Lessons

Such a complicated personality. This gives more depth in his character. I was teary-eyed at the end. We all hope for the life and happiness at the end of our life.

Look, I have no problem with Picard falling in love with a crew member but do it well! This was not done well

Not only was this episode cheaply produced (they used a Jeffrey's Tube drop right in front of the camera in the worst way possible), but it seems with all the talent around TNG, they can't seem to find a musician!!?? "I noticed you chose to use a D diminished chord in the second arpeggio." What??? It's Chopin piano trio. He wrote it, there no improv involved, no cadenzas. Any classical musician could have told the writers this. When Picard's love interest unrolls her "magical piano" it only has 4 octaves...and yet when she plays it, it seems to have at least 7. Ugh.

the acting feels stilted on the cheeseball scale it ranks Hallmark Channel 10!! One of the weakest episodes in the 6th season.

Or words to that effect uttered by Captain Picard.

Totally wrong, at least for the Star Trek I knew. The Star Trek I knew had a strict military hierarchy with some comforts allowed for the crew that you wouldn't see on a regular naval vessel, because it's the future and there's more allowance for maturity.

But this episode really just tried to pull the wool over many a viewer's eyes, and how on Earth did it work? The captain getting romantically involved with another officer? Heck, this doesn't even happen on Cruise Ships, how in the world does it happen on a heavily armed vessel?

Once again, Star Trek the Next Generation was an examination of interpersonal relations with moments of plot interspersed within the dialogue and set as the background for the story which focuses on not interpersonal conflict per se, but character psychology and interaction.

"Didn't we agree not to let our relationship get in the way of our work?" Well, lady, if you were stationed on a US Navy destroyer or cruiser, you'd be in the brig right now in a cell next to the captain. And this would go for the Kirk and Spock era of Star Fleet, or so far as I know. But on the good mental hospital starship Enterprise-D, apparently the concept of an inferior officer sleeping with the ship's CO and the ramifications thereof, is a new and puzzling topic that needs to be explored and talked about.

Is there anything more inane? Oh, maybe it washed with the high school and middle school audiences, and possibly with the uneducated adult audience, but it strikes me that most people with any sort of nautical experience or even military experience, know why those rules and regulations are there. And yet the idea of officer favoritism in the 24th Century version of Star Fleet is a new one.

Again, a lot of soft horn, soft violin, synthesizer soft music, no real plot, an emphasis on character interaction and what most people already know about heirarchies of all sorts, and you got your "Lessons" episode.

The truth is I'm the stupid one here. But not without cause. Visual theatre is used as a deceptive tool to present people, usually criminals, a visual to relax their psychological defenses and to get them to open up about whatever it is they're hiding. And that's kind of the theory behind the supermajority of Hollywood offerings, including this television show. And so it is that when "Star Trek" was going to get new life old guard fans like me were expecting a new action-adventure in space program, and what we got instead was absolute garbage, the epitome of which was this episode, and all of the series to be honest. The idea is that because this is Star Trek viewers will be lured in, see something that gybes with their personal lives, and they might have the wherewithal to examine their personal lives, address it, and move on.

Meanwhile morons like me tuned in once or twice a year to see if the show had gotten any better, and it hadn't. And yet the top tier students and universities, their professors, and science and tech professionals kept tunning in because it had the Star Trek name on it. I quit watching regularly after the first season the show was so bad, and it hasn't been until the last seventy-two hours that I've discovered why. I had the wool pulled over my eyes, as did everyone else, but I recognized the poor and emphasis shift, I just couldn't nail what that shift was nor identify its signifiers. All the while the smoke and mirrors of this show being more intellectual polluted the Trek-social-sphere, while I was trying to figure out how to get my adventure in space show shot. Now I understand, and trying to painfully rewatch this show after thirty years, reminds me of why pursuing a career in film and TV was a bad move.

In the end the two characters separate ways in this episode after a lot of obvious exchanges of why the Commanding Officer should not be romantically involved with subordinates, especially if they're on the same ship. Whereas in adventure series prior to the 1980s nearly everyone understood why you didn't allow that on any vessel, much less one that had weapons.

And that, good people, is why this show is garbage and condescending. You may like the production values. You may like the characters. You may call this more intellectual (which it isn't), and call Captain Kirk all kinds of names and so forth, but you would be missing the basics of what I've put down in this review and others regarding this tragically formulate television show.

In the end it doesn't matter what I write, but it would behoove the casual or fan viewer to examine what it is they love, why they love it, and its actual substance.

"Lessons" should be called "Music Lessons". In this episode, Picard meets the obsessive Commander Daren and the two begin a relationship, mostly consisting of them playing music (Picard the flute he got in "The Inner Light", and Daren a little keyboard pad). This is all dull and when the manufactured dilemma (which shouldn't have been a dilemma at all) comes around, are we supposed to care? This episode came right after the tense "Starship Mine" and the two episodes couldn't be further apart. A tense thriller followed by an uninteresting romance; the former is definitely much more memorable.

The German title of this episode is "Der Feuersturm", which might give you even higher expectations than "Lessons". "Lessons" implies that there's perhaps actually a point to make, which there isn't. "Der Feuersturm" gives an impression of danger, which doesn't exist for an instant.

This is my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in large part because my mom was a piano education major in college; she started me on the piano when I was only 3 years old & taught piano lessons out of our home for much of my childhood. Thanks to this episode, I now claim #3 as my favorite of Bach's 6 Brandenberg concertos. This is one of 23 TNG episodes my parents have recorded on VHS cassette; my dad, who still has some musical talent, just not as much as my mom (he played trombone in high school) used the VHS cassette of this episode to transcribe the "Folk Melody" (first played in "The Inner Light"; Season 5, Episode 25) onto musical staff paper. When my dad played the melody for his dad (who HATES Star Trek), he actually thought the tune was BEAUTIFUL!