168 – Thine Own Self

Grade: B+

Summary

Counselor Troi returns to the Enterprise from her class reunion and finds Dr. Crusher in command of the ship. Data is away on a pre-industrial planet, attempting to clean up some radioactive fragments left there from a crashed shuttlecraft.

Commentary

This enjoyable episode is one of the best of the 7th season so far, but I still have about 8 more to watch. The best part of this episode is the acting – especially from Kimberly Cullum, who was 12 years old when this episode was filmed. Most child actors don’t do as well as Kimberly did.

The storyline could have been done a bit better. The parts with Counselor Troi were fine, but they seemed to have been tacked onto the Data-centric episode when they realized it wouldn’t be long enough without a little more content. This is especially evident to me right at the beginning of the episode. The original opening scene of the episode was probably when Data came into the village. The reason I think that is because of how it ends with Data not being able to respond. The viewer wouldn’t have known anything about Data and why he was on this planet or what could possibly have happened. But the completed episode has an opening scene of Troi and Crusher, and that’s where we find out where Data went, and what his purpose was. So the shock of seeing Data arrive in the village is minimized.

There are a few other reasons why I think the Troi-centered parts of this episode were just added later, but the point is that I think the storyline could have been better. Personally, I would have liked to have seen more of the village. I’ve always been interested in pre-industrial history, and it would have been fun to have seen more of how these people lived and what they did each day.

Finally, one last thing is that Data’s face is injured at one point in this episode. But it doesn’t look real at all. I think they should have either done this better or found some other way to prove Data wasn’t an Ice Man.

Still, overall it’s a good episode and one of the best from the seventh season. Maybe I would feel differently if this final season hadn’t been so sub-standard.

Of Note

Captain Picard only appears in the last scene of this episode, and Worf and LaForge only appear as holograms.