Tin Man is one of the most scifi TNG episodes I have seen so far. The idea of a living ship was new to me when I originally watched this episode, but now having seen most of Farscape it doesn't seem quite so new. This episode also gives more background into Betazed psychic powers and how they generally manage to keep from going insane from them. I am guessing they named the creature Tin Man because it had lost its crew and therefore heart and need to get one or die from the loss. This suggests that whoever in Starfleet named the thing already knew the end of this episode, but whatever.
The episode begins with a surprise meeting with the USS Hood. It arrives bringing secret orders (although the information in them was clearly already compromised) and a passenger. The passenger is a first contact expert named Tam, although he is most famous it seems for a first contact mission that went wrong and got most of the team killed. He is a much more powerful than normal empath not exactly emotionally stable himself. Riker doesn't trust him knowing what happened previously and Dianna used to act as his therapist. The mission here is there for is to contact a living space ship that a probe encountered past the edge of explored space. They need to hurry since the Romulans are known to be on there way as well. The catch is Tin Man is orbiting a star which is about to explode so there won't be much time. The ship sets off at high warp but on the ship tensions are high as well.
The only one on the ship Tam seems to get along with is Data since he has no thoughts to transmit. The ship arrives but as they come out of warp a Romulan ship appears and shoots the Enterprise before racing towards Tin Man. When they are unable to contact it they prime their weapons but Tam warns Tin Man and it destroys the Romulan ship and badly damages the Enterprise. This is a problem both because there is another Romulan ship on the way but also the star is close to exploding. Tam decides to only option is for him to go over to Tin Man and Picard agrees if Data goes with him.
Upon arring Tam learns that Tin Man once had a crew who died long ago and that being alone it now wants to die. Data seems somewhat unimpressed that Tam now wants to join with Tin Man, but when the Romulans arrive and try to kill Tin Man it throws the other two ships away and transports Data back to the bridge of the Enterprise. Tam and Tin Man disappear never to be seen again.
Review: I guess my summary is a little short but that is because I am doing two today, not because I didn't like the episode. It was actually quite good and better than I remembered. For some reason I remembered Wesley going over to Tin Man and that being a problem, but luckily my memory was incorrect.
7 out of 10
No comments:
Post a Comment