In an effort to relive my early teens, I
am re-watching old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It is
both better and worse than I remembered it, as was my youth most likely.
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Seriesdate: 1.03
The Naked Now
The crew gets infected with an ethanol-nine variant from a derelict, alcoholizing their blood, and start drunkenly laughing and hitting on each other. The series could very well have accomodated such a non-plot late into its run when a change of pace was warranted. Instead, in a truly insane move, it played as the second episode. We didn't need to see the crew drunk before we'd even seen them sober!
So in this spirit let's look at one of TNG's worst recurring problems, a vague idea that toying with characters' defining characteristics once in a while can keep a serial fresh, expressed in weirdly awkward ways.
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Seriesdate: 2.05
Loud as a Whisper
Also, isn't blindness worse than deafness? So shouldn't Geordi have gotten, like, five mooks to follow him around and describe elephants to him? Because he's more oppressed therefore better than everyone else? That's how it works, right?
Aside from toying with the idea of curing LaForge's blindness, our hero of the week goes to pieces when he loses his chorus, but is talked back into the game by Deanna for an uplifting ending.
So... maybe you should've given him one pep talk instead of three slaves to begin with?
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Seriesdate: 4.10
The Loss
Discussed more at length here for the nice SciFi reveal of a vertically-undetectable shoal of Flatland anchovies. Their little psi-voices jam Troi's psi-dar, and "the loss" of her superpower turns her into a quivering overemotional wreck, quitting her job and crying alone in her room. We conveniently forget that aside from a half-betazoid, Troi's supposed to also be exceptionally trained in psychology, psychotherapy and is a Starfleet Officer to boot, with all the psych evaluations that implies she must've passed. It made absolutely no sense for the woman who can keep a thousand-strong submarine crew sane through months wandering the fringes of space to just instantly go to pieces and relinquish her very place in society because she's suffered the betazoid equivalent of maybe-temporary, maybe-permanent deafness.
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Seriesdate: 4.18
Identity Crisis
LeVar Burton joins the Blue Man Group!
Solid from a directing / effects / acting standpoint, especially the pivotal scene of LaForge holodecking the scene of the crime, even if you can see the extras twitching when they're supposed to be paused holograms. However, the script is purely a creature feature and manages to plow into almost every single idiotic horror flick cliché short of a topless bimbo tripping and falling while running from the monster.
1) You're chasing a shuttlecraft piloted by a mentally unstable victim of some unknown alien infection, about to burn itself up on entering a planet's atmosphere. Do you get his two friends, standing right there on the Enterprise's bridge, to gently talk him down and undercut his misfiring cortex via primitive but effective emotional appeals? No. You obviously have a captain he's never met, from the Starfleet he's already fleeing, try to order and domineer him into returning. "He's panicking" - yeah, no shit! In other news, if your dog slips his leash, the best way to entice him back is to call a random burly, angry mailman to scream loudly and throw rocks at him.
2) You discover a repeating pattern: of the five members of the old away-team, three have independently found their way to this planet via shuttlecraft. So the logical thing to do is to... send another away-team physically down to the epicenter of their obsession. Before even running any kind of comprehensive scan from orbit. Including the two remaining, probably already infected, original survivors. No hazmat suits? No problem!
3) Do you organize a grid pattern search maintaining visual, or at least audio contact the entire time? No. Just scatter and amble aimlessly about hoping to stumble across clues.
4) When your mighty alien warrior of a warrior race says he feels like he's being watched, by all means shrug it off.
5) Then when, inevitably, one of the two survivors vanishes, the obvious right choice is to "fan out; let's find her" - they're picking us off one by one, we've gotta split up!
6) Upon confirming she's panicking just like her predecessor who blew himself up in a shuttle and her "blood chemistry is way off" due to a histamine response do you quarantine her in a padded cell? Naaahh. Just tell 'er to stay put and pat the probable mind controlled plague rat reassuringly on the shoulder... DOCTOR Crusher. And give her free run of the ship, despite acting increasingly erratic. And stop to give her a hug when her symptoms worsen in a well-circulated corridor because by this point why the hell not?
7) Twenty minutes into this nonsense Geordi realizes the infectious agent could even be "in the air itself" (in a closed system to boot) but... I can't even...
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| It's just a rash. |
8) OK, we've finally established the disease isn't airborne after certainly infecting a thousand people if it had been. It biologically rewrites one species into another. On one hand, nobody tests Riker and Worf, who were down on the planet and might've been exposed anyway. On the other hand, nobody thinks to send down Data, their one abiotic, adiabatic, adiabetic crew member, for further sampling.
9) Crusher finally decides to do a more thorough scan of her patient. Better late than - who gave this idiot a medical license?
10) Geordi continues working, which would make sense if any of the military officers waiting for him to turn into an alien infiltrator would think to assign one of their dozens of layabout security mooks to shadow him. Hell, make it two mooks, keep the change.
11) See point 1) They chase the transformed Geordi down to the planet... empty-handed. No net, no bolas, no... harpoon? No anything, not even a salt lick to lure him. Their best plan to get their mind-controlled crewmate back is "take my hand" - after four other identical cases where that explicitly DID NOT WORK!
And yes, of course it works on Geordi. He's a blue-shirt.
To get a sense of this plot's nonsense ratio, consider the notion of a species of invisible, proto-humanoid, parasite-egglaying apes evolving some kind of interstellar homing instinct still makes more sense than the rest of it.
And yet... damnit, I kinda like it. Maybe I'm just a sucker for creature features.
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Seriesdate: 4.19
The Nth Degree
In which the Enterprise gets a Broccoli patch.
We begin with yet another tediously overextended holodeck scene, putting Broccoli through his public humiliation paces as an incompetent actor, lightened up by Beverly Crusher coyly sashaying over to their resident big strong klingon to coo "ah, Worf? I have an opening" - until she adds "in my [acting] workshop" a second later, I thought I'd queued up some porn parody version. This is all to remind us of Lt. Barclay's status as designated loser and acceptable punching bag due to his anxiety and general introverted nerdiness, after his first appearance revolved around ridiculing and condemning him for privately fantasizing about duelling and/or dicking his coworkers.
But don't worry. All that is about to change... for about thirty minutes, before the status quo is reaffirmed.
LaForge and Barclay get flashed by an alien lozenge, after which Barclay, lacking a visor to shield him from the whims of screenwriters, begins acting out of character. He out-engineers LaForge, gives a passionate performance in Crusher's acting workshop, schools a holographic Einstein, hits on Troi, is scientifically confirmed to have become the smartest human ev-vurr, and when the ship is in danger of explodey from the telescope array it was repairing, instructs the holodeck in synthesizing a mind-machine interface so he can directly compute an instant solution... and ends up taking over the entire ship. Pause for a second to wonder why exactly the Enterprise's central computer features back-door access via the holodeck of all things. Next time someone s(t)imulates a visit to Eroticon 6, you could literally wind up fucking the ship's brains out!
Anyway, Barclay launches into standard mad scientist rants about solving all problems, wormholes the Enterprise to the galactic center to meet the race of floating heads whose probe reprogrammed him, gets zapped back to his mediocre self but remains good at chess now. The End.
If you couldn't tell, I'm not a fan.
For one thing, Barclay's problem was never intelligence, so his Algernon-ish skyrocketing IQ lacks the requisite contrast. For another, given he was socially isolated by being an introverted tech-head, becoming even more of a tech-head is by no means consistent with his newfound confidence and initiative. Of course it does make sense as alien reprogramming, but then you're faced with the other officers' failure to respond to one of their own being mind-virused, a situation they routinely faced five times a season. You'd think they'd have a standard operating procedure in place by now. At least rescind the Manchurian Candidate's computer access! Never mind another example of our nominal exploration vessel stumbling across game-changing discoveries like the cyborg interface or cross-galactic teleportation yet making not the slightest effort to secure them.
And never never mind the fact any species "exploring" by making random aliens or their computers super-intelligent and teleporting their ships straight to its home planet would've been wiped out aeons ago.
Instead of keeping the plot consistent, all effort sank into hammering home the TV-friendly message that being smart is wrong and everyone is right to hate you because out-thinking them is evil. The real end.
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Seriesdate: 5.16
Ethics
Bev rips out Worf's spine and shows it to him!
Our resident mighty klingon warrior gets crippled by blunt trauma, depriving him of either might or war and turning him suicidal as per klingon custom for un-klingy klingons, prompting one of the most gratuitous bits of nonsense in the show's run: klingons have spare, unused "redundancies" in all of their vital organs. Aside from being an absolutely laughable idea in evolutionary terms* note the main plot works fine without this little SPECIES-REDEFINING tidbit thrown in just so Worf could flatline on the operating table for extra bonus redun-dundant drama.
As a rehash of the previous season's musings on ritual suicide in Half a Life, Worf's story's just swamped in triteness.
It does allow Worf to start outgrowing his naive, fanatical, uncritical, humorless devotion to klingon tradition as part of his character arc, but without displaying Timicin the kaelonite's greater awareness of such traditions' scope and waning propriety.
Riker emotionally blackmails Worf into giving up a tradition without further analysis while Timicin resisted a similar attempt from Lwaxana based on analyzing the social cost or necessity of fometing revolt.
Where Worf's kid just serves as an emotionally manipulative tool to prod him toward a predetermined outcome, Timicin's adult daughter actually supports his suicide... not because she hates her dad but because she wants him to live a full life, including its supposedly good and proper ending.
Even the B-plot, with Crusher browbeating the visiting doctor over putting research above individual patients' safety, doesn't scan. Worf's fully informed willingness to risk death in an objectively better alternative than hara kiri gets dismissed out of hand in an attack on the researcher's irrelevant motivation. The more relevant, wider question of whether she should be permitted to continue practicing is also never brought up, because 24th century medicine apparently lacks any formal ethics oversight beyond Bev Crusher wagging her finger. Either Crusher had a point in which case formal action should have been taken or she didn't and should've calmly informed Worf of her professional opinion then STFU and carried out her patient's wishes. Either version had merit, but instead we get thirty minutes of wishy-washy emotional appeals against reason.
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Seriesdate: 7.17
Masks - (relax, it's got nothing to do with COVID)
I could pick more illustrative illustrations, as from a purely visual
standpoint it's one of the series' more striking episodes, but honestly,
Spiner deserves the limelight for a performance to rival Stewart. Also,
the sheer creepiness of that chair-swivel reveal will stick with ya for
effectively playing down minor changes like eye color, an extra layer
of powder and the sun symbol plus Spiner's manic rictus to carry the
uncanny valley effect.
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| Masaka is waking! |
Data's brain gets pirated once again, this time by a space-library from 87m.y.a. containing an entire alien culture, and cycles through various of their personalities, most importantly that of a cruel sun-goddess leader of their pantheon. To add a bit more tension, the library somehow also starts matter-replicating the Enterprise into a vaguely mesoamerican temple complex, forcing them to prevent themselves floating through space on stone altars.
On one hand the symbolism here seems ahead of its contemporary pop culture. Back in '94, seven years before Gaiman's American Gods in the now prehistoric ages before everyone had permanent internet access, comparative mythology was not something you could casually wikipedia god-by-dog on a whim, and not nearly a hot enough topic for most people to buy specialty books. Thus the script walks you through a tediously overextended riddle about a horn-like symbol that's obviously a moon god chasing the sun away, plus other allusions any GenZ-er could independently thumb through faster than the Enterprise's crew dialogues them. Still, for the purpose of this discussion, Data's temporary multiple personalities are less important than the denouement of Picard conning the sun into acting out her ritualistic nightfall, rewriting her role, a surprisingly astute (for '90s television) example of temple rituals re-enacting divine order.
Otherwise though the script's easy to criticize. Very easy. So let's do that.
Start with the plot contrivance of Picard discovering his ship is being metamorphosed into clay statuettes early on yet deliberately allowing the process to continue until it's too late, something no captain would ever do and any viewer could resolve in a dozen saner (albeit less dramatic) ways while still studying the alien macguffin.
The half-assed technobabble explanation for changing sets is... meh, par for the course. Until, that is, you ask yourself why the library never bothered assimilating the far greater mass aggregated around it over the past 87mil. By the ending when Masaka falls asleep and everything automagically rubberbands back to status quo you can't escape the realization you just watched an Original Series script.
By its last season the show was either reaching for increasingly nonsensical ideas or blatantly recycling old ones. Where Ethics rehashed Half a Life, Masks tries the same for the memorable Inner Light... and fails even more soundly. Picard congratulating Data on having "been an entire civilization" inadvertently underscores the problem.
For one, Picard in Inner Light was immersed (as Kamin) as a rational participant in a first-person account of a society with its manifold flaws and charms. Data instead plays what appear to be deified ancestor figures in what he himself describes as a dreamlike state.
Also, Picard/Kamin's largely mundane experience drove home his civilization's ingenuousness, their desperate need to reach out to other minds in their last hour, securing the entire experience's poignancy. Masaka's pomp, grandiose matter-reshaping powers, the 87m.y. timespan as opposed to one thousand and the supposedly thousand individuals Data momentarily housed (but can't remember) come across as overblown amateur fanfiction of a better concept.
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Seriesdate: 7.23
Emergence
(working title: "something-something New Age buzzwords something-something")
In which the Enterprise has kittens.
Ugh... this is one of the series' last episodes, and much like Bev fucking a space ghost or Wesley's peyote-fueled ascension to heaven (while talking to many animals) probably helped convince most of us TNG was past due to pack it in.
Picard is coaching Data's acting when the Orient Express drives through Shakespeare's Tempest for no particular reason. That was the sane part. Hope you enjoyed it.
Long story short the Enterprise comes alive. Which would've been a pretty standard HAL9000 plot except they decided instead it should come alive by being infected with tinkertoys. Which they tried to explain with DeepakChopra-grade pop pseudoscientific mysticism like "complex systems can sometimes behave in ways that are entirely unpredictable" which you may as well replace with a .gif of writer Brannon Braga shrugging. Seriously, Destination: Void was better researched than this back in '65. To help you choke it all down, they even spend a few minutes trying to convince you a ship is already almost alive by spouting lines like "in a sense, it almost reproduces with the replicators" strongly suggesting Dr. Crusher doesn't know where babies come from,
since unless the replicator's replicating functional miniature Enterprises that can grow up into starships, nothing
it replicates in any way constitutes re-production of itself any more than you reproduce every time you clip your toenails.
If you think at least the "emergent" new life-form the Enterprise is gestating might serve as a pay-off to such claptrap, feel free to google it yourself; it looks like it came out of a Dr. Seuss book. For peak insanity (and a "so bad it's good" moment) witness Worf somehow generating real warp power by shoveling imaginary coal into a holodeck steam engine.
Even at ten years old I can remember walking away from Emergence's end credits with a feel of its utter irrelevance, and in retrospect this is caused by the fusilade of phlebotina necessary to patch together this excuse for a plot. <Something> magnetic infects the Enterprise with torso-sized <somethings> that apparently function like neurons or maybe ganglia or we've-never-opened-an-anatomy-book-because-we're-writers which turn the ship into <something> possibly intelligent but not really which can only express itself via holodeck characters (who have no trouble expressing themselves - wrap your head around that one) so Geordi does <something> to a torpedo which makes it do <something> to a planet-sized "nebula" to make it make <something> to feed the <something> in the cargo bay causing the <something> embodied in holodeck characters to do <something> turning the ship back to normal.
The End.
... or something...
Even David Lynch would balk at the sheer mass of contrivance here. There's writing psychedelic soft SF tacitly admitting a lack of justification, and then there's concatenating as many disparate elements as you can and hoping the audience will imagine you actually had some master plan while doing so.
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Abruptly forcing a character out of its original mold can go both ways. Take Troi, who lost her power in The Loss and was forced to pull rank on underlings in Disaster. Both changes were technically temporary and obviously intended to find a way to move her beyond being defined by her telepathy. They differ in grandiloquence, in what impact the writers assumed such a change should carry. The first played it as such a catastrophe shattering the poor darling's psyche that viewers could not but hope for a return to the status quo, while the second presented a challenge to be overcome and pushed her permanently in a more serious direction than the Enterprise's swooning drama queen. Riker to some extent captures this difference in his speech to Worf in Ethics to stop catastrophizing and playing the noble klingon, but that message gets snowed under the episode's emotional appeals. Instead of Worf learning to avoid falling prey to his klingon passions, he's pushed to fall prey to his human ones instead, presumably all the better to set up some ill-conceived nuclear family with Troi.
I was tempted to lump such plots together with telepathy or original series flavor alien deity possession (Masks overlaps the strongest) but mind-meld plots always seemed motivated by budget considerations. Cheaper to tell Spiner to pull a few faces and talk in a squeaky voice than design any new aliens. Episodes like these however stand apart as rather lavishly decorated with new sets, props and costumes, so they would have to be motivated by something else. Say, lack of creativity. Much like "drow that doesn't act drowish" RPG characters, they represent an older, more time-honored** brand of lazy shortcut to plot conflict. Thus quite a few of Worf's plots (broken back, discommendation, coming of age ceremony, etc.) exploit his fear of not being a full klingon - and by doing so prevent him from becoming a full character.
Geordi's probably the most interesting case study in that respect. Supposedly the visor prop was a literal headache to wear and Burton would gladly have been rid of it if it hadn't immediately caught on. Fully human, he lacked any other features to dramatically exploit (unless you count being a smart black guy in the era of Urkel, which proved too wormy a can for even Star Trek's writers to be stupid enough to open) so aside from bashing him as a dateless dweeb (a spot quickly re-filled by Barclay and immediately flip-flopped in turn) the visor was it. Except... well, try leaning just a little too hard on that crutch and you end up looking like you're constantly hurling abuse at the blind guy, leaving the issue of sight to linger subliminally. For all its horror flick insanity, Identity Crisis is probably the best episode I've listed here and allowed LaForge to exhibit a healthy mutually respectful friendship with a female former superior. Nevertheless I can't help but note even the blind guy's transformation into another species revolves around (in)visibility, and the return to normalcy is signaled by handing him his visor.
Episodes where the ship itself metamorphoses represents such radical character change taken to its logical extreme... and illogical absurdity. Tone down Masks' supernatural elements for instance and expand it to a miniseries covering years' worth of ship-time and you could have a fascinating study of an isolated population succumbing to cultural takeover, going native, converting to Masaka-ism one by one, deliberately redecorating their surroundings in Aztec-chic and sacrificing each others' beating hearts on ritual braziers. Full stories take full time to tell. The digest version looks like a six-year-old's make-believe where electrical wires are snakes, a dining room chair turns into a stone throne and talking in a funny voice gives you sun powers.
These metamorphosis, power loss or power gain plots plagued the series from the start. See Riker becoming a Q in season 1, so ludicrous the series couldn't deal with it in any other way than never speaking of it again. However, I doubt it's any accident that they became more... psychedelic, in the last season with the writing staff obviously grasping at straws. Claiming a character isn't himself (even when that character is the very ship) laid on an extra layer of suspended disbelief to justify desperate plot twists. Relax, Worf hasn't turned suicidal, it's just the SpinelessWorf(TM) that's suicidal. Even when the twists grew as terrible as coal-powered warp drives, at least the audience knew they'd get the real Enterprise back for next week's (hopefully better) episode.
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* Simplified: evolutionary adaptations don't arise "just in case"
and redundant or obsolete features are gradually lost over generations due to
energy expenditure; even assuming very violent lives, klingons would
more likely grow armadillo armour than extra livers, extra hearts and some sort of separate brain stem that kickstarts their vital functions after they die. One redundant feature might possibly arise... but the laundry list cited by Worf's doctors would give chromosomes nightmares. Never mind that humanoids already have that redundancy in the single-origin form of bilaterality. Are klingons quadrilateral? And if so where's their extra face?
**
Harold Zoid: A more classic movie plot there isn't: a son
who does not want to follow in his father's business. And that business
is being president of Earth, no less! The son, as it happens, is vice president.
Bender: That plot makes perfect sense. Wink, wink.
Futurama - That's Lobstertaiment
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