I have watched a lot of Star Trek throughout my life, a lot. Growing up my Grandmother had all 79 episodes of the original series on VHS that I am sure she ordered off the TV one night. That was my first exposure. I can honestly say I have seen every episode ever produced at least once, that is 732 episodes, 29 seasons, across 6 live-action series.
Whenever I feel the urge to watch an episode of Star Trek, I seem to always gravitate towards “Q Who” from the second season of The Next Generation. This hour of Television does a lot of things well, and it is considered the first great episode of TNG that changed the course of the entire franchise and had a ripple effect that lasted the next 15 years of storytelling.
“Q Who” marks the 3rd appearance of John de Lancie as Q, the Omnipotent Entity that returns to offer his services to Captain Jean-Luc Picard and his crew. Picard states he does need nor want his help as they are more than capable of handling any situation they may come across in the universe. Q, laughing at his arrogance simply snaps his fingers and shoots the Enterprise thousands of light-years away to an unknown part of the galaxy. Q then disappears. Picard confides in Guinan, who has had dealings with Q in the past, fearful, Guinan warns them to start heading back now, but Picard is curious to explore.
The crew discovers a nearby planet that has been stripped of all industrial and mechanical elements, similar to a previous incident a few months back. Moments later, they detect and are then met by a large, cube-shaped vessel which does not answer their hails. Guinan warns Picard that the ship belongs to the Borg, a powerful, cyborg-like race that nearly wiped out her people, scattering the survivors across the galaxy, and again urges Picard to leave immediately or face certain destruction. Though defenses are raised, a single, speechless Borg transport to engineering and begins to probe the Enterprise’s computer system. Lt. Worf ends up killing the intruder, just to have another appear and continue the probe. The drone removes some key components and both transport back to the cube.
The Borg ship contacts the Enterprise and demands their surrender. The Borg then immobilizes the Enterprise with a tractor beam, disables the shields, and uses a cutting beam to slice into the saucer section, in the process killing eighteen crew members. Picard orders return fire and apparently disables the Borg Ship. Against Guinan’s advice, Commander Riker takes an away team to the immense Borg cube where they find mostly dormant Borg Drones. Worf discovers that the ship is regenerating and repairing the damage made by the Enterprise. The away team is beamed directly to the bridge and Picard orders that they depart at maximum warp. The Borg suddenly reactivates and begins pursuit and is gaining on the Enterprise.
Q appears on the bridge and warns Picard that the Borg will never stop chasing them, and cannot be defeated. Picard fights back against the Borg, but to no avail and finally admits to Q that he needs his help. Q obliges, safely returning the Enterprise to its last position in Federation space, ending the encounter. Though Picard is thankful for Q’s lesson, he blames Q for the death of his crew. Before Q departs, he reminds Picard of their ill-preparedness and delivers this parting message:
“If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross, but it’s not for the timid.”
Later on, while reflecting with Guinan on the encounter, that perhaps Q did the right thing for the wrong reasons by moving them forward and forcing their first encounter with the Borg. It informs the Federation of what lies ahead of them as they continue to explore, and perhaps they could be better equipped then others had been in the battles and wars to come.
“Q Who” is consistently considered one of the best hours of all Star Trek. Whenever I am asked why I love Star Trek, and why after all these years I continue to watch it, I always bring up this episode as a starting point if you have never seen a single episode and want to give it a try. Almost everyone becomes hooked and then drives deeper after seeing this piece of television. The writing is superb in this showing and exhibits the best of what Trek can be on all fronts. The exchange between John de Lancie’s Q and Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard is always at its best, and this episode is one of them. The ending monologue when Picard is defeated, which rarely happens, and Q gives him a proverbial slap up the back of his head is one of my favorite pieces of writing ever. It gets me every time. This started a chain of events that changed how Star Trek storytelling would be going forward, it has affected every episode and series that has followed, now 20 years later.