Oh hey, let’s get around to fixing that whole “The holodeck kills people” problem!

This episode is all about what I’d call “Concept Aliens.” There’s no work to make the other species relatable; the focus is almost entirely on how foreign they are. In this case, it’s the Binars. They travel in pairs and are so integrated into their computer systems (and each other) that they finish each other’s sentences and communicate in short bursts of what is apparently binary. They store anything they can’t process right this second in hard drives worn like fanny packs (which has its own plot holes, like how are they engaging in back and forth dialogue if they aren’t processing it in the moment?) and they wear the spangley metallic clothes that are apparently the dress code of the future.

Concept Aliens annoy me. Unless they’re a long established race like Klingons or Vulcans, aliens in this show have to have some kind of gimmick. Star Trek seems to like to illustrate how CRAZY and DIFFERENT other species can be, with humans of the future tending to come out as all enlightened and shit. It’s annoying and sanctimonious. I compare it to Doctor Who, which tends to show different species as just people, trying to get along with their lives. There’s a little bit of crazy and different, but there’s more focus on similarities than differences. And in Doctor Who, humans usually come out looking like vicious assholes. Somehow, this is a lot more tolerable than the smugness of the Federation. Maybe it’s because LOTS of species come out looking like assholes in Doctor Who, and no one is as smug as Riker, who seems to be the usual mouthpiece for how enlightened the future is.

Maybe I just don’t like Riker so far! (This is sacrelige, isn’t it?) I spent a good portion of this episode creeped out by Riker falling in love with conniving-but-not-murderous holodeck creation, Minuet. And by he and Picard having dueling flirtation with the holographic lady. There’s a scene in original Trek, I think it’s in “The Naked Time,” that I like to call “The Birth of Slash Fiction.” Kirk and Spock are both intoxicated by this weird “heavy water” or something, and they’re both in states of emotional turmoil, vulnerable, and in my head, I heard my squeeing, slash-happy dorm neighbors from college shouting “KISS! KISS!” when I saw it. In this episode, Riker and Picard are talking about Minuet as if she isn’t there, and both kind of flirting with her at the same time, and it’s like an uncomfortable prelude to someone’s intense erotic fiction. I would lay money on a fanfiction existing somewhere that starts with this scene and ends places I don’t want to imagine.

I can see some really good angles that could be taken with realistic holopeople. They almost but not quite touched on the notion of someone falling in love with a simulation of a real person but having Riker be unable to find Minuet again after desperately trying. There could be a good, sad SF/F romance novel in that. I’m sure they must use that later on, right?

Bits and pieces:

• Hey, it’s 1958 in the holodeck in a jazz club because cool dudes love jazz, right? And yet Minuet has like three cans of aquanet in her hair and looks like a character from Matlock, not Perry Mason. But hey, it’s Star Trek. Who needs a semblance of realism, anyway?
• “…and a ‘bone for me.”
• Seriously, what is up with the eighties and purple? Why is everything purple
• Geordi advising Data on his painting. Data’s starting to develop more, but what I really like is Geordi’s “Fuck you, man” look when Riker smirkingly says that academics would be interested in a blind man teaching an android to paint.
• How much work is it going to take to restore the computers after the Binars filled every bit of space with their vital data from their planet? And how is the computer of the Enterprise anywhere near big enough to hold all the data of a planet whose premise is that it’s people are inextricably entwined in their computers? It defies logic. Not that this series has been real keen on the whole “logic” thing up to this point.

Ultimate verdict: Not terrible, but kind of squicky in parts. I don’t like Leering Riker, and yet he keeps popping up.

Wow. So hey, remember The Racist One? Well, welcome to The Sexist One! But since this is The Future, and the Federation is LOL SO ADVANCED, and there are Exciting New Cultures to encounter, it’s actually offensive to men and women both! Score.

The Enterprise has stumbled upon a wrecked freighter that never made its destination seven years earlier. No survivors, of course, but evidence of some jettisoned escape pods, and Angel I is the closest planet. Data helpfully notes that it would have taken 5 months. I guess Star Trek escape pods are a lot more substantial than the things that came off the Tantive IV. Anyway, Angel I is a sparsely populated, matriarchal oligarchy with apparently human inhabitants (c’mon guys, where is your makeup department? Are hideous costumes made of shiny material and felted purple angora taking up all of your budget?), but I’m going to take a wild stab and guess that none of these writers actually looked into any real matriarchal societies. Research? Ha ha ha, who needs that? This is space! We can make it up as we go!

Mistress Beata, the head of this little oligarchy, curtly allows an away team to come down to the planet to look for survivors. Worf also manages to sneak in an interjection that Klingons appreciate strong women. (Where is Geordi to express disgust at Worf’s sexual preferences again?) Yar, Data and Riker prepare to beam down. Troi goes as well, because women, you gotta be a mind reader to understand them, amirite? *rimshot* No, really, it’s because she’s a high ranking woman, and, as we’ll soon discover, these women will respect that because they’re chauvinist assholes that I want to stab in the face almost every time they speak. (That’s women for you, eh? Eh? Okay, okay, I’ll stop.)

Side storyline set up: Wesley is going skiing while wrapped in tinfoil and wearing a hideous eighties headband and there is a weird smell. Picard also gets pegged with a snowball from the holodeck (oh that wacky Wesley Crusher) and I decide that this better pay off somewhere later in the episode. It does. Sort of.

In some voiceover it’s noted that the women here are as dominant and aggressive as men used to be in Earth society. God forbid we miss an opportunity to note how goddamn enlightened the Federation is. It’s also probably worth noting that the last Federation contact with the people of Angel I was more than sixty years earlier. So the fact that Beata is incredibly defensive is either really interesting (ah ha, she has something to hide) or it’s how some jerk-ass writer thinks feminists act. There is a bit of “WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW BETTER BECAUSE YOU’RE A MAN, HUH?” attitude directed at Riker. Also, if this was so normal for this planet, why is everyone making such a huge production of the fact that women are dominant in this society? You don’t have to constantly remark on something that’s normal.

We’ll also note here that the costumes continue to be incredibly awful. I guess maybe they weren’t back then, but the predilection for lamé fabrics and purples continues unabated. There’s one fey little man running around in an open shirt (I think the only man from Angel I we see) and tight pants wrapped in ribbons, while Beata is wearing this weird, dark purple mohair dress. If it were me, I’d probably put the women in something more businesslike and less… furry. It’s like they skinned a muppet.

Beata prevaricates a bit on whether or not there are survivors of the Odin and sends the away team to their quarters to talk amongst themselves while she decides what she wants to tell them. Troi senses they’re hiding something, which, really, doesn’t take an empath. Riker declares them paranoid. We also find out that Data, despite being able to explain random bits of history like Yankee privateers, doesn’t know what an aphrodisiac is. I guess he never read any basic human sexuality texts despite his fascination with humanity.

MEANWHILE, ON THE ENTERPRISE: Sickness runs rampant! Oh no! Picard is grumpy and Geordi gets to take command.

Beata finally admits that there are four survivors, but they’re in hiding for “going against the natural order.” I don’t remember who has the idea to scan for elements that don’t occur naturally on Angel I, but Data is only grudgingly allowed access to their libraries, which are too sophisticated for men when it’s pointed out that as an android, he’s not really male. Pretty sassy for a pre-warp society. Somehow, they decide on doing a scan for platinum, and oh, what luck, these four men happen to have some platinum on hand. Everyone is off to go find the men and “rescue” them, except Riker, who needs to engage in some diplomatic relations, if you know what I’m saying. In native dress, no less.

And this is a nice little break from some of the silly, stilted acting, because Yar and Troi collapse into absolute giggles at Riker boy-toy outfit. I have to wonder how I would feel about this scene if it was, say, Janeway expected to make some kind of diplomatic contact in scanty clothing. And maybe that’s on purpose, to MAKE ME THINK about the EVILS OF SEXISM, but… well, there’s a deeper problem here.

See, part of the side story is that the refugees know the away team is coming because Beata’s second-in-command, Ariel, is secretly married to one of the survivors. So there’s an underlying message that no matter how big and tough a woman is, every woman really wants a big slice of Federation beefcake who will stand up to her, rather than some preening ladyman. You know, all those feminists just need a real man to stick them back in the kitchen where they belong.

And Ramsey, the leader of the refugees, wants to stay on planet not just because he and the others have made families, but because it’s “not right” that the men be treated as they are, and men aren’t supposed to act like they do here. And arguably, it’s an equality speech (remember, LOL ADVANCED), but it comes off as “We gotta teach these men to stop being pussy-whipped and take their proper place in society.”

To top it off, Riker and Beata’s diplomatic conversation has resulted in the following dialogue (slightly paraphrased, but not by much): “It’s nice to be with a man that knows what he wants.” “And doesn’t have to be told by a woman?” And then my notes degenerate into angry, capslocked cursing.

Up on the Enterprise, pressure and a race-against-the-clock element are hamhandedly placed on the main story by the continuing illness and Romulans in the Neutral Zone. Oh, yay. Data’s sent up to take command because he can’t get sick. Except for in “The Naked Now” but haha who needs continuity, right?

Beata threatens to kill the refugees, and Riker prepares to violate the Prime Directive by whisking them away with the transporter, which has to wait until the last possible minute while Crusher works on coming up with a cure for the mystery plague. Anyway, there’s a whole speech about not making martyrs and evolution of a culture and everyone lives happily ever after exiled to an unpopulated part of the planet. Wheee, let’s all go home and look threatening in front of the Romulans.

Okay, so, apparently the vast and mighty resources of a Federation vessel aren’t particularly needed, so in this episode, Picard decides to take everyone on a little field trip to the planet where Data was found.  Not much has actually been said about Data up to this point, we’ve just been expected to accept “super-strong, fully functional” (shudder) “android” with little question.  And that makes some sense, because theoretically, the crew of the Enterprise has been cruising around with him for a little while, so they either know what’s up, or they are too polite to ask questions about Data’s mysterious origins.

And mysterious they are.  Data was apparently found lying on a slab near a beacon at the bottom of some stone stairs on this planet of endless, endless death.  That is, there is zero life on the planet, up to and including bacterial life, which I guess explains why all the dead trees haven’t decayed even though it’s been years and years.  I doubt anyone actually thought it through that much, but it works.  And here’s a thing that bugs me.  The away team seems surprised that there isn’t any sign of life on Omicron Theta, but wouldn’t that have been in the report by the men of the Tripoli, back when they found Data?  Wouldn’t a good away team (let alone a curious person with access to the Federation computer library), you know, read that report first?  It’s not like the mass death happened between then and now.  Oh, yeah, and Data is a walking bank of memories of the dead colonists, though no one has ever mentioned that before (and part of me doubts it will ever come up again or be relevant in any way.)  And despite having these “memories,” every human experience is foreign to him, so I guess these colonists didn’t get out much.

This episode doesn’t bear much digging beneath the surface of the plot for things like, I don’t know, logic.  Geordi marvels at the skill of the colonists in hiding the entrance to their underground burrow, but finds the door switch in under two minutes.  Data doesn’t remember anything before being discovered by the away team from the Tripoli, except when he remembers the man who created him.  And for some reason there are multiple children’s drawings of the terrifying Crystalline Entity that killed them all posted up in the lab.  As if the children lived long enough to draw them, and that those were the only drawings anyone felt worthy of posting on the wall.  What.  Oh, and all Lore’s parts are kept in a glass-doored storage area full of smoke, and stored ass-outward.  Actually, I thought that was really funny.  That, and the absurdly ominous music when Riker assured Data that they could take the pieces back up to the Enterprise for reassembly.

I hadn’t thought of it myself, but my roommate, who watched this with me, noted that Crusher is actually pretty unnecessary for the reassembly of Lore.  She’s a doctor, damn it, not an engineer.  (I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.)  Later, of course, I realized that she had to be there as a plot point so that she could help WESLEY SAVE THE DAY at the end.

A lot actually happens in this episode, and I don’t really want to go over everything in detail.  It’s nice to see Spiner play kind of an asshole in Lore, and some of the Data/Lore interactions are fantastic, and some of them are such bullshit.  And credit where credit is due, most of the fantasticness comes from Spiner’s acting and most of the bullshit comes from the dialogue.  Seriously?  I was kind of touched by Data and all he innocently yearns for when Lore was throwing his “humanity” in Data’s face.  “I can talk in contractions and you can’t, nyah nyah” is some of the idiotic part.  That, and some of Wesley’s “I’m suspicious!” lines are just so terrible.  Also, Lore can apparently take away his weird facial tick and give it to Data through judicious use of Doctor Who’s sonic screwdriver.  And then there’s all the bridge crew yelling at Wesley (including Picard just outright shouting “SHUT UP, WESLEY!”) for daring to suspect that Data is actually Lore in disguise (which he is, as a matter of fact - “This is what you get when you put teenagers on your bridge crew,” I remarked to my roommate as Wesley threw a little hissy fit,) which is also badly written.  Has Wesley Crusher even had a good line so far in this show?

But the real shouting-at-the-TV is something from the middle that I saved until the end.  At some point, Lore had to incapacitate Data and take over his position.  And he couldn’t just sneak up behind his brother and hit the off switch he earlier swore the doctor to secrecy over.  Ha ha, that would make too much sense!  No.  Lore had to drug Data.  Yeah.  Drugs.  In an android.  Delivered in a glass of champagne.

Allow me to quote my roommate here:

Did it get absorbed into his bloodstream?  Did it poison his circuits?

Not only that, but it works INSTANTANEOUSLY.  I’m sure there’s some in-universe logic to this somewhere, but who writes a science fiction story where a ROBOT poisons another ROBOT?  (Yeah, yeah, android, not exactly the same thing, but he’s still inorganic and doesn’t digest food.)

Some other WTFery before I end for the night: Lore in Data disguise suggests beaming out a tree to the Crystalline Entity and then blowing it up with the phasers to scare it (?!) and Picard agrees that this is a good idea (!!?!?!!); Lore wants to lure it in to kill everyone on the ship because…. uh…. yeah, I don’t think they explained that at all; Lore speaks to the Crystalline Entity in English; and lastly, when Lore is beamed off the ship, this horrible thing that will kill them all just leaves.  And no one seems to  think that it’s odd for it to just… go.  Oh, yeah, and another thing no one asks about - where Wes beamed Lore to.  But hey, it’s just an insane, murderous android.  It doesn’t really matter where that goes.

First, I think it is important to point out Number One, which will provide for you, gentle reader, a growing collection of images, all of which depict one Commander William T. Riker.

Second, I’d like to thank Number One for pointing out that today is Captain Picard Day!  Happy Captain Picard Day, everyone!

So close and yet so far.  I could really see the potential lurking in TNG in this one.  Maybe, just maybe, the holodeck would be that boost to get us out of the gravity well of The Black Hole of Really Awful Writing.  And right up until the end, the word appearing most often in my notes is “glee.”

So!  Down to business.  There’s a frame story about a high pressure situation in which Picard has to make contact with a species that is really damn picky about its etiquette.  A single mispronounced syllable may lead to 20 years of the cold shoulder from this race.  Picard is freaking out and Troi actually acts the part of counsellor and instead of saying “augh the pain” or “I can’t sense anything!”, she says, “Hey, why don’t you take a break and try out the awesome new holodeck upgrades?”  Good idea, Counsellor Troi!  And off the captain goes to be a thinly veiled analog of Philip Marlowe or maybe Sam Spade named Dixon Hill.

I find it interesting that the holodeck is introduced here as NEW!  and EXCITING! but not so new and exciting that there isn’t one already built into the Enterprise.  So far we’ve seen it twice; Wesley found Data in there once in a lush forest, and Tasha Yar showed off her mad judo skillz to the Ligonians in That One Racist Episode.  I have to extrapolate here that until now, it’s been capable of producing environments and programs for training, and the upgrade gives it capability to sustain a narrative and realistic human personalities.  I guess.

After confusing Hill’s secretary by wandering in in his Starfleet uniform (am I checking off a list of holodeck cliches already?  Because we can list confusion with Futurestuff as #1, I’m sure), Picard gets super excited and invites Crusher on a sort of date, then ruins it by inviting another crewmember who happens to know a lot about 20th century history (not Tom Paris).  Data also invites himself along after speed reading the full Dixon Hill canon.  Everyone’s got Noir Novel Fever!  It’s all COMPLETELY ADORABLE, too.  And despite the quick introduction of Holodeck Cliche #2 (Something Is Wrong With The Program/We Can’t Leave), their reactions to the past and gleeful grins in the face of things like being arrested for murder and being interrogated are really delightful.  Crusher tries to preen in imitation of a floozy and, when a charmed police officer offers her a stick of gum, she swallows it whole. Data adopts a 1940s gangster movie accent.  Everyone is really into their new toy.

And while they don’t know that anything has gone wrong yet, Riker reaaaaaaally needs the captain.  Alien Emily Post has, despite the massive demands for protocol, decided to start the party early and demands the Captain’s presence.  Geordi announces that the holodeck has sealed itself, and Wesley fucking Crusher decides that he really needs to be part of the rescue attempt.  God help me, but I’m trying to give Wes a fair chance.  However, this is the first point where I start to think, “Uh oh.”

Meanwhile, everyone in the holodeck is idiodically gleeful about being held at gunpoint by Guy Doing A Bad Peter Lorre Impression.  How exciting!  Our lives are being threatened!  Good thing this is the holodeck, so nothing can…. aaaaaaaaaaaand bang, Waylon is shot and I am kicking myself for not spotting the redshirt as soon as he was introduced.  Either the holodeck tech is so young that there aren’t safeties yet, or the probe that fritzed the exits also turned them off.  Without messing up any of the other programming.  Convenient, that.

And with this, we enter the What The Fuck territory of this episode.  Firstly, there’s a DOCTOR there and yet this man is lying on the floor with nothing covering his GUNSHOT WOUND.  And when we cut to the operations outside of the holodeck, it’s to Wesley telling us that if he doesn’t do everything juuuust right, he could “make everyone inside vanish.”  What the goddamn hell is this.  A  holodeck failure, instead of just dropping you into the empty holodeck, CAN APPARENTLY DELETE YOU FROM THE WORLD FOR SOME REASON DESPITE THAT MAKING NO SENSE AT ALL.  I beg someone to tell my why or how the holodeck could kill a real person BY DELETING THEM.  I get stabbed or shot or dropped from a height (oops!), but an unexpected program shutdown?  You crash the holodeck and you die?  I’m sorry, I think that maybe such a flaw would make this inappropriate for recreation OR training. I just…. ugh!  Seriously.  I am so angry at this nonsensical danger AND the fact that this is becoming Wes Saves The Day yet again.  (I guess transporters are also dangerous but used all the time, but really?  The holodeck?  I hope they decided this was fucking stupid, because I never heard anything like this in the many, many holodeck-related episodes of Voyager I watched.)

Oh, and also, characters from the programs should not be able to get past the door of the holodeck at all, not even out into the hallway, so FUCK YOU, THIS EPISODE.

Ahem.  Anyway, the captain gets out and gives his greeting flawlessly, and The Data & Geordi Comedy Hour puts me a little more back in charity with this show.  Good effort, team, but we are not out of the woods yet.

So here I have another experiment in “write about the episode when you are done instead of keeping meticulous notes as you watch” recapping.

The Enterprise is headed to a planet called Haven for no real reason, except that it’s apparently a bitchin’ place to take some R & R. Picard takes a swing with the Foreshadowing Sledgehammer and lets us know that Haven is rumored to have healing powers, both emotional and physical, and is incredibly peaceful. Data makes sure to bring us back to earth by noting that there isn’t a lick of proof. Thanks Data, Official Starfleet Killjoy.

Meanwhile, Riker is in his quarters watching a hologram of two young ladies in spangly togas playing the harp. What. Seriously, why can’t people in the future like music that isn’t unapproachably futuristic or classical? I mean, that almost made Tom Paris a satisfying character in Voyager, because he had a liking for 20th century kitsch. I digress. He’s called away because something is waiting to be beamed up from Haven.

It’s a box! A big silver box with a face cast in the side, and I suppose I could claim that it is charmingly retro that on the close shots, it was someone’s face painted silver so it could make a stilted announcement, but I actually think it would be cooler as CGI. It distracts me that the eyes and mouth are normal colored when it is supposedly something made entirely out of metal. Anyway, it makes it’s little speech about, uhhhh, time and Lwaxana Troi and the Millers and Deanna Troi as soon as Troi enters the room, and then it just basically vomits a whole bunch of jewels taken from the prop room of a bad pirate film onto the floor of the transporter room.

The jewels, Troi explains nervously, are a wedding present. Her wedding present. Ohhhhh shiiiiiiiiiiiit, says Riker’s expression. Troi, it turns out, was betrothed as a child to Wyatt Miller and hey, he and his parents are ready to beam up. And even though Troi and Riker are, like, totally broken up, he’s still all butthurt about it and will be petulant throughout the whole episode.

I missed some of the meeting between the Millers and Troi because my computer’s DVD player is a delicate princess when it comes to scratched discs and my roommate was using our real TV. I will say that Mrs. Miller’s poncho-y coat thing is one of the few costumes I’ve seen in the show that I rather like, even if her hat is atrocious. Wyatt gives Troi a Mood Rose, and then disc error disc error HERE COMES LWAXANA TROI.

I can’t decide if I think Lwaxana is horrible or fantastic. God knows I wouldn’t want her for my mother, and she is pretty brassy and rude, but she is such a magnificent breath of life into this show that I can’t be unhappy about her presence. It’s so fitting that she constantly wears red. She’s terribly rude to Picard, which he takes with good grace, and just steamrolls everyone else. She pokes and prods everyone apparently just to stir shit up. You almost wonder how she produced such a drab and useless child as Deanna Troi.

Somewhere in here the subplot shows up, which is a mysterious ship headed to Haven, which, like Alderaan before it, has no weapons. They demand protection from the Enterprise, which makes me wonder what they would have done if it WEREN’T the Enterprise’s vacation week. I know you have principles, but jeez, keep a civilian space navy or something. I mean, if you’re going to shrill that a ship failing to respond is an act of hostility, be prepared to deal. It turns out to be the last survivors of Planet Typhoid Mary, and with some patented STAR TREK MORALIZING ™, they note that it’s the result of bioweaponry, and all you need to fuck up your civilization that way is 20th century technology and a 20th century intellect, which is implied to be some serious fucking idiocy. Thanks, Star Trek! I sure see the light about the evils of bioweaponry now! [themoreyouknow.gif]

Anyway, these ships from these planets have been landing for decades, and then the refugees infect the planet they land on, and everyone dies. Super. They lock the ship with a transporter TRACTOR beam after the leader of Haven has some further hysterics at them and demands that they be fired upon.

But back to the happy couple. Wyatt is clearly disappointed that Troi isn’t the woman he’s been having dreams about all his life and carries sketches of in a big plexiglass folding frame. He can’t even hide that from the audience, and his wife-to-be is a fucking empath (but a useless one, judging by the episodes so far), so he’s pretty well screwed. He talks about how his biggest ambition is to cure illness. Picard must have loaned him the Foreshadowing Hammer.

There’s some wacky comedy where Lwaxana goes around declaring that they’ll be having a traditional Betazoid ceremony, where everyone is woooo naked to symbolize… something. The love of the couple or something. Naked = comedy, that’s the key, here. Especially Wyatt’s fat father naked, and Lwaxana, shit-stirrer supreme, noting that he’s pretty eager to see her naked, too, to the horror of Wyatt’s mother. Troi snaps in the most unnatural-feeling way (it’s just out of nowhere, no build up, just a slight pause, she stands up, “STOP BICKERING!”, flounces out, and Data, my new hero, implores everyone to keep bickering because it’s fascinating) and then has an awkward and unsatisfying heart to heart with Riker, which Wyatt interrupts.

Just as the wedding seems inevitable, they finally get in contact with the ship, and, gaaaaaaaaaasp, the girl of Wyatt’s dreams (literally) is standing there in the middle of the viewscreen. And she’s terminally ill! It’s like a fairy tale! He beams over, because it’s totally fate, you guys, and there’s no coming back because of this super-plague that apparently DESTROYS ENTIRE CIVILIZATIONS but damn if these eight survivors don’t look perfectly healthy, if scantily clad. I mean, I guess running sores or something would kind of kill the romance of it all, but come on.

Wyatt’s parents and Lwaxana leave, the latter throwing some comments to Picard about his apparently thinly concealed lust for her, which seriously pisses him off, and she’s gone. Ahh, Majel. Certainly different than Nurse Chapel, who tended toward the passive, and a welcome breath of vibrance into this season. Oh, and lest I forget, there has also been this Lurch-like valet (who has apparently been borrowing Data’s makeup) silently following Lwaxana around and guzzling down booze at parties. Here, as they leave, he offers a little parting shot and thanks them for the drinks. WAAAAHHHH-WHAAAAaaaaaaaa.

Deanna Troi suffers from what I think of as Fanny Price syndrome in this episode. Things pretty much just happen to her, and she just lets it happen. It’s almost anti-feminist. “Well, I’m a bridge officer on a Federation ship, but I guess I’ll leave all that behind because my mom says it’s time for me to marry this guy that was picked for me as a child.” She has no agency over her own life and apparently no feelings about the whole thing, and it makes me pretty angry, actually. I mean, Jesus! It’s your life! Your career! Have something, anything, invested in it! Don’t just get watery-eyed and let other people make your decisions for you! Auuugggghhhhh. Are all the female characters in this show going to be hateful? Well, everyone’s hair was nice in this one, at least. And Crusher looked really pretty.

Sigh.

We join the Enterprise, already in progress toward a terrible mining disaster that…. has very little to do with the rest of the episode, really, except to give a sense of urgency and futility while dealing with Q.

Q wants to offer a dream come true.  But he doesn’t really want to offer it to Picard, maybe because Picard gives Q a hell of a scolding.  So he offers a deadly game to Riker on the Planet of Kind of Half-Assed Set Dressing.  Picard is left in time out on an empty bridge while Q whisks Yar, Worf, Data, Geordi and Riker down to play Napoleon.  (That seems actually kind of apt for him.)

The Q think it’s pretty awesome that humans are adaptable.  Riker seems to be enjoying the mental joust, which is an interesting comparison to Picard’s apparent exasperation with Q.  You’d think that Q could maybe come up with something interesting, but the game is basically “try not to die.”  Yar is immediately stuck in a “penalty box,” and if anyone else gets sent there, she’ll be destroyed.  Yar’s penalty box is the bridge, apparently, so she can boo hoo hoo to the captain about how she’ll be destroyed and how she hates being controlled.  Points for not mentioning rape gangs, I guess.  (I’m sorry.  I can’t stand her.)

Picard isn’t chosen, Q reveals, because he’s too bound by rules.  The gift of the Q is the power of the Q imbued into Riker, and the games are meant to display human character by the process rather than the ends.  I mean, it’s a while before the episode gets to that.  There’s Geico Cavemen in French uniforms from the Napoleonic War and laser muskets to deal with, first.

Picard pisses off Q by musing on the potential of humanity, which is plot important.  See, Q is giving his gift so that he can take Riker-Q back the the Continuum to inject a little… creativity and innovation into the stagnating Q Continuum.

And here it finally starts to get good.  It becomes the kind of morality play that Star Trek is probably best known for.  The ship is released (why does Q even bother with a big flashy forcefield?  Can’t he merely freeze the ship in space?  I guess Q is big on flash and sparkle.)  Riker has to keep from letting the powers of the Q from going to his head.  Q forces him to use them by letting the French Cavemen kill Worf and Wesley (who, like an idiot, runs right into the troops shouting “Woooooooorf, noooooooo,” and is quickly bayonetted.  Dumbass.)  Picard orders him to leave the powers untouched, so of course, the mining disaster has to come back into play and tempt Riker to save a little girl who died.  He resists (NO THANKS TO DATA), but he’s all bitter about it.  And then kind of an asshole about it, all calling the captain by his first name and ordering meetings of the bridge crew.

Once he gives in, he decides he’ll be a benevolent god and that he’ll give everyone their hearts’ desires, prompted by Q.  They’re all embarrassing, awful, presumptuous gifts, too.  Crusher tries to take Wesley away, but Riker ages him by 10 years.  Data outright refuses with a nice little speech.  Geordi gets regular sight and tells Yar that she’s more beautiful than he could have imagined, but the price is too high for his tastes and he doesn’t like the source of the gift.  Yeah, suck on that, Riker.  The worst is probably Worf’s Klingon bride that he can’t relate to (fancy fishnets, I don’t see Klingons as the unitard and fishnets type) and Geordi is all horrified that this is Worf’s idea of sex.  Judgmental much, Geordi?  Wesley also refuses his gift, and Riker finally, FINALLY realizes that it was a stupid thing to do.

Q is taken by his own people for his failure to tempt Riker, which now that I write it that way feels a little Biblical.

So, overall I have to give this episode credit for not being a rewrite of The Squire of Gothos.  The show is stumbling less.  Q’s dramatics are incredibly entertaining.  There’s a point where Picard looks at Riker, laughs, and basically says, “you seriously want to join this bullshit artist?” that is fantastic.  The Morality Play aspect of it is a little on the heavy handed side, however, and Wesley seems to be wedged in at the end unnecessarily.  I bet some people are satisfied to see him with a bayonet sticking out his stomach, but seriously?  Monsters with guns just killed your friend and you run into the center of them?  Idiot.

We open on yet another meeting with the Ferengi, Least Threatening Race in the Galaxy. Picard has a headache, and I don’t blame him. I’d have a headache if I had to face such awful acting first thing in an episode.

Dr. Crusher, however, opts to freak the hell out.  (Women, amirite?)   Amongst our Space Advancements (so far, I think we have “Elimination of Capital Punishment” and “Vegetarianism” as new innovations since TOS - we were not getting preachy speeches when there were societies practicing capital punishment from Kirk, let’s face it, and you know he’s the kind of man who enjoys a good steak), we’ve eliminated the headache because we understand pain now. The common cold is also a laughable antiquity. Guess what else we’ve eliminated in the future? Subtlety. Seriously, I did not need the significance of Picard’s headache pounded home with a Space Sledgehammer. I can pick out foreshadowing without the writers erecting a neon sign over it that reads “THIS WILL BE SIGNIFICANT TO THE PLOT, PAY ATTENTION NOW.” Even Crusher’s worry could have gone more smoothly. All she had to do was not find a cause for the pain and be concerned, not go “OMG, WE DON’T HAVE HEADACHES ANY MORE, THIS IS IMPORTANT.”

The Ferengi continue to cringe and be awful and Wesley is wearing a shirt that I’m pretty sure is stitched together from scraps of proper uniforms.  He’s also (unsurprisingly) a bit of a snot here, coming up to the bridge to tell them that a ship is approaching instead of calling, and also that he was dicking around with the long range sensors apparently without permission.  Wouldn’t another officer be reprimanded for such shenanigans?  Hearts to Data, though, for the intrigued “Really?  How?” moment.  It’s like the only good piece of dialogue in the episode.  (Maybe I am being too harsh, but I did watch this two days ago and now I’m banging this out on my lunch at work, away from my notes.)

So!  The Ferengi are here to give the Captain a gift as a goodwill gesture or something equally implausible (but implausible on purpose, so okay, we’ll go with it), and that gift is a big hulking derelict  that the Captain used to… uh, captain.  It happens to be the historic ship where Picard invented the Picard Maneuver, which makes Geordi all excited because this apparently happened long enough ago that it’s in Starfleet Academy textbooks now.  The ship was badly damaged and abandoned after a skirmish with an unidentified ship, which we find out here was Ferengi.  DaiMon Bok is allegedly giving it to Picard to show no hard feelings and all that.

I’m going to apologize for my cheesiness in advance, but I’m still going to say “Beware of Ferengi bearing gifts.”  And because the Ferengi are actually pretty new to the whole Trek mythos at this point, I can also forgive the hammy freakouts of the 1st and 2nd officers from the Ferengi ship over the fact that they weren’t going to charge Picard anything for anything.

PS- Big help, there, Troi, sensing “deception.”  I bet the Captain wouldn’t have suspected they were up to anything without you!  Please go back to freaking out with Crusher in sick bay, kthnx.

The Ferengi leave and the Enterprise starts towing the burnt out ship with their tractor beam until they can meet up with a tug.  And by leave, I mean the Ferengi go to their own ship but keep pacing the Enterprise.  HMM, I WONDER IF THAT’S SUSPICIOUS.  Points to the crew for not loudly pointing it out like every other piece of foreshadowing so far.

Picard gets some PTSD, courtesy of a big, red, glowing, suspicious orb in his trunk in the old ship’s stateroom.   Welcome to the second episode in rather short order wherein Picard is driven to dangerous, erratic behavior by thought control!  You would expect Professor X to have some better natural defenses.  Picard’s flashbacks are intercut with Bok cackling madly over his own orb.  I guess Bok’s son was the captain of the ship that Picard done exploded and now he’s out for some blood revenge.  Oh, and Memory Alpha reminds me that there was a falsified log suggesting that Picard attacked without provocation, which also contributes to his little journey into Crazytown, specifically the neighborhood of Flashbackville.

At some point in here, Wesley saunters into sickbay, where his mother and Troi are fretting over the Captain’s brainwaves and casually notes that there are transmissions matching those patterns coming from the other ship.  WESLEY EX MACHINA saves the day after appearing only one other time in the episodes.  He can be annoying, even when he’s barely there!  Ending with a snarky, scoffing little, “You’e welcome, ladies… Adults!”  It’s like the writers WANT me to hate Wesley, hate him so bad.

In fact, Picard becomes such a happy resident of Flashbackville that he beams over to the other ship.  Riker invokes some bond-of-first-officers with the Ferengi Number One, and he tells Riker that the glowy ball is a forbidden thought control device and removes his captain from command.  Meanwhile, Picard is deep in the past and starts attacking the Enterprise (boy, I didn’t see that one coming, what with the multiple instances of Picard reliving the past over the last ten minutes!) in delusion.  Data is order to do what has never been done before, mainly come up with a defense against the Picard maneuver, which of course he does within minutes.  I’d make another deus ex machina joke (probably more appropriately) but I’m so fond of the Wesley one further up.

Once Data’s managed to stop Picard from killing them all (including the children, I’m not sure I’ll ever stop harping on why it is STUPID TO HAVE CHILDREN ON A WORKING EXPLORATORY SHIP), Riker gets through to Picard by speaking in a commanding voice, mostly, and convinces him to phaser the thought control device, which breaks him out of his flashback/hallucination.  Hooray!

Here is the deal guys. Here is why I fell down on the job.

“Justice” was actually so bad I couldn’t bring myself to finish watching it. I had the DVD out for like six months. Then when I did feel bad because I had taken literal months to finish watching it and tried to start over from the beginning, well, that’s what did me in.

Here’s what I remember: Yar and Geordi go down to this planet of semi-clad jogging blondes. The people of this planet, the Edo, really like to have sex. A lot. Riker leers a lot. So does Yar, really. Worf makes Klingons seem like the least badass by just being uncomfortable.

But why focus on the adults on a sex-planet when we can focus on everyone’s favorite character, Wesley Crusher? Yeah, the initial away team report is that it’s a planet full of beautiful people who spend most of their time makin’ love, so the best thing Picard can order is for Wesley to go down and see if it’s appropriate for children. So he runs around throwing a ball with some scantily clad pre-teens. What fun!

Apparently, the Edo were big fans of 18th century social theorist Jeremy Bentham, because their planet is one giant panopticon. There’s no crime because every transgression is punishable by death, and the rules are enforced in randomized punishment zones, so you never know if you’re being monitored or not.

Hey, guess where Wesley is when he trips over a fence and falls through a greenhouse? Guess what is basically against the law? DING DING DING DING.

There’s a whole moral struggle about violating the Prime Directive (uh, didn’t they kind of start out doing that by visiting an obviously technologically inferior/pre-warp planet?) to rescue Wesley from a massively unjust law violated in ignorance where the Edo straight out tell Picard to just beam up and scram. There’s also another thing that I’ve totally ignored, a subplot about an invisible space station above the planet that sends out an orb that knocks out Data and scans him and is apparently the Edo god. I didn’t get to the resolution there before my stamina broke. According to Memory Alpha, there isn’t much else. There’s some speeches about what is and is not just and Wesley doesn’t die and the Enterprise skeedaddles.

I will try to do better next time.

If you haven’t seen Futurama: The Beast With A Billion Backs, this may make no sense/mildly spoil it for you. Just a note.

So! The mission for our intrepid crew is to get delegates from two species that loathe each other to a planet called Parliament (insert your own George Clinton jokes here, kids) for a peace delegation, because they both want into the Federation, and you’ve got to play nicely to enter the federation.

Oh, and apparently everyone in the Federation is a fucking vegetarian. (No offense, vegetarians, I’m just not one of you.) What. There’s meat, apparently, but it’s all replicated. The future is a little preachy.

You’d think it’d be time for wacky lizard-alien vs. mammal-alien hijinks, right? But wait! There’s a giant purple energy cloud traveling at warp speed for some reason! TO THE SENSOR STATIONS! God knows we never see mysterious glowing objects in space on Star Trek.

Geordi and Worf are working with the sensors, and Worf gets taken down by some blue electricity. Dr. Crusher is summoned, and he gets violent, so she hyposprays his ass and takes him to sickbay. Shouldn’t a Klingon be harder to subdue than that?

Like every other mysterious thing in Star Trek, this electric thing (let’s call it the Zap) is basically contagious. Worf isn’t really given a chance to act funny before it’s passed to Crusher. She gets dazed and out of it and manages to wander onto the bridge, but not before giving her poor son false hope by listening to his enthusiastic studies on dilithium crystal theory. My notes for this episode are a block of random letters from smashing the keyboard with rage. Goddamn everything is contagious. I’d say at least this isn’t The Naked Now, but this episode is it’s own flavor of bad. At least it’s not racist?

No one seems to notice that Crusher is acting like she’s been getting into the good stuff in the sickbay supplies and is randomly on the bridge. She eventually makes it to a science station to ostensibly look up data… but no one thinks it’s weird that she’s not doing that in sickbay? Shouldn’t she have access to the computers from there? Data notices she’s actually reading up on helm control, but doesn’t say anything to, say, the captain.

MEANWHILE: Mammal-Aliens are lying in wait to pounce on Lizard-Aliens. Those wacky aliens have Tasha Yar at the end of her rope! Ha ha! [laugh track]

Zap moves into the computer and kills the engines and communications and pretty much all the control systems on the ship. Not one single person on the command crew connects the various issues with the ship with the mystery energy cloud. Who put you people in charge of a starship?!?

No! Instead they have a meeting (oh my god there are so many meetings in this episode) and someone accuses the delegates of sabotage, perhaps after being bribed by the Ferengi, at this point the least scary race in the galaxy, less scary than a planet full of fluffy kittens, but damn it, we’ll pretend that they’re terrifying and dangerous. Also at this meeting, we have Data introduced to the concept of Sherlock Holmes and consulting detectives. He knows about 19th century privateers, but he’s never heard of a detective. Ooooooookay. I think this is probably an inconclusive meeting. Or I just don’t remember the outcome, because there are like ten of them in this episode. Nothing spells excitement like bureaucracy and meetings.

We really haven’t had enough Wesley Crusher in this episode yet, I wonder where he is? Oh, that’s right, he’s in Engineering. During a crisis. What better place for a teenage boy to be, really?

Zap kills the chief engineer, which doesn’t much matter because there hasn’t been a chief engineer spanning enough episodes for anyone to care about him or her.

The Data-Sherlock thing is just about the only redeeming thing about this episode, as it pops up through the ENDLESS AND INNUMERABLE MEETINGS the crew goes through.

So, while Data is off being awesome and the Chief Engineer is off being dead, Troi continues her run so far of being completely fucking useless. “Hey, Troi, the FUCKING EMPATH, why didn’t you sense something weird was happening?” “Well, I sensed duality, but all humans have that, no big deal.” Hrrrgnnnnngh.

Continuing the crew’s stunning record this episode of serious and dedicated service to a big, expensive Starfleet vessel, Geordi tells Wesley it doesn’t matter how or why the ship started working again as long as it is actually working again. Okay, yeah, I do the same thing when I get angry at my router for having an inconsistent signal, but… it’s a router, not the vital systems of a spacecraft. (Which, I remind you, is full of women and children. This is not TOS where everyone on the ship is a member of Starfleet and has a certain expectation of risk in their line of work.) (I’m sorry I will not stop thinking it is irresponsible to have a big damn ship full of families exploring the unknown. Or escorting delegations of people who are eager to kill one another.)

Finally, the Zap takes the captain when he touches a helm control or something. Stewart is doing pretty well here with some ridiculous material and I have to say I’m impressed. And then we have to go and spoil it all by having, you guessed it, ANOTHER MEETING, wherein they discuss exactly what they need to do to take command from the Captain. This time, you see, they actually notice that someone is acting strangely (finally). I know proper channels and everything are important, but it makes me long for TOS, where Spock would have just taken Kirk down if he were endangering the crew. Maybe have McCoy ready with the hypospray full of sedatives.

But nooooo…. we have to have a psychological evaluation. Which Zap!Picard neatly turns on them by insisting that Crusher and Riker go first, and in the meantime, the ship is going to turn about and go back to the energy cloud. There’s a brief interlude where the Selay are hunting the Anticans with what look like glow necklaces. Oh yeah, there’s that whole delegate-to-the-Federation plot thing that is almost utterly unnecessary to this episode! Right!

So! Back to the energy cloud we go!

Once they get back, Yivo… er, the Zap explains via Picard that it was accidentally kidnapped as they passed by, and it was lonely in the systems of the ship. It did what it could to get back, but then it entered Picard and they fell in lurrrrrrrve. Picard and Yivo are going to beam into the energy cloud and live happily ever after, so there!

And here it falls apart for me (again), because while Picard hasn’t had a lot of time to make a strong mark as a character, I have a hard time seeing him happily abandon his crew like this, even under an alien influence. I seriously just don’t buy it.

Anyway. The captain beams out into the void and the rest of the crew just kind of hang around for an hour trying to figure out what exactly to do. Riker is juuuuuust in the verge of making them leave when Troi (finally) makes herself useful and says she can sense the captain! And he’s alone! (You can sense this, but you couldn’t tell what was wrong with Worf and Crusher? I hate you.) The captain makes like Ghostwriter and writes a P in a control console, and they realize, hey, his transporter pattern is still in the memory because he was the last one to beam out! What.

We’re almost done here, I promise. But we’ve reached another place where my notes are full of CAPSLOCKRAGE. Why? Because when the captain beams in, he has no memory of going out to the Yivo cloud. Apparently, your [many colorful and creative expletives deleted] memories are stored in your transporter pattern aaagggghhh how did this show survive its first year?

Finally, to bookend the episode (and remind us that there was a whole other plot in this episode, in case we forgot again) Yar runs in at the last minute looking harried and lets us know that one of the Antican delegates (mammal aliens) ate one of the Selay delegates! Whaaaah whaaaah waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah [sitcom laugh track]

First of all, I know it’s obvious, but COME ON.

Hilarious. Star Trek is 100% subtle in trying to show the future as maybe a little more open about gender-notions, is it not? THE FUTURE: CRAZY AND DIFFERENT!

Anyway, on to the episode itself.

So there is this dude, Kosinski (thank you, Memory Alpha, without you I’d misspell many a name), a “propulsion specialist.” He’s here to tune some shit and really pimp Picard’s ride. Oh, and he’s got an assistant with some Standard Issue Star Trek face ridges and a silvery jumpsuit. Fashion of the future always seems to favor the jumpsuit! At least Wesley Crusher gets to wear something as normal as a variety of unattractive sweaters. Mr. Assistant also comes with Science Fiction Trope #708, “My name is impossible for your species to pronounce.” So he’ll be Mr. Assistant for the rest of this post, eh? Or, if you’re Wesley Crusher, you can call him “My frieeeeeeeeennnnd.”

Sensibly, if you have an empath in your crew, you might take her down to check these people out, and Riker does so. But so far Troi has had basically two reactions to characters thus far: “Augh, the pain, I’m so overwhelmed” and “I can’t sense a thing from them!” Mr. Assistant is the latter.

So Kosinski is a dick, but he has a point on some matters, mainly, “What is a child doing hanging around Engineering on a Federation starship? Seriously?” Then again, there have been younger children running around the command decks, so this ship has already show itself to be all kinds of professional.

Mr. Assistant, he sees that Wesley is special and wants to be his special friend. It’d probably all be a little less creepy with out the chiming music, but the creepiness would probably not be reduced as much as I think. He’s cool with letting Wesley sit in at his station.

Anyway, there’s something going on with algorithms and… warp… yeah, I didn’t really pay attention to that. It’s completely unsurprising when it all goes completely and horribly wrong. Plus the only one who’s actually doing the work, Mr. Assistant, is phasing in and out. Wesley is the only one who notices this, and the whole ship enters that scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey with the flashing lights and colors, and the whole ship is flung two million light years from home. How they hell they’re able to chart their position and know this is beyond me. Also, this distant galaxy is much prettier and much shinier than their own, for no good reason.

NOTE: I started writing this like three months ago, and I’m not going to watch the episode again, so this will be a… less thorough commentary.

Somehow, despite the fact that no one has ever traveled this far, they can still plot their position (HOW? How the HELL do you know how far from the Alpha Quadrant you are?) and oh noes, they are two million light years from home, which means a good 300 years’ slog back to Earth. This still does not explain in any way why this part of the galaxy is full of swirling rainbows and such. It will take 50 years to get a message to Star Fleet, and Mr. Assistant is… not doing well.

Whatshisname, Kosinski, is pleased with himself, which just makes him a giant dick. And I’m going to paste a bit from my original notes:

This is kind of an old trope, the true master masquerading as the assistant, even masquerading from the one he assists. Not a bad one, but an old one. I dunno, I just feel a little like they’re going to find Wesley’s molested corpse in a Jefferies tube.

Don’t tell me if I spelled Jefferies tube incorrectly.  I’m not nerd enough to care.

There’s some deep and basically terrible conversation between the Assistant and Wesley.  I guess Space and Time and Thought are like, connected, man.

Then we’ve got the good old “everyone starts hallucinating, which reveals things about their character or gives us glimpses into the lives of background characters” except that the hallucinations are real?  And I guess we can’t miss an opportunity to bring up Tasha Yar’s Rape Gangs.  I’m what, like four episodes in?  I get it, she’s tough and troubled.  There’s also a kind of cool Turbolift to nowhere.

The Assistant tells everyone he’s a galactic tourist, and he’s powered by thought or something.  He’s basically Tinkerbell, and to get back to their own galaxy, everyone pretty much has to clap their hands and belieeeeeeeve.  He also makes a point of telling Picard how super special Wesley is, and to take good care of him.

And then they get home, the guy disappears, and oh, they give Wesley a position on the bridge.  Christ!  Oh, whatever.  It’s a starship full of families and children, which still makes no goddamn sense to me anyway.

First of all, sorry for the lack of updates. Most of the blame falls on a trip I took to British Columbia earlier this month.

Over the course of the last three episodes, we’ve heard a couple of mentions of the fierce and terrifying Ferengi. Um, yeah. Now we finally get to meet them! The episode opens on the giant space ship equivalent of a car chase, except less exciting. The Ferengi have apparently stolen some kind of power converter from a colony and the Enterprise gave chase. Always looking on the bright side, Picard notes that this might be an opportunity to finally make some kind of contact with the mysterious Ferengi.

So, in the space equivalent of blowing a tire, the Ferengi have some kind of energy surge and coast to a stop near a planet in an unexplored system. The Enterprise slows down as well to take a look. Long story short, some shots are fired, Lt. Yar wants to fire on the bastards, and suddenly all the energy starts being sucked out of the ship.

Wacky miscommunication ensues, where the Enterprise makes a vaguely worded offer to surrender and the Ferengi are all, “Look, dude, we can’t surrender 100%, but we’ll kill all our second officers, okay?” In a move that’s either prudent or kind of dumb, Picard runs with it while trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Troi helpfully points out that they’re parked by a Mystery Planet that they’ve so far completely ignored. Hey, maybe that’s the problem.

There’s a token attempt to make it feel more like a military ship with Riker going around barking orders and being kind of a hardass to some stirring, militaristic music, but then there are children running around in the briefing room. WTF. You’d think they’d keep them away from the command sections of the ship, no? And for comic relief, we get to learn that Data’s internal library doesn’t include “Chinese finger trap” or enough common sense to release himself from one without assistance. And he’s an officer?

The Ferengi catch on and realize that the Enterprise is just as trapped as they are, and after a little persuading, Picard convinces them to team up and explore the planet, which used to belong to the Tkon Empire, long dead from a supernova.
Now, there’s hardly any power left in the ship, but five bridge officers and no redshirts risk beaming down (with Data helpfully noting that they’re not likely to be able to beam back up). Come on, guys, transporter accidents happen! Remember Evil Kirk and the spiky dog thing that got duplicated in TOS? They’re lucky they just all beamed down in random places (and, in Geordi’s case, upside down) and that they didn’t get turned inside out like that pig thing in Galaxy Quest. Meanwhile, the Ferengi have also beamed down and start laying waste with their electric whips.

The Ferengi are apparently all Gollum, except with less specific avarice. They hunch and shuffle and are generally parodies of themselves. Either that, or they’re all rehearsing for a bad, amateur production of Richard III. Scuffles ensue and Yar and Worf show convenient timing.

But then! From out of the darkness and giant glowing crystals appears the Wizard of Oz! Er, I mean, a giant glowing face. He’s one of the Tkon border guards, and one of Star Trek’s many Mind Reading Advanced Beings. There’s some craven accusations from the Ferengi, but Riker passes the Portal Guardian’s little test, and the Guardian is all “Hey, let’s get beers and talk about this Sun Tzu guy.” Riker has the presence of mind to ask for power to be restored to the ship, where all the civilians they’ve been recklessly dragging into danger for the last three episodes are currently freezing to death. And, because the Federation is nothing if not magnanimous, he asks that the Ferengi have everything restored, too, because maybe someday their society will grow. Has anyone met Federation standards of “civilization” so far this season? At the moment, it feels like we’re 0 for 2.

The last move is to beam over a box of Chinese finger traps to the Ferengi, which makes so much sense. The writers are still pillaging TOS and its Trouble With Tribbles, but not very well.

I have to admit that I’ve taken some time to mull over what exactly I want to write about Code of Honor. I don’t know if you were around or culturally aware in the late eighties and early nineties. I was pretty young, and am pretty much the whitest white girl imaginable, but my family is mixed race and my siblings were pretty caught up in the general cultural interest in Africa. What I’m saying is that my sister made me watch Coming To America a lot. Getting back to those roots was something of a fad, and I suspect that this episode was trying hard to capitalize on that.

So here’s the thing: I don’t know if this episode would have been a problem at that time, but it gives me a hell of a case of liberal guilt. The Ligonians (right? I don’t quite remember, and I’m feeling too lazy to go to Memory Alpha) are aliens described as “remarkably close to humans.” Remarkable indeed. We haven’t seen any awesome aliens yet, actually. Visually awesome, I mean, and not counting the what, one appearance Worf has made so far? Anyway, “remarkably close to humans” means “pseudo tribal African and a hell of a lot of Jeri Curl on Yareena.” Actually, Yareena isn’t bad, it’s Lutan that seems to be this played up Noble Savage who thinks he’s so clever, but meanwhile, here he is leering at Lt. Yar and making kind of childish and arrogant power plays. I know the civilization is supposed to be behind Starfleet and this gives the Prime Directive a chance to stretch its legs and all, but there’s this implied “black people are simple and arrogant” that just does not sit well with me. Sure, they’re not technically human (which is funny - they couldn’t be an independent colony like the ones that were so often visited by Olde Trek? They had to be some example of parallel evolution?) but they’re too close to human and too close to an existing Terran culture for comfort.

It is, of course, perfectly likely that I’m reading way, way too much into this whole thing. This, however, is a blog of my impressions of the episode, and my main impression was “Whoa, this seems kind of racist!”

So yeah, this isn’t a comedy Star Trek entry.

Some bits from the notes I took while watching:

• Again we see that ugly metallic prints are a galactic fashion craze.
• I almost immediately predicted that Yar would have “to do some Thunderdome shit.” Go me.
• I guess if a catfight is hot, a catfight to the death is even hotter.
• Okay, so there’s this scene with Data and Geordi, and it feels badly wedged in, even though it is used later so that Picard can bitterly remark that the whole situation is a joke. Still, feels clumsy.
• Speaking of Picard, I actually really liked that he caught himself halfway and said, “I’m sorry, this is becoming a speech,” instead of launching into a monologue.
• How many times in the history of Star Trek have Starfleet crewpeople been forced into gladiatorial combat of some type? It seems like a lot to me.
• What the hell is with the weapons? Those look like the least graceful weapon I’ve ever seen, clumsy and difficult to use. It seems like it’d be easy to accidentally nick yourself, and as the Ligonian equivalent of a red-shirt showed us, you are straight screwed if that happens.

This is a really unfunny entry, but this one didn’t lend itself to humor. Let’s hope the next few episodes lend themselves to comedic commentary better.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the TOS episode The Naked Time immensely. It’s delightful, it’s ridiculous, and you can almost see slash fanfiction being born when Spock gets all weepy about human emotions.

This is a remake of that episode. It is not an improvement on that episode.

Anyway, the general plot is that there is a research vessel sending odd messages… or their communications have been crossed with one of those commercials you see on late night TV for chat lines. Hot, single researchers are waiting to talk to you, baby. The Enterprise goes out to investigate and finds everyone dead. The bridge crew has been blown out an open hatch into space (someone explain to me why there even is a hatch leading to open space on the bridge in the first place) and just about everyone else has frozen to death, and most of them are naked (ooh, shock, titillation) except for one woman in the shower with all her clothes on.

This, of course, is the key for Riker. Why search databanks for history of crewpeople “suddenly acting out of character” or “going buck wild and having a ship-wide orgy” when you can search for records of “showering with clothes on.”

Anyway, Geordi starts to sweat and goes around infecting people, and Wesley acts really pathetically desperate for the Captain’s attention. Yar and Wesley are both infected by Geordi with intoxihol water, which apparently is self-replicating as well as (hello techonobabble!) a simple form of water that has been altered by powerful gravitational forces to pull carbon from the host and act as an intoxicant. Oh yes, that all makes sense.

So anyway, back to Riker (and Data) searching for Riker’s hunch. It isn’t enough to reference back to TOS by making the episode a transparent rewrite of the old script, but we also have to reference the original Enterprise and even have Picard mention Kirk by name. Hooray, we have a cure!  Except that we don’t have a cure at all, because then the episode would be way too short.  Also, there has to be some kind of race against the clock, which is, in this case, a collapsing star.

So Lt. Yar’s intoxication exhibits itself by having her turn into an unattractive sex-beast. Fashion in the future is apparently heavily reliant on hideous, eye-bleeding print fabrics. Lucky for her, the corridors are full of extras stumbling around all hot and bothered.

Meanwhile, Wesley has become this episode’s Kevin Riley, but where Riley took over Engineering on the Enterprise and declared himself Captain, Wesley… takes over Engineering and declares himself Captain. Huh. Of course, Riley made all kinds of crazy pronouncements, like women wearing their hair down and Wesley…. makes all kinds of crazy pronouncements, like dessert before and after every meal. What the fuck, writers, are you even trying? I’m surprised Wesley isn’t singing weepy Irish ballads over the comm.

But back to Lt. Yar! She’s changed clothes now and is a bit giggly, but really? Her hair looks awful and her outfit is hardly revealing when you consider what half the non-crew women in Olde Trek wore. Jeannie (as in I Dream Of) wore sexier outfits and she was barred from showing her bellybutton on TV. Also? Talking about rape gangs? Probably not great for the mood.

This is what I typed for the rest of this scene as I was watching: Why is Data fully functional? Also, ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew ew.

I’m not sure how much of it is just me (like Roast Beef, I suffer from a case of the Dignities) but I really disliked the fact that the intoxication took the form of everyone being all hot hot hot for each other. Yes. I get it. You can totally show more scandalous things on TV in the late eighties than you could in the late sixties. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

Troi gets infected, and as a half human, she’s kind of the anti-Spock, but they both have their moments of omg I feel so huuuuuuuumaaaaan, though hers is far less overwrought. And less interesting.

In the end, Wesley Crusher, Boy Genius, saves the day. Jeez. Never mind that your takeover of a vital section of the ship and letting whatshisname take out the isolinear chips in the first place is what almost got everyone killed, you were able to kind of save the day (by suggesting that Data save the day then reprogramming the tractor beam while simultaneously being a smarmy little brat to the chief engineer), handshakes all around.

I have to keep reminding myself that TNG is pretty new and at this point, trying fairly hard to assure fans that this is the Trek they knew and loved, though at this point, I think they’re still being way, way too heavy handed about it. The show hasn’t had time to develop it’s own character yet, and if one ignores all the overblown sexuality in this episode, it is doing a fairly decent job of being something different than the oft grandiloquent TOS. The sooner it moves out of this phase of “Remember Star Trek!?!?!? Remember how much you loved it?!?!?!” the better.

First things first: DUDES IN MINISKIRT UNIFORMS, WTF.

So, in Encounter at Farpoint, you’ve got the Enterprise, partially staffed and full of civilians (which I will get to later) heading out to jolly well explore new and exciting bits of space, but first they’ve got to stop by this new, suspiciously quickly built outpost and pick up the new first officer.

Oh, yeah, and they’ll have to prove humanity isn’t terribly barbaric and bloodthirsty to Q. But hey, no problem for an intrepid starship crew, right?

One of the major things I noticed here were the really obvious attempts to hearken back to TOS. The most obvious is DeForest Kelley popping up for no plot-advancing reason, with his cheerful anti-Vulcan bigotry expanded to include androids as well. Troi’s uniform with the minidress and high boots are also something of a throwback to TOS, though seeing the same uniform on about three male extras is a bit… different. (Paging Zapp Branagan…) Then there’s the design of Farpoint, both inside and out, which still does seem to conform to the sixties ideal of the future, at least in terms of architecture. Everything’s white with multicolored accents (usually pink, purple or red) and the fabrics lean heavily toward the spangled and shiny. I find it interested compared to Voyager, which seemed to favor the dark and industrial. The whole situation is actually very Olde Trek. Inexplicably powerful adversary who happens to be playful, bordering on malicious? Where could we have seen that before? Giant Space Jellyfish are also something I would not be surprised to see in a TOS episode. Hell, the TOS crew went up against such terrifying foes as a giant spinning cube! In space! And stock footage of tigers! Maybe I should stop name-dropping favorite TOS episodes and get on with it!

The next thing I’ve been thinking a lot about is the difference in design aesthetics. I know I’m placing everything in opposition to TOS and VOY, but you’ll have to bear with me, since those are my frames of reference. The original Enterprise’s bridge was full of primary colors and actually looked like it could be the bridge of a battleship in some ways - the amount of light, the gunmetal-greyness of everything that wasn’t yellow or red or black, and the angled overhead screens. From what I recall, Voyager’s bridge was almost always dark and dramatically lit and done up in a variety of shades of serviceable grey. The Enterprise-D’s bridge is bright and beige and… terribly, terribly bland. Like Picard is piloting a giant Holiday Inn. It probably seemed nice from the design standpoint of the late eighties.

Third thing that I want to discuss: I think I dislike all of the female characters who have been introduced so far. Troi and her feeeeeeeeeeeeeeelings are overplayed in this episode, plus there’s the moment of OMG SEXUAL TENSION when Riker and Troi first see each other. Eugh. Lt. Yar is, at least so far, mostly just angry and trigger happy without anything redeeming or, really, interesting about her. Dr. Crusher’s okay. It’s still early and given that this is a pilot and not much chance for character development has been given, I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt.

I think the rest of it can be in bullet points, here, because I think I hit upon all of the things I wanted to go into any depth on.

• I really did not know that Q was right there in the first episode, so my reaction was sort of “Wait, what, already?”
• Data’s Otherness is kind of pronounced, especially in his dialogue. “Inquiry: Snoop?” That, and “I’d love to be human, ever so much!” and lifting Wesley out of the holodeck stream one-handed. HAY GUYS, I THINK THERE’S SOMETHING UNUSUAL ABOUT THIS CHARACTER!
• I know how we’ll prove that we’re not a barbaric and needlessly aggressive race! We’ll break through this barrier and then fire torpedoes at the pursuing ship!
• While starships aren’t really designed for atmospheric flight, saucer-separation still seems like a bad idea from the idea of structural integrity. Of course, it wouldn’t be necessary if there weren’t inexplicably a fuckton of civilians on a Federation ship on what seems to be a potentially dangerous exploratory mission, but hey, whatever.
• It amuses me that there are scenes obviously meant to show the audience that the technology is NEW and EXCITING. Just ask the ship’s computer where someone is and follow the blinky lights to the amazing HOLODECK! And look, there’s that scamp, Wesley Crusher.
• I guess I felt like a certain amount of stuff was needlessly spelled out for the audience, and one of those things were the GIANT SPACE JELLYFISH. I think we could have figured out that they were happy from their tentacle high five without Troi having to tell us.

‘Til next time, internet. I’m out.

Hi, I’m Ellen, one of the other bloggingstartrek.net writers. If you’re unfamiliar with what we’re doing here, I recommend reading Drew’s first post. Me, I’m taking on The Next Generation.

I haven’t started yet, but I wanted to place myself within the larger framework of Trek as a whole first. I love the Original Series very much; it brings my dual loves of mid-century science fiction and 1960s television together in a glorious and absurd singularity. I haven’t watched the entire series, but I have watched large swaths of it, and I’d be watching it twice a week in syndication if I weren’t at work when it’s on.

I’ve seen an episode or two of TNG here and there, and the only movie that I sat down and deliberately watched was The Wrath of Khan. I’ve also seen parts of The One With The Whales. So, I can see where the TOS mission was to explore the edges of space, visiting colonies and unexplored planets. And I can see how Voyager stumbled into all their wacky adventures in the Delta Quadrant (yes I watched and enjoyed all of Voyager shut up) while trying to get home, but I actually have no idea what the TNG crew’s underlying mission is. For someone involved in a Star Trek-related blog, I am perhaps shockingly ignorant. My impressions, then, will be extremely fresh.

I’m looking forward to starting this whole endeavor, which I will be doing quite soon!