"Peak Performance" was written by David Kemper who later became a showrunner on the great sci-fi series Farscape. I see now he hasn't written anything since contributing a story to the short lived CW series Cult in 2013. I guess he's retired. I hope it was voluntary. Anyway, I almost always enjoyed his teleplays.
"Peak Performance" was the first of two episodes he wrote for TNG and centres on a combat training exercise. The Enterprise crew splits into two teams, one of them, headed by Riker, taking control of a starship called the Hathaway. Using simulated weapons and shields, the Hathaway and Enterprise engage in a skirmish.
But the real point of the episode seems to have been to humiliate a character called Sirna Kolrami (Roy Broksmith), who comes aboard the Enterprise as a technical advisor. He's also a grandmaster of a game called Strategema. Over the course of the episode, he's shown to be arrogantly wrong in his judgements about Riker (whom he calls too "jovial") and Picard. There's a subplot in which Data even beats him at Strategema. Brocksmith does a good job making him a smug bastard for the viewer to hate but I still couldn't help wondering why. I wonder if he was kind of an effigy of someone Kemper had it in for.
This was a cool moment between Data and Picard:
Star Trek: The Next Generation is available on Netflix.
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