Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 7 Episode 9

This unfocused ensemble episode begins with an A story about Data training his cat and a B story about Geordi trying to best an engineer of another ship and then drops both stories about halfway through to meander into a heavy-handed environmental allegory. The problem with doing the sci fi equivalent of a hole in the ozone layer is that the science inevitably takes a backseat to the personal issues and viewpoints (which can be covered in a more dramatic way) and thus the episode becomes more about who's right than the more Star Trekish idea of "let's find out what the problem is and then see how we can solve it together."



And if that's not bad enough, to really send home the episode's message that technology has doomed us all, the episode ends with a directive that handcuffs future Star Trek episodes until a few months later when the writers decide to forget about "Force of Nature" and never reference it again.