In 1991, Star Trek: The Next Generation was in the middle of its golden era. After producer Michael Piller transformed the series into a character-driven show in Season 3, the episodes of Season 4 represented the fulfillment of that promise. When one thinks about the cozy, ensemble feeling of TNG, that aesthetic largely comes from Seasons 3 through 5; a time when anything was possible on the show, but the stakes were almost always deeply personal for the characters. By going smaller, TNG was able to get a much bigger audience, around 20,000 million viewers in syndication per week at its height. And so, when you have characters as beloved as these, one of the best ways for the show to have fun was to put everyone into absurd scenarios.
Enter “Qpid,” a Next Generation episode which aired during the week of April 22, 1991, and is commonly remembered as the One Where the Crew Does a Robin Hood Adventure. This episode could probably be called a TNG classic, mainly because it features Worf (Michael Dorn) uttering one of his funniest lines ever: “I am not a Merry Man!” And yet, when you rewatch “Qpid” today, one fact will hit you at warp speed: This episode didn’t even need the Robin Hood thing to be interesting, and in fact, that conceit doesn’t even begin until about halfway through the episode.
