Star Trek TNG Too Short A Season

Another lackluster episode for me.  A guy holding hostages for weapons wants an old diplomat to negotiate with so he can just kill him anyway because he hates him and isn't really a terrorist.  But after he sees him die of backwards aging before his eyes he's ready to cooperate.  I mean, why bother going through the trouble of getting him to begin with?

They were attempting to be modern.  To bring to light the Iran-Contra controversy.  Or at least Roddenberry was.  He made so many rewrites to the script that the writer filed a complaint with the writer's guild and convinced the producer to make Roddenberry hand over all control of the writing staff to him.  Look, I'll say it over and over again - you have to respect Gene Roddenberry for coming up with the idea of Star Trek that's lasted for 50 years and has had so much influence over people's lives, but if he'd been left to his own devices, he would've killed his own product for the sake of his own personal vision of art and politics.  When he wasn't remaking episodes outright, he was using what appeared to be old material that he'd had in a drawer for 20 years... overly simplistic; a little shallow; with endings too abrupt and convenient for a realistic feel.  His tunnel-vision mentality and controlling nature suffocated the first season and parts of the second.

There were complaints about it being too much talk and not enough action.  I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.  They were onto something with this approach.  It was just a weak episode to try to make grand points with speeches and reasoning.

I liked the story from the wife's perspective.  Seeing her husband age backwards and the pain it caused in their relationship.  It was a good human element, so the episode wasn't an entire waste.  It was at these times that the "too much talking" made sense.  It was something they were able to harness and hone as the show went on when they would explore other human elements.

And I did like the backward aging premise.  "Old" makeup is hard to do on a T.V. budget, but they didn't do too bad really.  I think if they'd made use of this premise in a different type of episode it would've been great.  In a way they did with Rascals, but that was different.

I can give it two and a half stars for the wife and makeup, I think.