Star Trek: The Next Generation 6x24 Second Chances FIRST TIME WATCHING Reaction

It’s gonna be incredible when Jen eventually starts watching Lower Decks. 😂

I've been waiting for this one for you since I know you enjoy Riker and Troi's relationship. 😄

Man if I had a nickel every time there were two will rikers…

Apparently in an early draft, the episode was going to end with Will dying and Tom taking Data's place at Ops while Data would be promoted to First Officer.

I'm glad they didn't go in that direction, especially since Will was kind of a dick this episode and he shouldn't go out like that, but what could've been interesting is if instead Will finally took a promotion. Heck of a way to shake up the status quo without changing the cast.

The current Riker has spent years with Picard and the Enterprise crew, and has been shaped by his experiences with them. The alternate Riker has not.. so he is a different person with different values.

Riker found himself unusually attracted... to the new Riker. Deanna took up the trombone.

In season one, I didn't like Riker.
Now he's my favorite Star Trek character, I like him more than even Kirk and Spock. I just wish he'd catch a break. He deals with more grief than anyone else in Star Trek.

A lot of us felt at the time that Will should've taken a new command and Tom should've stayed aboard! Great insight. And yes, I adore this episode. ♥

No spoilers on how, why or when, but we will see Thomas Riker again. And that makes me appreciate this episode even more.

identical twins are the same genetically. but have different fingerprints. since fingerprints are formed in the whom. Will and Thomas will have the same fingerprints. i used to think they could be twins. but one is a duplicate.

Bev, ultimate wingman/wingwoman.

Jen's descriptor, really got me, for th first time. Troi sad from losing Will Riker.......being comforted by Friend Will Riker.

Kinda.....so cool. (if a bit bummer) And the Worf writing, mentioning how the mirror held up to oneself, might bother someone with seeing all the parts of themself (including the ones hey avoid dwelling on). Honestly, just now pondering just how VERY well written this episode is. Might be one of the best of all the TNG, low-key.

Not going to give too much of a spoiler, but we will be seeing Thomas Riker again.

Early ideas in the script were for the old Riker to die leaving the new Riker to take his place, but obviously they decided that would cause too many potential issues going forward.

The one-time romances in TNG can be very frustrating to watch. (Yeah, I'm still pissed about what happened between Picard and Cmdr. Daren!) However, the deal between Tom & Deanna just screams of lost opportunity.

Foreshadowing 😬

Jonathan Frakes was so committed to the part that he built a transporter so that he could split himself into two Jonathan Frakeses

Pausing real quick best the reveal to guess Jen's reaction: "What? WHAT THE FRIG??"

the so-called transporters are just a disastrous idea, should be pre-emptively outlawed

I wanted to know your philosophy takes on this episode.
Not just the fatalism / genetic determinism aspects on whether Tom Riker is predestined to repeat the same mistakes as his "clone", due to his biology being the same as Will's? Just how much of our life do you think is shaped by our environment / circumstances rather than our genetics / biology?

This episode establishes that Star Trek's [Rick Berman-era] transporters are capable of duplicating a person on the transport, which raises the question of who really is the real Will Riker? The commander or the lieutenant that stranded on the potemkin for 6 years? If it's both, that would make the transporter a murder machine which materialises a clone of you somewhere else and kills you.

Creating a "clone" you is one of the consequences of violating Heisenberg's quantum uncertainty principle, such as with the Heisenberg-compensator based transporters of Star Trek.

However, with 21st century advances in quantum computing, turns out you don't need Heisenberg compensators to achieve teleportation.

The technical explanation involves a loophole in the no-teleportation theorem derived from quantum information theory. The theorem disallows teleportation of classical digital information, but technically allows the teleportation of superposed states, as long as you don't measure it. And this method does work - so far, we've only been able to quantum teleport electrons and atoms for short distances (before a measurement interaction takes place), but you could envision a future version capable of teleporting much more. The requirement not to measure the entangled state means that the transporter cannot be used to create Tom Riker-style clones (known as the no-cloning theorem), and the physical information that makes Riker Riker shall get reassembled at the destination.

Due to the no-cloning theorem, this type of transporter is not a murder machine.

Or is it? When does a ship of theseus stop becoming the ship of theseus? Can you recreate a ship of theseus by reassembling it somewhere else? Or is there something that you cannot capture in the original ship that can't be reassembled somewhere else? And if objects do have a soul, how does it not die when you sleep, or when you teleport by foot, which involves destroying the original you at the original location and recreating you a footstep away?

Episodes like this make me wish i could erase it from my memory and watch it fresh, because i have no memory of how i reacted when it first aired. I was only 10 at the time

No one ever asks why the Federation put a research station on Nervala IV in the first place, and they really should.

Hi Jen,
Are you going to watch the next gen movies after / during the tv series?
Not sure where in the timeline the first movie is tbh but probably doesn’t matter.

Oh, fun fact...the transporter chief in this episode isn't O'Brien, it's Mae Jemison, the first African-American woman to go to space.

Looks like Jonathan Frakes loved Star Trek so much, he got behind the camera and almost played dual roles. How cool would that have been?

If you can try it Jen after finishing TNG and when following DS9 Seasons 3-7, I highly suggest watching the Next Gen movies at some key points. Generations after DS9 3x09 "Defiant", First Contact after DS9 5x13 "For the Uniform", Insurrection after 7x12 "The Emperor's New Cloak", plus Nemesis after DS9's ending (and after Voyager's end if you watch that too).

Yes, probably one of the best Troi episodes. Generally hers are some of the weakest in the series and filled with too much pedantic pyscho babble.

I kinda feel like there was a bit of a missed opportunity here to replace Riker with... Riker. The Riker we know has kinda stagnated. He's been offered a command more than once but refused every time, meanwhile there's another Riker who never got the breaks our Riker got.

They could have had our Riker finally take that command he's always wanted and depart, and for the Riker we rescued from the planet to slot into the crew at a lower rank, and give us a new different Riker that has to re-learn all the lessons that our Riker already did.

It would have been interesting if Jonathan Frakes shaved his beard for his time as Lt Riker on this one...just to really make him look how he would have appeared pre-TNG. It works either way in the end, I guess.

I kind of felt sorry for Riker (both) in this one. He was totally beside himself. In front of himself and behind himself as well.... 😁

For those who are Riker/Troi fans, there is a wonderful TNG book called "Imzadi", which does a great job of exploring their romance amd what Imzadi means for each of them.
Highly recommended!

And now we have to contemplate that the transporter is a death machine. It does not move you from place to place, but copjes you in another place and then shreds the orginal. Tom Riker is an original which avoided being shredded.

I always thought It be cool if they would've had a couple of more Thomas Riker episodes.

I never quite understood how Troi « power » works… 😅

“With benefits”. 😂

“You never know what might come out of the shadows.”

Well……you’re not wrong. 😆

This is the episode that nade me realise that yeah, transporters really do kill you and make a copy. Sure the copy thinks it's you, but what if for you everything just goes black?

People usually don't like others who are too much like themselves. Shows off all the flaws and makes a joke of pride.

They are meant to be together. Imzadi. Forever souls. Read the book it's really good.

This episode is a big missed opportunity. They could have had Commander Riker accept a promotion to Captain of another ship and have Lt Riker join the crew as a new bridge member.

Wow, never seen you this flustered

It is now that Lt. Riker might make a different choice WRT Troi but they were the exact same person back then. He would have made the same choice or, whatever might have caused him to choose differently, it wasn't because that version got through. What made them different were their different experiences after being separated. Regardless of which of the two got through, they would have been the same person, shaped by those experiences.

well if you want what riker and deanna turn out to be at "the end" then i suggest you watch the Movie "Star Trek: Nemesis. And about your sentence "i dont think he fully trusts him" i have to say in a deep space nin episode it is explained that riker did right to NOT trust him!

When this was first shown, the show writers said that they actually considered killing Will off and letting Tom stay. Frakes' thought was as long as there was a guy with a beard on the ship, he'd still have a job, so he was fine with the idea.