“Eye of the Beholder” (7×18)

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This one was a bit of a mixed bag for me. Conceptually, I liked the idea of telling a murder mystery aboard the Enterprise. And, in the final season, there was a certain bookending quality to making the mystery a cold case dating back to the earliest days of the Enterprise-D.

Pairing Troi and Worf as the investigators made sense given Troi’s empathic connection to the crime and Worf’s role as security officer, and provided an enjoyable change from the norm.

I had two main problems with the episode:

1. Most of the episode, from act two through to the final minutes, turns out to be a hallucination. It was all triggered by the psionic signature left by Pierce’s suicide. That’s far less interesting than a real murder investigation with real stakes on board the ship.
2. The Troi-Worf romance continues to be a real misfire. They have no chemistry together, and the final season should have been the time to resolve the Troi-Riker sexual tension rather than adding in a further complication and impediment. It’s not that Worf couldn’t be a leading man — he was wonderful with Jadzia on DS9 — but Troi wasn’t the right partner for him.

I did like the uniforms in the hallucinatory flashbacks to Utopia Planitia, however. They felt like a throwback to the TOS uniforms. I’m guessing they were specific to the shipyards, since all of the other flashbacks aboard ships, including fairly shortly before the events of the pilot, were a simplified version of the Wrath of Khan uniforms.