The opening scene of the Yamato exploding right in front of them with all hands aboard is a pretty shocking and effective way to draw you into an episode. This is by far the largest loss of life shown directly on screen of any Trek episode so far. Having the cause of the problem be a lost ancient civilization with knowledge far beyond our own seems not just very TOS but very 60's as well. Even still the tension stays high enough to keep things interesting until it is revealed that the solution to all their problems is turning things off and then on again. I know it is slightly more complicated than that, but not much honestly. The Trek writers have always been better at writing the crews into crisis situations than getting them out.
As mentioned above the episode opens with the Enterprise finding the Yamato in the neutral zone suffering massive system failures. The captain tells Picard that he found the Iconian home world but before he can do much more his ship explodes killing everyone. Just then a Romulan warbird approaches and the race is on to determine what caused the Yamato to explode. Picard manages to negotiate a truce while they investigate the Yamato. From the Yamato's logs Picard manages to determine that they visited the Iconian home world and gathered artifacts. Once they were scanned by a probe the ship started experiencing system failures leading to its ultimate destruction.
The Enterprise starts experiencing system failures across the ship and they race further into the neutral zone to visit the Iconian planet and figure out if it is behind all this. Things keep getting worse and just as they arrive Geordi spots another probe and hops in the turbolift to warn the bridge. But the turbolift tries to kill by accelerating wildly and he is eventually thrown onto the bridge just in time to destroy the probe. Picard decides to beam down to the surface even though that may have been what caused the other ship to be destroyed. The away team finds a machine capable of generating gateways to anywhere but as Data messed with it he is knocked out by a similar power surge to what the probe hit the Yamato with. Data is beamed back up by the captain remains behind for not entirely clear reasons.
In engineering Data appears to die, but his systems restart and slowly recover. This gives Geordi and idea and he reboots the Enterprise from the secure copy of its software and suddenly things are great again. Picard manages to use the gateway to get to the Romulan ship after setting it to self destruct and finds the Romulans have also set their ship to autodestruct. Picard orders the Enterprise to safety but not before Riker can send instructions to the Romulans to try and save themselves.
Review: This is an intense episode whose only major flaw is a far too simple solution, but give a lot of the rest of this season I think this still qualifies as slightly above average. Wesley is only in it to be sad about all the people dying and Pulaski is mentioned by not shown.
6 out of 10
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