Plot
The crew of the USS Enterprise, along with other ships in the sector, experience a localized time-distortion, and soon after receive a distress-call from Dr. Paul Manheim from the nearby Vandor system. Riker recalls that Manheim was ejected from the Federation Science Institute for conducting unauthorized experiments. In the Vandor system, they find the distress signal coming from a facility on a planetoid surrounded by a force-field. When they make contact with the facility, a woman requests the Enterprise's help to save her husband, Dr. Manheim, and lowers the shields.
The two are brought aboard, and while Dr. Crusher tends to Dr. Manheim, Picard discovers his wife is Jenice, Picard's former love from Paris before he decided to join Starfleet. Jenice warns that her husband was working privately in his laboratory, but does not know what he was doing. Jenice also alerts the crew to numerous security protocols that her husband has installed at the facilities. As the crew prepares to send an away-team to investigate the laboratory, they experience more time distortions, labeled by Data as "Manheim effects", and hurry their efforts. They find that they cannot complete a transporter beam to the facility due to the instabilities. Dr. Manheim recovers long enough to explain that he was doing experiments involving time, gravity, and funnels to other universes, and suspects his last experiment is running out-of-hand. He provides the crew with proper coordinates to beam down to avoid the security fields. Picard admits to Jenice that he worried about losing her again after he left her in Paris, and vows to correct Dr. Manheim's experiment.
Data is sent down alone and disables the remaining security measures before entering Manheim's laboratory. He finds a column of energy emanating from a dimensional matrix, the source of the time distortions. Data, though briefly affected by the time distortions, is able to add anti-matter to the matrix, causing the matrix to stabilize and halt the time distortions. Dr. Manheim fully recovers, and he and Jenice thank Picard and the crew for their help. Picard and Jenice use the holodeck to recreate one more encounter at a Paris cafè, before she returns with her husband to the planet.
Read more about this topic: We'll Always Have Paris (Star Trek: The Next Generation)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every mans education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobodys previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (18121870)