S1E15 11001001

Season 1 Episode 15: 11001001

Watchability: Recommended
Short Answer: The best written dialogue this season so far.
Notables: Watch out of Minuet, she'll come up again later.

I think this episode is the first one that has really surprised me. When I watched it as a kid, I don't remember it being notable at all. And while it has no over-arching message, I think it is the best written episode I've seen so far during these recaps.

When I watch each episode, I usually take notes. Sometimes I write down lines from the episode if I think that I might reference them later. Typically, there are only one or two quotations per episode. For this episode, almost everything I wrote down was a line of dialogue. Everything from Wesley commenting on a society where information is at your fingertips (*cough* *cough* smartphones...) to Picard making generalizations about love to Worf cracking a joke.

With these moments, we start see a little of the personalities of these characters; Worf as the deadpan comic, the mentor/friend relationship between Picard and Riker, Riker's love of jazz. I feel like all these are hints of what fans remember about these characters. Until this episode (and probably for a little while), I feel like the characters have been pretty flat. It's surprising to me that we get so much of it in a single episode. Hopefully, I haven't oversold it, since I definitely Recommend it.

Side Note: Watching this episode, it occurred to me to try to figure out if the title "11001001" had any significant meaning. Of course, being a computer science guy, I knew that it represents "C9" in hex or "201" in decimal. This didn't immediately produce a satisfactory answer, so I tried to figure out if it somehow connected to a "minuet" or had some significance in Jazz. All of my efforts came up empty. It wasn't until a day or so later, looking on Wikipedia, that I saw an explanation. Apparently, the number 201 can be seen on computer displays and other places repeatedly. This fact was was something I haven't heard of before. I'll have to look out for it in the future.