A quick administrative note before we dive into “The Naked Now.” The warp factor scale that we’re using is an out-of-10 scale, not the out-of-6 scale that was used for the TOS Rewatch. So “Encounter at Farpoint” was 4 out of 10, not 4 out of 6. Big difference, I know.
Also, we’re adding a new category, though we won’t see it in this episode: What Happens on the Holodeck Stays on the Holodeck, which is for when the holodeck is used in the episode.
Onward….
“The Naked Now”
Written by John D.F. Black and J. Michael Bingham
Directed by Paul Lynch
Season 1, Episode 2
Production episode 40271-103
Original air date: October 5, 1987
Stardate: 41209.2
Captain’s log: A rendezvous with the S.S. Tsiolkovsky turns to tragedy, as the crew apparently partied themselves to death. The bridge crew blows out the hatch, condemning them all to die in space, and the Enterprise away team finds both engineering and crew quarters frozen. La Forge also finds a woman who was showering with her clothes on when the heat was bled from the room.
Since he caught her when she fell out, and since the 24th century apparently forgot stuff about not disturbing crime scenes, he catches her with his bare hands, then starts acting unusually snotty for someone who’s supposed to be the nerdy friendly guy. Then he leaves sickbay, leaving his combadge behind, and wanders the ship like Typhoid Mary, if Typhoid Mary was carrying the happy-fun disease. Then he gets maudlin about how he can’t see.
Riker remembers reading something about showering with clothes on, and Data goes through Wikipedia to try to find the entry on “The Naked Time.” Unfortunately, the messed-up water molecules from that episode are just different enough that Dr. McCoy’s cure won’t work.
Meanwhile, Yar gets girly, Wesley takes over engineering, Troi gets moopy, Data gets ridiculous, Picard gets wussy, and so on. Riker gets infected, but apparently avoids actually getting the disease from the sheer power of his manliness.
A stellar fragment explodes and heads toward the ship. Wesley uses his fancy-ass tractor beam gadget to slow the fragment down by throwing the Tsiolkovsky in its way while Data puts the engines back together.
Crusher, despite being a drunken loon mooning over Picard, manages to come up with a cure, and all is once again well.
Thank you, Counselor Obvious: “All I sense from him is confusion.” Pretty much everyone can tell that La Forge is confused….
Can’t We Just Reverse The Polarity? “Then reversing power leads back through the force activator.” This is how Wesley saves the ship.
No Sex, Please, We’re Starfleet: The crew quarters on the Tsiolkovsky is filled with frozen naked people, leading one to think that, had they not been frozen to death, La Forge would’ve walked in on an orgy. Amusingly, the only one clothed is the woman in the shower. Meanwhile, infected people all over the Enterprise start smooching, Yar seduces Data (though she later insists “It never happened”), Troi gets moopy on Riker, and Picard and Crusher make goo-goo eyes at each other, to the point where Picard skips a little, which is quite possibly the goofiest moment in Sir Patrick Stewart’s career, and yes, that includes Life Force and King of Texas.
The Boy!? Assistant Chief Engineer Shimoda inexplicably leaves Wesley in charge of engineering—I really hope he was already infected, otherwise that’s an appalling lack of judgment, especially since there’s an entire engineering staff to take command—and then the kid completely takes over engineering. Shimoda removes all the isolinear chips, killing the engines, which is kind of a problem when the ship needs to escape exploding stellar matter. (I’m thinking there’s a good reason why we never saw Shimoda again after this episode…) And then Wes saves the ship.
If I Only Had a Brain… Data is apparently “fully functional.” WOO HOO!
There is No Honor in Being Pummeled: Worf is the only person on the ship besides Riker who doesn’t get affected by the disease, and he pretty much holds the bridge together while everything is falling apart. Which is almost too bad, as seeing Worf drunk might’ve been a lot more fun….
Welcome Aboard: Brooke Bundy plays MacDougal, the first of four chief engineers we see on the Enterprise during the first season before they give La Forge the job in season two.
I Believe I Said That: “There was a young lady from Venus / Whose body was shaped like a—”
“Captain to security, come in!”
“Did I say something wrong?”
“I don’t understand their humor, either.”
Data quotes a limerick, Picard interrupts, Data is confused, and Worf delivers the punchline.
Trivial Matters: Obviously, this is a sequel to the original series episode “The Naked Time,” even giving that episode’s writer John D.F. Black story credit. The less charitable would call it a ripoff, but they practically put up a neon sign saying that it’s a sequel to “The Naked Time,” so that accusation doesn’t really hold up. However, there’s nothing in this episode as entertaining as Sulu bare-chested with an epee, and Wesley being nerdy in the engine room is nowhere near as much fun as Riley singing, “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen” in the engine room.
Make It So: What a total misfire. It’s rarely a good idea to do an episode where everyone acts out of character as only the second one out of the gate, since we don’t know enough about these people for their acting strange to be meaningful. True, we did learn some factoids about the crew—more about Yar’s horrendous upbringing, Wesley’s sooooooper genius, the fact that Crusher and Picard carry a torch for each other—but you have to sort through a lot of chaff before you get to that particular wheat.
Worse, the “drunken” behavior is stereotypical and histrionic. The crew doesn’t act like they’re drunk, they act like high-schoolers pretending to be drunk. Notable exceptions are Gates McFadden and Brent Spiner, who are genuinely amusing as opposed to cringe-inducing.
The best that can be said about the episode is that we get Yar seducing Data, which has two benefits: Yar in an awesome piece of William Ware Theiss-designed sexy clothing, and Data informing the universe that he’s fully functional. The latter was definitely a gift that kept on giving.
Warp factor rating: 2
Keith R.A. DeCandido has written a mess of stuff about Star Trek. This rewatch is simply adding to the mess. Follow him online at his blog or on Facebook or Twitter under the username KRADeC.
Data saying he was “fully functional” was classic… my circle of friends still uses that phrase (and laughs about it) to this day. I would say this line and Picard’s “resistance is futile” are the most memorable lines from the show
What an awkward second episode. I remember back when it aired being confused that these characters I just met the episode prior were now OOC. Can you be OOC when you have not even established what is in character? Imagine how it was for the actors. No wonder a number of them mentioned being uncomfortable early on.
I prefer these sort of episodes to be a fan reward later. In retrospect I like it, but at the time (besides being under ten when I first watched it) it came out of nowhere. I think my parents almost took it off my viewing list after this one. Fortunately they didn’t. :)
It takes Riker and Data quite a while to find out about Kirk’s encounter with the drunkeness disease. Googling for (“star trek” shower “clothes on”) returns hits on this episode and the TOS episode at the touch of a key. Apparently they forgot a thing or two about search engines over the next 400 years. :-)
I couldn’t believe how much better The Naked Time was than this when I first saw it (since it was in that order). Sometimes in the first series it almost seems like they’re deliberately trying to get cancelled…
Ugh. This episode, coming after the ugliness of “Farpoint”, convinced me that I wasn’t going to make TNG a regular part of my schedule. It really turned off a lot of people that their first season was so bad.
@grenadier #3
However, they wouldn’t have used “Star Trek” in their search. I just did a search for shower clothes on and I saw only one hit with sci-fi in the header (on the eighth page) and neither “Star Trek” nor those eposide titles appeared in headers in the twenty pages I looked through.
I hated this episode then, and I still do today. I, too, think it was a major misstep on the creative team’s part to do basically a straight remake of an old episode their second time out!
Interestingly, though, “The Naked Time” was one of the first six or so episodes of TOS. So the original series somehow managed to have an early “OOC” episode when what was “in character” had only barely been established.
Re: “Amusingly, the only one clothed is the woman in the shower.” — You know that’s a direct homage to a line in “The Naked Time,” right? Lt. Tormolen tells Spock about someone (off-screen) who was frozen on Psi 2000 while taking a shower fully clothed.
At least the Data-Yar hookup has some emotional resonance at several points later in the franchise (“Skin of Evil,” “The Measure of a Man,” and even First Contact.) But, overall — um, yeah, ick.
This episode is responsible for me not watching any of TNG for two years while it was airing. I only came back to watching it when everyone started talking about The Best of Both Worlds.
Hoo boy, did this episode piss me off as a fan of TOS and The Naked Time.
IIRC, there was a writer’s strike that sort of forced them to go to the TOS well this early. But yeah, it was pretty bad and didn’t bode well for the show at all.
This was the episode that convinved me ST:NG sucked and I stopped watching it for a couple of years.
One thing you all seem to have missed is when they Google “showering with clothes on” and get a hit in the original Enteprise, not one of them has ever heard of James T. Kirk.
Naked Now was intellectually lazy and emblematic of the poor story writers they had at the beginning. It also showed how Gene Roddenberry didn’t have any idea of quality control on stories — he was enamored with the character of Wesley Crusher and it only got worse over the years until Crusher gained Traveller powers. Oh, please. I rejoiced when they finally jettisoned his character from the series to attend Star Fleet.
…and this is when the show should have been taken out behind the chemical sheds and shot.
What bothered me was it was bad. THEY KNEW it was bad. They also knew the words “Star trek” meant they could crap in a ziploc bag and Trek fans would watch
We’re just lucky it came out in ’87 and not ’07 or TNG would be a 2 week series at best.
The funny thing is that I never saw this episode during the first run – in fact most of the first season I had to miss due to my evening job (I couldn’t do the take-off-my-badge-and-watch-the-episode stunt every week like I mentioned in my Farpoint comment).
DemetriosX: No, the writer’s strike didn’t hit until the following year — it began in March 1988, five months after this episode aired. It affected the end of the first season and the beginning of the second (and also truncated the second season’s episode count).
I do rember being interested in the next one becuse the main aliens were black which never happened in the 1960s
Question for hardcore TNG fans How far into the series did they get before they revealed Tasha Yar had the most depressing backstory ever?
This was amusing. Yeah, it would have been better later on once we got to know the characters, but it still holds up pretty well, which can’t be said of most of TNG S1.
Tasha was funny, Data was too. Pretty much the rest of this episode was a loss. I agree the timing was horrible.
The single moment that shows how much TNG improves over the next couple seasons is that in “The Measure of a Man” the events of this episode and “The Skin of Evil” are used as milestones in the development of Data’s character, and they seem genuinely touching in retrospect.
Episodes like this made me hope for an early cancellation of the series. Compared to this, some of the later “Emissary”/Bajoran religious nonsense in early seasons of DS9 seem like Oscar-caliber stuff.
So I’m watching the series for the first time while you are all apparently watching it for at least the second time. When do they start getting good?
I mean, I’m enjoying them, but when do they really start to show why the series was continued?
astrodad: There are flashes in the first season, but the tremendous upheaval of the writing staff makes for some rocky roads. There are good episodes here and there, but mostly the show doesn’t start to show signs of excellence until the second season (some of the show’s best episodes are from the unfairly-maligned sophomore year), truly hitting its stride in the third.
roblewmac: Yar’s backstory was revealed in the very first episode, and she spelled it out in more detail in her seduction of Data lin “The Naked Now” (because nothing gets an android into fully-functional mode faster than hitting him with sexy talk about rape gangs, apparently….).
Isn’t the general consensus (for new viewers) that we should skip seasons one and two and instead start at season three?
amygdala11: Absolutely not. Season 2 has too many critical episodes to skip: “The Measure of a Man,” “Q Who,” “The Emissary,” just to name three….
Thanks everyone. I’ll stick through it, if only to appreciate the improvement. I am up to episode 6.
jEEZ i knew it was early not THAT early! it was the first time I heard the pharse “Rape-gang ” ewww
Yes, Tasha Yar…. such a waste of a character, although I do wonder what would have come of her had Denise Crosby not gotten bored. I could easily have seen her character evolve into a command position like they did with Worf, and possibly she could have been the iconoclastic glass-shattering first female captain that ultimately was Capt. Janeway.
But I digress.
This episode was so appallingly bad. I often think how weird it was that the Chief Engineer was not a prominent role, this early in the series. It was this episode that forged my decades long hatred of Wesley Crusher that even the awesomeness of Wil Wheaton has done little to quash, although the guy does try ;)
Meanwhile, I think an added feature should be the Troi Wardrobe Detector (Monitor?) – she had so, so many oddball outifts, if I recall. Was this the season where she was wearing a miniskirt and big hair, or was she in that grey pantsuit with the décolletage and that awful bedazzled upward bun? Don’t even get me started on the flowing, teal spandex ballgown.
Data, quoting Shylock from The Merchant of Venice (or Venus): “If you prick us, do we not … leak?”
Brent Spiner could always get a laugh.
@Ludon #6
Yes, I get that Data would not have used “star trek” in the query. The point is that in 400 years, search engines should be better not worse. Data would likely have had some other search term to limit his query by that should have returned a hit in a hurry. Focusing on my search term misses the point that it takes Data forever to come up with something relevant.
grenadier: Sorry, I disagree. All Data had to go on was “showering with clothes on.” That’s all Riker gave him, at which point Data then had to search through a database that includes information about, not just all of human history on Earth, but the history and cultures of thousands of planets, races, species, nations, etc. all across the galaxy.
When Riker was able to add another search term to the query — ships called Enterprise — Data found it in half a second.
Let’s not forget that this episode aired in 1987. There was no Google or Yahoo! or even Alta Vista back then, and while there were some engines you could use to search for magazine articles or library books, they weren’t especially fast or always reliable.
Star Trek’s always looking ahead to the future, of course, but it’s not like any of the writers at the time had reason to be particularly prescient about how quick and efficient the search for information was about to become, or how fast the advance in technology would be.
krad’s point @@@@@ 31 about the vast amount of information to search through is also a good one.
I’ve got to disagree with some of the people on this thread — I think this was a great episode. Yes, it was a completely blatant rip-off of a TOS episode, so blatant that they came right out and said it. But “The Naked Time” as a very important episode for TOS, and TNG needed something similar. On shows like Star Trek, it’s easy for the characters to get lost in their jobs — captain, chief engineer, doctor, etc. In “The Naked Time,” quite by accident, we got to see who everybody was once all their inhibitions had been stripped away. We got to see how uncertain Kirk was under his confident exterior, we got to see how much emotional termoil and conflict were hidden inside Spock, we got to see what an awesome guy Sulu was when you put a sword in his hand, got to see Chapel’s crush on Spock, we got to see Bones at his most surly as he tried to cure the disease, and learned once and for all that, whatever century you’re in, Irish people are really fun when they’re drunk. That single episode, early in TOS, laid the groundwork for all the major characters (“The Paradise Syndrome” finished the job half a year later).
I really think the concept came along by happy accident for TOS, but it can only be on purpose that the writers recycled it for episode 2 of TNG. When we rewatch it now, I think we take it for granted. But there are a number of enduring character traits that get their start right here — Picard and Beverly’s attraction to one another, Geordi’s yearning for normal sight, Tasha’s traumatic childhood, just how brilliant Wes really is, Data’s desire to be human, Riker’s grace under pressure (seriously, he holds up much better than Picard once infected, that dude can hold his Psi 2000 virus!), Tasha and Deanna’s friendship. We needed to know all of this information about the characters and “The Naked Now” gets the job done just like “The Naked Time” did. Everything’s out in the open, now the show can really start!
@28EmpressMaude, good point. But if Crosby had stayed I think Michael Dorn would’ve gone. Not enough script for both of those characters I think. And that would’ve been too bad as I think the early Klingon episodes are what saved ST:TNG from deing cancelled.
I didn’t like this episode when it came out at all. Didn’t consider it an ‘homage’ or a ‘sequel’ just a blatant ripoff of the original series that screamed of a show floundering around with no particular direction.
That said, however, I do agree that Brent Spiner was the best part of the whole episode. “Fully functional” is one of the best Star Trek lines ever and as EugeneR@29 said data quoting Shylock was a riot.
Kato
Sheesh! There are some real cynics on this board. Apart from @Pendard I feel like I’m the only one who appreciated Naked Now.
Mind you, I didn’t exactly love it when it first aired – but – I didn’t hate it either. Indeed, while some of you are calling it a blatant ripoff, I would call it a fitting homage to TOS. The episode establishes a continuity between this Enterprise and its crew and its predescessor.
Despite the missteps in the first season, overall it’s still a strong outting for ST: TNG in my humble opinion. Go easy on the show, will ya?(!)
@Gnome, no, I totally enjoyed the episode, but we’re talking after not seeing it for several years now. Most of my recent TNG experiences have been through rewatching the movies, mainly Generations and First Contact. Watching this episode after that provides some levity and depth, even if it is retrospective depth. Watching Picard skip was pretty funny. However, this episode might have been better received if it was moved to the middle of the season to establish the characters as NOT being ridiculous.
I missed this one first run so it ended up being about the 10th episode I saw. Based on that running order it plays a bit better. That being said it still stinks compared to the original and is an awkward use of the characters no matter how developed they are.
Oh, and MacDougal? Worst. Engineer. Evar. “I can’t help you, bridge! SOMEONE has yanked out all the control chips!” She sounds like a customer service rep with a bad attitude.
“They also knew the words “Star trek” meant they could crap in a ziploc bag and Trek fans would watch”
And that was pretty much the case with me. I was 20 years old, loved TOS as a kid, loved the movies even more, and had no girlfriend. Just by virtue of the fact that it was Star Trek made me keep watching. I loved the characters of Picard and Data and how different they were from Kirk and Spock. I also liked Worf and loved the idea of Klingons being Federation allies.
I knew the writing had to get better and it did. But never in my wildest dreams did I think that TNG would be the first of 4 spin-off series.
“The single moment that shows how much TNG improves over the next couple seasons is that in “The Measure of a Man” the events of this episode and “The Skin of Evil” are used as milestones in the development of Data’s character, and they seem genuinely touching in retrospect.”
It’s true. Future character development is this episode’s only redeeming factor. If the Tasha-Data thing hadn’t become a vital part of Data’s character, this would just be bad TV and not even worthy of discussion.
I guess I’m the only one that liked this story. I also don’t understand the Wesley bashing. In the last 2 seasons I personally couldn’t stand DR. Crusher, but I couldn’t tell you why.
Maybe someone can help, but correct me if I’m wrong, but the idea of a stellar core fragment is also something that does not happen, I believe. When a giant star collapses like the one in the episode, first off, unless it’s about to become a supernova, it takes a long time for the collapse to occur, number one, and number two, the core collapses in on itself, and there is no piece of the core that’s able to escape and float about the galaxy. I believe that’s right, isn’t it?
The Data-Tasha coupling really bugs me. First of all they’re both “drunk”, he’s an android so why does a virus affect him anyway, and then afterward she tells hime(on the bridge no less) to pretend what happened never happen and to keep it under his hat. Not exactly affirming to his “personhood”. Not like Brent Spiner needed that to boost his popularity although he was truly funny acting drunk. At least he can joke about it at Star Trek Cons, the whole “fully functional” bit.
Obviously I’m *very* late to the party, but I recently decided to do a proper, in order rewatch, as opposed to jumping around to specific episodes.
While just about every criticism of this episode is completely valid and justified, having just watched “Encounter at Farpoint” and this episode back-to-back I would pretty much reverse their respective ratings for one reason alone: pacing. Yes, this episode has a LOT wrong storywise and characterwise, and doing an out-of-character episode before the characters have really been established was a terrible idea. I groan-laughed at the sight of “a chunk of the star” flying directly toward the ship with no apparent other debris from this massive… explosion? implosion? visible anywhere. And there were plenty of things “established” in this episode I’m sure the later writing staff tried to do their best to ignore and/or forget.
But the one thing this episode has going for it over the pilot is that it doesn’t drag. There were *far* too many points in Farpoint where I was restlessly waiting for the meat of the story I vaguely remembered to start happening. All the bad bits of Farpoint are more pronounced simply because you have all these long establishing shots and pointless pauses to reflect on the problems. At least with Naked Now, while there are plenty of cringe-inducing moments, they aren’t as drawn out, and there’s at least the beginning of a sense that this crew isn’t so totally clueless that they have to be led by the nose to the solution.
You could say this is damning with faint praise, but I kept waiting through most of the second half of Farpoint for Picard to just get a clue already, based on my memory of him from later seasons, and Q had to drop hint upon hint before he finally cottoned on to the situation, long after it should have been obvious to even the slowest viewer. Here, there were plenty of lapses in medical and security procedures that even the mixed crew of Voyager wouldn’t make in its early episodes, but at least there was a sense of movement to the story in every scene (even the painful, stupid ones).
@krad 31 I decided to re-read this re-watch after reading The Naked Time‘s re-watch and I re-alized (see what I did there??) I should try actually googling “Shower with clothes on” in which case the first link was a youtube video of people showering with their clothes on. When I googled “Shower with clothes on enterprise” the first link it brought up was the Memory Alpha entry on The Naked Time. So no wonder Data found it so fast 348 years from now!!
When Yar is preening in front Troi with the flowery print dress, I could have sworn she says “there are plenty of stores on the Enterprise” or something to that effect. Really?
@45 JohnC Yea she did say something to that effect–might have been more along the lines that ship’s stores have a large selection, but yea…. Incidentally, they kind-of ret-conned what “ship’s stores” meant in Data’s Day, as being a replicator-based system, when they showed Worf and Data shopping for wedding gifts and a little kid “bought” a stuffed animal which clearly came from a replicator (it materialized on the counter in front of them).
I just watched the episode again and felt like commenting on something, then looked and noticed that my previous comment was exactly two years ago to the day. I don’t know what that means but I’m going to conclude that it has momentous import, so don’t ruin it for me.
Both TOS and this series have episodes very early on revealing that as time progresses, people will gradually stop worrying about the concept of communicable freaking disease. At least in Naked Time, Tormolen is wearing an environmental suit, but decides hey, I’ll just take it off so I can scratch my nose. So he’s the only real dumbass in that situation. Here, despite obvious signs that something is amiss on a ship where everyone’s, ummmm DEAD, they just beam over without any precautions whatsoever. And even after they identify that there’s something spreading among the crew, everybody just keeps touching each other. It’s maddening.
And I hate to be so cliche in loathing Wesley Crusher with a zeal that borders on fanaticism, but oh my sweet Lord I wish someone would punch him in the face, and it’s only episode 2 of my rewatch of a rewatch.
Why does this episode exist? If I hadn’t been infatuated with the totally awesome Patrick Stewart I’d have checked out right here.
KRAD, I hope you don’t mind this VERY late comment, but I was looking through the list of episodes I’d commented on and this was one of them and a thought occurred to me. I used to own a book by a couple of guys who reviewed every episode and film made to that point (late 90s or so) and I remember the review of this episode started by the authors remarking how it seemed so odd that this episode, which is generally panned critically, was pretty much universally hated by the cast, keeps showing up on audience/fan lists of their favorite episodes (at least back then).
@49 – That’s pretty interesting. I wonder how audience reaction was gauged back then, other than in ratings or letter-writing.
@Neuralnet I guess there’s no way to say this without coming off as a pedantic wet blanket but Data never says “I’m fully functional”. Yar uses that phrase and he affirms it and elaborates that he’s “programmed in multiple techniques… a broad variety of pleasuring”.
I was in my early to mid teens when I watched TNG and I thought the fully functional bit was comedy gold. Even if the rest of it was forgotten, pretty sure me and my brother quoted that line for yeeeeears!
I found this one fairly amusing. My only issue is not putting this episode further down the line, after the audience has gotten a feel for the cast. Yet they explicitly set this early on in Picard’s captaincy so you can’t even watch this out of order. It’s weird.
I know that the constant complaint about this episode is that it aired much too early in the show’s run and I agree. A couple of irritating issues: the Oberth-class vessel is much too large in comparison to the Enterprise and it makes zero sense that Data would have been infected. Other than that, this is a fun romp and I’d put it in the same category as Season Two’s “Up The Long Ladder”: disliked by many, but very watchable.
There is one line in this episode that bugs me to this day, which comes right after Riker and Picard uncover the events of The Naked Time:
PICARD: Data, download this information to medical immediately.
And then Data replies with “downloading“.
And somehow, neither actor – nor any of the writers and producers – caught that typo. And yes, I know the internet wasn’t yet a thing in 1987, but I’m assuming the term upload was already common amongst programmers and computer engineers. Someone forgot to proof the script and consult them.
Just starting my own personal rewatch and I admit I like this one. It was bizarre but fun. And there was something about the Beverly Crusher character here that I really liked. Even before she became infected, she wasn’t entirely certain of herself, which made her character more well-rounded than the smug and insufferable boor she became later in the series.
Now for a positive brush stroke for this episode. The look of TNG in first two seasons was obviously campy – jumpsuits ahoy!, the bridge reeked of Eddie Bauer, Riker commanded the Good Ship Lollipop, etc, ad nauseum. Picard had a stiffer (spoiler alert) persona but on the other hand with some fantastic comedic delivery/timing.especially when he’s responding to when he’s informed of a serious happening. Dr Crusher and Picard are alone basically an inch apart (buh-duh-bum), Picard proclaims “There must be a cure. Some Formula.” Crusher moves her left arm forward and then Beavis & Butt-head grunts ensue. Also on a plain observational tip, we get the view that there is more than 20 crew member aboard. Wesley’s gag to command the ship also reminded me of similar prank toy in the late 80s. Is the script/story terrible? Yes. Is it “terribly” hilarious? Yes. There concludes my blubber so out of 10, this episode receives Data’s fully functional “three thumbs up”.
Picard orders the transporter set “to maximum decontamination” — which, I dunno, might be a good idea as a general default.
Meanwhile, Data finds the records of Bones’ cure and neglects to mention that he’d just given the guy a tour of the ship a week before.
I think bare-chested Sulu with a sword and the revelation that Data is “fully functional” are pretty far up there in Trek moments that have penetrated (as it were) the wider pop consciousness, which is something, but the criticism of this episode is on target.
I’ve been a little bit of a thorn in the side of these rewatches. But I’ve been rewatching this ep a lot lately. This episode could have been a great idea for the first season. But the episode is poorly executed if for no other reason than the episode conflated drunkenness and the loss of inhibitions as one in the same.
“Naked Time” actually exhibited the two well hand-in-hand-and what the characters were like without inhibitions. And each character had a moment: Tormolen suffering from crippling self-doubt, Sulu’s desire to be an adventurous swashbuckler, Riley wanting to flaunt Irish royal pride, Nurse Chapel’s love for Spock, Spock’s profound inner turmoil at being Vulcan and human, and Kirk’s status as a Janus being a Starfleet Captain. But “Naked Now” overemphasizes the drunkenness-and does so almost with tropes. The three women leads become clingy and horny, Picard gets stupid, Wesley Crusher just kind of goes gallivanting, LaForge turns into a depressed mass over his blindness….And we don’t really see Riker uninhibited-other than a hint that he’s a depressed drunk. I also don’t know if we really saw Beverly Crusher and Deanna Troi uninhibited. Might Beverly Crusher want to be unencumbered of Wesley and go out and….? What about Deanna Troi….overwhelmed perhaps by all the emotions??? We don’t see nearly enough of the un-inhibited without being drunk. The closest we really come are LaForge and Yar in the observation lounge, Yar and Data’s quasi-foreplay where she talks about why she wants love, and Beverly Crusher’s sudden apparent attraction to Captain Picard-but not why. (Hence the clingy-horny trope.)
I also really don’t get why an inhibition lowering virus would make Jim Shimoda pull out all the isolinear chips. A shit-faced Jim Shimoda maybe for the hell of it…But, what is Jim Shimoda like with his inhibitions lowered? The two are not the same. And somehow, there was an assumption that they were one and the same. And that infected and detracted from episode.
This all aside (because I think I may have repeated the essential points), Ron Jones wrote a hell of a score for this episode (and for other mediocre to bad early episodes.) I’m surprised that this gets no mention. I’ve been relistening to it-the emotions, settings, and tensions are very palpable and on display throughout. It’s unfortunate that Rick Berman cut two cues involving Tasha Yar (“Needing Love”) and Beverly Crusher (“Horny Doctor.”) It would have added depth to the scenes rather than, as D.C. Fontana said in her reaction, objectifying them.
And I think this episode had interesting moments. Riker and Data’s joking based on his line to Dr. Crusher, Tasha Yar and Data (including and through “It never happened.”), Tasha Yar’s raid of Troi’s quarters, and some of Wesley Crusher’s scenes showing his mechanical genius.
I’ll still rather watch this though than most of the schmaltz on television. But definitely not one of Star Trek’s finest hours-salvaged only by a few moments and Ron Jones’ score.
“Where’s the f****n bourbon?!”