“Rascals”
Written by Ward Botsford & Diana Dru Botsford and Michael Piller and Allison Hock
Directed by Adam Nimoy
Season 6, Episode 7
Production episode 40276-233
Original air date: October 26, 1992
Stardate: 46235.7
Captain’s Log: Picard, Ro, Keiko, and Guinan are on a shuttlecraft, returning from Marlonia. Picard is geeking out over some archeological thing or other, while Ro recognizes the plants Keiko is bringing back (to everyone’s surprise). The shuttle then hits an energy field that’s about to destroy it. O’Brien barely manages to get a pattern lock, and he beams them over – concerned that there’s a 40% drop in mass, so he may have lost one of them.
Then it turns out that nobody was lost – but all four occupants of the shuttle are now twelve-year-old kids. (Also, their clothes shrunk with them for reasons never adequately explained by the script. Then again, neither does it explain much of anything else, as we’ll see.) Crusher and Troi both examine the four of them, and their minds are the same as ever, but their bodies have been changed to pre-adolescence.
[“I want to see my father, I want to see him now! Now! Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, NOW!”]