Star Trek The Next Generation: Every Season One Episode Ranked From Worst To Best

The only episode of the Next Generation to come with a viewer discretion warning, this episode was a follow on from Coming of Age. Writer Tracy Tormée wrote the outline as originally quite different. In his original story, there were no alien parasites and the coup was in fact another element of Starfleet. Roddenberry hated this idea.

The depiction of Starfleet as anything other than a perfect government was antithetical to his view of the future and so the parasites were introduced instead. The episode originally ended with the threat being definitively ended, but likewise this was nixed. Producer Robert Justman suggested leaving it open ended, something that Maurice Hurley was very against but was overruled.

The aliens were also an original precursor to the Borg, however this was rewritten by the time Q Who? was written. However, elements of the insectoid race remained with the Borg's collective consciousness and hive like existence. As depicted in the image above, the episode also featured some of the most graphic imagery to every appear on the Next Generation. This led to the episode being censored quite heavily in several of its reruns and initial airings.

Jonathan Frakes has commented that yes, some of those grubs did indeed go into his mouth while filming that scene! Undoubtedly the darkest episode of the first season, this really cemented some of the strongest storytelling that the Next Generation had to offer at that time.