This is what is known as a "clip episode." It's not as awful as some of the first season offerings, but it's unquestionably a bad episode and I won't spend too much time on it, because there's just not much to say about it.
It starts out sort of promising... if you didn't know what was going to happen. Riker and Geordi are on a planet and Riker gets cut with a thorn. They send Pulaski down to make sure they can bring him back for treatment without contamination and then they go get the thorn which looks like a remnant of one of the critters from Conspiracy. I liked the scene where Geordi and Data get the thorn. It shows the rapport between the two characters that everyone comes to love. Also, the idea of a predatory vine is kind of neat. They tried to squeeze in a little creativity I guess. But, they could only do so much.
When he gets back to the ship his leg goes numb, then his body, then he falls into a coma. The vine wound makes a parasitical growth spread throughout his body that will result in his death.
Pulaski figures out that stimulating different emotions affects the growth of this parasite, so they put him in a halo to control the emotions he's feeling and while Counselor Troi watches pensively, we see the expression on Riker's face change as he relives moments from the last two seasons. Good times; bad times. She finds out by trial and error that the bad vibes make the parasite recede, so she keeps tweaking him to have memories of the more stressful moments in the past - fighting, anger, etc. And then he comes out of it at the end. Yay.
I mentioned in Coming Of Age, if you have to relive the good times this early in the series, you're doing it wrong. I won't be too brutal because there's actually a good reason for this nonsense - they blew their budget on Q Who. It was a big gamble that paid off big as the show progressed, but it left them with no funds by the end of the season. So, I can understand the need to make a show like this on that basis and can't really fault them for it. Like I said, it wasn't as bad as some of the other concepts they'd kicked around and flashbacks aren't the worst things to be seen in a show. But the placement of this episode is what's unforgivable. They don't shoot these episodes in order and this is a terrible way to end a season, especially after the two strong episodes that came just before it. They should've buried this show either between those two, or further back if possible. It's tactical moves like these that make me stare in amazement at how this series ever lasted as long as it did. Thankfully, it's the last time they'd ever end a season without a two-parter.
But this is the end of the second season and we're officially out of the woods now. From now on, I'll be giving out a lot more 4 star ratings and even the 5 star ratings will come rolling in. This one gets only one star though. It was a content cheat and it was poorly placed in the line-up. Farewell, to the worst seasons of TNG
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