TNG Re-Watch: Who Watches The Bonding Of The Booby Trap And The Enemy

Monday night (Independence Day) we headed over to the Dodger game (which was awesome and I ate nachos out of a hat) and because I have a dime store immune system and went out amongst humanity and nature I spent the next day totally laid out by the crud. Also, I took some (expired) Mucinex DM and it messed me up big time. Big Time. Thanks to the meds I renewed my love affair with the couch and together we watched four episodes of Next Gen (and five episodes of The Murdoch Mysteries) Granted, I was tripping balls somewhat stoned (and not in a pleasant way) from the cold medicine, so I'm not sure how great my attention span really was but anyway, here's what I noticed:

1-Beverly's sudden and unexpected hair growth.
In my addled state, I was unduly distressed by the plain fact that Beverly's hair grew about eight inches over the course of two episodes:

Who Watches The Watchers

The Enemy

2- Worf has a "brother"
In The Bonding, Worf leads an away mission in which a crewman is killed. The crewman in question was a single mom who leaves behind a little boy and Worf feels obliged to go through a Klingon ritual that would bond the two of them as brothers. Lots of wacky stuff happens (or may not have happened, again, I wasn't really on top of things yesterday) but my takeaway here is that at the end of the episode Worf is all, "Now we're going to be forever linked as brothers." And then we never see this kid again.

Just doing brother stuff, I guess. 

3-Picard is a god, or not, maybe.
In Who Watches The Watchers a bunch of scientists accidentally reveal themselves to the primitive society they're studying and then religion happens. Their god is Picard because, I mean, come on, if you're lining this bunch of 23rd century jerks up and saying, "Pick one of these to be your god," obviously you're going to pick The Picard. I mean, if you've seen seasons 1-2, you're definitely going to pick Picard. At least, if Guinan isn't there. Because then you might pick Guinan. Anyway, they pick Picard. And Picard goes through all these god-like elaborate but earnest steps to show his new followers that he isn't a god and finally he's out of options and is all, "If the only way that you will believe I'm mortal is if you kill me, then fine! I will die!" And so they shoot him in the chest with a bow and arrow and he dies.

Except... he doesn't. He goes back to the ship (in a scene we don't see) and Beverly fixes him up and the next time we (and his followers) see The Picard, it looks like this:

And The Picard is calmly explaining the tenets of the Federation and the core principles of anthropology and suchlike and somehow no one is talking about the fact that The Picard died and then (probably on the third day) was resurrected. I mean, I may have been kind of zonked out yesterday but I did happen to grow up in the Bible Belt and, let me tell you, if I've seen one Sermon on the Mount painting on someone's grandma's bathroom wall, I've seen 'em all.

Hmm. I had a "really good" joke to stick here but in the time it took me to put together this Space Jesus photo collage, I totally forgot what it was...

Moving on.

4-Booby Trap
This episode has the word "booby" in it. Given that this is a holodeck intensive episode, I feel hoodwinked.

5- The Enemy
In this one the Enterprise comes upon some Romulans where they aren't supposed to be. One of them is stuck on a junk planet with Geordi. The other one is dying in sickbay and the only thing that can save him is a ribosome donation from Worf. You know what's super surprising and kind of awesome? Worf won't do it. And, he never backs down. And, he never shows any guilt about it. Obviously, TNG shouldn't be overrun with this kind of thing. If it were, it wouldn't be TNG. But I like the complexity here. Michael Dorn is given some meatier stuff in this season and he's making the most of it. Worf's character is deepened by his unqualified hatred of Romulans. And, Geordi's is deepened by his willingness to compromise à la Enemy Mine.

Ok. Well, it's been 24 hours and I'm fairly sure I've finished riding the Mucinex DM roller coaster so I have to get back to work. Fortunately for me, some of that work entails watching TNG. Unfortunately for me, the next episode is The Price:

Give me patience, The Picard. Amen.