“Ship In A Bottle” (6×12)

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An absolute banger of an episode, with a premise that has troubling implications.

My one regret is that I didn’t start with “Elementary, Dear Data” first. There were references to that earlier episode that I only vaguely remembered from when I watched it back in the nineties. It’s one of the rare cases on TNG with significant continuity to a prior episode, and I wish I’d respected that.

This story starts with an impossible premise: That Moriarty is able to will himself free of the holodeck. And then it provides an explanation that makes sense within the internal logic of Trek’s futuristic science: He was able to will himself free because he never actually left.

But the Matryoshka doll concept of holodeck simulations within holodeck simulations within holodeck simulations raises an urgent question: How do you know when you’ve reached the top level and exited the simulation? It’s the Matrix question before The Matrix. Picard is comfortable accepting the possibility and engaging with the world on its own terms. Barclay, who has always blurred the lines between holodeck fiction and the real world, isn’t quite so comfortable with the idea.

To help the audience keep things clear, this episode establishes a convention for simulation-heavy episodes: Exterior shots of the starship only appear during sequences set in the real world. Sequences set in the simulation(s) have no such establishing shots.

Impacts on Star Trek Continuity:

This episode explains both why Moriarty is so much older in the trailer for the third season of “Picard” and why his program didn’t get destroyed when the Enterprise-D was destroyed in Generations. For the gilded cage to trap Moriarty effectively, it had to be designed to run continuously, to provide Moriarty and the countess with a realistic simulation of the world they would have encountered had the transporter trick been actualized. So it makes sense that the simulation would age them like real biological organisms. And the crew of the Enterprise moved it to portable storage, for delivery to some specialized Starfleet facility, so it wasn’t on board when the Enterprise-D crashed.