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.

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..

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.

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!

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.