Sirna Kolrami Sucks!
Mar. 2nd, 2025 09:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
setsuledLast night may have been the first time I watched "Peak Performance", the penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation's second season. I certainly don't remember watching it before. Fishing through the murky waters of my memory, I think I stopped watching the show during the first season (1987) and then started watching again in the fifth season (1991), when I heard it'd actually gotten good. I kind of remember watching the two parter "Time's Arrow" that bridged season five and six. I then went back and caught older episodes in syndication but I think I usually turned it off when I saw the tight, no collar uniforms, which they got rid of in season three. I still think season three is the best season of the series but I'm enjoying revisiting season two and, I think, in some cases, seeing bits of it for the very first time.
"Peak Performance" was written by David Kemper who later became a showrunner on the great sci-fi series Farscape. I see now he hasn't written anything since contributing a story to the short lived CW series Cult in 2013. I guess he's retired. I hope it was voluntary. Anyway, I almost always enjoyed his teleplays.
"Peak Performance" was the first of two episodes he wrote for TNG and centres on a combat training exercise. The Enterprise crew splits into two teams, one of them, headed by Riker, taking control of a starship called the Hathaway. Using simulated weapons and shields, the Hathaway and Enterprise engage in a skirmish.
But the real point of the episode seems to have been to humiliate a character called Sirna Kolrami (Roy Broksmith), who comes aboard the Enterprise as a technical advisor. He's also a grandmaster of a game called Strategema. Over the course of the episode, he's shown to be arrogantly wrong in his judgements about Riker (whom he calls too "jovial") and Picard. There's a subplot in which Data even beats him at Strategema. Brocksmith does a good job making him a smug bastard for the viewer to hate but I still couldn't help wondering why. I wonder if he was kind of an effigy of someone Kemper had it in for.
This was a cool moment between Data and Picard:
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
"Peak Performance" was written by David Kemper who later became a showrunner on the great sci-fi series Farscape. I see now he hasn't written anything since contributing a story to the short lived CW series Cult in 2013. I guess he's retired. I hope it was voluntary. Anyway, I almost always enjoyed his teleplays.
"Peak Performance" was the first of two episodes he wrote for TNG and centres on a combat training exercise. The Enterprise crew splits into two teams, one of them, headed by Riker, taking control of a starship called the Hathaway. Using simulated weapons and shields, the Hathaway and Enterprise engage in a skirmish.
But the real point of the episode seems to have been to humiliate a character called Sirna Kolrami (Roy Broksmith), who comes aboard the Enterprise as a technical advisor. He's also a grandmaster of a game called Strategema. Over the course of the episode, he's shown to be arrogantly wrong in his judgements about Riker (whom he calls too "jovial") and Picard. There's a subplot in which Data even beats him at Strategema. Brocksmith does a good job making him a smug bastard for the viewer to hate but I still couldn't help wondering why. I wonder if he was kind of an effigy of someone Kemper had it in for.
This was a cool moment between Data and Picard:
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
