The Enterprise investigates two survivors living on the only undamaged patch of land on a devastated planet.
Worf warned Picard that the Okey Cokey was ‘without honor’
First Broadcast: 9th October 1989.
Quote: “Number One, I think you had better see who’s at home.”
Score: 8
MP3 can be downloaded here. More episode info on IMDB, Memory Alpha, and Wikipedia
Star Trek: The Rewatch 
For a ship that encounters uncharted planets regularly, wouldn’t it make sense that the Enterprise itself would automatically establish a prime meridian within its first planetary scans? This automated procedure would allow the many onboard science labs and transporter rooms (and hiding cupboards) to have a shared geographical coordinate system at the very outset of each new discovery.
Yep, I think that’s the only way to do it. Especially if you are hiding in a cupboard. So where to put that meridian? I guess they could put the Enterprise’s arriving orbital longitude as 0, then they’d also have a relative position from their rival point too?
If it was an arbitrarily defined 0 longitude point, it wouldn’t matter where that was, as long every subsequent ship used the same point surely?
To make it easier to identify from orbit, would you be best off picking an easily identifiable feature on the surface, like Olympus Mons on Mars for example?
The Enterprise can start scanning a planet way before it arrives in orbit. My guess is that the computer plots a meridian as soon as the body enters sensor range, making 0° on the surface relative to the center of the ship and the center of the planet at the time of first discovery.
This got me thinking last night – as we currently have a small army or robots kicking around Mars, poking in it various ways, this exact problem must be one we’ve actually encountered in the exploration of the solar system. After some digging around I found this IAU/NASA/USGS site:
http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/
The Nomenclature section deals a bit with this type of thing; as I was using Mars as an example in my own head, I ended up on this page: http://planetarynames.wr.usgs.gov/Page/MARS/system.
Hopefully the Enterprise doesn’t use an IAU committee to determine planetary coordinate systems, or they’d bafflingly end up changing the direction that lattitudes run in every so often, as they did on Mars (http://www.isprs.org/proceedings/XXXIV/part4/pdfpapers/521.pdf).
Hope you find this interesting :)
bah, i meant longitude in the final paragraph – my bad.
Thanks for those links – cool stuff!
I think, if our species is ever lucky enough to explore distant planets up close, we’ll need:
A) A ship-based / mission-based coordinate system upon arrival (as I was suggesting).
B) A method of “tagging” planet coordinates for later return missions – perhaps by way of an orbital buoy. This buoy could also provide a way to store all collected data for the next ship to retrieve and refer to.
Geographic features are not reliable enough to use as markers because we will encounter such a variety of planet types. Some will be subject to extreme erosions or violent techtonic shifts or natural cataclysms, others will have surfaces composed entirely of gas or water or ice flows.
You guys rule! Thanks for mentioning the teleportation to the transport. Hi-larious.
THANK YOU for giving this episode an 8. The guest stars are amazing! I was ten years-old when this first aired and the ending absolutely blew me away. Always been one of my favorites.
I think the point about Picard explicitly requesting that the Enterprise should be positioned “well clear of the planet’s three moons” was just to make it clear to the audience that it was positioned in such a way that the warship would be unnoticed by Worf “riding a Lagrange point behind the furthest moon”; if the Enterprise was at L1 it’s hard for the sensors to spot the warship at L2.
Also, I thought the numbers they picked for the warship’s energy weapons were interesting: “The vessel is firing jacketed streams of positrons and antiprotons, equivalent firepower of forty megawatts.” This is equivalent to our most powerful particle accelerators on Earth today, but is not enough to trouble the Enterprise’s shields (though if it did I’d be somewhat concerned to be bombarded with antimatter! Thermal damage to the hull is something of an understatement!). Later on the warship is reported to fire a burst of “four hundred gigawatts
of particle energy” that takes down the Enterprise’s shields; that’s about equivalent to the power of all wind turbines on Earth put together right now…