Summary[]
Young Amanda comes to the Enterprise for an internship. She has only recently discovered that she possesses supernatural powers, which she shows impressively when she stops a warp core breach on the ship. Q appears and claims that the girl is a member of the Q Continuum. It was him who initiated the warp core breach, in order to test her abilities.
Q wants to take Amanda back but then agrees to let her decide on her own where she would like to stay. When Data discovers that her parents, members of the Continuum who posed as humans, were killed by a very localized tornado that should have been prevented by the weather control system, Q has to admit that they were actually executed for being renegades - which included begetting Amanda the natural human way.
The girl is furious about this and is determined to refrain from using her powers to stay with the humans. That seems an easy task until Amanda can't help intervening in a planetary disaster on Tagra IV, and sadly realizes the best choice for all is for her to go live among her own kind.
Errors and Explanations[]
The Nitpicker's Guide
Next Generation Trekkers
Volume 2[]
Plot Oversights[]
- Amanda arriving at the shuttlebay on her own, despite Dr. Crusher stating that Nurse Ogawa will help bring the tricorders. Ogawa may have been delayed/called away.
Nit Central[]
- Josh M on Wednesday, April 18, 2001 - 9:35 pm: Does Picard ever ask Q what happened to Vash? LUIGI NOVI on Wednesday, June 13, 2001 - 4:59 pm: No, Josh, the subject never comes up again between them. The only nod to that bit of continuity is Q-Less (DS9).
- LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, June 14, 2001 - 1:29 am: To prepare Amanda for meeting Q, they have Crusher speak with her first. She also meets later with Crusher after her first meeting with him. Shouldn’t Troi be in on this? Have you forgotten how Troi got angry with Q for freezing Tasha during the Farpoint Trial?
- When Picard mentions how Q put his crew on trial for the crimes of humanity, Q says the jury’s still out on that. That’s funny. Q told Riker in Act 2 of the episode Q Who that they were exonerated. Brian Fitzgerald on Thursday, June 14, 2001 - 1:55 pm: I believe that I've pointed this out before, but Q says lots of things that aren't true. It seems completely in character to lie back in Q Who because they were hanging it over his head that he put them on trial. ScottN on Thursday, June 14, 2001 - 3:16 pm: Any Q episode after "Hide and Q" is a nit, because Q agreed on behalf of the continuum to butt out of humanity's affairs. Of course, it would be just like Q to lie about that, too! :) NarkS on Sunday, June 17, 2001 - 5:12 pm: "Q says lots of things that aren't true." Death Wish (VOY) would contradict that, although it's from a conversation between Q and Janeway. I can understand Q lying if he's a liar, but wouldn't Janeway remember this in pronouncing him unable to lie? (I could make so many comments to explain this, but I'll leave it to you)
- Keith Alan Morgan (Kmorgan) on Thursday, April 11, 2002 - 5:12 am: If they are testing tricorders shouldn't they test them on something which doesn't change over a period of minutes? Crusher runs one Tricorder over Amanda and tells her to compare those findings against the findings of the other Tricorders, but heart rate, breathing and other things in the human body can change over a short period of time. So the findings of a Tricorder run five minutes later may show different findings, but still be correct. It seems to me that the best way to run such a test would be to run two Tricorders at the same time over herself and check the findings against each other. If the Tricorder in the left hand has findings different from the Tricorder in the right hand then one must be wrong. How would you know which one was wrong?
- So did Q just leave Vash to fend for herself on some planet in the Gamma quadrant while he judged Amanda's abilities? Duke of Earl Grey on Thursday, April 11, 2002 - 3:49 pm: The events from Q-Less suggest to me that not only did he leave Vash to fend for herself, but he did it early on and didn't ever go back to the Gamma Quadrant for her. Seniram Either that, or he arranged it so she wouldn't notice he had gone. LUIGI NOVI on Thursday, December 05, 2002 - 8:32 am: I don't see why he couldn't be in two places at once. He is, after all, quasi-omnipotent. Rene on Thursday, December 05, 2002 - 8:29 pm: And he was in two places at once in that Voyager episode. Sure, it was in the same room, but still… Heck, it might even explain how he could be dating that other Q AND going around with Vash.
- Couldn't a machine be programmed to run the test on bacilli mitosis? Are these new bacilli? Shouldn't doctors have already run tests to determine which nutrients would work best? Or was all this just a 'make work' assignment for Amanda? It's probably part of her training routine.
- The tornado killed Amanda's parents in their house. So where was Amanda when this happened? She couldn't have been at school or a friend's house, because she was just a baby when they died. She could have been in another part of the house, which was left relatively undamaged.
- Jesse on Monday, November 17, 2003 - 10:22 am: One thing that bothers me is, why is Q in human form, using human words, to teach Amanda to be Q? I thought that the Q were so far above us that explaining Q things in mortal terms would be impossible. Wouldn't they revert to their "natural states" for this kind of lesson? Duke of Earl Grey on Monday, November 17, 2003 - 10:35 am: It's been a while since I've seen the episode, but as I recall, Q tried to take Amanda to the Q Continuum with him, but she resisted him (flinging him against the wall in the process), so he decided to stay aboard the Enterprise. However, he still kept telling Amanda things like, "It would be so much easier for me to explain things if you came with me to the continuum."
- Q2 on Monday, July 17, 2006 - 3:39 pm: It seems hard to believe that Q can't just take Amanda with him when he first tries to. He is presumably at the height of his powers, while she is just discovering hers. Yet she slams him into a wall and he gives up the idea and decides to play it nicey-nice, just like the humans want him to. Of course if he had taken her, we'd be instantly deprived of all of the regular cast, definitely forbidden for a TV series. Maybe he realised that the more he tried to force her, the more determined she would be to resist.
- Andre Reichenbacher (Amr) on Monday, April 26, 2010 - 12:45 pm: I wondered why Q did not just take away Amanda's powers, so she would be human. Why was this not an option? Isn't this what she wanted? She saved that planet by cleaning up their atmosphere, and Q felt she should go to the Continuum just because of that? What's the deal here? Perhaps she decided it would be prudent for her to visit the continuum, if only to stop Q pressurising her about it.