But it probably is a good thing that we are only talking about TNG here, not Voyager. I think once you start reviewing the Voyager Borg episodes I should keep my mouth shut. Not that I don’t agree that they got the better (and more interesting) treatment in TNG, but steaming and fuming in a place like this might not be a good idea.

BoBW was a pretty cool episode. The suspense was well done, as you said, and I found Shelby quite interesting (got me thinking how many things might have turned out with a different “Number One” on the Enterprise).

Only two things I disliked slightly:
1 - Earth’s defenses looked rather sad. But the “only ship in the sector” phenomenon is a time-honored staple of Trek, so I guess there is no way around it showing up in TNG, too.
2 - Yeah, sure, let’s use the deflector, why not? If TNG overdid any technological gimmick this must be it. But a big part of my resentment is hindsight, and at the time of BoBW it wasn’t half as overdone as it became later, so not a major problem here IMO.

Oh right, Shelby. Ayup, I’m with you on this. I’m not a very big fan of Riker myself. Could be nice to see her as Number One.

As for “the only ship” I believe it has been discussed on Trekcreative back in the old days. Me, I’m perfectly okay with it. There’s no knowing exactly how many ships the Federation has in general. It’s the flag ship we see all the time simply because we are watching the documentary of the flag ship’s voyages. I tend to assume that other starships have similarly rich adventures, though their missions might be slightly less prominent.

Technological babble? LOL! Gimme more! Do you remember Immersion?

“I can sweep the area with a concentrated particle beam. If that’s a ship, it’s warp trail will register in the feedback.However, this will require modification of our main deflector dish. To do it I will need to reconfigure our primary multi-spectral emitter.”

Have you forgotten I simply adore it?!

Oh, and just for the record: I have nothing against technobabble - as long as it does not overshadow the efforts of the characters or becomes central to the story. We may not agree on what the people of the future should (or would) be like, but I think we can both agree that any good TV show, Trek or otherwise, should be about the people and not their technology.

The more the resolution of an episode hinges on a technobabble-ish “deus ex machina”, the less I am thrilled by it, because it often takes something away from the human drama.

An additional problem of any TV show is that you can’t just introduce something into an ongoing story and then conveniantly forget about it a few episodes later, at least if you want to keep up some continuity and believeability. Perhaps it’s the curse of a series with a complex canon that’s written by a multitude of authors, but the more technobabble, the easier it becomes for later stories to solve a problem with technology and not human ingenuity. And the latter is what I believe Star Trek should be about, regardless of how optimistic, pessimistic, or realistic one thinks this future is.