TNG S02E05, S02E06

In this installment:
(viewed June 1st, 2013)

Star Trek: The Next Generation, S02E05 - "Loud As A Whisper"
Star Trek: The Next Generation, S02E06 - "The Schizoid Man"

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"Loud As A Whisper" 

• "Oh, cluck cluck cluck, Number One."
• Holy cow, leave the poor Klingon alone, Troi.
• I've always viewed the relative commonality of telepathy in the Star Trek universe one of the most unsettling things about it.
• "Our mediator is very self-assured."
  
  Your mediator is kind of a tool.
• How is it possible that your android didn't already know all of the possible sign languages?  I mean, I bet C-3PO knows them all.
• Again with the meddling, Pulaski!  Stop being mean to Data, and leave Geordi alone.  The man likes his VISOR.  He doesn't need your "normal" eyes.
• So the super-peacemaker's secret negotiating strategy is "find common ground and get people to listen to each other"?  Yeah.  That's like...revolutionary, man.
• I also like that in this episode, their chief engineer is primarily used as an officer-grade Party Tree.

"The Schizoid Man"

• Personally, I think Data should've kept the beard.
• USS Constantinople, whose distress call requires the Enterprise to leave its away team on Gravesworld and hurry away, is listed in the production notes as an Istanbul-class starship.  We never see a ship of this class on-screen, but the Advanced Starship Design Bureau has a speculative design.
  
  
  
  
  
• Lt. Selar, the doctor who beams to Gravesworld in Dr. Pulaski's place, is one of the first Vulcans we see in TNG.  She's played by Suzie Plakson, who will have three other Trek roles--K'Ehleyr, a female member of the Q Continuum, and Andorian Tarah.
• The "near-warp transport" used in this episode will never been seen again.  Ever.
• Dr. Ira Graves is played by W. Morgan Sheppard, who will also go on to have three other Trek roles--the Klingon commandant of Rura Penthe in ST6, the Delta Quadrant alien Qatai in the VOY episode "Bliss", and the head minister of the Vulcan Science Council in the 2009 reboot.
• Want to know how you can anger a Klingon?  Mistake him for a Romulan.
• "Call me grandpa."
• Graves' whistling of "If I Only Had a Heart" is a nice, if obvious, nod to Data's quest for humanity.
• It may not be up to par with, you know, actual physics...but I've always liked the visual effect they used in TNG for how the stars looked from the ship's interior (at a viewport, obviously) when the ship goes to warp.  They do a little hyperspace-looking thing and then drop into the fast-moving starfield.
• Not that they needed to be, but they certainly weren't very subtle with the "Oh, Graves transplanted his mind into Data's body" hints.  I don't remember my reaction when I first saw this episode (because I would've been like...nine years old), but I can't imagine actually being surprised when they "reveal" what happened.
• Ten Forward is home to some seriously butt-ugly chairs.
• The "psychotronic stability examination" that Troi administers to data features a lot of familiar Trek footage, but what always stands out to me are the excerpts from the Project Genesis summary/proposal video.
• I would literally kiss a person on the mouth for an animated .gif of Data slapping the bald off of Picard toward the end of this episode.  Sadly, my Google-Fu hasn't unearthed any such images already in existence, and I'm too tired to make one tonight.