Prior to that, we see the various members of the bridge planning how they will be spending their shoreleave time, and it’s mostly a delight: Worf gets caught up in the spirit of competition, Dr. You can’t understand why they’re saying, but I’d like to imagine it’s something along the lines of: “Dude, did you see him making out with a hologram? That’s messed up.” They are also the sole source of tension in this otherwise docile story, as they hijack the Enterprise in a bid to save their dying planet, with an unwitting Picard and Riker still on-board. For my money, these are the finest aliens TNG has yet produced, both visually and aurally distinctive as well as fascinating conceptually (though perhaps calling them “Bynars” was a tad less than subtle). To this end, we are introduced to the Bynars: an alien race that wires their brains to a central computer, works in pairs, and communicates through a simulacrum of binary. So in “11001001” (and boy, if that title isn’t a mouthful), the Enterprise arrives at Starbase for maintenance to the computer systems, including the malfunctioning holodeck. Very nearly a “bottle episode”, as they are known. So if episodes lush with lavish sets and costumes like “The Big Goodbye” are Star Trek’s equivalent of a splurge, then episodes like this one are how they plan to front the bill: a laid-back story short on action and largely devoid of new sets, confining a small number in the cast in a single locale. Star Trek is a program that isn’t routinely flush with cash, and net effect seemingly isn’t consistent, but rather modal.
![star trek tng minuet star trek tng minuet](https://66.media.tumblr.com/a04a361598557a82000a5427b86f49f0/tumblr_inline_o4nfhadtJh1r582r6_1280.jpg)
Isaac Newton once taught us that “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction”, and while he meant it in regards to physics, perhaps the same could be said of television budgets. It must be something about the way her compositing matrix reflects in the moonlight.