Shades of Gray

A main character who can't possibly die gets infected with something deadly. Can you guess what the outcome is? Yeah, just skip it and spare yourself the awful scenes of Troi standing next to Riker crying for the whole episode.

While we all know now that the reason for "Shades of Grey" being a "clip episode" was due to the 1988 writers strike and the production running out of money at the end of the 2nd season, I still can't excuse it on that basis.

There should have been ways to tell this same story without delving into the scene vault every 2 minutes. The entire amount of time devoted to new scenes (largely, those with Diana Muldaur, Marina Sirtis and Jonathan Frakes on the sickbay set) is about 15 minutes. The rest is all clips from previous episodes. Surely the director could have found a away to squeeze out of the budget a few extra "new scenes" that would have been "Riker specific" flashbacks. Perhaps they could have used alternate takes or different camera angles of those same previous scenes (I'm sure at least some existed), or possibly even re-filmed some of the same scenes with the actors.

Frankly, I just see this episode (when it was first broadcast and still today) as a complete mess, a real cop-out, and a very depressing way to have ended the 2nd season..

Watching this 30-40 years later - well bad idea probably. We're used to watch series in a binge sort of way or on demand. There was a time when there was only one episode per week and a season would take up to 24 weeks to be complete - sad if you'd missed an episode. I guess that's why someone thought flashback episodes was a good idea. But Rikas flashback was a pain to watch. The story around it was so poor and cringeworthy. Had to skip large amounts of clips in this episodes!

As a long-time fan of all the Star Trek series,I found this a disappointing episode, and I wonder if the liberal use of "flashbacks" featuring Will Riker's exploits, both positive (and largely romantic) and negative (lots of pain, and a crewmate's death)was a money-saving device, as were many of their "bottle shows" (episodes in which all scenes take place on the Enterprise). Diana Muldaur(who also appeared at least twice on the original series) deserved a better final appearance than this for her character, Dr. Kate Pulaski. Loyal viewers (in the Star Trek world, is there any other kind?) also were shortchanged. This was the last episode of second season; thus, the season ended "not with a bang" but with "a whimper."

"Shades of Gray" is a pathetic excuse for an episode for "Star Trek: The Next Generation"--one that insults the audience's intelligence and just looks like a lazy attempt to fill the time slot. It is so bad and so irrelevant that I recommend you skip it completely--you really don't need to bother with this one.

When the episode begins, Riker's leg is injured while on an away team mission. However, this is no mere scratch--the thing festers and cannot be eliminated using the transporter's bio-filters. Soon, Riker is dying and Dr. Pulaski is fighting to save his life.

This doesn't sound that bad, does it? Well, no...the concept isn't bad. However, this only takes up a tiny fraction of the show. Most of it consists of clips of Riker from other episodes--and they appear to be completely random in how they are used. Relevant or not--they are tossed into "Shades of Gray" and the sum effect is a show that obviously no one gave a crap about when they made it. A complete waste of time and the worst simply because there have been episodes with dumber premises (such as the baseball game episode from "Deep Space 9"), but at least they TRIED something different with these shows. Here, it's just an attempt to re-use old footage and otherwise take the week off from production! Awful.

UPDATE: By the way, it isn't just me who hated this episode. At the 50th anniversary Star Trek convention in Las Vegas, this was voted as one of the 10 worst of all episodes from every Trek franchise! That is some ignoble designation!