STARDATE 0009

If you've been perving in my window late at night recently, you may have thought I was up late watching TNG (on VHS)...well, wrong. I was doing something equally as nerdy. Reading.Reading 500 page fantasy epics I specially ordered through the interlibrary program.
Once that epic was read and returned, I moved on to more Star Trek books. One of the historic ones, Starfleet - year one by Michael Friedman. Gives the background on how the Federation and Starfleet were formed. A real page turner. Another equally historic one on Picard's first ship - the Stargazer...which leads right into the next episode I watched.

Now, back to the regularly scheduled TNG. Onto "The Battle". This episode plays on a couple of very frequent themes - 1) mind control is used on the captain & B) a deranged alien makes his goal in life to target the captain and punish him for some incident that happened years ago.
Having a captain who goes crazy for some reason or other just happened a few episodes ago, when that virus attacked the ship and made everyone crazy? That storyline taken care of.
In this episode the furrengi used some strange machine that made Picard have vivid memories...of when he was on his previous ship the Stargazer (which I was reading about late at night instead of watching the VHS. So, that bit of background came in handy on this episode...I actually felt like I was somewhat of a "trekkie", that's scary).
Anyway, the whole point of this mind control was to get Picard to beam over to the Stargazer and relive the battle where he had to abandon ship...which is turns out was the battle that killed a few Ferengi, one of whom was the son of the Ferengi using the mind control device.
Very similar story to the new Star Trek movie. You know? Where that deranged alien makes the goal of his life to get back at a captain that killed someone he cared about a long time ago. Instead of mind control he travels back in time to get Captain Kirk.
Again with the reoccuring storylines?

Oh, and in this episode guess who was the key factor, the guy who found the missing link (hint: he discovered a strange low range frequency while playing around with the long range scanner.)...it was that kid, Wesley Crusher. I think that's about half the episodes now where he has saved the day! This guy has the potential to be the next Luke Skywalker, but, I can't take him seriously because of the awful jumpsuits they put him in.