Data says it will take him almost an hour to load his findings into the computer. An hour? As fast as Data can be on occasion it will take almost an hour? How much info does he have?

The Alpha moon has tapped into the planet's magnetic field for energy. The graphic Data shows seems to indicate that the energy is in some kind of beam which is dangerous to the Beta moon. What are they doing to the planet's magnetic field? If they are converting it to some other kind of energy and draining it off, I should think it would become a problem for the planet sooner or later.

The whole problem between the two moons is that the energy that Alpha moon uses causes damage to the Beta moon when it passes by. So why don't the people of Alpha moon just shut off the energy when Beta moon passes by? Don't they have storage batteries for the excess energy?

Why does Odan wear a communicator badge? Other visitors and other ambassadors have been on the Enterprise and not worn the badges. Is it a voluntary thing?

If Dr. Beverly named her two imaginary boys Andrew and Alexander, then why did she name her real son Wesley?

On pages 259 and 290 of the NextGen Guide II, Phil uses Odan's statement to justify the claim that he is a parasite. Ambassador Odan was using the word parasite after Doctor Beverly did. It is possible that he/it did not know that humans have three different ways of referring to symbiosis, and just followed her word choice.

How this practice got started is an interesting question. The only clue is from a Deep Space Nine episode where some Trill caretakers are introduced. They seem to have a psychic connection to the 'slugs,' so presumably the originator of this practice had to be someone like them. No doubt they were like a king with a lot of followers to hold down the first test subjects for the implants.

On page 264 of the NextGen Guide Phil mentions that Riker's consciousness gets put on hold while he plays host but Phil then assumes that the Trill humanoids suffer the same fate. I don't think the episode ever states whether the minds of Trill hosts gets supplanted or not. Of course it does bring up some interesting questions.
Do the lobsteroids know when their `body' is hungry or sleepy or need to go through with other natural body functions?
Do the lobsteroids have to control all the various functions of the host?
Do the lobsteroids really enjoy sex or is that just to keep the body happy?
How and when do the lobsteroids reproduce?
What did they do before they started inhabiting humanoid bodies?

The differences between the Trill in this episode and Deep Space Nine are just a symptom of a larger space/time anomaly in the Star Trek universe. It was first noticed with the Klingons, suddenly they looked less human, had worse taste in clothes and their society put a lot of importance on honor instead of the paranoiac spying on each other that was revealed in their first appearance. Then the Romulans show up with brow ridges and shoulder pads. Now the Trill have dots and the lobsteroids have turned into slugs. Something must be done and quickly, before it's too late, while we humans still have our antennae and tentacles. By the three moons of Earth, when will this all end?

So when Odan was in Riker's body which room did he stay in? (I thought of this when Picard said, "Treat the ambassador in his quarters.")

Dr. Beverly orders Lemon Tea and it materializes with steam already in the air. Why would the Replicator waste matter and energy materializing steam?

If Odan is in stasis, then why do we see its body throbbing? Why did Dr. Beverly say that Odan couldn't last much longer? Isn't stasis supposed to stop everything?

Why did they keep the symbiont in a clear container under bright light? These things are normally inside a humanoid's body where it is, usually, dark.

In the NextGen Guide II, Phil says that 'Riker simply has never expressed an interest in her' meaning Dr. Crusher.
However, in Encounter At Farpoint, Riker appears to have an interest in her, at least until he finds out that she knows the Captain on a first name basis.

In the Making of DS9 video hosted by Terry Farrell, she states that the Trills and the Symbionts (the slugs) lived seperately (the humanoids above ground and the slugs underground) until an environmental disaster forced them to rely on each other for survival.

If Dr. Beverly named her two imaginary boys Andrew and Alexander, then why did she name her real son Wesley?

Perhaps the name Wesley came from Jack Crusher, maybe a name from his family.

Besides, KAM, she was only a child. Why would an adult necessarily keep this intention decades later as an adult?

:n page 264 of the NextGen Guide Phil mentions that Riker's consciousness gets put on hold while he plays host but Phil then assumes that the Trill humanoids suffer the same fate. I don't think the episode ever states whether the minds of Trill hosts gets supplanted or not.::

Actually, Odan tells Crusher that "that parasite is me," indicating that the personality of the joined Trill is derived solely from the symbiont. He didn't say "He is a PART of me," or that "We are linked", or anything.

I don't understand how a MALE entity can be comfortable having his essence in a FEMALE'S body. It would be terribly confusing. I feel sorry for Dax on DS9.

NANJAO: The end of this episode borders on lesbianism. For some, it's a very touchy subject for prime time TV.

Was it explicitly stated that Odan the symbiont was male? I haven't gotten that far in my TNG DVD set, but I don't think it was ever assigned a gender. That being so, it wouldn't really matter to the symbiont. Of course, the Trill could have fewer inhibitions than humans as well.

The symbionts don't have genders as I understand it. That's why it doesn't matter what gender person they are put in.

Male, Female, makes no diffrence to me.

Ezri, I presume? ;)

QUESTION: Did Crusher know that Odan was a slug or did she think the man hosting the slug was Odan? I can't help but wonder what Bev was thinking when it was all over..."I can't believe I fell in love with a SLUG!" Then begins banging her head against a wall and yells, "Dumb! Dumb! Dumb!"

This episode kinda reminds me of "Is There In Truth No Beauty?" (TOS)

GREAT SCENE: Crusher's BARE NAKED legs. (Pedicure scene)

Just saw this episode again. Dr. Crusher claims she doesn't want to see Odan again because she can't keep up with the changes. Riiight. More like, "I'm not attracted to women!"

It's called letting her (him) down easy.

How come none of the Onan Trill hosts have the "lots of spots" like the Dax Trill hosts?

The real question is why Dax (and all the other DS9 Trill) has spots instead of bumps on her forehead.

Bumps were taken already!

Apparently the producers tried a makeup test with the bumps and thought Terry Farrell looked better with spots.

Because then we can ask, "Do they go all of the way down?" ;)

And any shot of her barefoot would answer that cleanly. Nice try.

Watching the episode on Spike right now. Worf reports that the attacking ship is "loading phaser banks". How does one load an energy weapon? Torpedoes are loaded, phasers are readied, armed, or charged. pick pick pick...

Loaded the bank with an energy pack or battery?

Another retro-nit: after Odan's host dies, they mention that he hadn't used the transporter because it would have damaged the symbiont. Dax never seemed to have a problem with the transporters. I guess you could explain it by saying that all Federation transporters were upgraded to be compatible with Trill physiology after this episode... but that's just silly.

Not to mention that the female replacement at the end tries to strike up a relationship with Dr. Crusher, despite it being expressly forbidden on Trill.

Whats so silly about the Federation upgrading their transporters? Im comfused?

And Ezri had no problem starting things back up again with Worf in the final story ark of DS9.

Gates McFadden was very pregnant during the makeing of this episode.

Mr Crusher: "Gates McFadden was very pregnant during the makeing of this episode."

Are you saying that because you're Mr. Crusher?

---

NANJAO
Odan calls Dr. Crusher "Dr. Beverly." If he called her Dr. Crusher or just Beverly it wouldn't be something that would alert the audience that Odan was "in" Riker when Riker calls Dr. Crusher "Dr. Beverly"

---

This whole incident has got to be nerve racking for Troi and Picard. She's having to console Beverly on getting her to allow herself to have feelings and to act on them... while Odan is in Riker's body. Later Picard gives a shoulder to cry on even though he has feelings for Beverly.

What's next, we find out that Troi can no longer feel the same way about Riker because he kissed Beverly so she moves onto dating John A. Lang?

---
Dr. Crusher says that Riker's white blood cell count rises every time she scans him... well don't scan him! He might live longer.

After hosting Odan for a few days, Riker could never get anywhere with women because of his 8 inch beer gut.
Would Odan expand Riker's belly like it does to the Trill's? If so it would be a nit because human skin isn't meant to expand and contract like that.

Ah, but plastic surgery in the 24th century is just that good.

oooh... Riker has abs of slug!

I thought I would finally add my thoughts about this one. Basically, everything Phil said about this episode about the Trill species and why they do what they do was either updated and corrected or completely ignored by the time the DS9-era Trill debuted. The humanoid hosts for the symbionts now had spots down the sides of their bodies and could actually survive being transported. And they had a very complicated process of who would be selected to become hosts for the symbionts, as a few episodes of DS9 indicated. And you know what else? On DS9, it seemed like the old prejudices of a deceased host being male and the new host being female no longer mattered. It was simply not an issue anymore, by the time Jadzia Dax debuted as a character in Trek, only a few years later after this one aired.

Quite frankly, everything Phil had to say about the Trill species as a whole in his original NC book from the early 90s was both inaccurate and outdated. Yep, that's right. I actually said it. I actually do disagree with The Chief regarding something Trek-related. I also feel the same way about Phil's classic inquiry as to why the Federation did not possess cloaking devices (*coughTreatyOfAlgeroncough*) and why he thought that just because so many other races had them, the Feddies should have also. And then that too became a non-issue when the U.S.S. Defiant debuted on DS9. Once again, Phil's argument became outdated and irrelevant! But I digress.

I also wonder why Phil referred to the Trill symbionts as "lobsteroids". For one thing, they possessed no claws or any other appendages that would have made them appear even remotely like an Earth crustacean. It's also like when he called the TNG neural parasites "crayfish-like" when they more clearly had the attributes of earwigs and centipedes!

Oh well. That was WAYYYY back then, after all. And we can't be right ALL of the time. What ARE ya gonna do?

Basically, everything Phil said about this episode about the Trill species and why they do what they do was either updated and corrected or completely ignored by the time the DS9-era Trill debuted.

Phil was aware of that. He suggested that it would have been much better if they had made the DS9 symbiotic species different from the TNG parasitic one, different planets, different names, different features. I agree with him, they were, for all intents and purposes, separate species.

And then that too became a non-issue when the U.S.S. Defiant debuted on DS9.

Not really. The treaty of Algeron was still in force. The Defiant's cloaking device was a unit on loan from the Romulans provided through a special dispensation because of the Dominion threat. The Federation still had not developpped a cloaking device of their own.

"The Defiant's cloaking device was a unit on loan from the Romulans provided through a special dispensation because of the Dominion threat. The Federation still had not developpped a cloaking device of their own."

Yes, that is true. And it is what I meant to say originally. My point was that the Chief made such a big deal about the Federation not possessing cloaking technology during the run of TNG and DS9. What he failed to realize at the time he wrote the original NP guide is that the Treaty Of Algeron, a result of the Tomed Incident between the Federation and the Romulans in 2311, was signed as sort of a truce agreement and in effect, prevented the Federation from developing their own cloaking devices. Also, Gene Roddenberry didn't even want the Feds to have them in the first place when he was first developing and producing TNG, he reasoned that "our people are scientists and explorers - they don't go sneaking around." You know, the way certain other species would. Of course, after he was gone, things changed, blah blah, yadda yadda, life's too short and all that, let's just move on.

But getting back to the situation involving the TNG "parasitic" Trill versus the DS9 "symbiotic" Trill, I have to say I am glad that the writers and producers tweaked the Trill culture the way they did. What we saw with the Dax symbiont, for example, was really a vast improvement over the original.

And guess what? Remember the aforementioned neural parasites from TNG? Well, it turns out that in non-canon Trek, they had a major connection to the Trill. Here's how that went, taken from Memory Beta:

"The bluegill, more commonly referred to simply as neural parasites, were a parasitic genetically modified off-shoot the Trill symbionts created to try and cure the symbionts of a terrible disease. The experiments failed resulting instead in a race of psychopaths which the Trill tried and failed to eradicate. From then on the parasites maintained a hatred for the Trill and by various means attempted to destroy them. The parasites were created on an ancient Trill colony on the planet Kurl in the 3rd millennium BC. The Kurlans were a group of joined Trill who set about making a society of only joined persons on their world; unfortunately, something on the planet went wrong and a virus infected much of the population. In a short time, ten percent of the colony had died. As the virus most acutely affected the symbionts, the scientists from the colony went about genetically modifying the creatures to make them more resistant. In the process, the scientists learned that a joining would be more effective if it occurred at the brain stem, so they modified the symbionts with pincers necessary to burrow into the neck. However the experiments were unsuccessful and the virus adapted. After ten years of experimentation, the result was a race of mutated symbionts, which had gone mad from the experience and started taking complete control of their hosts. The Trill resorted to genocide, killing four million of the mutated parasites by remote orbital bombardment of the planet. Then they retreated to Trill, ending the first Trill space age and becoming isolated from the galaxy for centuries - not forgetting what had happened on their colony. But some parasites survived, and they did not forget what the Trill had done to them which was the source of their resentment to the Trill for millennia."

Wow. That's pretty heavy. And the parasitic creatures that infiltrated Starfleet Command actually got a pretty fascinating backstory in non-canon Trek sources. And I think that's pretty cool!

Andre, Memory Beta got that from the post-series DS9 reboot novels.

Yeah, I know. What are ya tryin' to do, upstage me or something?

Who, me?????? [innocent look]

Why is Deanna Troi at the beauty parlor? She don't need it.