80 – Legacy

Grade: D+

Summary

Responding to a distress signal, the Enterprise arrives at Turkana 4, the home planet of former security chief Tasha Yar. There, they find out that two Federation officers have been taken prisoner. One of the factions on the planet offers help to recover the two crewmen, but it comes with a price.

Commentary

I don’t like this episode. It’s probably my least favorite of the entire 4th season, but I haven’t seen all of them recently. So it’s possible that there are a few others worse than this one. Well, probably not.

The trouble with this episode is the writing. It’s horrible. The script sounds like something you’d expect a high schooler to have written. I had a very hard time listening to the dialogue and getting into the story. The scene cuts are terrible, and there are just too many “ta-da” moments right at the end of some supposedly poignant scenes. My guess is that this is a leftover episode from at least two seasons ago that just didn’t get produced until later for some unknown reason.

As if that weren’t enough, the acting is terrible. It’s easily as bad as anything I’ve seen since the first season of the series. The characters are flat and don’t even resemble what we’ve come to expect from them.

I wish I could be more specific about what I didn’t like about this episode, but it just stinks. Don’t watch this unless you’re like me and you have to see every episode this series produced.

Of Note

In one part of this episode, Picard talks about the first time he met Tasha Yar, and that he requested her for service aboard the Enterprise. But in the pilot episode and in the series finale All Good Things, it’s obvious that she was already part of the crew when Picard took command of the ship. Oops.