bela lugosi,

The reason DOOMSDAY MACHINE works for me is because there is this tremendous sense of overwhelming threat. This massive THING has already taken out one starship AND is gobbling up planets. William Windom (sp?) may have chewed the scenery a bit, but his description of his crew begging him for help as the machine destroys the planet he beamed them to is chilling. The whole ep has this sense that this thing is going to wipe out billions if the Enterprise doesn't stop it, and they have no help.

As you know I'm not a fan of TNG, but one of the few eps I saw was BEST OF BOTH WORLDs, part 1. It shared that same sense of moment, and what I liked about it was that besides some boring "Will Riker leave or not?" foolishness (no, he's not, and we all know it), it focuses on the dramatic situation--this big, indestructible thing is coming, how do we stop it. The one moment when I thought "Aw, this is COOL!" is when they are under attack, and the new first officer jumps out of her seat and goes to Dara and tells him to keep changing the phaser frequencies, or something. It was a thrilling moment because it gave some tiny clue as to how these things might be stopped--you have to think outside the box and get around their defenses using an untraditional manner.

The only other TNG ep I cared for was the one where Picard lives out his life on an alien planet, then learns it's all been in his head, as the aliens are long dead, and this probe of theirs goes around creating these false lives in people so they will remember the dead aliens. I thought that was just brilliant.

And then the show went back to sucking again. :P

 “The more elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.”
 Joseph Priestley