YMMV / Star Trek: The Next Generation S1 E9 "Hide and Q"

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Riker all but instantly becomes smug and power happy. When he takes everybody to the bridge, he's standing there gloating, and very quickly stops respecting Picard. That's so out of character, it's questionable how much control he has. "Power corrupts" but usually not instantly, and certainly not for a by the book type like Riker. It's similar to Gary Mitchell, and they both come across as more possessed than corrupted.
  • Fridge Brilliance: Is this the point where his ambition to be captain, which Troi mentions in the next episode has been all-consuming up till now, is derailed? Perhaps he's ashamed of his response to having power.
• Designated Hero: While it's debatable whether or not it was right for Riker not to use his powers to save the little girl, Picard's opinion on the matter is decidedly atrocious. Instead of trying to kindly assure Riker that it was best not to play God, he was smug and snide to the point where he all but congratulated Riker for letting her die.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • As the internet likes to point out, 25-year-old Wil Wheaton did not end up looking like 25-year-old Wesley Crusher◊. Gene Roddenberry was perhaps a little too optimistic about his Author Avatar.
  • Q's interest in Riker during this episode gets funnier when the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Death Wish" had Q (a different Q) revealing that he helped save his ancestor, Thaddeus Riker, during the American Civil War.
• Narm: Worf and Tasha's dramatically leaping over the tactical console to point their phasers at Q when he first appears. Not only does it look more silly than it does impressive, but you can see that Denise Crosby nearly loses her footing and then stumbles uncertainly onto the chair where Troi would normally sit.
• Special Effect Failure: The make-up that John de Lancie wears as Q-as-Data is decidedly patchy, with bits of de Lancie's skin visible around the base of his neck, especially in the HD remastering of the episode.
  • Possibly justified as Q is mimicking Data and may just not have bothered.
• Take That, Scrappy!: Probably unintentional, but Wesley Crusher gets gorily stabbed through the stomach by a "vicious animal thing". The image was popularly captioned "Wesley gets the point."

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