Show HN: To Honor Sir Patrick Stewart, Enjoy the TNG Episode Guessing Game
tng.episodle.comI appreciate this. The full text search is fairly crucial, as while I've seen the entire series more than once I cannot for the life of me remember "the name of the episode where the aliens pretending to be dumb kidnap Geordi", but the search is good enough to get there without being too obvious.
> The full text search is fairly crucial
It'd also be nice if the search had fuzzy letter matching, too. American keyboards typically don't make typing "deja q" or "menage a troi" with the diacritics particularly easy.
The aliens that want things that make them go! That's their official name isn't it?
Samaritan snare. It's also the one where Picard gets his heart fixed.
There’s two when that happens.
One where the season 2 doctor replaced Crusher (because apparently the producers didn’t like Gates McFadden even though the cast and viewers did) performed the operation.
And another where Q sent Picard back in time (kind of) to undo the incident that lead to his heart getting stabbed.
The latter episode hasn’t aged well because of one unnecessary romantic/sex scene. Which is a pity because it’s an otherwise fantastic episode.
But then the TOS has its fair share of cringeworthy moments for modern audiences that made total sense in the era it was aired.
> The latter episode hasn’t aged well because of one unnecessary romantic/sex scene.
Meh. I give huge passes for media based on when they were filmed. Stuff that doesn't age well is mostly just "well, it was ok at the time" and move on. TNG has very little in it that isn't really timeless.
Now, for stuff that was bad even for the time, that's the stuff that should rightly be condemned. For example, Code of Honor.
> the aliens pretending to be dumb
Pretending? The Pakleds were genuinely dumb. If TNG’s episode left you with any doubts, watch Lower Decks and let them all be dispelled.
The Pakleds assembled a huge pile of technologies they didn't invent together into a powerful ship and social-engineered the Enterprise into giving them more valuable stuff to exploit.
This is Hacker News, replace "Pakleds" with "startup founder" and so long as it's profitable that's called being brilliant and innovative.
I do remember waiting for the formulaic “aha! Tricked you! You thought we were dumb moment” and then it was just like “nope, this is just the way they are”, was definite an interesting twist.
Was it just their verbal intelligence?
No. And this reminds me of the “meat proxies” we see now who are “smart” and “powerful” using Claude.
No, they really were (hilariously) dumb and simple. Of the top of my head I remember their capital was named “Big Strong City”, their “Red Alert” was “Red Alarm” (it’s funny in context) and they didn’t really understand that’s an emergency, and despite being corrected multiple times by the woman herself, they kept thinking captain Carol Freeman was captain Kathryn Janeway. For reference, one of them in black and the other is white.
The Pakleds weren’t as dumb as they pretended.
Yeah Lower Decks played on their stupidity. But everything about Lower Decks was an exaggerated form of cannon.
But the actual behaviour of the Pakleds was to mislead people into thinking they were harmless through playing on their own stupidity.
Now I’m not saying they were a smart race comparable to (for example) the Romulans. But they weren’t as stupid as they portrayed themselves.
Lower Decks is canon, not “a form” of it (exaggerated or otherwise) but just as canon as any other show, and it’s my opinion (of course you may disagree) that it enriches Star Trek’s lore. Yes, that means the Koala is canon (it even shows up in the intro on the Strange New Worlds crossover episode!), but when you think about it, that’s not any more silly than Q or the myriad other bizarre things on other Star Trek shows.
https://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/q0udro/comment/hf...
Ultimately it doesn’t matter. They’re fictional shows so all that’s important is that we enjoy them in our own way, but I don’t think Lower Decks exaggerated how dumb the Pakleds are, I think it explored them so much because them being dumb made them a good comedic fit. When I watch the TNG episode and Lower Decks, I see consistency. More than comedy, Lower Decks has an immense respect and care for the lore.
That’s a very uncharitable reading of my comment when I literally said it was canon.
The “exaggerated” bit is clearly meant to highlight that Lower Decks is written to be a comedy first. So certain parts of canon are amped up for comedic effect.
The rest of your post seemed to imply that I was unimpressed with Lower Decks, and Star Trek in general, when it has comedy episodes. Nothing about my comment suggested that. I actually think Lower Decks (post season 1) was the strongest spin off in new Trek. And I even loved the SNW / LD crossover episode too.
I regret that you took my comment as negative, please believe that was not my intention. I tried to be exceedingly clear about what was opinion and that I think we’re fine to disagree as long as we’re enjoying ourselves.
There was certainly no implication directed at you¹. I don’t know you and wouldn’t assume your tastes. Rather, I was sharing my excitement at Lower Decks. I’m glad that you liked it too.
I wish you a nice Saturday.
¹ And it saddens me that these days so many people on HN constantly assume implications which aren’t there, and always negatively, instead of taking comments as they’re written and defaulting to assuming kindness.
No, they really were (hilariously) dumb and simple. Now let me list two examples that are just vocabulary.
Urk. Man, people like you really take the joy out of life. Here everyone else is, just having fun with harmless geekery, but something just compels you to be pedantic and wrong.
“Big Strong City” is not “just vocabulary”, it’s an example of how they think and what they value, what they give importance to. “Red Alarm” is vocabulary, but that was not the example (that was to situate people who have seen the show), the relevant bit is “they didn’t really understand that’s an emergency”. Mixing up two people is not vocabulary.
Now, was it worth it to poo poo on everyone’s fun just to try to show how smart you are and embarrass yourself in the process by revealing a lack of understanding of the subject matter?
Don’t be that kid at the party who’s always calling for attention and all of the adults secretly wish their parents hadn’t brought him along. Do better.
Ah yes, if you like Pakleds, you should really watch Lower Decks! Also if you like TNG, as it's set in the timeline just after TNG and has guest (voice) appearances from many TNG, DS9 and Voyager characters - though not Picard unfortunately (IIRC).
i watched TNG through when it aired as a child, and then again probably every other year since. i dont know anyone IRL who has seen or consumed more TNG, or loved it more than i do
i couldnt get a single one right lol
It's strange how brains store information so differently. I've watched through TNG maybe 5 times as an adult—most recently last year. (Watched a lot more in middle school because my dad recorded most of them onto VHS.) I went 20/20 with an average of 1.5 guesses. The game would show me a picture of a scanner on a table, and my brain would go, "That's the scanner Data used to scan Geordi and Ro when they phase shifted by the Romulans." Search "geordi romulans" and, boom, get it in 1.
Why did my brain store TNG to this level of detail and not, like, quantum mechanics or the names of the people in my church? This is not particularly useful information, brain!
Well once I saw it wanted episode names, I was like "Nope, not for me".
I can't recall a single name of any episode, except for maybe measure of a man and inner light. But I could tell you exactly what will happen within 5 seconds of watching an episode.
I watched tng and voyager 100s of times, I never have known any episode names of either. I recognized all the screens though and can tell what season and if it’s early or late in the season.
If you've watched it more than a dozen times and don't know Darmok, I don't know what to say.
i really love picard’s jacket that he wore in that episode. kinda weird it only showed up there and a small handful of cameos in others.
Picard's jacket, at El Adrel.
Shaka, when the walls fell.
Claude, when the machines broke.
Sokath, his eyes uncovered!
Darmok appears to be shockingly uninfluential in the current GenAI NLP/AI community.
Would love to be proven wrong!
If you search the season, the pop up gives the name and a brief description and I was able to select the right episode based upon that.
First attempt I didn't read the rules and didn't understand that the shots were all from the same episode.
After I got that I'm now at 34/34 with win guess avg of 2.68.
Maybe I’m not enough of a Trekkie, but I feel multiple choice would be good here.
TNG is one of my favorite shows of all time, and I can't answer most of these. I feel like I've watched the entire show at least a couple of times all the way through, but I definitely don't pay attention to the individual episode titles.
This is one step away from: "In season 4, episode 3, what was the exact code Data used to lock out the Enterprise?"
173467321476Charlie32789777643Tango732Victor73117888732476789764376Lock.
Oh great, now Cloudflare needs to revoke an entire certificate authority…
Turned out the key was 0n3S3v3ntHr33f0UrS1xS3v3nThR33... and so we were fine until I typed this comment.
That's the code on my luggage.
I've seen the show many times through and I know which episode every single one of these are from. But with a few exceptions I don't remember the name of any of them. It's just not a thing my brain picks up.
The thing I shared with people was his appearance in Extras which is hilarious. It proves he can be comedic because he is just that good of an actor. RIP.
It's great just a bit toooo hard.
But it's for trekkies so I'm not going to judge, I like Star Trek but I can't say that I'm anywhere as close to being a hardcore trekky, I'm still learning and getting into it.
I'm happy to see work like this and I'm also curious as to how you got all the screenshot content. Was that through scraping or ffmpeg going through video content or what? I'm deeply curious.
Additionally, I think there (might) be a decent vibe-coded game about the game Oblivion and the intro sequence where Patrick Stewart plays the Emperor Uriel.
His presence in Oblivion was far too short.
We can perhaps honour him by extending the initial sequences of the game, with a game. Idea, methinks.
Edit: Trekkies->trekky
Wow, I loved how hard this was. Some took me 3 or 4 tries before getting it. It’s been maybe 4-5 years since I’ve done a re-watch, so I found it interesting that some episodes like Silicon Avatar and Inheritance blurred together in my memory.
Re: screenshots, I’d assume they were scraped from memoryalpha.
I got a bunch of them but only because I am a super hardcore TNG nerd. Most casual trekkies probably don’t even notice the names of the episodes. It’s still a tough game.
Thanks for this! Back when TNG was on TV on the regular my wife would play a game with me, she’d flip over to TNG and pause the video, then I had to describe the episode well enough to match the guide description. I could usually get it as long as it wasn’t just a still of the Enterprise.
Most of these I can get in one or two guesses through key word search, I do not have all the episodes titles memorized.
*SPOILER quote re today’s episodle*:
[episode’s protagonist]: Computer, begin new programme. Create as follows, workstation chair. (he sits in it) Now, create a standard alphanumeric console positioned for left hand. Now an iconic display console positioned for right hand. Tie both consoles into the Enterprise main computer core, utilising neural-scan interface. COMPUTER: There is no such device on file. [protagonist]: No problem. Here's how you build it.
(some period context: circa 1990, a neuralink interface was pretty much unconscionable)
The Inner Light still gets me every time. Lovely tribute, thanks for making this.
As a TNG fanatic since it first aired in ‘87 I’m surprised I didn’t get more right, but I got 60%. I missed the one about the alien race who developed the technology where you could step through a portal into another place in the galaxy (“Contagion”). I thought the race was the Iconians but it wasn’t in the episode description for some reason. Love the game! Can I ask how you made this so quickly?
Thanks for doing something to honor him. I was bummed we didn't get a black bar for him today here on HN (I know he's not STEM but honorary STEM?).
The game might be too hard? I have watched A LOT of TNG and didn't make the first few guesses correctly and then bailed out.
I take it back, it's not too hard.
I didn't realize the first round through that each game was for the same episode. I also didn't realize I could search for plot keywords. That made it a lot easier and I haven't missed one yet.
I put out 5(4) candles for him!
Love that episode. I remember immediately being reminded of balut [1] when Picarde eats the alien egg.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balut_(food)
Also:
How would he be honorary STEM? Do you consider real life aircraft employees to also be STEM or honorary STEM.
Shoutout for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Greatest_Generation_(podca...
A goofy, often NSFW podcast by two hosts who really like Star Trek.
Looking for Red Letter Media's Honoring of Sir Patrick Stewart myself.
Nice little "game". Appreciate the effort
Is it cheating when you can search for a plot element you know from the episode but have no idea of the title? For example: The Big Goodbye. A newspaper suggests either the holodeck or time travel but you can merely enter "holodeck" and get a list of a dozen candidates. Sub Rosa and "grandmother"? Shame you can't search for "vasquez rocks"
No, not cheating. You are playing the way it was intended. Maybe we need a hard mode to turn off the plots.
That's a dumb game.
I know the first one I got was the anachronistic Irish and the clones. No clue of the episode name.
I know it's 2nd season cause it's Pulaski as doctor. I liked her over Crusher. And she called the clones' bluff immediately!
Up the Long Ladder
Is it dumb because you don't know the names of the episodes? There are hardcore trekkies who can list all the episode names easily. Maybe this game is for them?
Eyes in the dark...one moon circles
I wanna fall in love. But we never had a chance to meet that Jean Luc Picard because that was a character. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyKq7Aax-hI