"The Defector" (3.10) and "Tin Man" (3.20). I didn't watch a lot of television as a child, but somehow I caught both of these episodes—I caught a reasonable handful of TNG because my parents watched it, although I still had to be shown some of the famous ones by friends in college—and they just embedded themselves in me. In the case of "The Defector," I had retained the story almost beat-for-beat; I didn't have a complete recall of scenes or conversations, but individual lines, gestures, or expressions were right there in memory as they came up and I had not forgotten how it ended. The one thing that had meant nothing to me at the time was the interweave of Henry V, for the obvious reason that I hadn't yet read it. For "Tin Man," I had remembered almost everything about the guest character down to his body language and completely jettisoned any of the plot that wasn't focused directly on him and his relationship with the alien of the week; I had confabulated or extrapolated one detail about which I feel slightly bad because I included it in a description of the episode in an LJ-conversation some years ago and I don't like telling stories wrong. I still can't see how it wasn't influenced by Le Guin's "Vaster than Empires and More Slow," which I would have been reading around the same time. I was eight years old when both episodes aired in 1990. One of the reasons I want to write about them is not just that I was afraid that they wouldn't hold up to my memories and instead one of them was even better than I had been able to evaluate as a child, but that I have such an interesting double vision of them now, like the stamp of the Cold War all over "The Defector" or the fact that I didn't mistrust for a moment a character who is presented with obvious ambivalence in "Tin Man" because he made so much sense to me. I tend to have difficulty writing about things that I saw for the first time before I knew how to think about film/TV, but in the case of Star Trek I think the distance might actually give me something to work with. I also watched "Hollow Pursuits" (3.21) because it was right there on Netflix's otherwise aggravating autoplay, but I had actually managed to rewatch that one in 2007 and stand by my opinion that it's a wonderful concept executed with much more nuance than technically necessary that just shoots itself in the foot at the climax, thematically speaking. Then I detoured to Voyager's "Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy" (6.4), since it is a much more broadly comic take on similar material but carries off its ending more proportionally. In terms of other TNG, I have strong affectionate memories of "Masks" (7.17) as well, but I do not expect that episode to hold up on anything other than the myth-level. The myth-level caused me to write some terrible middle-school file-off, though.
[edit] This entire chain started because I realized that James Sloyan, whom I had just seen in "Jetrel," had been the guest star of "The Defector." So if I was going to rewatch "The Defector," I might as well rewatch "Tin Man," and then suddenly time had passed.
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"The Defector" (3.10) and "Tin Man" (3.20). I didn't watch a lot of television as a child, but somehow I caught both of these episodes—I caught a reasonable handful of TNG because my parents watched it, although I still had to be shown some of the famous ones by friends in college—and they just embedded themselves in me. In the case of "The Defector," I had retained the story almost beat-for-beat; I didn't have a complete recall of scenes or conversations, but individual lines, gestures, or expressions were right there in memory as they came up and I had not forgotten how it ended. The one thing that had meant nothing to me at the time was the interweave of Henry V, for the obvious reason that I hadn't yet read it. For "Tin Man," I had remembered almost everything about the guest character down to his body language and completely jettisoned any of the plot that wasn't focused directly on him and his relationship with the alien of the week; I had confabulated or extrapolated one detail about which I feel slightly bad because I included it in a description of the episode in an LJ-conversation some years ago and I don't like telling stories wrong. I still can't see how it wasn't influenced by Le Guin's "Vaster than Empires and More Slow," which I would have been reading around the same time. I was eight years old when both episodes aired in 1990. One of the reasons I want to write about them is not just that I was afraid that they wouldn't hold up to my memories and instead one of them was even better than I had been able to evaluate as a child, but that I have such an interesting double vision of them now, like the stamp of the Cold War all over "The Defector" or the fact that I didn't mistrust for a moment a character who is presented with obvious ambivalence in "Tin Man" because he made so much sense to me. I tend to have difficulty writing about things that I saw for the first time before I knew how to think about film/TV, but in the case of Star Trek I think the distance might actually give me something to work with. I also watched "Hollow Pursuits" (3.21) because it was right there on Netflix's otherwise aggravating autoplay, but I had actually managed to rewatch that one in 2007 and stand by my opinion that it's a wonderful concept executed with much more nuance than technically necessary that just shoots itself in the foot at the climax, thematically speaking. Then I detoured to Voyager's "Tinker Tenor Doctor Spy" (6.4), since it is a much more broadly comic take on similar material but carries off its ending more proportionally. In terms of other TNG, I have strong affectionate memories of "Masks" (7.17) as well, but I do not expect that episode to hold up on anything other than the myth-level. The myth-level caused me to write some terrible middle-school file-off, though.
[edit] This entire chain started because I realized that James Sloyan, whom I had just seen in "Jetrel," had been the guest star of "The Defector." So if I was going to rewatch "The Defector," I might as well rewatch "Tin Man," and then suddenly time had passed.