TNG S06E24 & S06E25

In this installment:
(viewed Wednesday, April 16th)

Star Trek:  The Next Generation, S06E24 - "Second Chances"
Star Trek:  The Next Generation, S06E25 - "Timescape"

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"Second Chances"

• Any episode that starts with Will Riker playing trombone in what's clearly a pajama top?  That's going to be a quality episode right there.
• The starship on which Riker had previously served, and was originally involved in the evacuation of the science station on Nervala IV eight years prior to this episode, is the USS Potemkin (NCC-18253).  It is of the long-lived Excelsior class, and is encountered on several other occasions over the course of TNG and shows up briefly in at least one DS9 episode.
• Hey kids, it's William T. Riker!
  
  ...wait a second.  Where's your trombone?
  
  YOU'RE NOT WILL RIKER!!!
• "So Rick...am I going to need to shave the beard to pull of this whole 'past me' thing?  Or lose any weight?"
  
  "Nah.  Just scruff yourself up a bit.  And we'll find an old first-season uniform and have wardrobe let it out a bit for you."
• "Alright, take my doppelgänger back up to the ship.  Let's get to work!"
  
  Denialist Riker is in denial.
• "The containment beam must've had the exact same phase differential as the distortion field."
  
  Yeah, sure.  I can see how that would work.
• "We now have two Will Rikers on board."
  
  Well, damn.
• I've said it before and I'll say it again:  If either of motherf**kers says "Imzadi" one more time, I'm shutting this episode down and canceling my Netflix account.
• Again with the friggin' EPS couping?!?
• "It pulses unendingly all through the night / Seek out the crystal that powers our flight."
  
  Okay, three things:
  
  1. Technically, warp flight is powered by a matter/antimatter reaction.  The dilithium crystals are the mechaism by which the product of that reaction (enormous amounts of energy) is regulated and directed.
  2. You can just put a sticky note and a flower on the warp core without someone in Engineering being all "Hey, I know you look like our first officer...but you're really not supposed to do that"?
  3. I didn't think there was anything more nauseating about the Riker/Troi will-they-won't-they romance than the term "Imzadi".  I was wrong.  This part?  This right here?  WAY WORSE.
• Hey, phaser art!
• Klingon tai chi is like...my third or fourth least-favorite thing about TNG.
• Lt. Riker (who goes by "Thomas Riker" by the end of this episode) is offered a posting on the USS Gandhi (pronounced "GAND-ee" by both Lt. Riker and Capt. Picard).  According to non-canon sources, it is an Ambassador-class starship with the registry NCC-26632.
• Lt. Riker is even more of a prick than Cmdr. Riker, if that's possible.  Seriously, the two of them at teh end of this episode?  It's like Battle of the A**holes down there.
• You totally should've let go of him, Commander.  You'll find out why in like...two years.

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"Timescape"

("Is that what you want?")

• Do we ever actually see people playing parrises squares?  That seems like something they may have slipped into an episode of VOY when I wasn't paying attention.
• Data's cat, Spot, is the biggest badass aboard the Enterprise-D.
• I'm pretty sure you're not really supposed to just throw a phaser around Sickbay, dude.  IT'S NOT A TOY.
• Romulans!
• Although DS9 premiered a few months prior to this episode in real-world time, this the first time outside of that show where we see the Danube-class runabout.
• Apparently Ktarians have the same bad Hollywood Scots-Irish accents as most of the cast of Braveheart.
• "Did you help him with his research, Counselor?"
• Physiognomy?  So that's a thing I'd never heard of before.
• Okay, who paused Counselor Troi's TiVo?
• Those pesky, pesky temporal anomalies!
• "It looks like the Enterprise has been damaged...there, on the port nacelle."
  
  See, Troi?  Those command classes paid off.
• This episode marks the second appearance of the emergency transporter armband, the first being its use by the rescue teams that beamed aboard the Borg cube that captured Captain Picard during the events of "The Best Of Both Worlds".
• WATCH OUT FOR THE BLINKY ROMULANS, GUYS.
• "Captain, I believe I have found the cause of the power surge.  There is a warp core breach in progress."
  
  Ah...yep, that'll do it.
• Temporal-drunk Picard is the best Picard.
  
  
  
  (This image requires no caption.  You're welcome.)
• Counselor Troi gives us a nice engineering lesson on Romulan warp technology, recounting to Data and Geordi the fact that Romulan warp engines use an artificial quantum singularity as their means of generating the massive amount of power necessary to generate a warp field. 
  
  She learned this during her time impersonating a Tal Shair operative, Major Rakal, aboard the D'deridex-class warbird IRW Khazara ("Face Of The Enemy").
• I TOLD YOU TO WATCH OUT FOR THE BLINKY ROMULANS!
• They're just protecting their eggs, guys.  Duh.
• "We basically just rewind the VCR guys.  It'll totally fix this whole mess."
• "It's going to take...a little time to explain, Number One."
  
  
  
• Yeah, suggesting that your android turn off his internal chronometer sounds like a great idea.