“Shades of Gray” is episode twenty-two of season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation and the season finale.
Geordi is looking for Commander Riker in what looks like a planetary jungle. He finds Riker sitting down; something has jabbed him in the calf. Geordi contacts O’Brien, saying Riker needs to beam up. Riker states it’s just a scratch, but Geordi says they are the first survey team to visit the planet and can’t take any chances. They don’t know what’s on it. O’Brien says the transporter has detected unidentified microbes in Riker’s body and the biofilters can’t screen it out. He’s notified Dr Pulaski.
Pulaski arrives in the transporter room. O’Brien says he can override the biofilters, bit the doctor tells him no. She’ll beam down and make an evaluation in person. Given Pulaski’s dislike of transporters, O’Brien takes the opportunity to wind her up. On the surface, Riker says he feels no pain, just a little numb. Pulaski decides to take him back to the ship and has O’Brien override the filters. Once in sickbay, Riker says his entire leg just went dead.
Pulaski fills in the captain when he arrives. It’s not a bacteria or virus but has elements of both. She can’t remove it surgically, because it’s fused to the nerve. It stops nerves from transmitting and the infection is spreading. Once it reaches Riker’s brain, he’s going to die.
The doctor needs a sample and Geordi and Data beam down. They remove a thorn from an aggressive plant that tries to attack Geordi. On the ship. Data tells the captain that he believes this wasn’t accidental; the plants seek out warm blooded creatures and deliberately infect them. The vines are predatory.
Dr Pulaski isn’t getting anywhere. She can kill the microbes, but only by killing the nerves as well. Hardly optimal. Picard has a word with the commander, then leaves. Troi arrives to find Riker joking. The joke he tells is one now strongly associated with Chuck Norris. He’s talking, then falls unconscious. The doctor says the only way to keep his brain neurons firing is to stimulate Riker’s bran with electrical impulses. This means show clips from previous episodes, centred on Riker. And that’s, well, it. Clips of episodes interspersed with Troi and Pulaski standing around being worried.
This is rightly regarded as not just probably the worst episode in TNG, but one of the worst episodes in Star Trek as a whole. Yes, every series. After only two seasons, there weren’t many episodes to take clips from. The reason for this episode was apparently because the season was cut down for four episodes, due to the writers’ strike, and they had no scripts to use. In addition, cost overruns on “Q Who?” meant they had little budget to work with. How they were going to be able to afford to do four more episodes is unknown. Frankly, it would have been better to have a twenty-one-episode series than make this.