Customer Reviews

Star Trek - The Next Generation, Episode 3: The Naked Now [VHS]

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

All TNG fans have one, and this is mine. "The Naked Now" is my big, huge, titanic TNG Guilty Pleasure. (And yes, I'm well-aware it's basically TOS "Naked Time" in a TNG suit.)

This episode is known for one thing and one thing only: Data has sex with Tasha. This act (which takes place off-screen) is so monumental that an entire fandom is built around its singular occurence. We're talking this is the one where we find out just what the term "fully functional" actually MEANS.

In short, everybody on the Enterprise is "intoxicated" by some sort of space disease that makes them lose control and do all sorts of things their sickeningly goody-goody selves secretly want to do but repress. Picard and Crusher get all het up. Wesley takes over the ship. Troi babbles about being One with Riker's Mind. (Why? I don't know. The man is as dumb as a box of rocks.) And, of course, Data and Tasha do the Wild Thing. The Enterprise is then threatened by a Deadly Situation -- the nature of which is so inane it escapes me -- and Crusher races against time to find a cure for the intoxication before the ship explodes or the pan comes for them or something. She finds the cure just in the nick of time and Wesley saves the day. Of course. Then, repressed and back to normal, Tasha says to Data: "It Never Happened."

Sure, sociologists write about "Naked Now" in clinical terms but we all know why they REALLY watch it.

A must-own for all Data fans.

Whenever I need a dose of Star Trek Therapy, I plug "Naked Now" into the VCR and watch the entire crew of the Enterprise go gonzo. Makes me see just how in control my life actually IS.

This is the second episode of TNG's first season making it the Second episode of the series. Officially is is listed as episode 3 because the pilot episode was a 2 part or "double" episode.

This episode is a spin-off of the TOS episode "The Naked Time" Basically the same type of thing happens. In this episode the Enterprise meets up with the U.S.S. Tsiolkovsky, in observing a star that is about to go nova (Named after the great Russian physicist and rocket scientist, Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky if you look closely you will notice that one of the plaques on the ship is written in Russian) The crew is acting in a strange manner. They then, in their drunken-like state blow out the hatch, decompressing much of the ship. The Enterprise crewbeams over to find the ship is a mess. The entire crew is dead, there are clothes strewn all over the corridors, naked people in one of the crew quarters with the environmental controls set to a winter-like condition. One crew member is found in a shower stall fully-clothed. The Enterprise crew returns to their ship and the ship is contaminated.

The Transporter's Bio filter and decontamination is unable to filter out the contaminant. It is a set of water-based molecules that are in a chemical like state that when passed on to a human, will affect the human body like alcohol. Now eventually the whole crew becomes "drunk", the star is about to go nova at any minute and the ship's controls have been taken over by Wesley!

This is a great episode and in it we leard about Data's full functionality. and the "multiple techniques" he is programmed with. The documenatry "Trekkies goes into this as well"

This episode is based on "The Naked Time", an Original Series show about the Psi 2000 virus. It all starts when the USS Enterprise is distracted by a series of distress calls from the S.S. Tsiokovsky, indicating something has gone wrong aboard that starship. When Geordi touches a frozen woman on that ship, he brings back an undetected virus that spreads at a rapid rate, and soon the crew have to fight their mischevious side and rescue the ship from a chunk of a star's surface. Will they make it?

You'll find the answer to this question and many more if you watch this exciting episode.

It is still not clear whether "The Naked Now" was meant to be a homage to the original Star Trek episode "The Naked Time," a sequel to that episode, or whether it was just a plain repeat performance of it, but it is clear that this was one of the less inspired episodes of the first season.

After beaming over to the derelict U.S.S. Tsiolkovsky, Geordi La Forge (LeVar Burton) starts to exhibit some curious behavior upon returning to the Enterprise-D. It turns out that LaForge has become infected by a substance that causes anyone infected by it to lose their inhibitions. Eventually most of the Enterprise's crew becomes infected and the ship is placed in imminent danger as it finds itself in close proximity to a collapsing star with its engines disabled.

The decision to go with this story so early in Star Trek: The Next Generation's run seems a little puzzling. "The Naked Time" was noteworthy because it showed viewers aspects of Captain Kirk's crew that we had never been privy to before. However, since most of the characterizations of the Next Generation's crew had not been firmly established yet, showing the "other" sides of these characters had a rather muted dramatic effect since we were not yet used to the "normal" personas of these characters. This episode might have worked better had it been saved for one of the later seasons. Still "The Naked Now" was not a total lost cause as it did put to rest all questions over just how compatible Data (Brent Spiner) could be with a humanoid.

The Enterprise is on a mission to locate the USS Tsiolkowsky. Shortly after they arrive, the whole crew are dead and the cause is soon discovered to be a virus. With similar affects to alcohol, the bacteria is soon loose aboard the Enterprise and it is up to Doctor Crusher to develop a cure before the crew meet the same fate as those aboard the Tsiolkowsky.

This episode was apparently a copy of the Original Series' "The Naked Time". I wouldn't know, having never seen it and not really being a TOS fan. However, The Naked Now itself is a sub-standard TNG episode that was a very strange choice for the series first outing to follow the pilot. How can we really care about what's happening to the characters when, as yet, we don't even really know or understand them? The infamous "fully-functional" scene between Data and Tasha Yar is one of the only highlights. Naturally, Wesley saves the day and Tasha makes it quite clear to the android that there won't be a repeat of their actions: "Data...It never happened" (I was always sorry that Yar was killed off so early at the end of season one - to me she was the strongest of the female characters and her death meant we had to wait five years until the appearances of Kira and Dax in DS9. Besides... she was my favourite character). Apart from that, this is a fairly average episode that is probably more for the collectors than anyone else.

~Jenna~

Star Trek: The Next Generation is one of my favorite television shows and The Naked Now may not be the best episode of the series and not a 5 star episode but I still think it was good and I enjoyed watching it and I like that they played homage to the Original Star Trek series episode The Naked Time. It was a nice tie-in to that show! In this episode the crew of the Enterprise is exposed to some kind of highly contageous virus that makes the infected individuals act as though they are drunk. I have this episode on video and I'm hoping to someday buy the complete seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD.

I'm a huge TNG fan, but this show really didn't take off until the third season. But a some of First Season episodes were really good,like Where No One Has Gone Before, The Big Goodbye,The Battle, and Conspiracy. This episode isn't one of them. I gave it some slack for it being the first hour long show, and the actors were still not used to their characters. But still compared with the later episodes, this episode is just weak.

This is the first episode of Star Trek TNG that I saw and I was not impressed. It is a remake of episode 7, "The Naked Time" of the original series, so my first impression was that TNG would consist of storylines from the original series. Secondly, it lacked the panache of the original episode, having nothing to equal the dash of Sulu swashbuckling his way around the ship. Furthermore, and by far the worst feature, was that once the crew of the new Enterprise found the historical reference, all they had to do to stop the spread of the disease was to avoid touching each other. It was like they had never heard of biological isolation suits. They go around touching each other and then saying, "Oh no, I touched you and now I have it." These are not the actions of Star Fleet officers and they appeared to be pathetic bumblers.
Few of the actors seem able to carry off the role of acting intoxicated, and that is another problem. When the crew of the original series were infected, they acted out their repressed psychoses, which is quite different from pretending to be a stumbling drunk. Sulu was never more dynamic than when he was chasing his shipmates around with a sword. Captain Kirk was never more troubled than when his fears were uncontrollably bubbling to the surface.
Fortunately, the producers were wise enough to avoid doing this again, creating story lines either independent of the original series or having only a secondary relationship. The only redeeming feature of this episode is that it forces the characters to interact with each other, so we are able to see some of the underlying dynamics in their relationships.

The third episode, "The Naked Now", is the sequel to the Original Series episode, "The Naked Time." The story opens with a Federation science vessel, the U.S.S. Tsiolkovsky, studying a star, on the verge of going supernova. During the mission, the crew of the ship is exhibiting strange behavior, until one person of the crew blows a emergency hatch, killing the Tsiolkovsky's entire crew. The U.S.S. Enterprise is ordered to investigate, and finds that most of the crew are frozen, someone has been playing with the environmental controls, letting the heat suck out into space. Not long after, Geordi complains that Sickbay is too hot. It prompts Dr. Crusher to keep Geordi under observation.

Slowly, more crewmembers fall prey to the same strange feelings, prior to the Tsiolkovsky crew's deaths.

The Naked Time Revisited

Spoiler Alert!

Data and the crew come under the influence of an alien virus in this episode. The is the one where Data and Tasha have their wild fling in her quarters. As in the original episode; all the inner feelings of the crew surface in a retread that's entertaining. Though the plot is similar to the original; we know that this is not the ship James T. Kirk would captain. He'd put Data in the brig for insubordination. Picard proves to be more of a father figure and tolerant of people's differences.