This is another episode that (like “We’ll Always Have Paris”) I remember quite liking as a 14-year-old, so it pains me a bit to slam it too harshly—but this one, I’m afraid, really doesn’t hold up very well. It is, I still feel, much more watchable than many of the season’s one-star travesties, but honestly, it doesn’t have much to recommend it. Its two storylines—the first appearance of Romulans in the series, and the idea of exploring the successful outcome of an instance of cryonics (and thereby bringing some twentieth-century humans into the world of Trek)—both had promise, but neither one fulfills much of that promise. Moreover, Picard in this episode is at his first-season worst: ill-tempered, impatient, stodgy, and a thoroughly unlikable character.
As executed, neither of the “storylines” in this episode has much in the way of actual story to it. I love the premise of the Enterprise thawing some cryogenically frozen modern humans, and theoretically, the thawed folks do go through an emotional arc that begins with bewildered disorientation, passes through a stage involving various efforts to cope, and eventually ends with them beginning to acclimate and come to understand and accept the changed reality of the twenty-fourth century. But since the key shift in attitude along this arc (especially for the arrogant jerk character) seemingly happens offscreen and is never even explained, all we’re left with is the characters comically misconceiving their situation and (in some cases) pompously throwing their (total lack of) weight around for a while, then suddenly doing a full 180 and becoming good little boys and girls—which is not really a story, per se. At least, though, there is a genuinely moving emotional moment when Troi helps the female character track down records of her family—and the musician character who takes a shine to Data is amusing, despite being a total caricature. The other character—the broker—is much too one-dimensional and annoying to be interesting, though, and the attempt to soften him by having him apologize to Picard after an outburst doesn’t quite work for me. Meanwhile, most of the regular characters show very little empathy for the thawed folk, much less any kind of sophisticated understanding of the factors underlying their behavior; instead, Picard and Riker especially are very condescending toward them. Picard, for chrissake, all but chews Data out for rescuing them in the first place, and can barely be bothered to treat them as people with rights of any kind! The whole “Picard is irritated about the thawed folk being around to distract him from the Romulan problem” motif is just awful.
As for the Romulan “storyline,” it’s pretty well summed up in the Romulan commander’s “We are back!” line, as all the episode really does with the Romulans is to hype them up in order to build tension, establish a bit of back story, and then have Picard converse with them briefly (their conversation being full of unrealistic and exposition-laden posturing on the Romulan end)—so again, no real story. I do realize, of course, that a writers’ strike messed up the original plans for this episode, and that the intent was to have a big multi-part episode that would have introduced the Borg as the true power behind the missing neutral zone bases and whatnot. These ideas sound intriguing (at least in theory; in practice, I can’t help but to fear that the first-season writers would have found a way to make them totally lame, had they actually been able to execute them)—but what got cobbled together to replace all of that amounts to a pretty sorry excuse for a Romulan story.