star trek tng transfigurations cast

Transfigurations (episode)

• 1.2 Act One
• 1.3 Act Two
• 1.4 Act Three
• 1.5 Act Four
• 1.6 Act Five
• 1.7 Log entries
• 2 Memorable quotes
• 3.1 Production history
• 3.2 Story and script
• 3.3 Production
• 3.4 Sets, props and costumes
• 3.6 Continuity
• 3.7 Reception
• 3.8 Video and DVD releases
• 4.1 Starring
• 4.2 Also starring
• 4.3 Guest stars
• 4.4 Co-star
• 4.5 Uncredited co-stars
• 4.6 Stunt double
• 4.7 Stand-ins
• 4.8.1 Other References
• 4.9 External links

Summary [ ]

Awkward conversation

The Enterprise is exploring an uncharted star system within the Zeta Gelis star cluster , when the ship discovers a faint life sign and debris from a small ship crashed on one of the planets.

La Forge is sitting at the bar in Ten Forward having drinks with Worf . La Forge says that he is interested in Christy Henshaw who is sitting at a nearby table with a friend, but he is too shy to approach her. Henshaw comes over to the bar to leave her and her friend's empty glasses. She tries to strike up a conversation, but La Forge is tongue-tied. Then Commander Riker contacts him from the bridge and he leaves Worf.

A strange burst of energy

On the surface, the away team locates the crashed vessel, with a single badly-injured occupant . Dr. Beverly Crusher scans him and says that his brain stem has been damaged and his involuntary nervous functions are not stable enough for transport up to the ship. She asks for a volunteer, and La Forge steps forward.

She establishes a neural link between La Forge and the alien, to allow La Forge's brain to regulate both nervous systems and stabilize the alien until they can beam up to the Enterprise . Crusher advises La Forge to breathe normally and that she will terminate the link between them if anything goes wrong. When the connection is made, an energy discharge enters La Forge's mind, and he inhales sharply, but assures Crusher that he's fine. As soon as the alien stabilizes, all three of them are beamed directly to sickbay .

Act One [ ]

In sickbay, Dr. Crusher works tirelessly with her staff to stabilize the severely wounded mystery man. On the bridge, Commander Riker reports to Captain Picard that the crashed vessel appeared to be an escape pod , which means that the ship it came from must have been attacked somewhere close by. Data detects debris and refined metals in orbit of the planet , indicating the ship was destroyed. Worf also picks up trace elements in the debris consistent with residual phaser fire. Riker shows Picard a small module which is all that is left of the pod's computer system, and Picard gives it to Data for analysis.

A speedy, fragile recovery

Picard visits sickbay to check on the patient's progress, and Crusher reports that he will make a full recovery, due in no small part to his body's quick recuperative powers. She is also troubled to note that his undamaged cells are mutating , a process that does not seem to be connected to his injuries.

La Forge is in Ten Forward sitting at a table with Worf and Data discussing the salvaged computer module. La Forge and Data present various theories on how to decode it, but Worf is unhappy they are talking shop and not relaxing. La Forge says he is relaxed and has never felt better. He then spots Henshaw and decides to escort her out of Ten Forward to the ship's arboretum . " I have been tutoring him. He learns very quickly ", a proud Worf tells Data.

In sickbay, the mysterious alien has been removed from intensive bio-support and most of his major organs are functioning on their own after only 36 hours. While Dr. Crusher monitors his life signs, he awakens and touches her hand, surprising the doctor. His first words to her are " I am alive ". Crusher remarks that he certainly is. He follows this up by asking " Who am I? "

Act Two [ ]

A smooth talker

When the alien finally recovers enough to awaken, he does not know who he is or what led him to be on that planet. The bridge crew attempt to ascertain the mystery of Doe's origins while continuing their work on the charting of the Zeta Gelis star cluster.

Doe has been aboard for over a month, his recuperation speedy and successful, but the doctor is still puzzled by his continuing mutation, which now elicits pain and a glowing energy pulse from his torso. Crusher is frustrated at her inability to solve the mystery or halt the pain, while Doe is contrite about not being able to remember.

" I'm the same old guy I always was. " " If you say so. "

Riker is waiting for the turbolift , and when it finally comes, he sees La Forge and Henshaw in a long kiss . Riker comments that he is having a lot of luck with her. La Forge says that he's still the same old Geordi, but Riker says he's changed. La Forge admits that for the last month, things seem to be going his way and he is a lot more confident than he used to be.

" The pain is gone! "

Chief Miles O'Brien comes into sickbay with a dislocated shoulder , after kayaking on the holodeck . While Crusher is preparing the necessary equipment, Doe drifts over and touches his shoulder. There is another glowing energy pulse, and O'Brien's arm is completely healed, to Beverly and her son Wesley 's astonishment.

Over dinner with Wesley, Beverly admits that there is something oddly compelling about the mysterious man but denies anything like a " Florence Nightingale " effect (i.e., that she is falling in love with her patient). She feels that she has a spiritual connection with Doe that is different than a romantic one. She tells her son she probably is not making much sense, but Wesley tells her he understands somewhat.

As the bridge crew grow closer to discovering the origins of John Doe, including discovering the coordinates of the planet from which he came from, the alien is starting to remember fragments of his past, namely that he was escaping his planet and that there were others with him. He asks Picard not to return him, at least not yet. Picard states that the Enterprise will not be in the vicinity of the planet's star system for three weeks, giving Doe ample time to discuss the problem further. After Picard and Crusher leave Doe alone, a powerful yellow glow briefly appears on his body.

Act Three [ ]

Doe and Dr. Crusher have some drinks in Ten Forward celebrating Doe's first day out of sickbay. Doe marvels at the diversity of the Enterprise crew, many different species all working together freely. He tells Crusher that his species is different from this philosophy somehow. Crusher tells Doe how fond she has become of him and he vice-versa. Doe tells Crusher that he believes he is on some kind of journey and that his mutation in his body is connected to it. He knows he must complete his journey before anything else.

Worf announces to Picard that the Enterprise will soon be joined by a ship heading to intercept the Enterprise at high warp. It refuses to answer hails and will intercept in ten hours. Riker tells Picard that whoever is aboard that ship is in a big hurry to intercept the Enterprise .

" …no life signs. "

Now nearly two months on board, Doe's painful and accelerating cellular mutations cause him to fear that what is happening to him may hurt people around him. He flees sickbay after telling Dr. Crusher he must leave the Enterprise . While chasing him down a corridor , Dr. Crusher reluctantly calls for security. As he tries to escape in the shuttlepod El Baz , Worf is mortally injured by Doe when he accidentally unleashed his power on him. Worf's neck breaks on impact after falling hard from high up onto the shuttlebay's floor. Dr. Crusher urgently calls for a resuscitation team to Shuttlebay 2 as John walks over to Worf. He places both of his hands on Worf's neck, and he is miraculously healed by John.

Act Four [ ]

In Picard's ready room , Picard gets Doe to admit he was going to steal a shuttle and asks what is happening to him. Doe does not know, but believes he has to leave the ship before he harms another individual. Picard asks that Doe be kept under constant surveillance.

The Zalkonian Commander Sunad finally answers the Enterprise 's hails and demands the delivery of the stranger from Captain Picard. Allegedly, he is a dangerous criminal who is disturbing the normal order of society on Zalkon and deserves death. Sunad demands that the Enterprise leave the Zalkonian system and return John Doe to them. He gives them two hours to make their decision before he fires. Captain Picard, Riker, Troi , and Dr. Crusher discuss in the observation lounge what Doe could be accused of and whether or not they can let personal relationships affect their decision to return this so-called criminal. Crusher remarks on the irony of having saved Doe's life and now to give him back to his people to die for his alleged crimes.

Act Five [ ]

" I… can't breathe… "

Picard tries to negotiate with Sunad, telling him that Doe has exhibited some extraordinary abilities, and would like to know more about the nature of his alleged crimes. Declaring that Doe has "corrupted" the Enterprise 's crew as well, Sunad motions to his bridge crew, and the Zalkonian ship creates some kind of effect that causes every member of the crew to suffocate.

In sickbay, Doe is the only one not affected. He finds Crusher suffocating on the floor and heals her. Helping her to her feet, he declares that he finally remembers who he is and why he is there. Finding another crew member on the floor outside sickbay, Doe heals him as well, then touches a panel, spreading his power throughout the Enterprise and freeing everyone from the Zalkonian weapon.

As Doe and Crusher enter the bridge, Sunad furiously orders his ship's weapons targeted on the Enterprise . Before it can fire, Doe simply raises a hand, instantly transporting Sunad from his ship's bridge to the Enterprise . Sunad insists to Picard that Doe and his kind are a severe danger to society, but Doe tells Picard the truth: the Zalkonian species is on the verge of an amazing evolutionary change, but Sunad and their society's other leaders, fearful of something they don't understand and perceiving a threat to their authority, have decried the changes as "evil" and been murdering any members of their society who exhibit them. Doe and three of his fellows decided to flee Zalkon and let the changes take their course, but only Doe has survived, with the help of the Enterprise crew.

Doe gasps in sudden pain and undergoes the final metamorphosis , becoming a luminous being of pure energy. He tells Sunad there is nothing to fear, but Sunad recoils in terror. Doe says that they can no longer prevent him from telling the rest of Zalkon what is happening to them. He returns Sunad to his own ship, which quickly departs and heads back to Zalkon.

Leaving for parts unknown

Doe expresses how glad he was to have found people like those on the Enterprise but also apologizes to the people on the bridge for needing to leave, especially to Dr. Crusher. Captain Picard states his pride in being present at the birth of a new species, and the new energy life form says goodbye to Crusher before he wafts up and out of the ship into space.

Log entries [ ]

• Captain's log, USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D), 2366
• Medical log, USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D)

Memorable quotes [ ]

" You must let her see the fire in your eyes. "

" But what would I say?! " " Words come later. It is the scent that first speaks of love. " " Thanks, Worf. That helps a lot. "

" What happened to you? " " Oh, I was kayaking on the holodeck again... "

" I have much to teach you about women. "

" Less talk, more synthehol . We came here to relax. "

" I've been tutoring him. He learns very quickly. "

" Well, maybe I am a little bit more confident than I used to be. "

" Hey, Doc! I'm dying out here! "

" Damn it, you nearly killed a member of my crew... " " And healed him. " " I'm not forgetting that. That's the reason he's here and not in the brig . "

" It is our mission to seek out life in all forms. We are privileged to have been present at the emergence of a new species. "

Background information [ ]

Re-editing the remastered episode in 2012

Production history [ ]

• First draft script: 16 March 1990
• Revised final draft script: 27 March 1990 [1]
• Technical notes by David Krieger : 28 March 1990
• Filmed: 29 March 1990 – 6 April 1990 (7 days)
• Premiere airdate: 4 June 1990
• First UK airdate: 22 April 1992

Story and script [ ]

• This was the second episode written by René Echevarria . He recalled, " After selling " The Offspring " to the show, I went back to New York and Michael called me a couple of weeks later and said he had a story that was dead in the water. It was a premise they had bought involving us finding some crashed ship on a little moon and there's a man who's basically dead and we use miraculous 24th century medicine and bring him back to life. We practically grow him back, but who is he and what's the story? I thought about it for awhile and came up with the basic idea of 'Transfigurations,' that someone was evolving out of their Human form into an energy being. We've seen both of those stories before, but we've never seen the intermediate step. " ( Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , p. 198)
• After completing the first draft, Echevarria was called back to help on the rewrite, which was divided by acts among the writing staff. The script then received a polish by Piller. ( Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , p. 198)
• Michael Piller commented, " We wanted to do a show where we get to see 24th century medicine up close and personal. Beverly Crusher uses all her skills to save an alien, reconstructing him and putting him back together and sort of falling in love with him. It's a very spiritual kind of show. " ( Captains' Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , p. 198)

Production [ ]

Director Tom Benko with Julie Warner and LeVar Burton

The injured John Doe

• The scene with John Doe transformed was in fact done live with only minor post-production touch-up. Actor Mark La Mura wore a fluorescent orange suit that glowed on the special film used. ( Star Trek: The Next Generation Companion , 2nd ed., p. 129)

Sets, props and costumes [ ]

• This episode marks the first appearance of the large laboratory set, later re-used as stellar cartography and a number of other laboratories.
• A large transparent interface seen on the bridge of the Zalkonian warship was previously seen on the surface of Risa in the teaser of " Captain's Holiday ". A second display that is seen behind the Risian one first appeared in Picard's alternate ready room in " Yesterday's Enterprise " and would later reappear in Benjamin Maxwell 's ready room aboard the USS Phoenix in " The Wounded ".
• The musical score in the final scene as John Doe leaves the ship was reused by composer Dennis McCarthy in the series finale " All Good Things... " as the poker game continues and we leave the ship; the rolling suspended cymbal and the trumpet solo of the fanfare portion of the Alexander Courage 's Star Trek: The Original Series theme tune were added for the finale.

Continuity [ ]

• This episode was the first to establish Miles O'Brien 's love of kayaking and the usual associated shoulder dislocation, both of which would be revisited many times in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine .
• Though only seen briefly, John Doe has actually lost his left arm during the crash. It is apparently later replaced with an artificial arm; however, spoken dialogue suggests it was stored in stasis and later reattached. Furthermore, parts of his facial skin and skull have been torn off during his crash, revealing his brain and his molars.
• Christy Henshaw shows overt romantic interest in Geordi despite having rejected his previous overtures and claiming she wasn't interested in him "in that way" in " Booby Trap ".

Reception [ ]

• A mission report for this episode by Patrick Daniel O'Neill was published in The Official Star Trek: The Next Generation Magazine  issue 14 , pp. 48-51.

Video and DVD releases [ ]

• Original UK VHS release (two-episode tapes, CIC Video ): Volume 37, 17 February 1992
• UK re-release (three-episode tapes, Paramount Home Entertainment ): Volume 3.8, 2 October 2000
• As part of the TNG Season 3 DVD collection
• As part of the TNG Season 3 Blu-ray collection

Links and references [ ]

Starring [ ].

• Patrick Stewart as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard
• Jonathan Frakes as Commander William Riker

Also starring [ ]

• LeVar Burton as Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge
• Michael Dorn as Lieutenant Worf
• Gates McFadden as Dr. Beverly Crusher
• Marina Sirtis as Counselor Deanna Troi
• Brent Spiner as Lt. Commander Data
• Wil Wheaton as Wesley Crusher

Guest stars [ ]

• Mark La Mura as John Doe
• Charles Dennis as Sunad
• Julie Warner as Christy Henshaw
• Colm Meaney as Miles O'Brien

Co-star [ ]

• Patti Tippo as Nurse Temple

Uncredited co-stars [ ]

• Rachen Assapiomonwait as Nelson
• Majel Barrett as USS Enterprise -D computer voice
• Joe Baumann as Garvey
• Michael Braveheart as Martinez
• Debbie David as Russell
• Jeremy Doyle as operations ensign
• Doug Drexler as command division officer
• Eben Ham as operations division ensign
• Kim as operations division officer
• Casey Kono as operations ensign
• Mark Lentry as science division officer
• Tim McCormack as Bennett
• John Milke as Zalkonian officer
• John Rice as science division officer
• Denise Lynne Roberts as Patti
• Joycelyn Robinson as Gates
• Joseph Michael Roth as Starfleet engineer
• Brian Tomlinson as Zalkonian officer
• Guy Vardaman as Darien Wallace
• Command division officer
• Female civilian
• Female command division officer
• Female operations division officer
• Female science division officer
• Science division officer
• Ten Forward waiter
• Ten Forward waitress
• Three female civilians

Stunt double [ ]

• Rusty McClennon as stunt double for Michael Dorn

Stand-ins [ ]

• Jeffrey Deacon – stand-in for Patrick Stewart
• Nora Leonhardt – stand-in for Marina Sirtis
• Tim McCormack – stand-in for Brent Spiner
• Lorine Mendell – stand-in for Gates McFadden
• Guy Vardaman – stand-in for Wil Wheaton

References [ ]

47 ; ability ; accusation ; alien ; amnesia ; arboretum ; arm ; arrival ; assignment ; ATP ; authority ; autonomic function ; battle ; bearing ; bingo ; biochemical storage medium ; bioscan ; blood plasma ; body ; brain ; brain stem ; brig ; capital offense ; cardiostimulation ; cc ; cell ; cell regeneration ; cell structure ; charm ; chemical element ; chest cavity ; citizen ; civilization ; code seven ; colleague ; computer ; computer system ; control booth ; control system ; cough ; course ; criminal ; cryogenic stasis ; culture ; data processing system ; day ; death ; death sentence ; debris ; defense ; device ; diagnostic center ; dinner ; dissent ; distance ; doctor ; Doe's ship ; El-Baz ; electrical field ; emergency bio-support unit ; energy pulse ; escape pod ; experiment ; extended orbit ; eye ; face ; false sense ; Federation ; feedback loop controller ; feeling ; flight path ; foot ; frame of reference ; friendship ; G-type star ; generation ; gratitude ; guest ; hail ; head ; heading ; heart ; hello ; holodeck ; hour ; humanoid ; hypothesis ; immune system ; inaprovaline ; infection ; information ; injury ( wound ); instinct ; intercept course ; intimacy ; joint dislocation ; judgment ; kayaking ; law ; leader ; leg ; lie ; life sign ; long range scanner ; love ; magnetic inducer ; matrix translator ; medical emergency ; medical log ; medical staff ; medical tricorder ; memory ; memory loss ; memory RNA ; memory pathway ; metabolic analysis ; metal ; metamorphosis ; minute ; mission ; month ; motive ; motor assist band ; muscle ; mutation ; nacelle ; natural order ; navigational chart ; neck ; nervous system ; neural net ; neuroendocrine function ; neurofeedback ; neurofibrowave ; neurolink ; neuromuscular function ; neurotherapy ; neutron star ; night ; non-corporeal lifeform ; nucleic acid ; organ ; osteotractor frame ; pain ; parsec ; patient ; phaser ; physical being ; physiology ; place ; plasma ; prisoner ; protodynoplaser ; pulsar ; quantity ; radiation level ; recovery ; recuperative power ; reflex ; refusion ; relapse ; resuscitation team ; rotational period ; scent ; Sector 9569 ; sensor range ; shipwreck ; shoulder ; shuttlebay 2 ; sickbay ; smile ; society ; sorrow ; spaceship ; speed ; star ; star chart ; starboard ; stellar object ; storage capsule (aka storage cube ); strength of will ; survivor ; symbol ; synaptic induction ; synthehol ; synthetic compound ; tactical analysis ; theory ; tissue ; tissue oxygenation ; trace element ; transfiguration ; transformational matrix calculation ; transgression ; transmutation ; transporter room three ; trauma ; treatment ; trespassing ; tricorder ; truth ; tutor ; value ; virus ; vital signs ; walking ; weapons range ; week ; Zalkon ; Zalkonians ; Zalkonian escape pod ; Zalkonian leaders ; Zalkonian prisoners ; Zalkonian space ; Zalkonian warship ; Zalkonian star system ; Zeta Gelis star cluster ; Zeta Gelis star cluster planet ; Zeta Gelis star cluster sector ; Zeta Gelis star cluster star ; Zeta Gelis star cluster star system

Other References [ ]

• Shuttlebay Operations: Ansel Adams ; approach vector ; Armstrong ; Chris Pike ; Clarke ; Cochrane ; Cousteau ; Curie ; Decartes ; Einstein ; El Baz ; Feynman ; Hangar 1 ; Hangar 2 ; Hangar 3 ; Hangar 4 ; Hangar 5 ; Heinlein ; Indiana Jones ; JF Kennedy ; Lindberg ; main shuttlebay ; McAuliffe ; Onizuka ; PT Farnsworth ; primary acquisition zone ; refit ; Sakharov ; Sam Freedle ; Shuttlebay 3 ; Starbase 515 ; Tereshkova ; tractor control zone ; Type 7 shuttlecraft ; Type 15 shuttlepod ; Von Braun

External links [ ]

• " Transfigurations " at Memory Beta , the wiki for licensed Star Trek works
• " Transfigurations " at Wikipedia
• " Transfigurations " at MissionLogPodcast.com
• "Transfigurations" script  at Star Trek Minutiae
• " Transfigurations " at the Internet Movie Database
• 1 USS Voyager (NCC-74656-A)
• 2 Daniels (Crewman)
• 3 Star Trek: Prodigy

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Star Trek: The Next Generation

“Transfigurations”

Air date: 6/4/1990 Written by Rene Echevarria Directed by Tom Benko

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan

Review Text

Until now, I'm pretty sure I hadn't seen this episode since it originally aired in 1990. As this is one of those middling episodes of TNG that few people seem to care about (myself included), I've had no reason to revisit it until now. So a funny thing happened to me while watching "Transfigurations." For the first 20 minutes, I couldn't remember what it was about or how it ended. Not at all. But as the episode continued, I remembered more and more, until finally I said to myself, "Here comes the part where Worf goes flying over the railing and breaks his neck." Funny how I remembered that . Probably because neck-breaking stunts are cool.

The weird thing was how my experience watching this episode mirrored the central character — an alien (Mark La Mura) who has no memory but recalls bits and pieces as the story moves forward and strange things happen to his body. The alien was found by the Enterprise crew, a hair's width from death after the crash of his escape pod. He does not remember his name or where he's from or why he crashed, so John Doe it is. Crusher cares for him over the course of a month, and his recovery is a miraculous one that can be attributed to his body's phenomenal ability to heal itself. He discovers that he also has the ability to heal others.

The episode seeks the answers to where this guy came from and what's now happening to him. He can't explain himself or his powers. Picard is concerned. Meanwhile, the Enterprise ventures into a territory of space where Doe might be from. Mark La Mura is earnest and projects a nice-guy persona, but the episode's problem is that it moves slowly and has a tendency to repeat itself. The episode amounts to Doe explaining that he can't explain himself, Picard expressing concern, Crusher defending Doe, and then Doe healing somebody. Repeat. I was more intrigued by Geordi's newfound confidence and girlfriend Christy Henshaw (Julie Warner); although I wondered what changed her mind about Geordi between "Booby Trap" and here.

The ending, in which the Enterprise finds Doe's people — who were responsible for attacking him and causing his crash — provides the usual TNG lesson about tolerance versus fear, seeking out new life, etc., etc. Doe (and his people) are on the verge of a wondrous evolution into a different kind of life form. Doe's people fear that possibility, and I can't say I blame them. Of course, I also can't say that killing everyone who has symptoms of this change is particularly bright, either.

I'd forgotten that this is where O'Brien's kayaking hobby and shoulder injury were first documented. For some reason I'd thought that was established much later, on DS9 . I'd call this a nice touch of continuity, but since this is the first time, I guess the "continuity" part doesn't come until later.

Previous episode: Menage à Troi Next episode: The Best of Both Worlds, Part I

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Comment Section

124 comments on this post.

It amuses me that there are no comments on this episode yet! It really is nondescript, as Jammer says -- I can't really think of any episodes this side of, say, "Lonely Among Us" from season one, that are this unmemorable. This is better than that episode, obviously, because "nondescript" for season 1 is bad and nondescript for season three is competent at least. Still.... John Doe represents a little bit about this series' take on evolution. Like the X-Men (which resonates with Patrick Stewart's career, though that's a decade away), John Doe is progressing beyond the norm of his society as a mutation. Society, it turns out, wants to stamp him out and kill him because they're afraid of change. Fortunately, John has superpowers to protect himself with. The Enterprise serves as somewhat of a midwife for his rebirth as a being of pure light, and along the way he heals the sick of body and mind; apparently Geordi's creepy awkwardness with women is as easily cured as O'Brien's shoulder injury. To continue the X-Men comparison, part of the reason the X-Men story (in some of its incarnations, anyway) has some resonance is that while the X-Men can code for whatever minority the writer wants them to at any given time, when they are depicted as "the next stage in human progress," there is some reason for ordinary humans to fear them. They have superpowers which can be used offensively, and some of them use them for ill. It doesn't make persecution of the mutants right -- but it makes it understandable, and the message that persecution is wrong carries more weight if the proviso that it's wrong even if the people being persecuted against are scary. John is a little worrying because he's Mysterious, and does hurt Worf when he's trying to escape, but he immediately undoes it and we never get any real sense of why he and his are feared besides generic fear-of-the-unknown. The other obvious parallel is that John Doe is a messiah figure -- healing the sick and all, as well as offering something like spiritual transformation for Geordi and maybe for Crusher, who (we are told, by Wesley, more than shown, really) benefits from his presence. In that sense the episode could be taken as saying that spiritual leaders in human history are really people advancing to the next stage of 'evolution' in human/social consciousness more so than literally divine; there is no indication that Doe is a messenger from God, but merely that he's advanced in some way from his prospective peers in a way. The episode never quite gels. Who Joe is is not revealed until the end of the story, and so the bulk of the episode is spent on the slowly unraveling mystery about him -- in which the main cast is fairly passive, and in which we are more told than shown about John Doe's influence. Beverly and John's bond feels a little real, but there is ultimately not enough to solidify their connection. The episode is perhaps most notable for taking place over such a long period of time -- it's over a month, in-universe time -- but part of the reason it takes so long, I feel, is that the crisis is so low-urgency that no one besides Beverly can actually devote any particular resources to figuring out what is going on with John. It's nice to have a low-key episode, but once it's over, there's the real sense that nothing much has happened. I think I'd give it 2 stars.

One thing that is noteworthy upon further reflection: John Doe's version of "evolution," in which humanoids might get to the point of being able to heal physical and psychological wounds but leaving behind their physical form and the history that surrounds it, is really interesting to see in the episode before BOBW. The Borg represent a different version of transhumanism, of "the future" writ large, in which the Borg are granted some of the same "powers" as John -- the ability to "repair" with ease, for example. While I doubt this was the intention, the presence of the Borg in the episode immediately following this one makes John Doe's species fear of him just a little bit more understandable, and underlines the creepiness of John removing the "weakness" of doubt in Geordi. It is seemingly "biological" rather than technological here.

This episode is about space Jesus. John is chased down as a social dissident. He heals and brings back the dead. He has an attitude of peace and humility, no anger or frustration related with his loss of identity. In the end he is reborn and departs to lead his people to a higher truth. I love this episode along with almost any episode that hints at the limitless potential of life. Mainly I love it for prominently featuring my favorite doctor and I enjoy the development of John's relationship with her. It never feels romantic to me but the connection is very deep and spiritual. I think John was being portrayed as a very nonsexual being hinting at his future evolution. I don't know how you call this a middling episode. The pacing is slower because its a thoughtful episode that is supposed to stimulate questions more than provide answers. I also remember watching this when it first aired and this one stuck with me. It's not the best episode but it exemplifies the philosophical attitude that I appreciate in TNG over other trek series. I don't watch for action and excitement but for a sense of wonder.

I think the premise has potential (unknown alien with unexplained powers), but I think it's too much of a slow burn, so to speak. Throughout much of the episode, having so many people say "I don't know" or "I can't explain it", doesn't help it much. What does it all mean? While I realize that's a central question of the show, and gets answered in the end more or less, the journey to it just isn't interesting enough. From a production point of view, the FX seemed decent, but I'm not sure the acting was all it could have been. For example, if my wife lost her memory, she would be agitated not being able remember her name, or her history. At the very least you would think John Doe would be a bit more passionate in his speech about wanting to remember, but it seems too much like he's reading lines. I think McFadden and Stewart did fine in their parts though. So overall, would give a 2.5/4. Decent, but not stellar. Perhaps not enough emphasis on the human condition.

Something about the Crushers' and being attracted to beings made of light. Back in "The Dauphin" , Wesley fell for a light being (though there, as here, only in the closing scene were they revealed as such - for most of the episode they masqueraded as humans or giant feral gerbils), and now Beverly and this guy.

I think that "boring" adequately sums up this episode. The John/Crusher connection is supposed to be a central pillar of the episode, but it never works. She doesn't seem to be even trying to pretend that she's infatuated or interested in him. The theme of the episode is about the birth of a new species, as well as Space Jesus/Buddhist Illumination. The problem is that they pretty much start exploring the theme 10 minutes before the end of the episode. As others have pointed out, the action was slow and there was nothing happening, no tension. I'm just glad that they didn't write off René Echevarria after this...

How convenient was it that when they figured out where John Doe came from, it was almost exactly in the direction they were already going. I had to roll my eyes at that one. And then Picard says that fortunately, becuase of that, they won't hav emuch of a delay in their mission. But...isn't finding John Does pretty much their primary mission? It's right out of the narration in the weekly opening credits....

This episode was a heaping helpings of technobabble. I can't even recall the last time a TNG episode inflicted this much technobabble on me. Ugh. John Doe's energy form was a guy wearing a silly body stocking. The alien captain had a mullet. And why the hell does Gates McFadden *whisper* every single line of dialogue??? She's like a walking morphine drip. No wonder they let her go in season two. I notice these things because my mind was flailing about for some kind of diversion. I'd rather mow the lawn than watch this again. The single minute devoted to O'Brien and his kayaking injury was the only tolerable minute. The rest? Ugh. One star. No--make that half a star.

Glad I"m not the only one who thought "Alien Jesus." It was interesting, but not great. William B is right, it never comes together...there seemed to be a connection between the alien and Geordi's newfound confidence, but Geordi disappeared from the episode and they never came back to it. I don't get it. Well, at least he was a better love interest for Crusher than the horny ghost.

Just watching this now. Does anyone wonder when the alien stops everyone from breathing on the ship, why was data affected too? He gets up like he was passed out too. Always bugged me. Otherwise a decent episode for me. Not great but not bad.

I wonder what happened to LaForge's newfound confidence with women after this episode. Next time the issue is addressed (in season 4's "Galaxy's Child"), he's back to fantasizing about Holo-Brahms and blaming her for calling him out on it. Would have been nice if the writers had started giving him some kind of real love life. Even Data (drunken sex with Tasha and that relationship in one of the later episodes) and Wesley (a kiss from the future leader of an entire planet - that's almost Riker caliber!) had more amorous contacts than him. The date with Christy Henshaw in this episode (after she stood him up on the last one) is the closest Geordie gets to love. And Barclay at least got to take Troi for a walk in the arboretum. Poor guy...

"I was more intrigued by Geordi's newfound confidence and girlfriend Christy Henshaw (Julie Warner); although I wondered what changed her mind about Geordi between "Booby Trap" and here." That about sums up my perspective on this episode. "Transfigurations" is neither great nor horrible, neither good nor bad. It's just 'there,' existing. What is there to say? I suppose I could complain about Crusher getting into a quasi-romantic relationship with her freaking patient. But John's too likable a guy for me to be bothered by that. I suppose I could applaud the Geordi/Christy scenes. But they're dragged down by the surrounding blandness. I suppose I could complain about the standard heavy-handed TNG preaching about tolerance. But it's certainly not as heavy-handed as in other episodes. I suppose I could applaud the attempted religious symbolism in John and his "transfiguration." But it isn't very well developed. You see the problem? For every good thing in this episode, there's a corresponding bad thing and vice versa. 5/10

There's a bit of comedy in this episode that I'd completely forgotten from my first viewing. When Geordi first walks up to Christy and asks her out, Worf turns to Data and says "I've been tutoring him." My girlfriend and I were laughing hard on that one.

The suffocation attack at the end of the episode was rather absurd...it was pretty much Q-like - any technological explanation for that capability would almost certainly be ridiculous.. And the lunacy that he could fix it shipwide by touching the wall was Q-ish too. Is that what these people are supposed to be on the verge of becoming?

@Nic - in researching these, I'm finding Worf had some of the best lines and an incredible delivery. He's been the bright spot (sometimes the only bright spot) in a lot of episodes for me.

@Nic - whoops, that's "rewatching."

grumpy_otter

I have a soft spot for this episode. For me, this is my favorite kind of Trek--slow mystery, with bits of crew minutiae, an interesting main character, and a good ending. This is the whole point of Trek, as Picard says at the end--they were honored to be present at the emergent of a new being. I would give this 4 stars except for one thing, and it might sound trivial, but it is so distracting it makes me crazy. That damn white turtleneck penis-flaunting jumpsuit they put John in. Good lord. WHOEVER thought that was a good idea should be punished severely. Early in the episode, I am falling love with this sweet confused alien, and then when he starts to recover his health, they dress him in THAT. Ruins the mood and becomes a detriment to the rest of the episode. Otherwise, this episode is thoughtful, intriguing, and thought-provoking, and I like it.

For me it is like most people said: boring and nondescript. "John Doe" comes and goes without changing anything in particular. On the other hand, it is notable how O'Brien is becoming more and more relevant as the third season develops, until he becomes the center of attention in "The Wounded" (next season) and, eventually, a protagonist of Deep Space 9, if my childhood's memory is right. O'Brien is the second character to stand out after starting from very small acting parts. And, of course, the first was Worf. Both guys spent most of their early episodes just saying one or two words like "Yes, Captain". And then, they become protagonist, or at least supporting cast and the show is all the better for it.

@grumpy_otter: thank you for pointing out that hideous jumpsuit thing John is wearing -- what a truly terrible piece of costume design. I really can't stand episodes where they cram a time-elapse story in a single 45-minute episode. The premise is certainly interesting but the pacing just seemed off.

Like Jammer, this is an episode I almost forgot about. I'm currently re-watching the show from the beginning, for the first time since 2002 (when I bought the DVDs). So far, this is the first episode that I really have almost no memory of. It's a shame the episode was so forgettable, but there are at least a handful of semi-interesting scenes. When I recently re-watched the episode, I was almost convinced that Geordi's new sense of confidence would soon turn to arrogance, but it never did, and that whole storyline really didn't end up anywhere, unfortunately. By the end of the episode, quite a few things still remained unexplained. From me this gets 2 stars only.

This is one of those special episodes that make this series so wonderful and prophetic. I'm not surprised most people don't see that. One day when people will become more spiritual this episode will become more appreciated.

DutchStudent82

I too had the memory lane experience. -not remembering what episode this was as I rewatched it, but remembering parts of it as I watched it. -However I did remember there was a TNG episode with such a being in it, just not remembered it was this one. But I found this episode rather enjoyable, for different reasons. After STE ended, I felt into cold vacuum, born in 82, I pretty much grew up with trek, never single year without new episodes, and such became the norm for me. So when STE was pulled, for the first time in my life, (and that was in my early 20s) I was without anything to watch.. I was REALLY like "why it was good and well watched, how can there be no trek??" After the first mourning, and a few years waiting and hoping they would come to their sences and launch a new star trek series, while visiting the star trek website dayly for news about this and reading "the trek life" I gave up. I switched to star gate, that by than was in it's 6th season, untill it too got pulled with the same ununderstandable tricks, a few years later. (it got replaced for the crap called SGU what logically never got a second season, but I did not expect the whole series to be ceased) I save you the details, but rest to say star trek reboot for me is no trek at all, and don't get me even started on star gate reboot movies, true scifi is dead, sadly, corporate drones have assimilated all. Well why this introducion, because this episode introduced the idea of "acended beings" BEFORE star gate, and that with hindsight thats very interesting. It would make this race like both the altarans and the ori from star gate. -> I hence would have loved a more detailed look at their tech, it must be advanced, very advanced, i they are so close to ascending, their space faring society must be much older and much more advanced than any of the main races in star trek. The chocking tech I hence buy, but I was waiting for a revelation : was it technological? in that case interesting very advanced indeed, or did even the conservatives have powers to enforce such things at range to other races? was there an "enhanced" aboard the attacking ship? (could have made interesting drama play and put the danger of these ability's and the polarity they may cause even more into perspective) I am a christian, and hence i not believe in evolution, but I do believe we were created originally as MUCH MUCH more than we are now, as beings living outside time, in infinite dimentions, litterly to the immage of God (and God is spirit) and that our vanity of wanting to be equal (the desire for control and power IS the core of all sin) caused us to be cast down much much deeper, to this pityfull 3d dimension linear timeloced beings, who like plato said "have an inhering yearning to heavens, aka like a memory of what they used to be, but are no longer" (while I am good in science, and have a rational mind, I see many scientists are blind for these reasons, they only want to "know" what can be controlled, to gain more power to chance things, and are vain in wanting recognision of others. It does not even apear to them that that is not objective science at all, like Jesus said, none is as blind who cannot see, and only those who are prepared to loose themselves will keep themselves) -> there is much more depth in what Jesus said than many christians often know, many are just as control freaky, with a book in their hand they use THEIR minds and THEIR ideas and THEIR institutes to control and be vain just the same as science does. Christ ment it when he said he left HIS spirit to guide us, why than are we using still our mortal brains to try to puzzle things out on our own, to obtain control? -> and what I say is not the same as new age mumbo jumbo, witchcraft too often wants control and many of those people are just out there for vanity, power and money too. Those who are not are often hedonistic, just out their for their next endorphine shock, drug induced or otherwise, not how to find the truth either. This episode hints to many of those features, control vs communion, a sence of things to come and that have been, but no hard memory, and for doing so I like it. more down to earth, when picard confronts Q he does see mankind one day becoming like Gods and evolving beyond even Q's ability's, this shows one way of that to become true. (as I hinted before the Q may have simply evolved from biological beings, and my bet is Q has evolved from humans (thats why he is so interested in them, where the other Q, not so much as they must be of different races) I give it 4/4 stars, for introducing many of such concepts.

Walter E. Gough

I may have missed this episode in its initial airing, or simply forgotten about it, but having watched it last night I'm struck by its overt religious message. Star Trek, historically, has avoided direct message shows and dealt with issues via anology or allegory. There was talk of the son of god near the end of Bread & Circuses, but overall the franchise has been overwhelmingly about science and only sometimes -- and then only impliedly -- about faith. Here we have an episode, first aired in June 1990 according to the Memory Alpha wiki (so it wasn't a Christmas show), titled Transfigurations, a direct reference to an event described in the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. I found its vaguely proselytizing message strange, and -- with all due respect to DutchStudent82 above -- for somebody like me who seeks answers from science, not faith, a disconcerting departure from what I expect from Star Trek.

I remembered this one fondly from my first viewing years ago. I originally enjoyed the mystery of John's identity and the quiet romance and the glowy ending. And Worf's death. This time around, knowing where it was going, it was likable but bland. It's still one of the only tolerable Beverly-themed episodes... Probably because she spends only forty-five percent of the epiaode acting intensely concerned about stuff. Usually she only quits being intensely concerned when someone turns her into a dog. I didn't notice any issues with the costuming until after I watched it and came here to the comments. Then, on Grumpy Otter's recommendation, I rewound twice.

LOL @ Aaron and Tara It can't be unseen, can it? I am reminded of a time when a friend called me and told me to turn on Saturday Might Live because she wanted me to see the pants on that night's musician and she didn't know who it was. I recognized him but couldn't think of his name, but MAN, those PANTS! Quite revealing. It turned out to be Joe. . . Cocker.

The choke-weapon was an homage to the Sith choke hold. I thought it was an awesome moment when Sunad orders his ship to fire on the Enterprise, and then John zaps him right onto the Enterprise bridge. Like 'OK, tell them to fire now.' Even less-than-awesome episodes can have some pretty good moments.

Jeff Jensen

Wow. Funny how we have all had similar experiences with this episode. I caught the beginning of this in a rerun tonight and thought to myself, "I remember this episode, it has the wrinkled face guy in that hideous white jumpsuit." Then, I realized, I remembered nothing else from this episode. Who was he? I had no clue. What happens? No idea. Well, I decided to watch it, so I popped in my blu ray set which I got recently and compared shots airing on TV to my blu ray. As a quick aside, I must say, the blu ray picture is amazing. The colors are vibrant, and the surface textures are so detailed. With that said, the texture details of the, um, "mid regions" of the alien's white jump suit seemed enhanced, too...definitely distracting, but I digress. This episode must be the epitome of unmemorable, as I watched the whole thing and only had vague recollections of what I was seeing, not knowing how it would end until it finally did. I really did enjoy the brief scenes with Worf and Geordi talking about romancing women, and Worf's line "I've been tutoring him" is not one I will forget again. It was awesome. All in all, I suppose this episode had enough intrigue to keep me watching, and had my interest piqued, but primarily because I knew I HAD seen it but I couldn't remember it. It kept my interest throughout, but in the end it was definitely an average episode. I did find myself asking if the writers were somehow thinking about the general population's response to the AIDS virus in the 1980s. It was something unknown, and many people were scared of it, like this species was to their new and unknown condition. Probably not, as I haven't seen that connection mentioned anywhere else. And the more I think about it, it seems less likely rather than more. Just a passing thought I had.

Raphael Bloch

I liked this episode well enough up until the full spandex bodysuit. What the hell? They even had space Jesus turn into an energy orb in the end, so was the super awkward bodysuit step really necessary? You can even see all the wrinkles on it. I really can't take that supposedly deep part seriously.

I am pretty sure I had given up on TNG when this was on the first time around as I could not remember it at all. This was a tedious collection of overused Trek themes as has been remarked upon already. God knows what the heck Geordi's new mojo has to do with anything at all and no , please,please Mr yawn fest-in-a-hilarious-full body condom-don't transform into a glowing superbeing. Yep-series 3-hmm-at least the Borg are coming to kick the Federation's arse next week.

Boring ? Yes a little bit. On the other side it gave some views of the life outside the Bridge. The ten forward scenes, sick bay. Even if it is easier to appreciate the more action filled episodes, these 'love peace and understanding' episodes is an important core essence of star trek.

An alien comes aboard who is NOT dodgy, untrustworthy, evil or dangerous. The only other Trek episode I can remember where this scenario happens is Voyager's "Bliss," with the awesome Captain Ahab type who helped Seven and Naomi to escape from the nebula-monster.

I got about 15 minutes into this one, then realised Best Of Both Worlds was next and realised I'd had quite enough.

Sarjenka's Little Brother

The actor playing the star alien is Mark La Mura. He was on "All My Children" back in the late '70s and the '80s playing Erica Kane's half-brother Mark Dalton, a musician who had a cocaine problem. As to his wardrobe, I recall a bathing suit scene from AMC. He was blessedly endowed.

Kind of a lame episode before the epic BoBW -- one with a slow, repetitive buildup and a payoff that isn't really worth it. I think the episode intended for a cool sci-fi ending as we witness the "evolution" of a species into something god-like but it didn't have the desired effect for me. And then there's these new humanoid aliens that are on par with or stronger than the Enterprise -- but they're 1-dimensional stiffs. I don't quite get why the rescued alien could not remember anything prior to the crash. Perhaps the writers wanted an excuse for a big reveal at the end. In a way the changes the alien is going through remind me of "Too Short A Season" with Jameson's changes being somewhat of a mystery and then a payoff that falls flatter than this one here. But again, it's hard to care about some unknown race where 4 of them tried to undergo this metamorphosis and just 1 survived the attack. We have our wooden 1-dimensional aliens at the end who want to kill the alien, but the alien has gotten too powerful by then. I take it Geordi is the big winner here -- having his nervous system hooked up with the alien gave him confidence to get the girl, finally. One other cool scene involving Geordi was when they determined the home world of the alien -- seemed like good logical deductive problem solving. 2 stars for "Transfigurations" -- hard to care much about this one with its recycled ideas, inexplicable medi-techno-babble. I guess the Enterprise crew, and Crusher specifically, are supposed to marvel at saving an alien and allowing him to transform into some kind of higher being. Kind of boring, slow-paced but not awful in any respect.

A run of the mill mystery that the audience has no chance of solving. Not bad, not great.

This episode was like melba toast. It's there, it's not bad, but it has zero exciting about it. It's not even fluff filler. It's just there, not hurting anyone but not doing anything exciting.

Prince of Space

“This is one of those special episodes that make this series so wonderful and prophetic. I'm not surprised most people don't see that. One day when people will become more spiritual this episode will become more appreciated.” Oooo... Matsu, you are so wise. I am not worthy. I shall immediately give up gluten and only drink non-GMO free-range water! Please, accept my contrition and offer me your guidance, oh Matsu!!

Dash Rendar

Nearly dead alien becomes Captain Marigold and flies off into the night. I think I've seen funnier looking supersuits, but not many. Bananaman perhaps.. John Doe is less funny, unfortunately. He's almost as offensively benign as Vedek Bareil from DS9. Apart from the (unintentional?) comedy, there isn't much going for this one. The dialogue in the end scene made me chuckle because the spandex suit made him sound gagged. I don't know why they didn't record the actor saying the lines without the rubber over his face. It's not like lip syncing was going to be a problem with the overdubbing. Underneath the nasty production techniques is the idea of species evolution and transcendence, which is captured best by Arthur C. Clarke in his book 'Childhood's End'. All of the ideas that make that book iconic are missing from 'Transfigurations'.

Bobbington Mc Bob

Spaaaaace Jeeeeeesuuuuuuus Re: the baddies, we already have the space Rom(ul)ans so I dunno who these guys are. Surprised they didn't call them "The Herodians"

Why in the world would Geordi be needed on the away mission in the opening scene? The plot needed him to get "linked" to Light-Guy, but that was pretty contrived.

The guys home planet in less than three parsecs away and it takes three weeks to get him home? Haven't seen that since the pre-Warp 5 days before Enterprise/.

Beverly should have called up Light-Guy when Worf broke his back...again...two years later... He did owe her a favor.

I didn't really like it. I can't think of the right word for this ep. It bordered on silly and cliche, but was well done. I enjoyed Worf''s frustration with Geordi's way with women. Wes and Beverly had an awkward dinner. Will and Geordi had an awkward time in the elevator. Lots of references to indentity knowing others and knowing ourselves. Letting ourselves be our best selves. The laying on of hands (healing the sick, raising the dead) and the title, Transfiguration, gives the ep heavy handed religious imagery. The science/technobabble was super weak. Average. Very average.

Mads Leonard Holvik

I agree with what Marshal wrote. This is about Jesus, transdescending and being reborn. The episode has humor also and a story of connection between the doctor and the humanoid transdescending. A thoughtful and nice episode. Me and my brother watched it yesterday and he made the remark: why can't they make Star Trek like this today?

I was mildly entertained, but it's a poor episode really. It hinges on a notion of a species who are fairly ordinary humanoid transforming into god-like creatures capable of faith healing, transporting people and illuminating themselves like a Christmas Tree, apparently by power of thought. It's just too far-fetched, even for sci-fi. The crew of the Enterprise quite often encounter these aliens with improbable mystical powers, of course. Most memorably Q, but also Kevin in 'The Survivors', who wipes out a species of billions in a moment of rage. How could the Federation, dominated by ordinary beings like Humans and Vulcans with no superpowers (I'm not counting the neck pinch) be so successful and powerful in a galaxy where powers like this exist? I don't like any of the mystic voodoo nonsense in any incarnation of Star Trek, really. Even Deanna's empathic powers annoy me.

A month? I hate when time passes without any visual or script cues to the audience. We just have to take their word for it and it feels cheap. Riker does comment to Geordi he has improved in the last month, so it's not completely ignored but they could have at least changed Bevs hair or given the alien a cool beard. Something to indicate passage of time!!!! This is not a temporal rift!!

This episode was pretty good, as far as Bev eps go but it was waaaaaay too spiritual for a Next Generation episode. I love me a good dose of hippie shit, but it was really really out of place for this show but primarily in how it was all presented. I appreciate the idea of a race being so far advanced that they seem like magic even to our future Federation friends, but it needed to be handled differently. Having the guy snap his fingers and turn into his glowy, ultra-peaceful final form was too abrupt. No major complaints, otherwise, but the main plot just didn't feel ike a TNG episode.

Frake's Nightmare

Isn't that the jumpsuit that T'pol wears when she goes to deserty places ? And how many major spinal injuries does Worf suffer in Next Gen....bit more dignified than being hit by some poorly secured barrels I suppose. More injury related to continuity?

An episode that only even remotely became interesting in the last 10 minutes or so. Until then, I was just so BORED! 1.5 stars

@DutchStudent82 “ I am a christian, and hence i not believe in evolution” “Hence…”?? Do you really believe that all Christians do not believe in evolution? In the Southern states of the USA perhaps, IF they are the Bible-bashing fundamentalist nut jobs that give the religion such a bad name. But I think you’ll find that most Catholics, worldwide Anglicans, Methodists, Quakers, Universalists, many Baptists, even many evangelicals, have no problem with science in general or evolution in particular. Wake up. Open your eyes. The Old Testament creation story is just that: a poetic story dreamed up by the primitive Israelites to explain what they didn’t yet have the science to understand.

@Tidd there is a distinction to be made between what an individual believes and what is doctrinally correct for one's religion. Lots of Catholics no doubt think that homosexuality is perfectly ordered, natural and fine. Yet that is not what they would believe if they were practicing their professes religion correctly. Any Christian denomination that takes the bible literally would find it impossible to accept evolution, that is just a fact.

@Tidd "Wake up. Open your eyes. The Old Testament creation story is just that: a poetic story dreamed up by the primitive Israelites to explain what they didn’t yet have the science to understand." OK I guess you must be some kind of hardcore atheist but this is just such a ridiculous, ignorant, and idiotic statement to make. Do you not understand that some people whether they be ancient or modern can have faith in some kind of divine being or God? Maybe it is you who should wake up and open your eyes. It's perfectly normal and quite widespread for people to not believe in evolution whether they are following religious teachings to the letter or not. For me, I don't believe in evolution and *one* of the reasons for that is the science behind it is so full of holes that the theory comes across as total bullshit. If you want to believe in atheism and evolution, go ahead. That's your choice but I see no issues with the choice of @DutchStudent82.

@ Rahul, I think the issue Tidd raised isn't so much that someone doesn't like the theory of evolution, rather specifically the "hence" that implies that because they believe in the religion this automatically implies they do not believe in evolution. This is not *quite* the same as suggesting that everyone should believe in evolution. Anyhow, if the person in question is a fundamentalist then it might well directly imply that their faith teaches that anything like evolution is wrong. @ Jason R., "Any Christian denomination that takes the bible literally would find it impossible to accept evolution, that is just a fact." Agreed. Or perhaps a slight modification, any person perfectly obedient to such a sect would find it impossible to entertain theories that violate the teachings of the sect. However if I'm going to agree with Tidd about one point - and this is one I would not out of the blue levy at some random poster - it's that there's a difference between logical consistency and correctness. One can remain consistent with a premise or axiom and yet still be objectively flat wrong. So to the extent that in order to remain in line with some set of beliefs, it may be vexing to see someone reject empirical data out of hand purely on principle. Why Tidd chose to focus on some poster in that manner I couldn't be sure of.

@ Tidd, "The Old Testament creation story is just that: a poetic story dreamed up by the primitive Israelites to explain what they didn’t yet have the science to understand." For what it's worth, it is *not* the case that the Jewish religion teaches that the Old Testament is a scientific document describing the *how* of scientific fact. The argument made is that the book is divinely inspired, and tells truths about the world and about us, but not specifically about the mechanics of how natural phenomena work (i.e. science). It wasn't intended to be primitive science; it isn't science at all, good or bad.

@Peter G. Think you're missing the point of Todd's comment that I focused on -- that he doesn't seem to believe that there could actually be people out there who have faith in some kind of diving being and whether it is driven by stringent religious beliefs or not that people can rubbish the theory of evolution. Not to mention the dumb notion that those ancient people didn't have science yet to explain something. And also, what's with the "Wake up. Open your eyes." crap?? Todd's comment to DutchStudent (from 2016) came out of nowhere as if he has some kind of agenda against those who don't believe in evolution and the tone of his post reflected some kind of denigration of religious beliefs / faith as well. It's just another bush league comment similar to the time EventualZen dreamed about living in a world of just 500M people in a single-family home powered by green energy -- though nowhere near as awful. I will say that I know Todd posts a lot of reviews but I haven't paid any attention to them so you probably know his tendencies better than me.

I'd say Peter G has it right; the way evolution appears to work could easily be taken by a Christian as part of creation (which none of the holy books ever said was complete following their descriptions). For what it's worth though, as Rahul said, evolution is really just another poetic story, and how it all really works is likely well beyond our understanding.

There is a direct correlation between level of education and believe in evolution. The better your education the less likely you are to not believe in evolution. There is one study that checked for support of the theory of evolution in 34 countries: Last places (from last to fifth last): Turkey, USA, Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania First places (from fifth to first): Japan, France, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland From an Ipsos poll of 24 countries: "The "evolutionist" view was most popular in Sweden (68%), Germany (65%), and China (64%), with the United States ranking 18th (28%), between Mexico (34%) and Russia (26%); the "creationist" view was most popular in Saudi Arabia (75%), Turkey (60%), and Indonesia (57%). Consistently with previous polls, in the United States, acceptance of evolution was higher among respondents who were younger, with a higher level of household income, and with a higher level of education."

@ Booming, I haven't studied that precise issue personally, but one thing I do read a lot of is objections to abstracts and data sampling vs interpretation. And it's immediately apparent in that type of study that I don't believe they could possibly be isolating properly for "level of education" in a vacuum. For instance it's clear at first glance that the top "level of education" countries are also essentially non-religious countries. They're also countries (not sure about Iceland) with a strong belief in centralized government, and in following the edicts of the 'popular' consensus. I'm sure they have other things in common as well. And there's no way such studies can define 'level of education' other than as a reflection of what those particular countries teach. So if the norms of the educational institutions are that they're low on the religion scale, naturally it would be less likely in such places for a person to *come toward* a religious conviction, having gone through them. So you could even suppose that the lack of certain religious beliefs is not merely correlative, but actually a direct result of how they educate over there. So no coincidence. But as Rahul mentioned, there are non-religious reasons why a person might reject a prominent scientific theory as well. @ Rahul, I understand your point, but Tidd (a female as I recall) did specifically in her OP that the objection was about the direct statement Christian = no evolution, which indeed is inaccurate as regards probably most Christians in the world. But I suppose what I was trying to say is that this was probably just a sloppy wording on the part of that person. If they had wrote, "I'm a Jehovah's Witness so I don't believe in evolution" that would have cleared up that aspect of it. I actually agree with objecting to someone saying something that's basically equivalent to "Christians don't believe in science." That would be a false statement.

@Peter Level of education may differ from country to country even though from university level and onward there are many similarities, especially since the Bologna process but in any of the surveyed countries there are certain levels and the higher you are on those levels, the less likely you are to believe in unscientific things like creationism. I'm not sure what you mean with strong believe in centralized government. But if you are hinting at federalism vs centralism then I might add that 8th is Belgium, 9th is Spain and 10th is Germany who all have strong regional governments. " So if the norms of the educational institutions are that they're low on the religion scale" Could you explain that sentence, please? Like division of state and church, or that universities are generally secular institutions? "naturally it would be less likely in such places for a person to *come toward* a religious conviction, having gone through them." Most people who have religious parents undergo some form of religious education before they go to university. I don't have the willpower to look this up so you have to take this on my shaky expertise when it comes to the history of education but I'm fairly sure that a (longitudinal) trend study for whatever country would show that the more people get a higher education the more they stop believing in non scientific things. "But as Rahul mentioned, there are non-religious reasons why a person might reject a prominent scientific theory as well." It has been my impression that the general impulse behind these reasons are still often fueled by religious convictions hiding behind pseudo scientific arguments. How can you believe that natural selection and spontaneous beneficial mutations do not exist or are meaningless for the ongoing development of life?

@Jason R "Any Christian denomination that takes the bible literally would find it impossible to accept evolution, that is just a fact. " I think that was my point. I would claim that a majority of Christians do NOT take the Bible literally. Not all of it, anyway. @Rahul "OK I guess you must be some kind of hardcore atheist but this is just such a ridiculous, ignorant, and idiotic statement to make. Do you not understand that some people whether they be ancient or modern can have faith in some kind of divine being or God?" I'm not sure that ANYTHING I said denied the right of belief in religions ? If you can point to it, that I'll be happy to debate it with you, but I never said that. @Peter G "I think the issue Tidd raised isn't so much that someone doesn't like the theory of evolution, rather specifically the "hence" that implies that because they believe in the religion this automatically implies they do not believe in evolution." Thank you. That's exactly the point I was making. It was a statement that took it as fact that being a Christian means you don't believe in evolution. That isn't a fact. @Tom "I'd say Peter G has it right; the way evolution appears to work could easily be taken by a Christian as part of creation (which none of the holy books ever said was complete following their descriptions). For what it's worth though, as Rahul said, evolution is really just another poetic story, and how it all really works is likely well beyond our understanding." Yes, and yes. Actually I wouldn't say that evolution is "a poetic story" but I would say that we're a long way from understanding it in full. It is still classed as a theory after all. But there is a whole lot of Darwinian evidence to support it. ~~~~~ To summarise my original objection: it was the claim that being a Christian means that necessarily you don't believe in evolution. Factually, that's a serious error, and I speak as someone who's been an Anglican and then a Quaker, and now a 'spiritual atheist' (no, I don't have the space or time to unpack that right now!), and have always believed in evolution. I've met very few Christians who don't.

@Tidd, Not looking to debate but just to clarify why I said that you seem to be denying the belief in God that someone may have is that you said this: "The Old Testament creation story is just that: a poetic story dreamed up by the primitive Israelites to explain what they didn’t yet have the science to understand." My point is that the primitive Israelites are not looking for some "science" to "understand" creation -- they believe in God and that is the end of it. So by you saying they just dreamed up something and didn't have the science is completely overlooking / denying their belief in God, which is paramount to how they'd think about things as ancient people. And what Tom said makes perfect sense: "as Rahul said, evolution is really just another poetic story, and how it all really works is likely well beyond our understanding." If you think the OT creation story is a poetic story, then I'd say evolution is also one. More sensibly, both are beyond our understanding. And what's with going back to some dude's comment from 2016 and responding with "Wake up. Open your eyes"?? I don't really care for your answer on that one, but just pointing out your strange behavior. Sorry to hear you're a "spiritual atheist" (whatever that is -- thanks for not unpacking it here, as I couldn't care less).

@Rahul I admit that I may have been a little harsh in my language to the original poster, but this whole “Christianity versus science” stance adopted by a fundamentalist minority of Christians has become a personal bugbear of mine. If DutchStudent82 has read my post and been offended by the language used then I apologise to him/her. But not to you, who have taken up arms uninvited. “So by you saying they just dreamed up something and didn't have the science is completely overlooking / denying their belief in God” Once again, you don’t seem to have understood what I was saying. The ancient Israelites did not have a scientific knowledge of the world but there is nothing wrong with their writing a poetic story to account for the creation of the universe. I don’t see where you find a link between that and denying their belief in a God. Cultures across the planet have believed in God(s) all along, and still do. Meanwhile, scientific knowledge has advanced. I invite you to challenge Jim Al-Khalili, a leading physicist and a Muslim, that he is a walking, living, breathing, contradiction, which by your argument he seems to be. Or am I now wilfully misunderstanding YOUR words, hm? “(…as I couldn't care less).“ Well, that tells me all I need to know. You are inviting me not to waste time and energy on your words. I accept.

@Tidd "The ancient Israelites did not have a scientific knowledge of the world but there is nothing wrong with their writing a poetic story to account for the creation of the universe." This is a strange comment. First, there is the parternalistic/ colonialistic mentality inherent in saying, "there is nothing wrong" with the Israelites of 3000 years ago (or so) developing a particular creation story. I don't think they require your approval, nor do the ancient Sumerians need your approval for Gilgamesh, the ancient Greeks for Zeus, or the ancient Ashanti for Anansi. Second, on the concept of "scientific knowledge," your point is only true if you define scientific knowledge as that which can only be obtained through a microscope or a telescope. But these societies that you debase as "primitive" (or is it only the ancient Israelites that you debase?) would have a far greater WORKING knowledge of science than any one of us, through their constant interaction with the natural world. The survival of their crops, livestock, and themselves depended on that knowledge. Take a look at Genesis 30, the detailed account Jacob's cross-breeding of sheep and goats to build a larger flock. Can anyone say that the "ancient Israelites" did not believe in evolution, or at least the ability to intentionally produce desired physical characteristics through breeding? Now take the creation story. The ancient Israelites naturally UNDERSTOOD that light comes from the sun, and that flowers/trees require the sun for growth. For that reason many ancient peoples had sun gods, including the Ancient Egyptians, who exerted a heavy influence on the Israelites. The creation story is a polemic against these idolatrous tendencies. It therefore INTENTIONALLY makes everything backwards, so that in that first day, there is no sun yet there is still light, and on the third day there is still no sun but there are trees and plants. Finally on the fourth day we get the sun and moon, which are purposefully "demoted" to merely being "signs for sets times, the days and the years," i.e., for us to know when days and years (and implicitly months) begin and end, in order to worship God at His appointed times. That's not a reflection of lack of scientific knowledge -- it's the whole point, to assume the reader's/listener's knowledge and then challenge it with an anti-science litmus test requiring faith and the suspension of disbelief. Those hearing this account for the first time may have had the same problems that modern readers do, as it required them to believe something that conflicted with their observations of and interactions with natural phenomena. Incidentally, for that same reason I have a problem with fundamentalists who twist themselves into knots to "reconcile" the creation story with science. It cannot be reconciled. It was designed not to be reconciled. There was also a second goal in mind -- to create a precedent in God Himself resting on the seventh day, so that people would do the same. We can thank the ancient Israelites for the universally accepted seven-day week, and the concept of a "weekend." Not too bad for a primitive hill-people.

@Ben "or is it only the ancient Israelites that you debase?" Jesus Tidd, you are really taking a beating here! " But these societies that you debase as "primitive" (or is it only the ancient Israelites that you debase?) would have a far greater WORKING knowledge of science than any one of us, through their constant interaction with the natural world. The survival of their crops, livestock, and themselves depended on that knowledge." That is not true. 1. Cambridge dictionary definition of science: "the careful study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world, especially by watching, measuring, and doing experiments, and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities." So one of those very VERY primitive Israelites wasn't doing science or had a working knowledge of science when he thought:" Seed goes in, plant comes out." and before Ben calls me an antisemite, too let me tell you that Jason is Jewish and he loves me and don't believe him if he denies it. Scientifically proven prosemite... Semiteophile? 2. Even if you mean having a working knowledge of natural processes, a person with a western education today would know soooo much more about that than some young shepherd in the hills near Jerusalem 3000 years ago.

@ Booming Um, okay. It's been a while since I heard someone actually say -- joking or not -- "I have friends who are [X] so that means I'm not anti-[X]." Hopefully it'll be another decade before I hear it again. Cheers to old times, I guess. You're entitled to your opinions, whatever they might be. My opinion is that whatever you define as "Western education" sure as hell sure wouldn't help you, or me, fend for ourselves in a pastoral/agricultural society. I've had some of the best education out there, and the fancy degrees hanging on my wall wouldn't give me a clue. I'll stick with the plain-Jane definition of "science" in Merriam-Webster: "the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding." Although your fancy Cambridge definition makes my point even better: Genesis 1 was never intended to be scientific, and deriding it for NOT being scientific is the ultimate strawman argument.

@Tidd Glad you're realizing the error of your ways in how you responded to that dude who posted something in 2016 but WTF is this: "But not to you, who have taken up arms uninvited." I was never seeking an apology from you. I was just taking you to task for the nonsense you posted. This is a fully open public forum so if you shit post, you might get called out on it by any random person. Not that I want to get into a tit-for-tat, but it seems to me you have been getting your head handed to you on this forum a number of times for questionable remarks. If anything it is your words that energy should not be spent on. Hope you check out what Ben D. posted -- you might learn something as I think he actually does know what he's talking about and makes a good deal of sense.

@Ben D Wow, so much to unpack here! I hope my energy lasts out... "the parternalistic/ colonialistic mentality inherent in saying, "there is nothing wrong" with the Israelites of 3000 years ago (or so) developing a particular creation story. I don't think they require your approval, nor do the ancient Sumerians need your approval for Gilgamesh, the ancient Greeks for Zeus, or the ancient Ashanti for Anansi." Not sure why you brought those last into the argument? As for the Israelites, it was probably my poor choice of words again. When I said "...nothing wrong" it wasn't meant as 'approval' of them, more a rebuttal to those here who thought my remark about the poetic story was some kind of criticism - it wasn't. "your point is only true if you define scientific knowledge as that which can only be obtained through a microscope or a telescope." Plucking some obvious names from a hat, and working through from Aristotle, via Ptolemy, the Islamic mathematicians, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Heisenberg, Hawking - many of those formed theories which were decried at the time through lack of empirical evidence, only being proved later. For example black holes. Even now, no-one has ever seen dark matter, dark enerrgy, or strings, but their existence is theorised to explain anomalies in scientific knowledge. Microscopes and telescopes often don't come into it. "But these societies that you debase as "primitive" ... would have a far greater WORKING knowledge of science than any one of us, through their constant interaction with the natural world. The survival of their crops, livestock, and themselves depended on that knowledge." Yes, true, but that depended upon their limited knowledge - but what practical experience they did have often surpasses our own in modern times because we rely on others to produce all that "stuff" for us. "That's [ the creation story] not a reflection of lack of scientific knowledge -- it's the whole point, to assume the reader's/listener's knowledge and then challenge it with an anti-science litmus test requiring faith and the suspension of disbelief." I'm not sure where your evidence is for this being the basis for the creation story? I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I don't have the academic background to agree or disagree. "There was also a second goal in mind -- to create a precedent in God Himself resting on the seventh day, so that people would do the same. We can thank the ancient Israelites for the universally accepted seven-day week, and the concept of a "weekend." Not too bad for a primitive hill-people." However, contrast that with the Eastern philosophies (for example Tai Chi or Advaita yoga) which say that the whole of life can be 'action in rest', i.e. by living in the present moment and letting our attention rest only on whatever is the matter in hand. With that, the need for a weekend is redundant.

Jeffrey Jakucyk

"It is still classed as a theory after all." A theory is the highest form of scientific understanding. It is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that has been repeatedly tested and verified, having withstood rigorous scrutiny. The vernacular use of the word, which more often means "guess" or "unsubstantiated hypothesis", pollutes the discussion because of its different meaning. Evolution itself is an observed proven fact. We've seen it happen in the short-ish term from selective breeding (artificial selection), drug and pesticide resistant bugs, moths that changed color due to pollution, etc. The theory of evolution by natural selection is the best explanation we have of how it works the way it does. The fossil record, even if it's not complete, corroborates the history of speciation, as does the continuing work on genetic sequencing. So the "it's just a theory" statement belies a complete misunderstanding of the term, and is no different than saying "well gravity is just a theory."

I think a distinction needs to be made between what "evolution" encompasses and what "natural selection / adaptation" encompasses. And maybe even what "creation" encompasses. "Evolution itself is an observed proven fact." Absolutely not. Could not disagree more with this. Even natural selection / adaptation takes a very long period of time and there are a ton of variables outside the control of an experiment at play. Who can actually live long enough to observe natural selection / adaptation? It is only theorized after the fact. Sure, science can point to the changing of a species due to an external stimuli and call it "evolution" but that is a sloppy use of terminology, especially from a rigorous scientific perspective. How did homo sapiens appear on Earth? Are you expecting me to believe that it developed from a lengthy sequence of natural selection / adaptation from the ape? If so how did the ape come about? We say something evolved from X to Y and call it an "evolution" but to just say homo sapiens came about due to the theory of evolution is beyond nonsensical. I think we humans need to realize we can't explain everything in the natural world with scientific theories and there will be some things we won't understand even for another 10,000 years.

Oh Jeffrey, poor Jeffrey. Tidd may say that we have never seen dark energy but you just wait until Rahul answers you...

@Ben Sorry forgot about you. I also got some of the best education and at my alma mater we would certainly not use the first definition of science merriam webster provides. Maybe one of the others, though. "Genesis 1 was never intended to be scientific, and deriding it for NOT being scientific is the ultimate strawman argument." I guess that was aimed at Tidd? " Hopefully it'll be another decade before I hear it again." Fingers crossed, Sweety.

"I think we humans need to realize we can't explain everything in the natural world with scientific theories and there will be some things we won't understand even for another 10,000 years." Well it is possible that we can't explain certain things with scientific theories due to lack of information - so there simply may not be available evidence in the fossil record or whatnot to give us a complete picture of every stage of evolution since the beginning of life. Science can't conjure data where none exists. But evolution is the best scientific explanation we have. And what's the alternative? God did it? Creationism is, from a scientific perspective, worthless. It's equivalent to just saying a wizard did it. There are no better competing theories with evolution and creationism is no theory or explanation at all. And I might add that saying something called "God" did it is as far from Jesus or any current religion as the roof of my house is from the moon. It may give comfort to the religious Christian that science cannot explain everything because they imagine that opens the door a crack for Jesus to walk through, but that's a fool's hope based on a false assumption. I agree with Jeffrey that there seems to be ample evidence of evolution including the existence of "human" species related to or predating our own.

"Creationism is, from a scientific perspective, worthless. It's equivalent to just saying a wizard did it. There are no better competing theories with evolution and creationism is no theory or explanation at all." Why does creationism have to be looked at from a scientific perspective? Of course it would be worthless from a scientific perspective. That's a fool's argument / criticism. Why does creationism even have to be a theory? Is that the only way to look at something difficult to explain -- from a scientific perspective? Well what other perspective is there, one might ask? Why not faith in something we can't explain but believe is at work? That won't hinder us in making scientific advances and creating greater prosperity -- there's plenty of room for that. But at least it should help keep our morals in check and guide humanity into bettering itself morally, which won't happen under atheistic beliefs.

@Rahul the reason I addressed creationism from a scientific perspective is because that is generally how it is framed by its proponents. If religious people want to thump the bible or the Koran they can always do that. But when they want to poke holes in the theory of evolution in terms of *science* inevitably creationism gets trotted out as the alternative "theory". It's not actually a religious idea so much as an outright pseudoscience.

@ Rahul Couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, you're dealing with someone who has a predetermined agenda, as you correctly pointed out at the outset. @ Tidd You've tried to pretty it up, but at heart you seem not so much an atheist as an anti-theist. Your animus toward of religion and its adherents, specifically of the Judeo-Christian variety, bleeds through everything you say, and is sometimes quite explicit. You couldn't even let it go that today is Monday because, many thousands of weeks ago, it was also Monday in ancient Israel (the horror!!!) You needed to quote Eastern philosophy to "do me one better." The irony is that even the philosophy you quote -- "living in the present moment" -- which you say originates from Tai Chi and Advaita Yoga (dating back to the 12th and 4th centuries respectively), is right there in the Hebrew Bible, in Ecclesiastes. For example: "I saw that there is nothing better for man than to enjoy his possessions, since that is his portion. For who can enable him to see what will happen afterward?" or the famous "There is nothing worthwhile for a man but to eat and drink and afford himself enjoyment with his means." In other words, "Live in the present moment." Perhaps you can (and will) come across an example of even older Eastern philosophy. Fair play if you do. But it's not a question of one system being superior to the other, but rather that, at every opportunity, you either ignore or cast aspersions at anything that smacks of Western religion, or its foundations. That is apparently your cross to bear, but I mean, your politico-religious diatribes do feel out-of-step with Star Trek's ethos of tolerance. On the other hand, you've got a damned good eye for Trek, and your Trek-centric posts are a joy to read. (That's an olive branch.) As for the source of my argument about the polemical objective behind Genesis 1, it's a pretty mainstream theory in biblical studies, so it's ingrained in my neurons having spent quite a bit of time on that topic. But just for you, I pulled this from http://www.scielo.org.za/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1010-99192015000300021: "[T]he Genesis references to the creation of 'large sea creatures' as well as the heavenly 'luminaries' may be construed as a polemic against ANE [Ancient Near Eastern] beliefs about their deities (p. 45). Finally, 'the biblical account has as its chief purpose to glorify the one Creator God who is the sole God of all reality' (p. 46)." It's no different than Jesus walking on water. You might argue, "It's scientifically impossible for a person to walk on water! What kind of idiot dreamt up this nonsense?" But that's precisely the point. The writers of the Gospels knew that "scientifically" it was impossible. Sure, they may not have understood buoyancy at a molecular level, but through empirical evidence they knew that people, sadly, cannot walk on water. That's precisely why Jesus doing it was significant -- it was a miracle, the subjugation of nature by divine forces. You can believe it happened, or not, but for the believers, there is no disjuncture between believing in the laws of nature and simultaneously believing that a super-natural power can suspend or transcend those laws. I remember a pictogram in a psychology textbook that had all the emotions laid out on a grid and connected to each other by various lines. Then, way outside the grid was the final emotion -- "awe," with no lines connecting it to anything. Awe is what you feel when you lay on your back and stare up at a starry sky on a pitch-black night. It is a uniquely human emotion, primordial and very powerful. Tapping into that drives the impulse toward religion (or other forms of exploring the unknown). It may also drive us to explore the cosmos, and even here to this website. We all can, indeed, coexist. @ Booming I forgive you.

@ Ben D., "You've tried to pretty it up, but at heart you seem not so much an atheist as an anti-theist." You're barking up the wrong tree, friend. That's not the position Tidd is taking. Tidd may be guilty of a little snark, but not of advocating against anyone's religious beliefs. @ Jason R, "But when they want to poke holes in the theory of evolution in terms of *science* inevitably creationism gets trotted out as the alternative "theory". It's not actually a religious idea so much as an outright pseudoscience." That definitely does happen. I think the point of Tidd's original polemic was to point out that this is not the norm, but the minority, among Christians worldwide. Most sects don't believe such things dogmatically, and fewer individuals care enough to start arguing the science of it. I've met some who do, for sure, but I think it may be a similar phenomenon to social media, where there's a megaphone making it sound like all kinds of people are fighting against science. It's probably mostly American evangelicals, which may well be a thorn in the side of certain parts of America, but also end up casting shade on intelligent people everywhere.

@ Peter G. I've got nothing but respect for you (for what it's worth), but I do disagree here. Describing certain sects of Christianity as "Bible-bashing fundamentalist nut jobs" and the foundational text of monotheism as "dreamed up by the primitive Israelites to explain what they didn’t yet have the science to understand" comes pretty close to advocating against the religious beliefs of quite a few people. It's fine to disagree with the tenets of religion (and organized religion has always been an easy target, often justifiably so), but to deliberately choose degrading language to do so, in the context of dredging up a single line from a five-year old post clearly written by a non-native English speaker, is what I find crosses the line into something more vindictive and agenda-driven. But I think I've said my piece.

@ Tidd, I know some of Tidd's OP was inflammatory, but she also went out of her way to mention having respect for religions, and having been a person of faith in various capacities over time. I'm not saying you can't object to that post, but I was trying to narrow down exactly what Tidd was trying to communicate so that we can try to keep posts focused on the real beliefs of the poster, rather than dogpiling on one or two quotes and turning them into strawmen. I know they bothered you, and actually they bothered me too. But Tidd's point didn't seem to me to be anti-theism, but rather to object to a certain mindset that makes it sound like all Christians are nuts. It seems to me that part of the objective of Tidd post was, ironically, to defend the reputation of Christians, rather than to throw religion under the bus.

Whoops, sorry, last post was directed at @ Ben D., not Tidd.

@Jeffrey Jakucyk My understanding is that evolution is still officially classed as a theory? However in no way do I consider it “unproven” and I wish you hadn’t used the word “polluted” as it doesn’t reflect my own views. I can only assume that you had a trigger reaction to one phrase and did not read the whole thing? @Jason R “But evolution is the best scientific explanation we have. And what's the alternative? God did it? Creationism is, from a scientific perspective, worthless. It's equivalent to just saying a wizard did it. There are no better competing theories with evolution and creationism is no theory or explanation at all.” Well, hear hear! I would only add that religion has an entirely different purpose than science, and the attempt by fundamentalists to play one off against the other - as if it’s ‘either / or’ - lacks any real understanding of either. @Rahul “Why not faith in something we can't explain but believe is at work? That won't hinder us in making scientific advances“ Indeed. Is that your answer to the “challenge” (above) about Jim Al-Khalili? @Peter G “You're barking up the wrong tree, friend. That's not the position Tidd is taking. Tidd may be guilty of a little snark, but not of advocating against anyone's religious beliefs.” Thank you. I’m not sure why Ben has become so polemical when all I was trying to do was debate the points he had made. I wonder if he is smarting over my original phrase “the primitive Israelites”? That phrase can be interpreted two ways: 1. “All Israelites are primitive” (he thinks that is what I meant?) or 2. “The early Israelites were primitive, compared to the later Israelites” - which is how I meant it. “ It seems to me that part of the objective of Tidd post was, ironically, to defend the reputation of Christians, rather than to throw religion under the bus.” Once again - thank you! I’m not being anti-Christian, but against the minority who throw science “under the bus”. ——— Just two more points: Somewhere way up there, someone accused me of being ‘anti-theist’ rather than atheist? Almost: I would describe my beliefs as ‘non theist’, not ‘anti…’ Also, though I am unsure of when precisely Advaita yoga dates from, it’s based on the Vedas whose origins go back 000’s of years. Finally, Monday is “Moon day” and has nothing to do with the Israelites (oh, do please calm down, Ben!). The names of our days of the week are mostly Norse in origin, and our months are Roman.

@Ben "I forgive you" I did not ask for your forgiveness nor do I want it. Let me answer your "forgiveness" with a quote:" I like your Christ, but I don't like your Christians because they are so unlike Christ."

@Tidd What Jeffrey was pointing out is that many people misunderstand what a scientific theory is. https://www.masterclass.com/articles/theory-vs-law-basics-of-the-scientific-method "A scientific theory is a description of the natural world that scientists have proven through rigorous testing. As understood within the scientific community, a theory explains how nature behaves under specific conditions. Theories tend to be as broad as their supporting scientific evidence will permit. They seek to serve as a definitive explanation of some aspect of the natural world." In other word the fact the it is called the "theory of evolution" means that it has been proven to be correct.

@Booming Thanks for that. I’ve never quite understood the difference between ‘law’ and ‘theory’ - that link helps.

"Well, hear hear! I would only add that religion has an entirely different purpose than science," Haha not to be pedantic but I actually don't think their purpose is different really. This claim that science and religion answer different but equally valid questions is the desperate rearguard position of the religious as humanism powered by science has supplanted and swalliwed up most of its former territories banishing it to tiny reservations of human thought. 500 years ago no one would have accepted this measly domain for religion.

I can understand why Peter G. would hope a few lines somebody wrote doesn't end up a straw man but I find it puzzling how he is repeatedly trying to get inside Tidd's head and try and understand his/her motivations. I also respect Peter G. but find it odd his making light of Tidd's ugly comments. I think Ben D. laid it out pretty well -- it's not a "little snark" as Peter G. put it to rip into some dude's post from 5 years ago with an idiotic remark. It's shameful in the way it was done. From what I've observed over the past couple of days on this thread, I think I can help with his understanding of Todd. Think of him as Discount Booming. Not quite a troll but a shit disturber. He'll post his reviews but every once in a while he'll write something offensive and try and stir shit up. Then somebody will call him out on it, he'll respond by acting all scholarly and dropping some names and then get his head handed to him by someone who actually knows what they're talking about. I'm not saying to completely ignore him like I suggest with Booming for a better experience on this forum, but I just would hardly pay any attention to him. One would certainly have to question his agenda through all this.

Sorry Tidd, Rahul harasses all women who come here. Don't expect the men to call him out on his behavior. I mostly stay because I know it bugs him a little that he can not get rid of me. He will misgender you, write your nick wrong, often insult you indirectly, try to get the other men on his side. Welcome to the shit disturber club.

@ Rahul, I'm mostly not thrilled about flaming someone, even if it's in response to a post that also seems like flaming someone else. In Tidd's case there's the additional fact that she has outright stated things about herself that are being dismissed while the critiques of her OP continue tangentially. Trying to get inside someone's head is IMO the literal only reason why you should engage with them. You want to know what they think. Picking apart a text, if the critique doesn't touch on what they think, is a waste of time. If the post is imperfect and the poster wants to add more, they can, and Tidd did. If you don't agree with the answers, then cool, but I'm not sure why you dislike that I'm trying to verify what Tidd is and isn't saying. If your issue was Tidd's tone (and fair enough) I would remind you that your tone has not been entirely generous either on this matter. So if it's the tone alone, I'll agree with you, but also suggest that escalating the hostilities maybe doesn't help?

@Peter G. You know I don't come on this site just to flame people. But when I think about it, Tidd is sort of like what I recall Booming doing (years ago when I first started to get a sense of how he acts here) -- hence "Discount Booming". I know it is not very nice to associate somebody with Booming, but if you think about Tidd that way, I think it will help you get in his/her head. Pretty sure both lean pretty hard to the left. I think you'll better understand now why Tidd would make a comment to denigrate some ancient religious believers and say they didn't have science to understand. Yes my tone has been harsh, as has Tidd's -- so you agree with me on that. That is also an inevitable consequence of these types of fora. You know it happens all the time on here. It is what it is. But I stand by everything I said. "Picking apart a text, if the critique doesn't touch on what they think, is a waste of time." Maybe Tidd has problems expressing himself/herself in writing but I just go by what somebody writes and take it at face value. Why would somebody write something and think something completely different?

@Jason R "This claim that science and religion answer different but equally valid questions is the desperate rearguard position of the religious as humanism powered by science has supplanted and swalliwed up most of its former territories banishing it to tiny reservations of human thought." I'm no great defender of religion, well especially organised religion, and more especially the Western Abrahamic religions. The point I was trying to make is that many Christian fundamentalists try to place science and religion as opposing factions answering the same questions. (In the East, many of what are regarded as religions are really more philosophies, and if - *IF* - there is any meeting place between the two, then philosophy could be that place.) I really wanted to say that religion's speciality has generally been more about *how* to live, rather than answering objective questions about the universe (though it has tried to encompass those too). Beyond that issue of morality, religion is a question of faith, which is an entirely different approach to life than science takes. In any case, I think most of the moral considerations that have traditionally been the province of religion are now more than adequately met by humanism. Or, if you will allow its more practical and philosophical side rather than "how many boddhisattvas dance on the head of a pin" - Buddhism, especially Zen. Which leaves science to deal with the more mundane aspects of the physical world on the one hand, and the mind boggling mysteries endemic within particle physics, gravity, time, string theory, entropy, singularities, and the multiverse, on the other. @Booming Thanks. I think I've now got the measure of rahul but your warning is useful. I've met too many misogynists to let them drain my energy. @Peter G I do hope I've apologised for the tone of my original post? If not adequately, then I want to try once again. I'm not sorry for the essence of what I said, but I am for the particular words used.

EventualZen

@Rahul "For me, I don't believe in evolution and *one* of the reasons for that is the science behind it is so full of holes..." Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution and/or believes in creationism should check out Aron Ra at https://www.youtube.com/c/AronRa . He discusses the evidence for evolution and debunks creationism. I personally believe in evolution even if we were created or given a helping hand (genetically engineered by aliens) whoever created or altered us must have evolved themselves.

@ Tidd, "I do hope I've apologised for the tone of my original post?" I wasn't asking for one :)

@Jason R. "Haha not to be pedantic but I actually don't think their purpose is different really. This claim that science and religion answer different but equally valid questions is the desperate rearguard position of the religious as humanism powered by science has supplanted and swalliwed up most of its former territories banishing it to tiny reservations of human thought. 500 years ago no one would have accepted this measly domain for religion." It's hard to disagree with any critique of "the religious" (an easy target in any debate) but if the shared purpose you refer to is to seek objective knowledge, that would have only been true post-Age of Enlightenment and not surprisingly, science was always going to win that battle. Seeking proof or objective knowledge of God (whatever that word might mean to you) is simply misguided. As an historical or sociological field maybe religion has a place in academia, but religious studies has no place alongside the sciences.

@EventualZen "Anyone who doesn't believe in evolution and/or believes in creationism should check out Aron Ra at https://www.youtube.com/c/AronRa . He discusses the evidence for evolution and debunks creationism. I personally believe in evolution even if we were created or given a helping hand (genetically engineered by aliens) whoever created or altered us must have evolved themselves. " I watched some of these and I'm confused why "creationism" is always pitted against evolution when the advocates for "creation" frame it as a one-time event - God creates everything then departs. While evolution is a process in constant effect. Wouldn't it make more sense to also view creation as a continuous, ongoing process still in operation? I suppose that would interfere with the common view of sin and having to blame God (as God is defined for most believers) for bad stuff. Still, it makes no sense to me.

"I really wanted to say that religion's speciality has generally been more about *how* to live, rather than answering objective questions about the universe (though it has tried to encompass those too). " Well my point was that until very recently in history, I don't think the religious would have even made such a distinction or even considered it a coherent point in the first place. While religion may not have had a scientific methodology, the purpose of religion was always to explain objective questions about the universe that science now explains, which was not some incidental or secondary purpose but absolutely essential. It is only now that religion has been ejected and supplanted from those realms by science that somehow the fallback has become that religion never sought to even answer those questions, which is revisionist nonsense.

@ Jason R, "While religion may not have had a scientific methodology, the purpose of religion was always to explain objective questions about the universe that science now explains, which was not some incidental or secondary purpose but absolutely essential." I can't speak about the history of religions such as Hinduism or other Eastern religions, but in regard to Christian history it's really just inaccurate that there was ever any animus against science. This is a common modern statement that is only reinforced by its repetition. What was the case, on some occasions, was conflict when a new idea directly contradicted a theological point and was taught 'without permission'. This may sound pedantic, but it was a society where there was a hierarchy of teaching that strictly kept within bounds what was accepted. If you want to think in terms of scientific revolutions, it would have slowed, but not stopped, the turning over of established ideas in favor of updates. Most of the cases of persecution that are famous, for instance Galileo and Bruno, were not so much that the ideas were banned, but that they were being written about and taught prior to the establishment having agreed that it made sense. You won't get any disagreement from me that this type of top-down control over information had negative repercussions, and that in the Western world we frown on government controlling narrative, but you have to remember it was a different world. But this issue about controlling narrative was, again, strictly in matters that directly impacted theology. So Copernicus was a sticking point because it threw into question the Aristotelian model, but it's not like the Church was stopping research into gunpowder, masonry, and agricultural techniques. This idea that religion was supposed to explain how natural phenomena work was never true in any real sense. But what did evolve was that certain areas, of natural philosophy such as astronomy and cosmology had to be re-understood as being natural areas one could study like rocks, rather than being placed in the divine sphere. Honestly the only place you'll see an actual opposition to science in and of itself would be in fundamentalist groups. And I think you'll find this is true in the extremes of any set of belief systems. You can find groups of any strain of human thought that are so married to their concepts that they don't want to hear from anyone else or be contradicted. This is not strictly a religious thing; it's a human thing. Like in the rest of the world, these groups of people exist among the religious, but not really IMO in any different capacity than non-religious people who likewise are impervious to alternative concepts.

"it's really just inaccurate that there was ever any animus against science." Did I say there was??

@ Jason R, "Did I say there was??" Fair, that is not precisely what you said, although it's generally the topic on the table when this issue comes up. So you can consider that this individual clause was addressed 'to the room' rather than to you personally. But your broader point, that the "purpose" of religion was to explain natural phenomena, is what I was chiefly addressing, and it's simply not the case. The Bible, or the Koran, or the vedas, do not purport to explain the viscosity of water, light spectra, or mineral content in soil. They were never meant to, and *almost* no one thinks they are even about that. But maybe you're thinking more of teleological stories like in the Ancient Greek myths, where for instance the story of Ixion is meant to explain the origin of clouds, and stuff like that? The only thing even comparable to that in the Judeo-Christian canon is Genesis 1, essentially, and it's really not about mechanics either, even though it does outline a chronological sequence. It says it happened, but how how the things in it work; like is says "let there be light", but it doesn't try to describe the measurable speed of that light, or how interference patterns work. Those would be scientific objects of study, and it would be bizarre to suggest that the "purpose" of the Hebrew religion was to explain these things. It's actually a bit far-reaching to even speak of the purpose of a religion at all, given that (from a materialist standpoint) religions emerge organically, and not by design. So they don't have a purpose; purposes are for created things, not emergent things. You might say religion had niches, within society, psychologically, etc, but not a purpose. Anyhow, if it did have a purpose, surely it would have been as a means to order their society and assign priorities to personal comportment, no?

@Jason R. "While religion may not have had a scientific methodology, the purpose of religion was always to explain objective questions about the universe that science now explains, which was not some incidental or secondary purpose but absolutely essential." My question would be: essential to what? In the Vedas there are descriptions of the nature of prakriti (matter), which is said to be made up of three qualities - rajas (activity), tamas (inertia, darkness) and sattva (purity). Obviously that's a big departure from the molecular model, and if anyone tried to use it to synthesize new drugs or build a nuclear reactor it would be a failure. That's not what the Vedas are for, nor are their descriptions there to tell us "how it is" - they state very clearly their purpose is to describe how to achieve what they say is the ultimate purpose of life - liberation/enlightenment/salvation. That's one example but is common to all or most religions. They're not objective in how they describe the universe and they don't need to be for the aims they set out. The descriptions of how the universe is found in religious texts are absolutely incidental or secondary to their larger purpose.

"But your broader point, that the "purpose" of religion was to explain natural phenomena, is what I was chiefly addressing, and it's simply not the case." I can't speak to what religion's true "purpose" may be - according to who? Evolutionary biologists? High priests? And something as complex as religion might have more than one purpose. All I can say is what every religion has actually done, and that always included the explanation of natural phenomena, from Zeus's thunderbolts to the stars to death itself. This explanation may have come in terms very different from a scientific textbook but the ultimate fact that the religion was seeking to explain the natural world isn't in doubt. I mean even taking a religion like Judaism there is an explanation of who created the universe, in what order various things came to be, even down to the substance of how men and women were created from Earth and a rib, respectively. This is all a necessary precondition to any understanding of what Jews or Christian's believe and why. The natural world and and how and why it came to be including God's role in it are hardly trivialities just as they aren't in any religious belief system. It makes no sense to worship God unless you accept that he created the universe and did all the the other aspects of the natural world, such as man! It is only in the modern world that we have apparently decided that science explains these things far better than any religion, to the point where even fundamentalists often revert to scientific (or pseudoscientific) explanations of things like evolution when they engage the public square - even the bible thumpers have all but surrendered this territory when they seek to influence public policy. Yet 500 years ago nobody needed to artificially curtail or cordon off religion's domain - of course religion explained the how and the why of the natural world, even if in terms we would consider crude or fanciful. Every religion did. This idea of religion being purely devoted to pie in the sky notions of morality and purpose is a modern contrivance, as I said, a desperate rearguard to carve off a tiny domain for religion that it can't be ejected from by science.

OmicronThetaDeltaPhi

@Jason R. "This claim that science and religion answer different but equally valid questions is the desperate rearguard position of the religious as humanism powered by science has supplanted and swallowed up most of its former territories banishing it to tiny reservations of human thought." Science and religion don't answer "different" questions. But they do answer the same questions from very different perspectives. Religion views the Universe as a conscious being, and tries to shed light on our relationship with that being. Science views the Universe as a clockwork of physical laws, and tries to decipher how this mechanism works. The two disciplines, of-course, speak about the same universe. The scope of one does not - in any way - come at the expanse of the scope of the other. There may be occasional conflicts, of-course, which means that our understanding of either the spiritual realm or the physical realm is faulty. But there shouldn't be any rivalry between the two approaches. On the contrary: When done right, science and religion should inspire and enrich one another. "Any Christian denomination that takes the bible literally would find it impossible to accept evolution, that is just a fact." Any Christian denomination that takes the bible 100% literally would also find it impossible to accept that the earth goes around the sun. Remember the story where Joshua stopped the sun? You can't stop something unless it was originally moving, right? Of-course, we could argue that Joshua stopped the earth and the story is told from the point of view of a person on the ground. But that's not what the Bible literally says, is it? See, even the majority of the creationists don't take their Bibles 100% literally. @Tidd "Wake up. Open your eyes. The Old Testament creation story is just that: a poetic story dreamed up by the primitive Israelites to explain what they didn’t yet have the science to understand." I agree that it is a poetic story. But is it *only* a poetic story? I don't think so. Because the parallels between the events of Genesis 1 and the modern scientific account are too striking (in my view) to be a coincidence. This goes nicely with what I said to Jason: Religion and science have different goals in their explanation. Genesis 1 does not make sense as a scientific text, nor does it read like one. But it does makes perfect sense as a mythical telling of actual events: The events that happened from the Big Bang to the dawn of man.

@Omicron " There may be occasional conflicts, of-course, which means that our understanding of either the spiritual realm or the physical realm is faulty. But there shouldn't be any rivalry between the two approaches. On the contrary: When done right, science and religion should inspire and enrich one another." Religion doesn't have an occasional conflict with science but with reality. Science tries to find out how reality is, most religions, including the abrahamic ones, already know how reality is because they have a book for that and every time science makes a discovery that is not in line with religious doctrine, religious people are up in arms. That is why born again Christians/Evangelicals are actively undermining public trust in science. While Peter is right, that the Catholic church had a far more supportive relationship with science then it is often perceived. Jason is also right. People over time so overwhelmingly accepted certain scientific facts that going against them would have been more damaging for religions than accepting them and losing some influence over human thought. Religion and science can only have a harmonious relationship if religions give up on their holy texts because those were written at times so far removed from modern times that they will constantly come into conflict with reality. For example the Christian religion should only be: Jesus loved all no matter what religion, pacifistic, humble, cared for the poor and probably a few other things. Behave like that and you are Christian. No book needed and no conflicts with science/reality as a bonus.

@Tom “In the Vedas there are descriptions of the nature of prakriti (matter), which is said to be made up of three qualities - rajas (activity), tamas (inertia, darkness) and sattva (purity). Obviously that's a big departure from the molecular model, and if anyone tried to use it to synthesize new drugs or build a nuclear reactor it would be a failure” The Vedas are 000’s of years old - among the oldest writings, let alone the oldest religious writings. They are an extraordinary body of work, explaining what the universe is and by understanding that, also understanding the right way to live. However, as a religious work, their foundation is really quite simple: there is no God, simply pure consciousness that exists always and everywhere, and which they call Brahman. Within that concept, everything conceivable can exist. I find that Advaita yoga has a fascinating simplicity at its heart quite unlike other religions most of which (Taoism being one of the honourable exceptions) require belief in an external super-being who not only created the world but is an ‘active interference’ in it. Sorry, I’ve gone on long enough. I just find it interesting that the oldest recorded religion is also the simplest, and has no external god. It could teach later religions a thing or two!

@Tidd I welcome your comments. Don't feel the need to stop. I have different views on the Vedanta. I certainly wouldn't say it's simple, it's very complex in its metaphysics at times. And I also wouldn't say it doesn't have a God - there is the concept of Isvara which depending on the context substitutes for either supreme personal God or universal common denominator of oneness. And there are also a range of deities that are worshiped. But again, my point was that these are symbolic concepts. They're not in these texts to describe how things are objectively, but for the purpose of attaining moksha - liberation. That is what sets them apart from science, which apparently goes over the head of those who like to pit religion against science.

@Booming "Most religions, including the abrahamic ones, already know how reality is because they have a book..." That's downright false. The vast majority of religious denominations don't work that way. Doctrine evolves and adapts, and the place of scriptures in it has changed throughout history (as well as from one denomination to another). This has always been so. "every time science makes a discovery that is not in line with religious doctrine, religious people are up in arms." Yes, because change is difficult. This is human nature, and religious people don't have a monopoly on resisting change or attacking ideas that threaten their worldview. Followers of secular philosophies also do this. Even scientists do this, despite the fact that modern science has a gazillion safeguards in place in order to prevent such bias. We human beings are notorious for this. Speaking of which: 15th century science was just as bad in correcting itself as 15th century Christianity. Thankfully, today, both mainstream religion and mainstream science are doing better on this front. "Religion and science can only have a harmonious relationship if religions give up on their holy texts because those were written at times so far removed from modern times that they will constantly come into conflict with reality." That's like saying that Trekkies must give up on the message of Star Trek, just because the science on the show often makes no sense. Or because the show sometimes betrayed it's own ideals. "For example the Christian religion should only be: Jesus loved all no matter what religion, pacifistic, humble, cared for the poor and probably a few other things. Behave like that and you are Christian. No book needed and no conflicts with science/reality as a bonus." Again taking the Trek analogy: There is a huge advantage in having a canon that everybody can refer to. Even if it means pointing out a certain passage/scene and saying "this is morally wrong", the whole point of such canon is to give us something concrete to discuss and learn from. Of-course there are always those who nitpick the details while also completely missing the big picture. :-)

"For example the Christian religion should only be: Jesus loved all no matter what religion, pacifistic, humble, cared for the poor and probably a few other things. Behave like that and you are Christian. No book needed and no conflicts with science/reality as a bonus." I agree wholly with Booming though perhaps for a different reason than what she had in mind. Yes, she is correct in her implication that when you strip away all the baggage from Christianity about creation and natural order etc... you end up with some variation of the golden rule. The hippie love everyone and be super nice laid back woke Jesus. Of course, that renders Christianity pointless, since virtually everyone everywhere from die hard Taliban fighters to Buddhist Monks to stone cold atheists agree with the golden rule (in principle, if not always in actuality) which means Christianity is left with nothing unique or useful to say and becomes little more than a hollowed out shell of trite platitudes. It becomes culturally irrelevent, except as a collection of old rituals and symbols like an ethnic dance demonstration put on for tourists. But that goes to my original point, which is that if you expel religion from explaining the natural world, if you divorce it from its traditional domains in favour of some pie in the sky philosophy gimmick, then whether you know it or not, you've rendered it irrelevent and pointless and anyone who goes down this path will inevitably stop believing - which is exactly what has been happening everywhere this ideological shift has taken place, with the most progressive churches shuttering most rapidly.

Hopefully Omicron you are not insulted if I don't respond point by point. We could both make out arguments and to be honest discussing religion often bores me a little. No offense. :)

The problem with the "Jesus as hippie" ethos is that he also performed miracles and transcended death. That was as much a part of his life (as the stories tell us) as his loving kindness. So there's an inherent conflict between his life and science which says there are certain natural laws which can't be superceded. Churches might tend to downplay that part of his life in order to attract followers (and being told you're sinful is much more attractive than being told you can perform miracles) but it's still an essential part. So we can forget the idea that Christianity is just the golden rule.

@ Booming, "For example the Christian religion should only be: Jesus loved all no matter what religion, pacifistic, humble, cared for the poor and probably a few other things. Behave like that and you are Christian. No book needed and no conflicts with science/reality as a bonus." I know you're just saying what you would prefer things to be, but as Jason R correctly mentions, this would not be Christianity. Not because Christianity needs to have the last word on science in order to survive, but because it covers a domain of reality in which it does state objective facts as it sees them. It's not a philosophy, and if that's all it was I would agree with Jason R that it becomes at that point a self-help book. So you would probably want to reformulate your statement to read "behave like that and you're a decent bloke." And @ Jason R, "But that goes to my original point, which is that if you expel religion from explaining the natural world, if you divorce it from its traditional domains in favour of some pie in the sky philosophy gimmick, then whether you know it or not, you've rendered it irrelevent and pointless and anyone who goes down this path will inevitably stop believing - which is exactly what has been happening everywhere this ideological shift has taken place, with the most progressive churches shuttering most rapidly." This is an interesting idea, but afaik it's by no means clear to the people in positions of authority in churches that this is the reason for the dwindling religious numbers (such as church or synagogue attendance). In fact there is a lot of debate whether it's about any number of causes, which could include being to lenient and asking too little of people, or maybe too much material comfort (you may notice religion still does very well in poorer countries), or maybe too little innovation in how the faith is presented and lived. I personally don't think that "losing domain to science" would be on the list, because actually I suspect that there was an enormous conflict of interest historically between the supposed message of (for example) the Catholic religion, and the need for strong governance, squashing rebellion/dissent, and controlling narrative. The very things demanded of the faith seemed to be impossible to make concordant with the use of political force and empire-building. I think things are in much better shape now that all of this extraneous stuff has been ejected. Now it's actually religion we're talking about, as opposed to the historic thing, which was religion-fiefdom-military-governor all baked into one. That was a hot mess. So it's perhaps even likely that another reason for the falling off of religious numbers is simply the fact that it has become increasingly over time entirely voluntary to join, and not even encouraged from all quarters. But I personally suspect the rich/poor thing is a huge component of why some people feel they don't need religion. Just a small comment about the "pie in the sky" thing that's left when you remove empirical matters: you need to distinguish between empirical in the sense of calculable in a lab, versus empirical in the human experiential qualitative way. The lab stuff has nothing to do with the Christian religions at this point, but the other sort of empirical stuff, i.e. what people experience and attach meaning to, is obviously very much a part of religion. It's not just airy-fairy realm of idea stuff that you play around with in your imagination. If that's all it was then it would indeed be irrelevant. The argument made is that they do address real stuff, just a different domain of stuff from that studied by science. Like, how is one supposed to address the question of meaning without an axiomatic system? It is well understood that you cannot derive an ought from an is, and science only comments on what is. But humans *cannot* live without an ought; so right away probably the most critical human domain is well within the daily life of religious people.

@Peter That may sound insulting to religious people but to me religion is just a very peculiar self help creed? that is of based on a 2000 year old version of the Simarillion.

@ Booming, You can say that, but like anything else if your statement is a misrepresentation of the actual stated beliefs of the religion then you're just inventing something of your own (Booming's religion) and then declaring that to be a very peculiar self-help creed. Just for instance, Flannery O'Connor once said something along these lines: "Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol. Her response was, “If it's only a symbol, to hell with it."" It's really supposed to be the opposite of a pie in the sky philosophy system. Of course you may disagree with the concepts, the beliefs, the reality of it, etc etc, but a statement of the form "religion IS this" would be objectively false if you aren't keenly and specifically aware of the details. The broad strokes version you get from the media will give you nothing; not about Christianity, not about Judaism, etc.

@Peter Just my opinion. I have read a little about it, so I'm not a complete neophyte. Two books I remember, one was about the Popes. Raunchy stuff. There was, for example, a period called the "Pornocracy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeculum_obscurum https://www.amazon.com/Popes-History-John-Julius-Norwich/dp/0701182903 Then there was Gibbon and with his 6 books about the Roman Empire I kind of started to dislike church history. He wrote quite extensively about the conflicts of the nicean and the orthodox church. These conflicts about Jesus having a human body or not, did he own money and other things like iconoclasm sounded like hardcore fans discussing Harry Potter to me, with the twist that at the end of discussion one side often murdered the other. I had that with other books, too. When church doctrine is discussed I fall asleep. Besides that I have skimmed a few encyclicals.

@ Booming, "Just my opinion. I have read a little about it, so I'm not a complete neophyte." Sure, not everyone can steep themselves in something just to be informed, especially if they're disinclined in the first place to like the topic. But just FYI, a lot of these superficial descriptions of religions are really not 'opinions', they're statements of fact that can be true/false. Like, if I say "in my opinion the United States has 57 states" that's not an opinion, it's just bad information. It's basically a misuse of the word opinion. So I mean you can make statements about any religion from a limited POV, like "in my opinion Judaism is supposed to be about wearing funny hats and talking to a man in the sky." You can say that, but it's not an opinion so much as factual nonsense. Likewise, in this instance, about Christianity being essentially a "self help creed." I mean, you can say that you think that's all that's functional about it (i.e. that it can get you to help yourself), but it's factually wrong that that's what it actually is, or is supposed to be. "Then there was Gibbon and with his 6 books about the Roman Empire I kind of started to dislike church history." The problem with history is that no one had a monopoly on terrible behavior (by our standard). It's easy to underestimate how much the world has changed, even in very mundane ways. "These conflicts about Jesus having a human body or not, did he own money and other things like iconoclasm sounded like hardcore fans discussing Harry Potter to me, with the twist that at the end of discussion one side often murdered the other." Haha! Well, maybe it's not so different from trying to argue about whether a theoretical particle has integer or fractional spin; or whether it has weak interactions. Depending on how you look at it, that is. At a certain point *anything* becomes ridiculously esoteric and fantastical, even true things.

@Peter "The problem with history is that no one had a monopoly on terrible behavior (by our standard). It's easy to underestimate how much the world has changed, even in very mundane ways." I dislike church history not because I think the church was horrible back then. It was pretty much in line with the times. I just find church history itself very boring, that's were the dislike comes from. I never finished decline and fall because of it. About the self help creed. I wasn't really sure if that was the right phrasing, therefore the question mark behind it. ;)

@Tom "I have different views on the Vedanta. I certainly wouldn't say it's simple, it's very complex in its metaphysics at times. And I also wouldn't say it doesn't have a God - there is the concept of Isvara which depending on the context substitutes for either supreme personal God or universal common denominator of oneness. And there are also a range of deities that are worshiped." Hinduism is basically a corruption (of devolution?) of the original Vedanta - it makes those deities into actual gods instead of seeing them as metaphors (or symbols, perhaps) for what they represent as universal forces rather than gods. And Hindus do worship those "gods" indeed. But Sankara the medieval commentator on the Vedas, re-established Advaita as the original 'pure' form, though in truth his commentaries are far from simple!

In my broadcast area reruns of TNG air nightly followed by DS9. How sad it is what happened to Worf. Worf was one of the lights of early TNG, funny and genuine with no trouble being himself. Then he was made all about his neverending identity crisis, and by the time DS9 was done with him he was wooden, flat, and boring, and worse, a miserable foil for the unwatchable Dax. Watching _Transfigurations_ followed by a random DS9 Word episode made this depressingly stark.

I rather liked this one because it has a day in the life type vibe with what appears to the crew to be a minor background plot/mystery of John Doe and the data capsule. This explicitly takes place over more than a month. That's nice sometimes because it feels more like a real life ship. Also nice things like Beverly and Wesley casually discussing John over dinner. It's funny above a commenter noted how convenient it was John's origin was in the planned path of the Enterprise. True, but in most episodes they drop everything to fly off wherever the plot needs. The data capsule thing was almost like a red herring though because of the prop's interesting appearance (nice job) and they kept carrying it around. On first viewing I expected it to be a bomb or shapeshifter or whatever.

@ladderff: I agree completely about Worf on DS9. It nearly ruined the character for me. They removed most of his fun attributes and ramped up the negatives. Constantly mopey, self righteous, etc. bleh. I wish they had never added him there. On DS9, I like Martok infinitely more than Worf.

@John back in 2015: Data wasn't affected by the breathing weapon. He's actually crouched beside Picard, presumably trying to help him.

SNOOZERS!!!!! Man, that "alien" has all the charisma of a moldy dishrag. Jesus Christmas Christ, tell you something else! Then his writhing as he enters some metaphysical trance, all the while wearing longjohn-onesie... - yeah, THAT's never been done before! The resolution was kinda cool. I don't mean the metamorphosis and silly SFX but how this particular bad guy was seen off. It didn't save the episode, which is eminently forgettable, but it made it not a total flop.

Neo the Beagle

The opening teaser was great. Worf giving Geordi advice on women is the best scene in this episode, especially the line where Worf tells LaForge "she must see the fire in your eyes", and Geordi gives him an incredulous look, as he has no eyes for her to see

How did O'brien dislocate his shoulder in the holodeck, do the safety protocols not prevent minor injuries?

Once again the anti religious folks apply their own narrow rigid worldview and have everything all "figured out."

This episode ends quite precipitously, in contrast to the leisurely pace it's kept throughout. Maybe another scene of Crusher reflecting on John, or even just a few seconds on her face, might've given a more satisfying resolution.

I love this episode for the music signature at the end. They embellished this for the series finale as the Enterprise D sails into the Sun.

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Den of Geek

Revisiting Star Trek TNG: Transfigurations

The Enterprise rescues a mysterious patient in this week's Star Trek: TNG look-back. Here's James' take on Transfigurations...

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This review contains spoilers.

3.25 Transfigurations

The Enterprise is enjoying some quiet time (Picard’s phrase, not mine) so Geordie and Worf are hanging out in Ten Forward. Geordi is trying to catch the attention of Christy Henshaw, but is too shy to go and talk to her. When La Forge tries to stop Worf staring, Worf advises him that “you must let her see the fire in your eyes” – apparently oblivious to Geordi’s lack of visible eyes.

This awkwardness is interrupted when Riker calls Geordi away, and the two head to a planet to investigate a crashed vessel. It’s an escape pod with one badly injured survivor. They need to transport him to the ship, but his brain is too damaged and can’t take the strain. Crusher rigs up the tricorder to link Geordi’s brain to the patient’s (wow, those things are powerful!) and despite a weird moment of feedback, it all goes fine.

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In sickbay, Crusher is attempting to save the patient while Riker reports that the crashed ship appears to have been an escape pod. Luckily they salvaged some kind of disco lamp which is probably the ship’s black box, so once they find out whether it runs Windows or OS X, they can figure out what it was and who attacked it.

The patient, who they call John Doe, survives his injuries and it’s soon clear he’s healing fast. Indeed, his cells aren’t just regenerating, they appear to be spontaneously mutating as well. John does wake up, but unfortunately he’s lost his memory completely. (Although… mutant cells, a healing factor, no memory of his past… is this guy Wolverine?)

In ten-forward, Data and La Forge are talking about decoding the computer module so much that Worf starts to get annoyed that all of his friends are giant nerds (except Riker, but he plays the trumpet). Taking the hint, Geordi decides to go and chat up Christy, while making subtle remarks like “I’ve never felt this confident!” or “boy, that brain zap sure did something to my mind!”

Soon, a month has passed. As John is rehabilitated, Crusher starts to get way too involved with her patient, but luckily Starfleet has a policy of not caring about this sort of thing. As the saying goes: what happens in the Zeta Gelis Cluster stays in the Zeta Gelis Cluster.

But John isn’t just charming, kind and medically improbable. He also starts getting weird glows and energy pulses bursting from his chest. “It’s probably fine,” everyone says unconvincingly. Then he heals Chief O’Brien’s dislocated shoulder with a touch. “Well, if anything that’s good news!” everyone says, even less convincingly. Then he freaks out and tries to steal a shuttle, accidentally kills Worf, and subsequently raises him from the dead. “Ah, this is probably a bit more serious.” everyone says.

As John’s memory returns, Geordi continues to strut around talking about how confident he has become. He and Data finally decode the computer module and learn the escape pod’s flight path, but he begs them not to take him home. Then a ship from his race, the Zalkonians, turns up demanding he be turned over to them for a swift and brutal execution. Picard isn’t keen on this idea for obvious reasons.

As Picard and the Zalkonian argue about who gets to keep John Doe, he suddenly appears on the bridge exhibiting a variety of god-like powers and displaying the kind of peaceful serenity that makes you want to punch him. When Picard refuses to hand him over without a decent explanation of his crimes, The Zalkonians use their magic suffocate-o-matic to stop the Enterprise crew breathing. It almost works, but John Doe is able to use his new abilities to protect them and restore breathing to the Enterprise.

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With his memories now returned, John explains that he and his fallen crewmates were killed for being honest and open about the genetic mutations which give them crazy superpowers, spreading social unrest as a result. The Zalkonian Captain wanted them all dead so that they could prevent the mutation of their species, but it’s too late. How do you stop a man who can restart people’s breathing with the wave of his hand? As if to underscore his point, he turns into a glowing mass of light, which is the second time someone has done that at the end of an episode.

Once the Zalkonians have left, defeated. John Doe gives Crusher the “it’s not you, it’s me” speech, Geordi thanks him for his free confidence boost, and then John turns into a ball of energy and flies away. And let us never speak of this again.

TNG WTF: Not that it particularly bothers me, but you can’t help but be surprised at the oddly graphic close-up of John Doe’s body when they find him crash-landed on the planet. YOU CAN SEE HIS BRAINS.

TNG LOL: Worf gets some great stuff in this episode, believing that he’s teaching Geordi about women when he’s mostly just offering hugely impractical advice and taking credit for stuff he had nothing to do with.

Who’s That Face?: Julie Warner who plays Christy Henshaw was the co-star of Doc Hollywood and appeared in films like Flatliners and Tommy Boy . Those are some stone-cold early 90s credentials.

Time Until Meeting: 35:54. Picard, Riker, Troi and Crusher have a meeting with John to decide what they should do.

Captain’s Log: There are plenty of things about this episode’s premise which are quite good, but in general it all falls a little flat. The investigation into Doe’s past or powers is slow and uninteresting, and the Zalkonians, when they arrive, are one-note and so unreasonable you’re in no doubt what Picard will do with John.

Furthermore, the sub-plot about John and Beverly being attracted to each other lacks a lot of chemistry, and the plot about Geordi’s improved confidence just… ends. There’s no “the confidence was inside you all along!” revelation. John just suggests that maybe he awake something that was already in Geordi and that’s supposed to be the satisfying conclusion to that story. Still, given that we never see Christy again, we can probably assume it didn’t work out long-term.

Watch or Skip? Skip. 

Read James’ look-back at the previous episode, Menage A Troi, here .

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Transfigurations

The Enterprise crew saves a badly injured humanoid who possesses remarkable powers.

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Star Trek: The Next Generation – Transfigurations (Review)

This January and February, we’ll be finishing up our look at the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and moving on to the third year of the show, both recently and lovingly remastered for high definition. Check back daily for the latest review.

In way, what is so interesting about Transfigurations is how incredibly generic the story is. It’s a cookie-cutter Star Trek story, a collection of the narrative elements one associates with the franchise – mysterious aliens, energy beings, metaphors about tolerance and fear of the unknown – all loosely sorted into something resembling a linear story.

There’s none of the cheeky subversive charm from early in the third season. This isn’t a deconstruction of “energy being” stories in the way that The Bonding was a deconstruction of “red shirt” deaths. This is just a straight-up story about an alien species learning an important lesson about tolerance, dressed up in a science-fiction mystery, with a romantic subplot thrown in for Beverly because the show hasn’t really done much with Gates McFadden since she returned.

The result is as bland as you might expect, with a sense that everybody involved was just exhausted by the production difficulties that had haunted the third season, and desperately trying to make it to the hiatus. Transfigurations is nowhere near as bad as The Price or Ménage à Troi . It’s just forgettable and average.

Mellow yellow…

That’s not entirely fair. There are some interesting concepts at play here, but they really require a bit more work than the show is willing to put in at this stage in the third season. Star Trek: The Next Generation might have been producing a ground-breaking pieces of television, but the production staff were also emerging from a year of hell. Most of the writing staff would jump ship at the end of the season. Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler would return to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , but the band was breaking up.

There’s a sense, watching Transfigurations that the show is trying to maintain a holding pattern, just filling space between now and the big season finalé. It’s a very conventional Star Trek episode, in terms of plotting and in terms of structure, and it’s decidedly messy. For example, we get a rather superfluous subplot involving Geordi somehow developing some mojo after an energy transfer from our rapidly-evolving John Doe.

Lighting up the crew’s week…

It’s worth pausing to reflect on this surreal plot thread. While John’s ability to heal the sick and resurrect the dead makes a certain amount of sense, given we’re going for a thinly-veiled Jesus analogy here, his ability to turn Geordi’s romantic luck around is just weird. The third season has a strange fixation on Geordi’s relationship with women. The Booby Trap was built around how the engineer had to create his girlfriends in the holodeck, while Sarek featured Wesley (!) offering a variety of insults on that theme.

In theory, this sort of character continuity is good stuff. While The Next Generation never became a truly serialised show, it was great that the show could suggest these character attributes and then follow up on them. Geordi was never going to be the show’s most developed character, but we know a lot more about him now than we did at the start of the season, and that’s a testament to how far Michael Piller has taken The Next Generation . Even Geordi is defined.

Scarred tissue…

However, the plot line is a bit problematic. Even if we get past the strange logic whereby a divine deity gifts Geordi self-confidence like a tin woodsman, the show seems to be falling into familiar patterns here. Romance on The Next Generation had an uncomfortable tendency to assume that the male character had to be assertive or domineering. This was most obvious when The Price and The Vengeance Factor aired back-to-back, both episodes about how women apparently can’t resist domineering and sexually aggressive men.

Geordi’s “confidence” inevitably falls into that sort of pattern, where the character simply has to show that he’s perfectly capable of taking charge. “Christy, you’re not leaving, are you?” he opens with, practically following her out of Ten Forward. When he offers to accompany her to the arboretum, Christy is immediately unable to resist his sheer masculine charisma. “I didn’t think you were interested in that kind of thing,” she observes, insinuating that the previous unassertive Geordi must clearly have been asexual and not a “real” man conforming to the sort of trite gender stereotypes of the twenty-fourth century.

He can’t stand it no more!

Of course, it’s worth noting that Christy exists as nothing but an object to be won by Geordi. She is a character who recurs from The Booby Trap , but the character is hard to reconcile with the woman who appeared briefly in the teaser to that episode. In The Booby Trap , she simply wasn’t into Geordi at all. The problem was that Geordi was too keen, trying too hard. So, in Transfigurations , it seems weird that the relationship has so dramatically reversed. Now Geordi can’t bring himself to try at all, while Christi is clearly infatuated with him.

It’s a little unfortunate, reducing this recurring female character to little more than a plot device with no real consistency between her two appearances. Apparently, actress Julie Warner has joked that she was cast because she was shorter than actor LeVar Burton , which adds another uncomfortable suggestion. It seems the show might have been afraid to hire an actress taller than her romantic interest. Either way, it seemed like Christy Henshaw was a disposable character. This would be her final appearance, despite Geordi’s infatuation with her. (He confesses that he saw her “every night this week.” And, apparently, never again.)

Love in a turbolift…

As strange as this plot element seems, it’s not a total wash. For one thing, Crusher’s romantic entanglement manages to avoid the “assertive male/submissive woman” dichotomy, even if it does fall into a familiar pattern where the male characters on the show seem to drive the relationships. Transfigurations also gives us Worf as a source of relationship advice, coaching Geordi in the art of romance. Worf is one of the show’s secret weapons, with Michael Dorn a master of deadpan delivery.

Still, outside of the strange Geordi tangent that seems to exist to eat up time in the first half of the episode, Transfigurations is a solid piece of Star Trek .  The Next Generation always had trouble with its female leads, with Troi in particular accruing a considerable volume of  “bad romance” stories across the show’s seven seasons. Crusher tends to fair a bit better, with stories more willing to focus on her profession or her character. (Then again, Sub Rosa is a Crusher episode… so…)

I bet Bashir wishes he could do that…

Looking at the outline of Transfigurations , it seems like an episode constructed around the fact that Crusher is a female cast member and the show’s doctor. As a result, the only logical thing to do was to construct an episode where she falls in love with her patient. To be fair, the episode works a lot better than that pitch makes it sound. Gates McFadden was always sorely underused as part of the ensemble, and she rises quite well to the material on offer.

Crusher’s interest in John Doe seems more professional and mature than most the ill-advised romantic entanglements featuring Troi in episodes like The Price or Man of the People . John Doe is a decidedly bland character, likeable and yet vague, which makes sense since the episode is pitching him as space! Jesus. While this hardly makes the episode’s romantic subplot exciting or engaging, it does mean that Crusher doesn’t end up looking like an idiot with extremely questionable taste in men.

Into the wild grey yonder…

From the point of view of storytelling mechanics, Transfigurations is quite fascinating. On paper, several of the ideas are quite interesting. It’s nice to have an episode based around futuristic medicine that doesn’t border on magical and isn’t incredibly convenient. In Pen Pals , the crew were able to conveniently escape the consequences of their actions by wiping the memory of a young girl. Here, however, John Doe’s full recovery from his injury takes weeks.

The episode doesn’t necessarily capture the feeling as well as it should, but there’s something quite fun about an episode of The Next Generation that unfolds across weeks with no real sense of urgency. “This routine assignment has made for a refreshingly quiet time aboard the Enterprise,” Picard tells us in his opening log. It takes the Enterprise three weeks to reach John Doe’s home world. This creates a sense that this what happens  between all the big missions featuring the Enterprise, a glimpse at business as usual.

A touching encounter…

There’s also the fact that Transfigurations is based around an instantly recognisable Star Trek narrative convention, but that it’s focusing on a novel aspect of that tried-and-true trope. God-like energy beings have been around since the very first episode of Star Trek broadcast, with the Enterprise frequently stumbling across entire species that have ascended to a higher plane of existence. The climax of John Doe’s story sees John transforming himself into a floating ball of pure energy, is Star Trek short-hand for “hyper-evolved species.”

The novelty in Transfigurations is that we’re actually getting to watch that leap in evolution take place. Those hyper-advance beings (like the Organians or the Q) are typically presented as a fully-formed race – they’ve already moved well beyond existence as we might understand it. As such, building a story around a race preparing to make that leap to a higher form of life is a neat narrative hook, cleverly playing with Star Trek storytelling conventions. ( Even if I remain somewhat skeptical of the science involved in such an evolutionary leap .) Transfigurations doesn’t really do much with this idea, but it’s a nice hook.

Talk about a warm fuzzy feeling…

Then again, it does feel like Transfigurations owes a conscious debt to Marvel’s X-Men franchise, telling the story of a strange person with strange powers who is ostracised by his own people for being different. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby , the book only really became a massive success when Chris Claremont took over in May 1975 . The book quickly became one of the most popular comics published by Marvel, and Claremont would write on the franchise for seventeen years. (Even today, the writer is occasionally drafted back in to write X-Men comics.)

Transfigurations comes as the X-Men were enjoying a surge in their popularity. Released a few months after Transfigurations aired, the September 1990 issue of Uncanny X-Men (no. 267) would see future superstar Jim Lee become fully-time penciller on the book, leading toward Claremont’s departure and the solidification of the X-Men as Marvel’s premiere franchise into the nineties – the decade that would see comic books explode ( and then implode ) in a wave of speculation-fuelled marketing. Released in October 1991, Jim Lee and Chris Claremont’s X-Men #1 would become the biggest-selling comic of all time .

Worf’s been working flat-out…

All of which is just a round-about way of pointing out that the X-Men were an aspect of popular culture that would have undoubtedly informed Transfigurations . Just as The Next Generation brought science-fiction to the masses in the nineties, paving the way for all manner of science-fiction television in the second half of the decade, X-Men brought comic books to the masses and played a massive role in the medium’s brief ascent to mainstream attention. (Crusher even repeatedly stresses the word “mutation.” )

Either way, it’s quite tough to watch Transfigurations without feeling that this is all very familiar. The story beats, the character arc, the reveal that the amnesiac John Doe was running from a people who fear and hate him, it all evokes the X-Men , to the point where one might consider this as a practice run for Patrick Stewart’s tenure as Professor Charles Xavier in Fox’s big budget X-Men film franchise a decade later.

It doesn’t quite scan…

Still, the fact that Transfigurations is so explicit in its religious imagery is striking for an early nineties syndicated science-fiction show. The episode doesn’t hesitate to cast John Doe as space! Jesus. “He apparently has the power to heal injuries with a simple touch,” Picard proclaims. “And even to reverse death itself.” Doe dresses in white as soon as he is recovered from his injuries. Even his polite rebuke of Beverly’s advances feels like a shout out to the fascination with the relationship between Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene that was the fixation of so much pop culture discussion in the wake of The Last Temptation of the Christ .

“The rapport that exists between us also means a great deal to me,” Doe tells Beverly, informing her that he has an obligation to a greater cause. “But I am on some kind of journey. Whatever brought me here, whatever is happening to my body, is all part of that journey. And I must complete it before any other consideration.” Even in the last sequence, he ventures off to spread to the word, keen to find “those who are willing will follow [him].”

He really knocked Beverly off her feet…

It’s a very clever hook, because Doe’s space-age messiah is cast opposite a hard-line zealot afraid of change and unwilling to accept the possibilities. In essence, Transfigurations pits John’s space-age humanism, very much in line with the New Testament’s approach to the teachings of Jesus Christ, against a very conservative and close-minded opposition. This is obviously an effective mirror to the persecution that Christ faced from the religious establishment of the time, but it also feels like it lands a bit closer to home.

Sunad feels like a rather aggressive commentary on the more extreme elements of the religious right – those very vocal radical religious organisations that seem to have very little time for values like tolerance or temperance or compassion. As such, John is cast simultaneous as a religious figure and as the victim of religious persecution. The accusations leveled at John by Sunad sound like the type of hard-line narrow-minded nonsense often used to justify the persecution of individuals who are “different.”

A tough cell…

“He is a disruptive influence,” Sunad warns Picard. “He spreads lies. He encourages dissent. He disturbs the natural order of our society.” It’s worth noting that there’s a relatively subtle suggestion here that John might be standing in for the LGBT characters so often overlooked by contemporary Star Trek . He’s an individual deviating from his society’s perceived standards of normality, who explicitly declines the romantic advances of a female lead. Perhaps reflecting transgender concerns, John is in the process of changing into something for which his society has little tolerance.

Unlike most religious character, John doesn’t threaten the established order through his philosophy or his actions. Instead, John’s very existence is deemed offensive to his people. The episode returns time and again to the idea that Sunad isn’t merely offended by John, he is somehow severely unsettled by him. “The Zalkonians are afraid of John,” Troi explains. When Picard remarks that John’s “existence has broader ramifications than that of a simple criminal” ,  Troi responds, “Sunad thinks so. He feels personally threatened by John.” Crusher clarifies, “Sunad called John a disruptive influence.”

I would totally watch a remake of Hitch starring Worf.

Keep in mind that John has actually done nothing at this point in the episode. Every indication is that he was actually fleeing persecution. He was not undermining the system, or seeking to subvert government authority. Though we get no real insight into John’s history, there’s little indication that he was a radical. However, his very existence was deemed offensive to the state. This can’t help but feel like (a very careful concealed) commentary on deep-rooted early nineties homophobia, the sort of sentiment that would be explored in films like Philadelphia .

There’s really not too much to support this reading, except the fact that writer René Echevarria has a history of dealing with LGBT themes within Star Trek – while skirting the restrictions imposed by the executives. After all, Echevarria’s first script for the show, The Offspring , featured a character choosing their own gender – a scene from the writer’s original pitch, and a sequence he seems quite proud of on the commentary. Echevarria would also go on to write Rejoined for Star Trek: Deep Space Nine , one of the few episodes of the franchise to tackle homosexuality and homophobia in an almost direct manner.

A beacon of hope…

Still, all of this plays out in the background of the episode, and there’s very much a sense that Transfigurations is just trying to make it out to the end of the season. Michael Piller asked Echevarria, who was not yet on staff, to write the first draft of the script from a basic outline. According to Captains’ Logs: The Unauthorized Complete Trek Voyages , the script was then divided up amongst the writing staff to polish off. This was the writing staff that would (by and large) be departing the show at the end of the season.

So Transfigurations is an episode with a wealth of interesting ideas let down by a perfectly competent execution. Don’t worry. The best is yet to come.

Read our reviews of the third season of  Star Trek: The Next Generation :

• Supplemental: (DC Comics, 1989) #1-2 – Return to Raimon/Murder, Most Foul
• Supplemental: The Ensigns of Command by Melinda Snodgrass
• The Survivors
• Who Watches the Watchers?
• Supplemental: Star Trek (DC Comics, 1989) #19 – Once a Hero…
• Supplemental: (DC Comics, 1989) #19 – The Lesson
• Supplemental: The Romulan Way by Diane Duane and Peter Morwood
• The Vengeance Factor
• Supplemental: The Sky’s the Limit – Suicide Note by Geoff Trowbridge
• The High Ground
• Supplemental: (DC Comics) Annual #1 – The Gift
• Supplemental: I, Q by John DeLancie and Peter David
• A Matter of Perspective
• Supplemental: The Lost Era – Well of Souls by Ilsa J. Bick
• Supplemental: The Last Generation
• Supplemental: Q-Squared by Peter David
• The Offspring
• Supplemental: Phase II (1978) – Kitumba, Parts I & II
• Captain’s Holiday
• Hollow Pursuits
• The Most Toys
• Supplemental: Sarek by A.C. Crispin
• Supplemental: Imzadi by Peter David
• Supplemental: Star Trek/X-Men: Star TreX
• Supplemental: (DC Comics, 1989) #47-50 – The Worst of Both Worlds
• Supplemental: Vendetta by Peter David

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Filed under: The Next Generation | Tagged: Beverly Crusher , Crusher , energy beings , evolution , john doe , Mutants , mutations , René Echevarria , star trek , star trek: the next generation , third season , transfigurations , x-men |

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Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season 3, Episode 25

Transfigurations, where to watch, star trek: the next generation — season 3, episode 25.

Watch Star Trek: The Next Generation — Season 3, Episode 25 with a subscription on Paramount+, or buy it on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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Cast & crew.

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Jonathan Frakes

Cmdr. William Riker

LeVar Burton

Lt. Cmdr. Geordi La Forge

Michael Dorn

Gates McFadden

Dr. Beverly Crusher

Marina Sirtis

Counselor Deanna Troi

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[TNG] Transfigurations

[TNG] Season 3, Episode 25: Transfigurations

Why are you watching this episode when you could just skip to the next one? Don’t you know what the next episode is? – – Read more at Memory Alpha –

Geordi still likes Christy, but he doesn’t know how to talk to her. Worf: “You must let her see the fire in your eyes.” Not a cool thing to say to Geordi, Worf.

They find a guy that’s almost dead.

Geordi links with him to stabilize him or something…

The guy wakes up but he doesn’t remember anything. Beverly calls him John Doe.

Ever since Geordi linked with that guy, he’s had more confidence.

Wesley wears a uniform and they establish that O’Brien loves kayaking, and that he seems to injure himself every single time.

But then John heals him.

Beverley goes on an orange juice date with John.

More glowing!

Worf dies but then John brings him back to life.

Enterprise runs into other people from John’s species.

They say something that scandalizes Riker.

Glowing climax!

<Previous Episode ——————————————————– Next Episode>

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Transfigurations Star Trek: The Next Generation – Season Three --> Transfigurations

Dr. Crusher is stunned when an alien rescued from the wreckage of an escape pod begins to exhibit incredible healing powers. Picard tries to protect the amnesia-stricken man when his people’s military come looking for him.

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Star Trek: The Next Generation S3E25 "Transfigurations" » Recap

Original air date: June 4, 1990

In Ten-Forward, Geordi is still pining for Christy Henshaw. Worf tries to give him a pep talk, but when Christy approaches him, Geordi becomes tongue-tied and gives up. He's spared more embarrassment when he's called upon to beam down with an away team to examine a crashed escape pod on an unknown planet. On the surface, the team finds a sole survivor clinging to life. When Crusher links Geordi's brain waves to the survivor, Geordi gets a jolt of something mysterious before they all beam to sick bay.

Crusher calls her new patient John Doe and works to stabilize him. Despite being on the verge of death, his body's amazing regenerative powers allow him to quickly recover and wake up, but he's got amnesia and cannot provide any details about his identity, species, or homeworld. As Crusher nurses him back to health, he and the doctor form quite a close connection.

Meanwhile, Geordi has a new spring in his step. He quickly puts the moves on Christy Henshaw and begins a romantic relationship with her. But Geordi isn't the only crew member to get help from John. When O'Brien visits sick bay with a dislocated shoulder, John lays his hand on the afflicted arm and heals him with a burst of energy. John also begins to remember that he was on an important journey before his accident. However, as he gains strength, he becomes increasingly afflicted with flashes of pain related to his cellular regeneration. He also becomes increasingly agitated about the prospect of returning to wherever he came from.

Picard and Data make a guess at John's homeworld and head toward it. Soon, they identify that an unfamiliar ship is heading toward them on an intercept course at speeds that even the Enterprise can't match. When John hears this, he freaks out and tries to escape on a shuttlecraft. Worf tries to intervene, but John unintentionally fires a burst of energy that knocks Worf over a rail, breaking his neck. However, John heals Worf back to perfect health. Picard demands to know why John doesn't want to return to his homeworld, but John still doesn't know.

The intercepting ship finally reaches the Enterprise and reveal themselves to be Zalkonians. The commander, Sunad, brusquely demands John's return as a fugitive sentenced to death and refuses to provide any further details. Picard balks at handing over their guest to be executed without knowing more. As the crew mull their options, Geordi finally admits that his newfound confidence must have something to do with what John did to him, but John says that whatever Geordi feels was inside of him all along.

Picard politely requests more information from the Zalkonians before turning John over. Sunad reveals only that John is a disruptive influence on his homeworld, but that does little to quell Picard's misgivings. Sunad loses patience and activates a weapon that starts asphyxiating everyone on board the Enterprise . John, who is unaffected, heals the ship's entire crew and then goes to the bridge to confront Sunad.

Tropes in this episode include:

• Amnesiac God : Downplayed . John Doe isn't quite a god, but he is about to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence and doesn't remember anything about it.
• An Arm and a Leg : When first discovered, John Doe's horrible injuries include the complete loss of his left arm, though it's hard to notice. Though she never explicitly says so, Crusher presumably reattaches it after stabilizing him. (She does make a comment about keeping his arm in stasis until he's stable enough for surgery.)
• Artistic License – Medicine : O'Brien's dislocated shoulder is healed with a touch, and the only thing we see happen is a brief glow of yellow light. But healing a dislocated shoulder would require physically moving bones back into alignment, so O'Brien's shoulder should have moved.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence : What everyone of John Doe's species is destined to do. He's just the first to do so successfully— because his species' authorities have been killing others showing signs of the metamorphosis, out of fear.
• But Now I Must Go : "John" has to leave Crusher and the Enterprise in order to spread the truth about the transmutation to other Zalkonians.
• Call-Back : Geordi is still courting Christy Henshaw . Or at least trying to. Curiously, this time his problem is being too shy, while in the previous episode he came on too strong. She also now seems to be practically begging for his attention, whereas in the previous episode she turned him down.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome : Like Ensign Gomez, Christy Henshaw disappears after her second appearance. At least Geordi actually gets to have a relationship with this love interest.
• Cool Starship : The Federation has never heard of the Zalkonians, but they're actually more advanced than the Federation. The Zalkonians' ship is faster than the Enterprise and has a loadout comparable to the Federation's flagship. It also has some sort of mysterious weapon that can asphyxiate an enemy ship's crew and sidesteps the need to even fight.
• Curbstomp Battle : The Zalkonians' ship is said to be comparable to the Enterprise , making Picard leery of a confrontation but not averse to rattling his saber if necessary. However, when the Zalkonians decide to attack, they simply asphyxiate every single person aboard the ship, defeating the Federation's flagship without firing a shot.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance : Worf coaches Geordi in romance Klingon-style, which is quite different from how humans interact.
• Does This Remind You of Anything? : Between Dr. Crusher's characterization of her relationship with John Doe as "almost spiritual," and Sunad's accusations against Doe of being a "disruptive influence" on Zalkonian society, Doe and his fellows are strongly suggestive of a persecuted religion. Oh, did we mention John's Healing Hands ? And after becoming an Energy Being , John Doe even announces his intention to return to Zalkon to spread the Good News, now that Sunad and the other authorities can no longer kill him for speaking out.
• Energy Beings : When John Doe Ascends to a Higher Plane of Existence , he first takes the form of a glowing orange humanoid, then transforms further into a ball of orange light.
• Florence Nightingale Effect : Wesley hints that it might be happening between Dr. Crusher and John Doe.
• Headdesk : Geordi, after another failed attempt at flirting with Christy.
• Healing Factor : John Doe's recovery is very fast, but there is a reason for that, namely having something to do with the episode title.
• Healing Hands : John Doe has the power to heal grievous injuries, even those which would otherwise be fatal.
• Holding Your Shoulder Means Injury : The first instance of O'Brien dislocating his shoulder while holo-kayaking.
• Identity Amnesia : 'John Doe' can't remember who he is, where he was going, or even what happened to cause his crash . He recovers bits and pieces over the next several weeks, but it's only in the last few minutes of the episode that he finally remembers who he is and what brought him to the crash site.
• Innocently Insensitive : Worf tells Geordi that he must let Christy see "the fire in his eyes." He tells this to a man whose eyes are completely covered by a VISOR at all times.
• Interspecies Friendship : "John" and Crusher start one over the month he spends in Sick Bay. There are hints that their feelings go further than that.
• No Name Given : John Doe's real name is never revealed. He only remembers who he is in the final act, and his name never comes up.
• Power Incontinence : At points, John Doe's power goes beyond his control, including one burst of energy that critically wounds Worf . Thanks to Doe's Healing Hands , though, Worf survives.
• Resist the Beast : As "John"'s transformation progresses, he has to force down the energy coursing through his body, lest he start blasting things. Worf briefly dies due to his control slipping.
• Teleportation : As an Energy Being , "John" has the power to teleport Sunad onto the Enterprise and back onto his ship.
• That Came Out Wrong : When Worf tries to help Geordi woo Christy, he says "You must let her see the fire in your eyes.". Geordi, who wears the VISOR that completely obscures his eyes, briefly looks at him in befuddlement.
• Time Skip : A month goes by in the middle of the episode while John Doe is recuperating and the romance between Geordi and Christy flourishes.
• Windmill Crusader : Sunad and the other Zalkonian authorities, who consider John Doe and his comrades a threat simply because they're evolving into Energy Beings .
• The Worf Effect : Worf gets thrown over a rail by John's Power Incontinence , showing just how powerful it is.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation S3E24 "Ménage à Troi"
• Recap/Star Trek: The Next Generation
• Star Trek: The Next Generation S3E26 S4E1 "The Best of Both Worlds"

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Star Trek: The Next Generation : "Transfigurations"/"The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1"

"Transfigurations"

Or  The One Where Alien Jesus Helps Geordi Get Laid

It always bugs me on TV shows when cute girls are really obvious about liking a guy, and the guy doesn't catch on. I mean, sure, I'll buy it if the guy is a creep, or if he's not interested, or if he's so paralyzingly shy that any interaction is beyond him. But when the guy like the girl back, and is just too insecure to make his move … I dunno. I've been insecure most of my life, like any sensible person would be (I mean, have you seen yourself naked? What the hell is going on there?), but if somebody I had a crush on kept going out of her way to talk to me and smile at me and leave me gigantic openings in the conversation for me to make my move, I would at least acknowledge the opportunity existed, even if I was too much of a wuss to take it. "Transfigurations" opens with Geordi whining to Worf about his romantic problems (note to  TNG : if you've gotta keep coming back to Geordi not getting laid, I approve of including Worf in the conversation), and the object of his affections is so painfully interested it's hard to feel any sympathy for Geordi at all. Suck it up, man. Worst she can do is laugh.

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Although technically, Christy already rejected Geordi way back in "The Booby Trap," so maybe he's just worried she's been taken over by aliens or something. I'm not sure what's changed in Geordi between those two episodes (maybe he's been working out?), but whatever it is, Christy likes it. It's just our poor blind Chief Engineer can't spot the signs, and not even Worf's helpful advice can reach him. Then the  Enterprise  gets a distress signal while charted a previously unexplored region of space, and they find a shuttle crashed on an unknown planet, a seriously wounded alien on the ground beside it. Dr. Crusher connects Geordi's brains to the alien's to help regulate the severely wounded stranger's vitals, and in the exchange, somehow Geordi gets a piece of something that gives him a boost of self-confidence. He starts making out with Christy in the turbo-lift. But just who is this alien? What is it he does? And is it possible to bottle up his mojo and sell it as some kind of over-priced body spray for men?

Judging by the title of the episode and by the effect the alien (who doesn't ever get a real name in the episode; they just call him "John Doe," and I will follow their lead) has on Geordi, I assumed that sudden surge of bravado was going to turn sour soon enough. That's how these stories play out, generally: The geek finds some magical shortcut to coolness, they get to enjoy the shortcut for a few days, and then they sprout fangs and murder everyone. Or else there's pig's blood at the prom or the magic box has to go back to the shop because the switch is stuck on "Stabbing." (If you're trying to figure out what movies I'm referring to, don't kill yourself; only one of those is actually real.) Characters very rarely get exactly what they most desperately need without having to pay a very steep price, and it seemed reasonable to assume that Geordi's brief trip to Real Live Boy Land wouldn't last out the hour. I expected the confidence would turn sour and he'd get violent. That seems to happen a lot.

That's not what happened here, though. "Transfigurations" is a largely conflict free episode—there are arguments, and one major character even gets killed, but he doesn't stay dead very long. (It's Worf. As always, his job on the ship is show how dangerous the danger is by getting his ass kicked. In this episode, he's defeated by a wave of yellow light; next episode, a forcefield takes him out. Stay strong, my Klingon brother!) John Doe isn't a threat, although he puts the  Enterprise  in a couple of tight spots. He heals very quickly, which is vaguely suspicious, but he's also quite nice, and Beverly is quickly taken with him. (Which once again raises the question: How the hell would you ever get romantically involved with a member of another species? Just because they're all vaguely humanoid doesn't mean the genitalia matches up; we've seen the faces, it boggles the mind what might be going on below the waist. If below the waist is even a place where things go on for Doe's people. Ah well. Beverly's a doctor. I'm sure she knows more about all this than I do.)

John also makes a habit of healing people on the  Enterprise,  first inadvertently with Geordi, then fixing O'Brian's dislocated shoulder. (Sorry for another parenthetical, but: O'Brian injures himself on the holodeck. He's kayaking, so it's not like he was attacked, unless he kayaks with bears, but—what about the safety protocols? Surely the system would be designed to prevent any but the most minor injuries. Because if you have a program that can dislocate your shoulder, however accidentally, you have a program that can kill. Join us next week for our latest installment in Why The Holodeck Don't Make No Damn Sense.) Later, of course, he brings Worf back to life after inadvertently breaking his neck. It's emblematic of the short-sightedness of this episode that Geordi's cure, the first one we see, is also the one with the weirdest implications that nobody ever recognizes. There's a big difference between curing a physical ailment and boosting someone's self-esteem, and while the positive effect John has on everyone around him is probably connected to Geordi's good vibes, there's something strange about treating insecurity like a wound. Does this mean that Geordi's passed some personal threshold, or is he just on an adrenaline high that won't last him past third base?

Not that "Transfigurations" is really about any of this. We're more concerned here with John's ascension into godhood or whatever. This is the sort of episode that starts off fairly interesting, gets a little more interesting as it goes, and then just falls apart once it actually has to start answering the questions it's raised. It's all terribly symbolic and reads a little like somebody's a big fan of his  X-Men  comic books: John is one of the last survivors of a race that's been systematically destroyed because his race is reaching a new level in evolution, and that scares people. It scares them real bad because eek, change! And newness! There's a confrontation with one of the bad guys who does all the killing, the bad guys use their mind power to choke everybody on the  Enterprise , and then John saves them, and turns into one of the aliens from  Cocoon . It's pretty stupid.  TNG  works best when it's specific in its stories; it can do more archetypal fare (like, say, "The Survivors," in which we're less interested in the mechanics of how everything works than we are in the tragedy of it), but too often, these kinds of vaguely symbolic plots come off as weak and reductive. That's the case here. There's a reason I spent most of this review talking about the edges of "Transfigurations" rather than dealing with its main arc head-on. It's because there's not much to say about another episode in which our heroes are largely passive and in which everything gets tied up in a neat little bow by the end.

Stray Observations:

• I would watch a show of Worf giving dating advice. Hell, I'd watch a full series.
• "I'm going to hook up your nervous systems with this tricorder." Um, no?
• Late in the episode, there's a shot of everyone on the bridge, and it shocked me to see Troi in her usual spot. I'd completely forgotten about her. Given that John suffers from amnesia for much of the episode, wouldn't it have made sense to consult with her earlier?
• Oh, hey, there's Wesley.

"The Best Of Both Worlds, Part 1"

Or  The One Where We Meet Locutus Of The Borg

I've probably mentioned this before, but I write fiction. It's my first love, writing-wise, and one of my favorite aspects of it is the satisfaction I get from fitting the pieces together of a really excellent climax. See, the thing about writing characters is that if you want them to seem real, you can only have them doing things that that sort of person could be expected to do. If your hero is a doctor, it's not a stretch that he'll see a patient or two or that he'll drive a car around or talk to people or maybe even have a drug addiction or be a werewolf. These are varying degrees of possible, but none of them inherently violate who that character is—we accept fantastical elements in stories, but what we don't accept is when characters behave in ways that violate their nature simply to facilitate plot. So if we spend a whole story hearing about how great this doctor is, and then he intentionally murders a toddler, and we're still supposed to believe he's great, only now he's really, really upset about that dead toddler, well, we're not going to buy that.

Or for a better example … I'm about to spoil the hell out of the ending of  The Mist , so if you haven't seen it yet (and you should, as it's one of the best horror movies to come out in the past decade or so), better skip to the next paragraph. At the end of the movie, Thomas Jane, distraught over the loss of his wife and the apparent destruction of his entire world, shoots his companions, including his own son, to save them from a more horrible death at the hands of whatever monster lurks around the next turn. He then walks around for maybe three minutes, screaming for something to kill him next, because he's all out of bullets. Then the mist clears away, and the military rolls by, carting survivors from the town he just left, the world restored to some relative version of sanity. None of the individual pieces of this ending are unworkable. Given all the ugliness that happens over the course of the movie, it's possible to accept that he and the others might be driven to group suicide. The arrival of the army, the sudden reveal that everything's okay after all (except for poor Jane, who probably sucks a shotgun 30 seconds after the scene fades to black), that's not inherently bad either. The problem is the abrupt conjunction of the two and the way it forces us to re-examine the shootings in the car. In order for this ending to work, we need to believe the trap that Jane and the others are in almost as much as they do. Given the rush of the rest of the film, we're in the moment when it happens, but by having the rescue arrive less than 5 minutes after the deaths, the scene becomes less about Jane's awful mistake and the way fear corrupts our judgment, and more about how obvious the strings are. Whether or not the characters in that moment would've believed they were trapped, we no longer believe they were, and it becomes nearly impossible to empathize with their choice. Instead of walking away shell-shocked, I kept making jokes about how the next time I shot my son in the face, I'd wait 5 minutes first.

The point of all of this is that plotting means the creation of a succession of plausible events. The greater the stakes of an event, the greater a violation of a character's internal code it requires, the more thoroughly the trap must be set. By the end of "The Best Of Both Worlds, Part 1," Riker orders the  Enterprise  to fire and theoretically destroy a Borg ship. That's not much of a stretch—except the Borg ship has Picard. A good portion of this episode is devoted to getting us to a point where we'd be willing to believe that Riker would knowingly give an order that would kill his captain. Sure, Picard has been Borg-ified by now, but Beverly insists she could still save him. Doesn't matter. Riker speaks his final line in the episode without any hesitation whatsoever, and what's even more amazing is that we don't doubt his conviction for a second.

"Worlds" isn't complete in and of itself, but it makes a terrific way to close out the third season, and as  TNG 's first attempt at a finale cliffhanger ending, it's deservedly iconic. Ask anybody what they most remember about this series, and I'm betting 7 or 8 times out of 10 (presuming you can ask that many strangers before they kick you out of the mall), that most will mention this episode. Not the only episode, mind you, just that final, awful scene: most of the cast on the bridge, aggressive newcomer Cmdr. Lt. Shelby insisting that Riker contact Starfleet for advice, and Riker having none of it. Then Picard's robo-zombie gaze filling the view-screen to inform them that hope is dead, meet the new boss. And, of course, Riker's response. This is not a show that's given to taking major risks with its cast. Tasha Yar is the only main character to die, and that was way back in the first season, before we really cared that much about any of these people. To suddenly throw the show's most important character into the cybernetic meat grinder, and to do so in such a way as to imply that he could very well be gone for good? That's heady stuff.

I don't think I watched "Worlds" when it originally aired, so I have no idea if people actually believed Picard was lost. I kind of doubt they did, given Beverly's comments, and seeing as how we never actually see Worf firing the Magic Bullet that will supposedly take out the Borg cube; most cliffhangers don't resolve by just giving us the most obvious next step. But this was back before everyone knew about actor's contracts, before every casting development hit the Internet before the ink was dry. Plus, the episode is structured in such a way as to strongly indicate that Picard is on his way out. Nobody ever suggests it, but there's a lot of talk about Riker getting a promotion, about how he needs to move on and take command of his own ship, and about how his time on the  Enterprise , as much as it means to him, may have robbed him of something in himself he once valued a great deal. Moxie, I guess, or boldness. This is all partly to help us understand his determination in that final order and maybe suspect he might be trying to prove that he hasn't entirely lost his spine, but it also works to suggest a future for the series in which Riker is seated in the captain's chair, with Shelby slotted into the Number One spot.

Really, this is more Riker's episode than it is Picard's, which is one of those sideways choices that seems counter-intuitive but actually works to the show's advantage. Much of the running time is given over to Riker debating what he should do next, and sparring with Shelby over her mildly aggressive manner (which of course reminds everybody of how Riker himself used to be). The investigation into the recent Borg attack is suitably chilling, but the threat remains in the background for the first half; there are poker games to attend, after all. So it's wonderfully effective when the Borg cube makes its first appearance. The  Enterprise  is en route to the cube's last place of attack when they're ambushed mid-trip by that old classic, an unidentified vessel. Ten seconds later, there it is in the view screen, all bulky and hideous. I don't often get unnerved by  TNG  episodes—it's hardly ever a truly scary show—but that reveal gave me chills. For a long time, the Borg were the threat to beat in the  Trek- verse, and while countless iterations have diminished the threat (as is understandable since you can't have an unbeatable foe bent on destroying you and your civilization hang around forever), at this point in the franchise, they were still, so far as we knew, unstoppable. And for some reason, they were gunning for Picard.

And it's not just the  Enterprise ; they specifically want Jean-Luc Picard because the  Enterprise  is the strongest ship in the fleet and he is its captain. Which is one of those compliments that I never know quite how to take, honestly. Picard does get a few nice scenes before the Borg finally grab him—his conversation with Guinan is great, as she essentially tries to console him by explaining, "Well, most everyone in your race will be killed, but a few will get away, so that's cool, right?"—but the show does a great trick of giving us a passing-of-the-torch style episode without ever openly admitting that's what's going on. I highly doubt there was any intention to do away with Patrick Stewart; you don't get rid of the best actor on your show just when your show is actually becoming excellent. (That is, unless Stewart was holding out for more money, in which case this would have to be the best episode-inspired-by-contract-negotiations  ever. ) Still, just seeing him with that zombie make-up, his voice flat, merciless, dead … Whatever logic tells you, there's a part of the mind that believes he's gone, same as it believes the shadows behind the closet door have teeth. Hell, I know he'll be fine, and I'm still a little concerned.

I should probably point out the trap I was going on about earlier. It comes down to this: The  Enterprise  is chasing the Borg cube, which is headed for Earth. They need to slow the ship down long enough to use their big guns on it—a weapon that can only be used once, by the way, although that's basically true of every weapon when it comes to the Borg—so an away team beams aboard the cube to find some way to force them to drop out of warp. They shoot some distribution nodes, which has the desired effect, and they find Picard's empty uniform, which freaks everybody out. Back on the  Enterprise , everything's set for the magic bullet weapon, except when the away team beams back, they tell Riker that Picard is still alive, only he's been turned. Shelby begs for a chance to go back to get him, but the problem is, the Borg cube is already regenerating the damaged components. It'll be back at top warp speed momentarily, and the  Enterprise  engines have been so drained by the chase that they won't be able to retake the ship. And they can't just go back and destroy some more nodes, because the Borg will be prepared. This is the only chance to stop the cube before it reaches Earth.

So Riker makes his choice, and, at least for now, sacrifices Picard. It's really very elegantly done, and all of it is built on information we already know about the threat and the characters. We know the Borg adapt quickly and that they represent a nearly insurmountable threat, and we know that the crew of the  Enterprise  is trained to keep going about their duties even after losing one of their own. I love cliffhangers, because I love how they feel—like someone pausing in the middle of a sentence, staring at you, grinning, driving you out of your mind. ("SAY IT!") The resolutions are nearly always disappointing, so I'll be curious to see how this one plays out. (Other than the fact that Picard goes back to being human soon enough, I honestly don't know what comes next.) So let's just savor the moment, shall we? We—and the show—have earned it.

• I really, really wish the "Data takes adages literally" would die. I understand that he doesn't do metaphors very well, but given the amount of memory he has and the information about humans he's acquired during his lifetime, surely he would've heard "The early bird catches the worm" before?
• All right, change of plans—because YOU DEMANDED IT, on Thursday, I'll be doing a season three wrap-up, and then moving on to "Best Of Both Worlds, Part 2."

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Episode list

Star trek: the next generation.

S3.E10 ∙ The Defector

S3.E11 ∙ The Hunted

S3.E12 ∙ The High Ground

S3.E13 ∙ Deja Q

S3.E14 ∙ A Matter of Perspective

S3.E15 ∙ Yesterday's Enterprise

S3.E16 ∙ The Offspring

S3.E17 ∙ Sins of the Father

S3.E18 ∙ Allegiance

S3.E19 ∙ Captain's Holiday

S3.E20 ∙ Tin Man

S3.E21 ∙ Hollow Pursuits

S3.E22 ∙ The Most Toys

S3.E23 ∙ Sarek

S3.E24 ∙ Ménage à Troi

S3.E25 ∙ Transfigurations

S3.E26 ∙ The Best of Both Worlds

S4.E1 ∙ The Best of Both Worlds: Part 2

S4.E2 ∙ Family

S4.E3 ∙ Brothers

S4.E4 ∙ Suddenly Human

S4.E5 ∙ Remember Me

S4.E6 ∙ Legacy

S4.E7 ∙ Reunion

S4.E8 ∙ Future Imperfect

S4.E9 ∙ Final Mission

S4.E10 ∙ The Loss

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Transfigurations Stardate: 43957.2 Original Airdate: 4 Jun, 1990

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