In my faulty juvenile recollection, I always had the impression that “The Naked Now” came a bit farther into the first season of ST:TNG than it actually does. Being the second episode of the series gives it a really odd tone. As critics at the time pointed out, having these characters that we’ve barely met all suddenly act totally out of character is not only a weird directorial choice, it takes away a lot of the punch of the episode. We don’t really know that most of these folks are acting abnormally. We won’t know that for a number of episodes to come. Conversely, rewatched with a pretty good understanding of how the characters turn out makes the episode both more fun (Crusher and Picard’s interactions in particular) and more dramatic.
The main thing anyone really remembers about this episode is Data’s line about being “Fully functional and versed in multiple forms of pleasure.” Which is weird, and mercifully, never brought up again in the series, if I recall correctly. Fan fiction is another matter, but we’re not going to go there.
The other thing this episode starts to set up is Wesley “Wonder Boy” Crusher, Savior of the Day. I’m going to defend Wesley a little bit, because both when I was watching ST:TNG for the first time as a teenager, and now, seeing my teenagers watch ST:TNG for the first time, Wesley is kind of relatable. He’s super smart, sure, but he’s got that teenage enthusiasm of being in this fantastic, cutting-edge technology place, and he just wants to play with All of the Things! What teenager wouldn’t, in his shoes? For teens, it’s fun to see someone with a similar viewpoint on TV. (Does this count as representation? Don’t know, don’t care.)
We’ll give Wesley a pass for this episode, because sure, you take away a nerdy teen’s inhibitions, and maybe he would try to make himself starship captain. He’d definitely do some moody emo B.S. like locking all the boring adults out from the controls.
There’s a funny fan theory about why only Riker remembers that Kirk’s Enterprise experienced a similar incident decades earlier. It goes that while Kirk and the gang were galivanting around the galaxy meeting all sorts of weird situations, the rest of Starfleet was having fairly normal cruises. Most people blew off Kirk’s logs as being a bit embellished. Alternatively, absolutely everyone was meeting with the kind of weird stuff that the Enterprise was, and Kirk’s weird logs got lost in the overall cavalcade of epic weirdnicity. Either way, of course Riker would be the one to remember reading about the previous USS Enterprise’s wacky adventures.
The overall episode tension comes from the race against time. As the crew slowly succumbs to the unknown virus, Dr. Crusher tries to find a cure before she too goes over the edge. Meanwhile, the star in the planetary system is about to turn into a supernova and destroy Enterprise. Naturally, with just seconds left, an inoculated Wesley figures out how to reverse a tractor beam, push the Oberth-class USS Tsiolkovsky into the way of a chunk of debris and buy Data enough time to put all the computer chips back into place so that the ship can get away.
That’s a pretty expensive repair bill, but hey, Oberth-class science ships have got to be cheaper than Galaxy-class ships, right? We really didn’t learn anything new about the crew in this episode (other than Data) but it’s at least sort of fun in retrospect.