Shades of Gray

Because of the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike they had to shoot this episode in 3 days. It's pretty much crap, consisting of repeat cut + pasted clips from Season 2 and was described by its writer, Maurice Hurley as "terrible, just terrible."

Why the producers couldn't just wait to shoot something decent who knows. I'm guessing because of the strike the production ran out of money and could only release a flashback episode or maybe Roddenberry was too sick at the time to be able to veto this half-assery. This episode also marks the final appearance of Diana Muldaur (Dr. Katherine Pulaski) on the series.

I'd forgotten about the writer's strike of 1988. After watching those season ending episodes of "The Outer Limits" which shamelessly includes random insertions from previous episodes, I thought other series were above that. I guess, at least for one episode, STNG needed to save a few buck and bank on an insipid plot. Riker picks up a kind of raging virus as he and Geordi explore a planet previously unexplored. It is beyond the expertise of Dr. Pulaski, who can't stop it. Scans reveal that it has attacked the nervous system and will eventually head for the brain and kill Riker. What Pulaski and Troi find is that the entity is reactive to human emotions. Troi is there to read Riker's thoughts as he dreams. She senses different kinds of dreams from adventure to erotic to pain to terror. All these are represented by short clips from the first two seasons. There is no order to them, but Pulaski is able to use drugs to enhance the experiences. Troi, whom we all know is in love with Will, coaches the doctor as they search. It was fun to guess what scenes might fit in, but it detracted from the actually presentation. It's sad sometimes to know that factors other than a lack of creativity force the hands to the producers of shows such as these. It's so piecemeal and the whole treatment is so hard to swallow that it's a bit of an embarrassment.

I've been rewatching the series after not having seen this show in over 20 some years - and missing most of these episodes before. I can see now why this episode has been called the worst of the series. There's really no plot, the actors don't really seem to be into it and the clips serve no purpose.

From Wikipedia:

At the end of its second season, Star Trek: The Next Generation had one more episode to shoot. However, Paramount cut that show's budget to make up for an episode earlier in the season that had gone over budget-and, similarly, over schedule, leaving only three days for principal photography. Because the season had gotten off to a slow start due to a writers' strike, the producers had no scripts set aside for future use as they normally would have. The result was "Shades of Gray", in which the "clips" were the induced dreams of a comatose William T. Riker.

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."