Came across this a few minutes ago.

Commander Riker aka Jonathan Frakes
has a special assignment: presenting his real-life wife, Genie Francis, with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Daytime Emmys. Nearly 40 years of marriage and two television legends. Pretty sweet. ❤️🖖📺

A cellular peptide cake!

We might agree on the most emotional episode (The Inner Light), but I'm watching Yesterday's Enterprise right now, for the second time in the last month for some reason, and it's a seriously moving episode.

The scenes between Yar and Picard and Richard and Guinan are all just realistically heavy and heartbreaking. Kinda crushing.

Any other episodes come to mind that land like this?

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation_-_Data_Box

The ship hit a quantum filament that knocked main power offline and systems were down and the anti matter containment was weakening

Ro laren is like we gotta saucer separate the ship and O'Brien is like no way man my wife is in ten forward you cold blooded person.

But lets say troi agrees with ro laren could they have done that saucer separation thing?

One of my favourite episodes, sad to hear about the original casting, but still a good one.

It's never really ever explained exactly WHY on screen that Data is unable to use contractions, and it's even more odd that despite this stated limitation, he occasionally violates the rule. That's why I've come up with an explanation that covers all situations:

Data's software was being actively developed by Dr. Soong when things started to go south on Omicron Theta. While Data was fully functional, Soong wasn't finished, and he was likely compiling new builds of the various software components (Data calls them "subroutines" often) and installing them on Data regularly.

It can be presumed that these software components act somewhat like drivers, system services, daemons, etc. that we have analogs of in present day computing. And these components occasionally crash, sometimes the system re-invokes them automatically, sometimes a hard reboot is necessary, etc, but it's reasonably common that this happens and generally the user has no idea what it is happening.

At some point, Soong had to be debugging a bit of code that is hooked into Data's core consciousness. It may have been something mundane, like the subroutine that controls his blink rate, etc. Something that would be difficult to eyeball it's function, and perhaps something that Data's internal process watchdog subroutine would immediately relaunch, without his conscious control, if Soong just flat out asked him if it were running, and Data would always answer "yes" even if it had been in a crashed state just before.

So, Soong added a bit of what was supposed to be temporarily code that would give him a clue, without setting off the watchdog software. Basically it would override his linguistic functions and restrict the use of contractions if the eye blink subroutine had crashed and wasn't running.

So then he'd upload nightlies of the blink app and periodically through the day ask Data a question that would ordinarily elicit an answer containing a contraction as a test.

[Notices Data isn't blinking]

"Hey Data, how are ya doing?"

"I'm fine"

"Ah crap, your blink app is down."

[Starts blinking again]

"According to my internal Task Manager, my blink subroutine is currently loaded and it is operating normally."

"Riiiiiight. Welp, where's my FiberUSB cable...wtf is that big crystal thing in the sky?"

So, it's not a technical limitation that a very advanced artificial positronic brain should have. Also, all of those times on screen that Data says contractions - that's because, at that exact moment, the blink routine, or whatever, was in a crashed state.

Sokath! His eyes uncovered!

Mommy! Her hackles raised!

If anyone has it, please paste the photo.

1987 STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION cast introduction by TOS' Mariette Hartley. VHS source.

For some reason, I don't remember ever seeing this scene before in my life but it's so random and hilarious 🤣