingly praises Wesley for saving the ship.  By using one of the plots of the original episode so soon in the run of TNG, it almost seemed like the writers and producers didn't have faith in the show succeeding on its own merits. On top of that, this episode was pretty silly. 

Considering that we had just met the characters in the previous episode, it was a strange idea to make everyone act "out of character" so soon. This episode would have fit much better near the middle of the season. And again, poor Wesley suffered here the most, since he was probably told to act drunk, and for a 16 year old kid, this is what that looked like...

    

All-in-all, though, this episode had some of the strongest TNG memories for me. 
My rating for this episode: Warp 4.5