79 – Remember Me

Grade: C+

Summary

Dr. Crusher welcomes an old colleague of hers, named Dr. Dalen Quaice, aboard the Enterprise. Meanwhile, Wesley Crusher is experimenting with a new warp field. Suddenly, there is an explosion in engineering, and Dr. Crusher disappears.

Commentary

This episode really isn’t one of my favorites, honestly. There are some funny moments here and there, and it’s actually fairly well-acted. Dr. Crusher gets some much needed screen time, and she really carries large portions of this episode. Gates McFadden does well in this role.

But there are also several weak spots in this episode. For one thing, the writing is pretty weak, with the exception of Dr. Crusher’s lines. She actually has some great lines once she finds herself completely alone on the ship. But the rest of the crew get some really bad lines.

The episode really starts taking a nosedive once the Traveler shows up near the end. He says a bunch of nonsense, and it’s hard to understand what’s being said. He’s supposed to be helping Wesley Crusher to rescue his mother, but it just sounds odd. At one point, he tells Wesley to stop thinking about anything and concentrate on the warp bubble thing or whatever, and of course, Wesley has to be overdramatic and say he can’t. And like you’d expect, the Traveler tells him to try again, and we see Wesley do the exact same thing over again, but it works this time for some reason. It’s very cheesy and unrealistic. And yet, it’s all played up as if it were high-quality drama.

Honestly, the Traveler is not one of my favorite characters, and that’s probably the main reason I don’t like this episode.

Of Note

Late in this episode, Dr. Crusher tries to remember the first time she saw the vortex, and she says it was in engineering. But actually, it was in sickbay. Oops.

Also, when Dr. Crusher disappears in engineering toward the beginning of the episode, she is not wearing a lab coat. But when she re-appears, she suddenly has one. Hmm.