Genesis

The title says it all for me. These guys know that the "powers that be" do not want to pay the high salaries of seven year veterans for another season, that they can go cheaper with "Deep Space 9" and the soon-to-be-released "Voyager." So, with the light at the end of the tunnel, why worry? The series has been picked up for a full season, and it's too late to cancel the six episodes that remain.

Let the makeup people have some fun. Cut back on the writing talent, and above all, just shelve the science books for a week. Maybe this episode with pick up a cult following like the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" or something.

Better yet, while the first and second seasons were really not that hot, STTNG has never really made a total stinker like Voyager will do with "Threshold," or STTOS did with "Spock's Brain," among others. So it's time to make one so horrible, it will be remembered forever.

Except I had forgotten it. My wife remembered bits and pieces, though it was scrambled. She though that Troi would turn into a spider (she didn't; someone else did), so I'm sure we had seen it together. But my subconscious, protecting me, had erased it totally from my memory, but after watching it a second time, said, "Sorry, Bud. This time you have to live with the memory forever." So here I am.

But it's not the end of the world for me. I actually dozed off in my chair for about 5-7 minutes of the story, and had to ask my wife what had happened.

So many STTNG episodes will be with me forever, treasured and watched again. But I have marked this one mentally. I will never watch "Genesis" again. I would watch "Spock's Brain" first.

Just watched Star Trek TNG series 7, ep 19 "Genesis": It was absolutely hilarious! I don't remember it at all from the first time around but I'm very glad I saw it now! It's so utterly ridiculous, I place it on the level of a Simpsons Halloween special: IE it was just meant as a bit of fun and is not to be considered as a real episode.

So spiders are part of human's genetic past??? And Spot the cat suddenly becomes an Iguana with a pink collar? No expense spared on SFX there!! And never has an abrupt TNG "and they all lived happily ever after" ending been so apparent as with this one! So the crew ends up joking as usual, suffering no disturbing after-effects after having just spent three days morphing "The Fly"-like, into all manner of pustulating, venom-spitting creatures and trying to rape / eat each other?!

I seriously can't decide if I love or hate this ep, at least the hilarity levels make it a memorable one. Being the final season, they had nothing to lose I guess. Why not have a laugh and camp it up with a horror parody?

This episode harkens back to the roots of science fiction. It's an amazing homage to the Saturday afternoon matinee science fiction classics within the framework of the Star Trek universe.

As if the writers run out of ideas in the second half of the 7th season.

There are so many messed up evolutionary events in this offering that it slips into the ludicrous. People are already acting strangely before Picard and Data take off to chase a torpedo that his gone off course, flying into open space. While they are gone, the crew begins to "devolve." They turn into various incarnations of their individual evolutionary past. What is strange is that they seem to come from all kinds of different entities. Data's cat, Spot, retreats to being an iguana. Are cats supposedly the ancestral progeny of reptiles? Picard and Data must confront these things as the Captain begins to show symptoms of regression. Once again, they are facing something that is so utterly foreign to them it would take a group of researchers months to come up with an antidote, if they could even do such a thing. Other than the jump-out-at-you stuff as the ship is filled with combative critters, there's not much here if you have the ability to think. How did Patrick Steward keep a straight face.