1.04: The Naked Now

[markpud]

This was one of the typical early episodes, not a particularly strong one, dealing with the role of women in starfleet.

It does deserve note though, as it tried to set out that this series of Trek would actually follow the Prime Directive, and therefore Picard was forced to use diplomacy to try to get Yar back from Lutan as he needed the diplomatic relations with them in order to get the conveniently unreplicatable vaccine.

Shame they didn't really make a habit of complying so fully with the PD

Also interesting to note that this was I think the only time a stardate went to 2 decimal places, eg stardate 41235.25

And Worf was completely missing in action during this episode.

 

[Sonic_Siddhartha]

"The Naked Now", wasn't that episode 3 of the first season?

I thought the whole situation with Data and Lt. Yar was hilarious.

 

[lordoftime]

Um markpud was getting The Naked Now and Code of Honor mixed up. He was describing events in Code of Honor, whereas The Naked Now was the episode with the now infamous Data-Yar scene. Lets just say it helped make Denise Crosby one of my earliest crushes!

 

[Delvo]

You seem to be talking about two different episodes. TNN was a shipboard episode which contained that Yar & Data scene; the unusual environment the ship was in had molecular-level effects that made it as if everyone had been consuming alcohol when they hadn't. The episode in which they needed to get a vaccine and Yar was a hostage on the planet they had to get it from was the next one, "Code of Honor".

 

[lordoftime]

Yes I already said that. But as he posted this three years ago he may not even come back to see our posts.

 

[steve12553]

He hasn't posted in over a year. TNN was the episode that scared me. It had a title similar to an original series episode, it had a similar plot and it was episode 3. Add in Where No One has Gone Before and things start to get scary. Fortunately they relied that heavily on an Original Series episode until "Trials and Tribblations" on DS9 which was clearly a tribute episode.

 

[lordoftime]

Yes the early TNG episodes did have noticeably similiar themes to the original series. I can remember seeing a letter published in Starlog back then talking about that.

 

[steve12553]

If you look back at it now, the whole first season is an anomoly. ( Literary not temporal. And definitely no Tachyons)

 

[lordoftime]

To be fair TNG didnt really get going until the 3rd season. Almost every fan I have ever come across says the first 2 seasons were of mixed variety. Just as some fans say it was running out of steam by Season 6....

 

[John Thiel]

Denise Crosby sure did complain about the scandalousness of that episode in her talk at the StarBaseIndy convention. I'd seen it and didn't notice what the scandal was all about in the episode so I watched it carefully when it was run on TV again, and still didn't think it was that fabulously awful. Wil Wheaton had also stormed about how bad the episode was. I am wondering if the scenes were so objectionable that they were deleted from the two showings of the episode that I saw. The nudity and hi-jinks were not all that different from other episodes of the series with such shenanigans on it.

More scandalous is that it has an inexplicably existential title.

 

[Dave]

The title comes from the episode of the original series - The Naked Time in which the crew exhibit odd and exaggerated behaviour. It was an opportunity for them to build and develop characters.

This epsiode was meant to do the same for the TNG crew and had a similar storyline, and hence the similar title. It one of the many early stories to copy original series stories and it just didn't work at all!

I'm not sure what was so scandalous when you got Majel Barrett-Roddenberry naked in a mudbath and naked weddings a few seasons later. I think it was probably because it was so early in the series and the cast didn't feel comfortable with each other yet.

 

[John Thiel]

Then the existential connotations of the title were accidental; apparently what it meant was "The Naked, Revisited", or "Look at the Naked, of Kirk's Star Trek, Now". So it's somewhat boastful of denuding casts, and I now suppose that's what the cast of TNG has been showing objections to.