Q puts humanity on trial while the new Enterprise-D investigates a mysterious station.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard takes the new USS Enterprise-D on its first mission, to Deneb IV, where the Bandi have built Farpoint Station and want Starfleet to use it. On the way the omnipotent Q stops the ship and puts humanity on trial, offering the investigation of Farpoint as the test of whether humans have outgrown their savage past.
The crew learns that the station is really a captive shape-shifting space creature, held by the Bandi and forced into the form of a base. When a second creature of the same kind arrives to free its mate, Picard works out the truth and the pair are released, which ends Q's trial for now.
First aired as a two-hour pilot, the story brings the main crew together, with Riker reporting aboard at Farpoint. Partway through, an elderly Admiral McCoy appears briefly, tying the series to the original Star Trek.