Tuesday TNG Thoughts
I’m getting back into Star Trek: The Next Generation again after years — now that I think of it, almost a generation! — of not watching it. My wife’s not a fan, but that doesn’t mean I can’t catch some on my own sometimes.
Anyway, for #TuesdayThoughts I thought I’d pick a quote I either remember or looked up for each of the six Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes I’ve seen the past month or so, some serious, some funny.
1️⃣ In “Who Watches the Watchers?,” Picard criticizes religion as being “superstition, ignorance, and fear” and decides to break the Prime Directive to keep a civilization from falling back into faith in a higher power. I wonder if that episode had a subtle influence on me later becoming an atheist?
“Millennia ago, they abandoned their belief in the supernatural. Now you are asking me to sabotage that achievement, send them back into the dark ages of superstition, ignorance, and fear!’”
2️⃣ In “Remember Me,” Beverly Crusher sums up how I feel about politics, and life in general, a lot of the time.
“If there’s nothing wrong with me... maybe there’s something wrong with the universe.”
3️⃣ It’s hard to pick just one from “Darmok.” The whole episode is well-written and riveting, and the idea of a language based entirely on metaphors, while linguistically unlikely, is still an interesting thought experiment. Here’s one I like from Dathon.
“Sokath, his eyes uncovered!”
4️⃣ “The Outcast” is a great exploration of what gender is. What Soren is forced to go through to completely erase her gender identity and sexual orientation reminds me of the gay conversion camps Mike Pence and other religious bigots support. A very powerful episode. But on a lighter note, it has probably two of the best pickup lines ever —
“SOREN: What do you think of our planet? Isn’t it beautiful?
RIKER: Yes, it is. It’s beautiful.
SOREN: We have many varieties of plant life. Perhaps you would like to inspect some of them?
RIKER: Yes, I would. I’ve always been interested in exobotany.
SOREN: Please, let me take you on a tour.
RIKER: Thank you. It’s kind of you.”
5️⃣ “Cause and Effect” has one of my favorite Star Trek plots of all time. Then again, I’m a fan of the movie “Groundhog Day.” The Enterprise getting destroyed over, and over, and over, until they figure out how to get out of the temporal loop…
“All hands abandon ship! Repeat: all hands aban...!” [the Enterprise explodes]”
6️⃣ “Chain of Command” has one of the best known Star Trek lines ever, and probably the one I’ve quoted the most. But when I watched it again recently, there was another very important line at the end of the episode that I don’t remember from when I watched it the first time — either I didn’t get the importance of it as a kid, or it didn’t stick for some reason. One of the most powerful Star Trek episodes ever.
“There. are. four. lights!”
“PICARD: At the end, he gave me a choice – between a life of comfort or more torture. All I had to do was to say that I could see five lights when, in fact, there were only four.
TROI: You didn’t say it?
PICARD: “No! No. But I was going to. I would have told him anything. Anything at all! But more than that, I believed that I could see five lights.”
What are your favorite TNG quotes? Comment below or reply to my tweet!
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