I'm going to keep this one shorter and sweeter than the last, if only because I really don't have much desire to slow-watch it again, parsing it all the way.
Ship taking on delegates from waring races on a planet (two distinct alien races on one world, both clearly somewhat primitive and savage), to a peace conference on a different planet. Dress coats in the transporter room, giant snake men with attitude problems, and Yar getting assigned a sticky diplomatic job.
Yar? Ms. I-judo-flip-people-for-the-hell-of-it Yar?
Well, I guess that fits with a theme of this opening, that Picard wants his junior officers to be constantly learning, as "Plot Unfolds", with Laforge and Worf doing sensor maintenance in some tiny room.
Relevance: The ship is passing some sort of gas formation (in warp? ugh, I don't recall), so they do a pass-through to scan it. Worf gets zapped through the control panel, and when doc goes to wake him, he's berserk and needs sedation.
Doc gets zapped from Worf, and meanders onto the bridge acting zoned, zaps computer. Shit is malfunctioning on the ship, Engineer Singh, who we've never seen before this episode, but features as prominently as Argyle in the last episode, exists only to die by electrocution, as Weasley swears the ship's problems fix themselves. Doc and Worf have amnesia, and Troi does hypnosis, finding signs of split personalities. Picard gets zapped.
Alien Possessed Picard is, frankly, awesome on toast.
Yar deals with mutually hostile aliens trying to kill (and eat) each other in a boring subplot that only barely manages to create some tension on the 'get to the planet so these two races can make peace' track.
Possessed Picard fends off weak sauce legal maneuvers by the bridge crew to have him declared unfit for duty and directs the ship back to the gas cloud. He then resigns his commission, paralyzes everyone with electricity and beams into space to join the gas-cloud entities in their explorations of the galaxy as a disembodied being.
Oh noes! Troi senses that the captain doesn't like being a gas cloud! So they stay and look for him, but how do you find one sentient piece of a gas cloud in a big collection of sentient gas cloud? Answer? Drive aimlessly around until the Captain grafitti's a random control panel with his initial. Technobabble the Transporter to reintegrate his pattern along with his disembodied consciousness.
Presto: Star Trek has proven the existence of the Soul.
No, seriously; The captain beamed off the ship but never had a new body formed on the other end. They still have his pattern in the buffer, but they can't just remake him since his vital energy, his conscious thought... his chakra or what have you... isn't in the buffer, its in the cloud, and not only does it have to get back on board, it has to somehow figure out which circuits control the Transporter buffer.
Ergo: The Enterprise has scientifically proven the existence of the Soul in the Star Trek Universe.
And we're back to ordinary, slightly dim, Picard. Oh, and a snake man was eaten by the... rodent men? Whatever.
Too bad. I really liked cocky, possessed Picard.
Other than that, this episode establishes Data's fascination with Sherlock Holmes, so there is that. Given how little Yar got in the last episode they gave her something meaty to do this episode... to bad it was boring and stupid.
Much shorter, and yet vaguely unsatisfying.
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