The week-long national syndication window opens for the 26th episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, beginning the series’ second season. This episode introduces Diana Muldaur as the Enterprise’s new chief medical officer, Dr. Katherine Pulaski, and Whoopi Goldberg as Guinan. The script is actually a holdover from the aborted 1977 attempt to relaunch the original Star Trek on a Paramount network that never came together; the barely-reworked script is dug up in an attempt to get filming started as soon as possible after the end of the Writers’ Guild strike. 
Stardate 42073.1: Counselor Troi, impregnated by an alien entity, gives birth to a child whose mind is not that of a child but of an alien wishing to discover the variety of human experience. Meanwhile, the ship’s newly promoted chief engineer, Geordi, and newcomer Doctor Katherine Pulaski are faced with the possibility of a fatal shipwide epidemic…
written by Jaron Summers & Jon Povill and Maurice Hurley
directed by Rob Bowman
music by Dennis McCarthyCast: Patrick Stewart (Captain Picard), Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker), LeVar Burton (Lt. Geordi La Forge), Michael Dorn (Lt. Worf), Marina Sirtis (Counselor Troi), Brent Spiner (Lt. Commander Data), Wil Wheaton (Wesley Crusher), Diana Muldaur (Dr. Pulaski), Seymour Cassel (Lt. Commander Hester Dealt), Whoopi Goldberg (Guinan), R.J. Williams (Ian), Colm Meaney (Transporter Chief), Dawn Arnemann (Miss Gladstone), Zachary Benjamin (Young Ian), Dore Keller (Crewman)
Notes: This story was originally conceived in the mid 1970s as an episode of the aborted late ’70s Star Trek Phase II series, which was to have been a new series with the original crew of the Enterprise. (That production later morphed into the first Star Trek movie.) The script was dusted off to serve as the delayed season premiere after a Writers’ Guild strike brought American TV production to a halt in the summer of 1988. It is also notable for being the first appearance of Guinan.
LogBook entry by Earl Green