Symbiosis

While studying an unusually active star, the Enterprise receives a distress call from a badly damaged freighter. Rescuing the passengers and its cargo, it soon emerges that the ship is transporting medicine from one world to another to combat a deadly plague and ownership of the medicine is being fiercely contested by parties from both planets.

An intriguing storyline quickly falls apart when it becomes apparent that this episode is little more than a clumsily handled PSA on the dangers of drugs and addiction. It has all the subtlety of a photon torpedo to the face, undermining the good work done by the guest stars. Riker's "I'm being electrocuted face" also undermines the episode because it's hilarious.

This was a great early episode of TNG with Picard facing a difficult choice. Better acting than most of the S1 episodes. Unfortunately it features what is possibly the worst scene in Star Trek history when Tasha gives Wesley the "drug talk". Nancy Reagan should have got a writing credit.

This episode of TNG brings the Enterprise to a pair of planets humanoid inhabited who have a strange relationship. One of the planets is where the population is quite healthy, but the other has been suffering a plague for generations and is completely dependent on the other to give it medicine, for an exhorbitant price. It's economic bondage.

It's worse than that. The medicine is a narcotic and you have planetary wide addiction.

Dr. Crusher weighs in as this is a medical issue. She wants an intervention, but Captain Picard is sticking by the prime directive. Personally I'm with Gates McFadden here. I think the usually wise Patrick Stewart is dead wrong.

You'll have to tune in to see how this is resolved.

A good story about exploitation and utter dependency. I thought the whole "why do drugs" bit by the annoying Wesley Crusher was silly, but all in all a good episode from season one. What I don't get is this: The transporter works by turning every molecule of a thing into energy then back again...right? So it stands to reason that once something has been transported, there is now a record of what it's made of. So once the "medicine" was beamed on board (then again to the cargo hold) making more would be a simple matter. I don't care how "rare" the main ingredient is, when you have transporters and replicators...just make as much as you want and get on with it! That's my point.

Even maybe a top 3 Symbiosis is a great story, entertaining and simple. Not the best ever, far from it, but you will have a good hour of tv, a solid 8.5/10 Star trek season 1 have been the weakest by far, but not without some very good one, like the Paris one of skin of evil, to only named them.