Star Trek The Next Generation: Every Season One Episode Ranked From Worst To Best
16. We'll Always Have Paris
This is a late season entry and features the first romantic interest for Captain Picard. The title is a play on the line from Casablanca, while the café that Picard recreates on the holodeck is called the Blue Parrot Café, another nod to the film.
This episode would serve as a prequel of sorts to the seventh season episode Parallels. Dr. Manheim's experiments propose the existence of an infinite number of universes, which then appear in that later episode. Guest star Michelle Phillips, who plays Janice Manheim in this episode, is one of the four members of the '60s band The Mamas and the Papas, who famously released California Dreamin'.
The episode suffers from a couple of continuity errors but the main one comes in the appearance of the arm and leg of Denise Crosby. This episode was filmed before Skin of Evil, but was broadcast after. That meant that Yar was alive in terms of the shooting schedule, yet should not have been in shot at all when the episode went to air.
It is also the only episode from the first season with missing footage when it came to the remaster, albeit two seconds only. This is an episode best enjoyed as an example of the wider possibilities that Manheim's experiment offered, as beyond this it doesn't really affect the show at all.