This, the first episode of season six, is the second of a two-part story and follows immediately from the events of the previous episode. Data in 19th Century San Francisco and the away team have just emerged from the temporal rift in an attempt to find him and thwart the activities of the shape shifting aliens. They discover the aliens are using a cholera epidemic as a cover for their harvesting of human neural energy that they feed on. After a run in with the local police they escape with Data and plan to return to the cavern where Data's head was found; there is a slight problem though; Samuel Clemens believes Data and the others are not just from the future but that they are intent on interfering with humanity in his time. Convinced that he must stop there interference he endangers the mission and ultimately ends up back on the Enterprise with the away team while Picard is left in the 19th Century.
After a good introduction to the story I was a little disappointed with its conclusion; it wasn't bad, it just could have been better. Mark Twain's involvement was clearly meant to be rather amusing but was more irritating as was the away team's pretending to be a troupe of actors to avoid telling the owner of a boarding house that they couldn't pay her. On the plus side it was nice to see the first time Guinan met Picard and it was good to see Data's head reunited with his body after five hundred years apart; especially as it enabled Picard to send a vital message which was received just in time to avoid a major error. Overall this was a decent enough episode that could have been better if it had avoided shoehorning real characters into the story.
After a good introduction to the story I was a little disappointed with its conclusion; it wasn't bad, it just could have been better. Mark Twain's involvement was clearly meant to be rather amusing but was more irritating as was the away team's pretending to be a troupe of actors to avoid telling the owner of a boarding house that they couldn't pay her. On the plus side it was nice to see the first time Guinan met Picard and it was good to see Data's head reunited with his body after five hundred years apart; especially as it enabled Picard to send a vital message which was received just in time to avoid a major error. Overall this was a decent enough episode that could have been better if it had avoided shoehorning real characters into the story.