The Arsenal of Freedom

God damn title sounds like a Toby Keith album.  Or at least what Toby Keith calls his porno collection.

After the usual opening shot of the Enterprise cruising around, we learn that they are trying to hunt down a missing ship, the USS Drake.  The Drake was a ship offered to Riker, but since he is kind of a pussy when it comes to taking his own ship for some reason he wasn't in command.  Some boner named "Rice" was the captain so they are trying to see what the fudge happened.

The Drake disappeared around some planet that they call "The Arsenal of Freedom" which was run by weapons merchants (ohhhhh). Rather condescendingly, there is an automated message of one of the spectacularly jewy looking guy:

"oy vey!"

No life signs captain!  Better send an away team! I smell a trap! 

Oh shit, I knew I recognized that jew guy.  It is Vincent Schiavelli - he played Buggy on one of my favorite movies of all time: Death to Smoochy. That movie is excellence, and I'm pretty sure I am the only dude on the planet who thinks so, so we'll just leave it at that.

Down on the planet, which is a jungle this time!, the away team is cruising and finding stuff like big guns and shit, when Riker spots the missing captain, lookin mad creepy:

guess they don't have any proactiv in the future

But wait!  Doppleganger!  He turns into some thing that looks like a boss from Secret of Evermore (lol) that cruises around and puts Riker in a electro-cocoon - spooky!

Then, like a dumbass, Picard decides to beam down himself!  Silly goose! He leaves dang Geordi in charge again and almost immediately dies like 40 times.  I thought we all knew beaming the captain down was a bad scene. These ain't the Kirk days anymore where he needs first dibs on the space trim.

robot ain't even close

So Picard and Crusher almost die, the whole away team is stuck on the planet, and dang ole Geordi is in charge when the Enterprise gets the rope-a-dope treatment.

"awww shiiiiiiiit"

oowwwww

Here we have yet another chief engineer (seriously why didn't they just cast somebody for this role?), who is totally not cool with having a black dude in command.  

"seriously bro check out my awesomely styled pompadour" 

Geordi puts this Orrin Hatch motherfucker in his place and sends him back down to engineering. But then sorta sucks at his plan and loses confidence in himself.  He looks like he is about to cry here.  GANGSTERS DON'T CRY, GEORDI.

sometimes they do :*(

He calls back this dickhead Logan who keeps shitting on Geordi even though he is doing now what he originally wanted.  But Geordi once again pimp slaps him to command the saucer section. But then he has to listen to god damn Troi blab on about feelings and whatnot.  What a useless lady.

So the Enterprise separates for the second time. Seems like they originally planned to do this a bunch of times in the show but it sort of dropped off as a plot device.  I don't like the way the ship looks without the saucer section, so aesthetically at least, I'm fine with this. You hearing me, producers for Star Trek over 20 years ago?

Turns out the weapons planet dudes got killed by their own weapons because they were too stupid to figure out how to turn them off.  But the Enterprise crew figures it out in like 8 minutes.  There is a scene in the control room where Picard and Beverly are trapped and she is injured.  Apparently, (I love memory-alpha for this shit) it was supposed to be a big scene establishing some rapport betwixt the two.  But Roddenberry nixed the mood, probably because it wasn't filthy enough. Also, that set was infested with fleas when they were filming, which is funny to me.

Geordi manages to not destory the ship, but they never give his black ass command again.