An obsessed scientist arrives on the Enterprise-D to perform a once-in-a-lifetime experiment. Accidentally released nanites, however, threaten both it and the ship.
Bob Kelso shows off his holiday snaps to the bridge crew
First Broadcast: 25th September 1989.
Quote: “I’ve missed about 2 inches of him.”
Links: More info about Type 1A Supernovae
Score: 8
MP3 can be downloaded here. More episode info on IMDB, Memory Alpha, and Wikipedia
Star Trek: The Rewatch 
Oh, thankfully we are finally into season 3. I have long had a rule of thumb with Star Trek TNG: if you turn it on and you have a clean shaven Riker and no collars on the uniforms, you are season 1 so RUN AWAY! If you have a Riker beard, but no collars, you are in season 2 so you might get a good episode by chance. But, if you’ve got a Riker beard and collars, you’re in for a great show!
Scotty mentions “the feel of the deck plates” in Relics. And this episode sure has the Enterprise giving us a smooth ride after two years of loudly rattling deck plates (and data parts).
You mentioned the singularity – have you guys seen “Ex Machina”? I think it’s the best sci-fi film of 2015. And a refreshing chaser for those of us who suffered through “Interstellar”.
Fantastic article about Artificial Super Intelligence:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
Also includes the singularity and discussions on nano-tech and grey goo!
Hey chaps, your astrophysics excitement is getting in the way of the details of this episode. Although the accretion of matter onto a compact object that eventually explodes at a predictable point sounds a lot like a type 1a supernova, it can’t be in this case as the event in this episode is described as regularly occurring _every_ 196 years, whereas a type 1a supernova would completely destroy the compact object (which, in the case of a type 1a supernova, is always a white dwarf). This would be more consistent with the recurrent novae type of stars but these are all cataclysmic variables where the compact object is a white dwarf and the system in this episode is described as a neutron star with a red giant companion (they want to capture the “neutronium” that is released in the explosion). That’s more like a low-mass X-ray binary star system where the red giant overflows its Roche lobe so matter streams onto the neutron star as depicted beautifully in the HD visuals in this episode. These systems are quite rare in the galaxy (~25 per quadrant) and one which undergoes a regular periodic outburst is probably a soft X-ray transient (first discovered in the early 80s by the first space-borne X-ray telescopes) and would be rarer still: a true old faithful!
Good point about the food replicators though: they were always called food slots or food units at this point in the series, replicators had been mentioned but only in the context of replicating components for engineering.