Eye of the Beholder

When the show begins, one of the crewmembers walks into a reactor and deliberately vaporizes himself despite Commander Riker trying to stop him. Counselor Troi tries to piece together why all this happened and soon finds herself pulled into the same things that caused this other empathic crewman to kill himself. So is she next?

The only element of this episode I particularly enjoyed was the new relationship between Troi and Worf. However, like Worf's glimpse into the possibility of such a relationship in an earlier episode (one with MANY different realities), this one turns out to be unreal. Will the pair later become a pair?

Otherwise, I disliked the show because the ending seemed to come out of no where with lots of bizarre elements which make the viewer say 'what?!'. Like the Voltaire song, the "USS Make S&#@ up", the answer seemed contrived and explained with a long bit of exposition.

I enjoyed the Enterprise not being under threat of destruction for once and having Deanna and Worf taking time to investigate a mysterious suicide. The deepening romance between the two plays out well and while the ending seemed a bit slapdash, it was a fun and interesting journey.

This is one of the poorer episodes from the 7th season. The plots revolves around telepathic abilities, one of my least favorite aspects of the Star Trek universe. I like my science fiction at least somewhat grounded in science rather than pseudo-science. I grudgingly accept Troi's abilities when presented as extremely sharp intuition but when presented more like a true psychic ability I can't help but be skeptical. The plot is something of a who-done-it. I don't want to discuss the details because they aren't very interesting. But I can say that the ending is poorly scripted. The first time I saw the episode I didn't even fully understand how much of the episode the "reveal" covered... almost the whole thing.

The quality of this episode can be summed up by this actual dialog ...

"Something terrible must have happened to him. It's not like Dan to take his own life"

By this point in the series some people weren't even trying any more

Counsellor Troi experiences visions associated with the death of another crew member.

This is a mostly good episode with a fair story and decent performances, but some aspects feel slightly ropey and a bit pointless.

Although it's not told in a very compelling way to me personally, the mystery is good and has an interesting sci-fi concept. When the reveal comes it is mostly by technobabble but feels like a well thought-out idea.

The downsides are the dramatic hysteria, which Marina Sirtis and the other cast do very well, considering how laughably over the top certain scenes are written. Plus the romance, which feels pointless when you know the eventual outcome for the characters. Michael Dorn is also good.

I like the art direction and set design. The numerous scenes set in engineering are very well done.