True Q

*** (3 stars out of 5)

Here comes the first and only intern I ever heard of on a starship: honours science student Amanda Rogers.

She's kind of odd: she just wishes for puppies and they appear.  Did she wish for the internship too, just so she didn't have to sit through the Academy?

And do they really give honors in neurobiology to people who don't know how to hold a tricorder?

Amanda the Teenage Witch lost her parents when she was a baby, and sadly did not end up on a sitcom with an oddball pair of witch aunties.

Enterprise is on a relief mission (with free condescension) to the highly polluted world of Tagra IV. Everyone's got an inhaler here, and they dispose of the non-biodegradables by leaving them out in the acid rain. Two birds with one stone! (Also, those were the last two birds.)

Amanda wishes away the threat of a falling container headed for that hunky Commander Riker, and stops a warp core breach with her twitchy powers, too. So who should drop by but the Main Warlock himself, Q! He says her parents were Q posing as humans.

That explains it! That's why she used her tricorder backwards: when you're a Q you don't have to know things.

Q looks deep into her nose and sees her potential. She hurtles him across the room for his trouble.

Now a pair of all-powerful genies are loose and playing hide and seek in the warp core. "The universe could be your playground." says Q.

And Riker could be your Pride & Prejudice Mr. Darcy Action Figure, or at least he could be if you didn't have the moral sense to stop yourself.

The records show the Rogers were killed by a freak tornado that evaded the weather modification net, touched down only to kill them, and vanished. Does that count as suspicious circumstances? Is 'Act of Q' covered by any insurance companies?

Offered the option of staying a human if she can refrain from using her power, Amanda agrees. Inside of a minute, she reneges on the deal to save thousands of people from death by explosion and whisks away all the nasty pollution.

"True Q" asks: what would you do as Q?  I like to hope I wouldn't use people for my amusement, but like Amanda, I might choose to dispense with our planet's burgeoning Diaper Continent. Or like Superman in the oft-maligned Superman IV, I might utterly disarm Earth and bask in all the applause I would no doubt receive from people who never wanted all that pesky free will anyway...