Today, three episodes of Star Trek – The Next Generation on BBC Two starting with Angel One. The Enterprise visits a planet where women are the larger, more dominant than men. It’s basically a Sci Fi remake of the Two Ronnies serial The Worm that Turned.
Riker dresses in local garb for a probing diplomatic meeting with their leader. I wonder if he’d sleep with a male head of government if that were their custom? Extending that thought, why do the writers think it’s OK to have a head of state sleeping with a visiting diplomat just because she’s a woman?
On the Enterprise, there’s a virus sweeping the ship, with most of the crew being affected. This is causing a problem because the Enterprise is needed in the Neutral Zone because of Romulans. This might have been the first time we get Patrick Stewart with his shirt off.
This is not one of the best episodes. Some of the performances are quite poor, and the facile inversion of gender stereotypes is hardly illuminating. Hamfisted.
BBC Genome: BBC Two – 9th January 1991 – 18:00
The next episode is Home Soil. The Enterprise visits a planet where a group of people are terraforming a planet.
Something seems a bit off with the interaction of the team, and things get more suspicious when one of them is critically injured by a laser drill.
Later, Data is in the drill room, trying to trace the malfunction, when the laser starts shooting at him. He manages to avoid it and destroy it. The terraformer’s engineer seems more upset that his laser is destroyed.
They discover that there is, in fact, a strange lifeform on the planet, which was supposed to have been determined to be utterly lifeless. When they finally make contact with the Enterprise crew, they refer to humans as ‘Ugly bags of mostly water’. It also starts attacking the Enterprise computer.
This turns out to be quite a good episode. It started like a murder mystery, and turned into another examination of the Prime Directive.
BBC Genome: BBC Two – 23rd January 1991 – 18:00
The final episode here is When The Bough Breaks. In the opening, little boy runs into Riker, complaining to his father that he doesn’t want to got back to school. His father tells him “Everyone needs an understanding of basic calculus”. I can attest that this is not true today, so I wonder what it is about the 24th century that requires this.
The story concerns the Enterprise coming across a semi-mythical planet, Aldea, which has cloaked itself to prevent discovery for millennia.
The leaders of the Aldeans visit the ship briefly, to invite a team down to the planet. Riker, Troi and Crusher are chosen.
A beam of light appears on the bridge, and takes particular interest in Wesley. It’s like a Space 1999 monster.
The Aldeans tell Riker and the team that they need children, because nobody has had any children on the planet for over 20 years. So they want to take children from the Enterprise. Riker refuses, and so the team are sent back. Almost immediately, several children disappear from the ship, including Wesley, ending up on the planet.
The Aldeans aren’t going to give the children back, and only want to negotiate the price for the children, somehow getting confused at why the Humans aren’t happy at having their children taken.
In the end, Dr Crusher works out that the Aldeans have been affected by solar radiation, which explains their sterility, partly caused by the machines that hide their planet and provide their technology.
It’s another pretty good episode, if I’m honest. It’s nice to see a pre-X Files Jerry Hardin in the cast. And the final scene is a ‘Picard being awkward with children’ scene which are always a delight.
BBC Genome: BBC Two – 30th January 1991 – 18:00
After this, recording continues. There’s am advert for paying for your TV Licence in four payments, presented by the most trustworthy man on television, Jimmy Savile.
Then, there’s the start of Reportage, with a report about “the use and misuse of the world’s fastest selling consumer durable, the video camera”. The tape ends during this programme.
VHiStory 
In the 2nd picture at the top, I notice Patricia MacPherson (Bonnie the technician from Knight Rider). She was in season 1, was replaced by Rebecca Holden in season 2 as April then returned for the rest of the series.