The Hunted

This was a Super Annoying Episode because of the inablity of the "Supposedly" Trained Enterprise security members to take down one man.

Also, the writers, AGAIN, made the Bridge Team Powerless and Inept. Unable to stop this lone guy or even catch him with all of their advance technology.

Just a plain dumb episode!

The first time I saw this episode, I hated it. I found the plot to be dumb, and the character of Danar to be terrible and nonsensical. It is also makes no sense to think that the crew of the Enterprise, with all of its resources and technology, would have trouble dealing with this one man, regardless of how enhanced he is.

However, after watching this episode for the first time in many years, I realized just how excellent a metaphor it is for the PTSD. Danar is a soldier through and through, and as a soldier he is conditioned to do one thing, survive and win at all costs. Unfortunately the byproduct of this conditioning is that it becomes impossible for him to be integrated into mainstream society.

It's amazing to see the ethics of Picard on display. On one hand, Danar is a criminal, while in the other hand, his actions are a result of societal oppression. Either way, it ends up having serious implications for the society that he comes from.

It's not a perfect episode, but I do think that it deserves to be considered among the classics.

Danar's story seems to follow a similar arc of Rambo in First Blood albeit without all the death and destruction.

After not being welcomed back to society, a former soldier relies on his military training and reflexes to survive in a world where they feel unwelcome.

I loved this episode... Kept us guessing and the resolution was true to Starfleet and Picard. Teaching a little lesson. Always good to get back to basics. Deanna Troi used as she should be without any special attraction added to her talents.

The SENIOR senior Trekker writes.

This character would have been ideal to inject into deep space nine's Dominion war.

I am surprised that they didn't do it. Or at least used the prisoners/soldiers from this episode to fight in that war. That would have been interesting to see, how well would these soldiers stand up against the genetically enhanced Jem'Hadar? How many Jem'Hadar could Roga beat silly? It would have been great to see.

This is just another missed opportunity of Star Trek in a galaxy of missed opportunities and ideas that were dropped, but then never again picked up. The third season of Star Trek Picard gathered a lot of these dropped ideas and storylines and put it all into one big 10 episode story. That was the best that we have gotten in the last 20 years. But even there they had more wasted opportunities.

Jeff McCarthy (who was also the original doctor of the USS Voyager in the first episode) does a great job of convincing us that he is Roga Danar and that he could easily whoop Worf's byuttox, or 5 whole security guards, or even a transporter beam.

This is one of James Cromwell's first Star Trek appearances, this time as a stuffy bean counting pencil necked administrator with awful clothes. He gives us all of the traditional political excuses for not undoing damage he was partially responsible for causing. He blames his own constituents for not coming up with a good solution in the form of "they didn't want to pay for it/voted against it".

Hopefully the Federation was able to help the Angosians deal with this little hiccup after they became members. But, this was just another "the cloud minders", when the Federation, through one of their starships, discovered a problem, but was not allowed to actually fix that problem within the scope of the episode. But just like the cloud minders and the city of Stratos and the mines below, the whole story was not told and we never got to see whatever happened after the episodes in question. Deep space nine would have been the best place to capitalize on the subject that was introduced here. But like I said, a wasted opportunity in a Gamma Quadrant of wasted opportunities.