Plot Summary: Vice Admiral Nechayev comes aboard the Enterprise near the Cardassian border to tell Picard that she is there to relieve him of command. While Captain Edward Jellico, who has experience wrangling with the Cardassians, takes the ship into negotiations, Picard is sent to lead Crusher and Worf on a top secret mission to the Cardassian colony of Celtris III, where Starfleet believes they are developing a bioweapon with which Picard is familiar from his experiences aboard the Stargazer. The team finds that there are no weapons and Picard is taken prisoner, where the Cardassians first use truth serum, then sensory deprivation, to try to learn of Starfleet’s intentions concerning a border world claimed by both the Federation and the Cardassian Union. Picard reports honestly that he does not know, but the sadistic Gul Madred continues his interrogation. Meanwhile Jellico comes into conflict with several Enterprise officers over his stringent command style, but his aggressive negotiations with the Cardassians appear to be effective until Gul Lemec tells him that Picard has been captured and will be tried for espionage. In order to keep Starfleet blameless, Jellico insists that Picard was acting alone and refuses to risk a rescue, which infuriates Riker who is then relieved of duty.

Since Starfleet will not admit that a state of war exists, Madred is not required to obey the treaty governing the treatment of prisoners of war and tortures Picard, insisting that there are five lights behind him when there are in fact four and using pain to reinforce that message. The Enterprise crew determines that the Cardassians have been exposed to particles from the McAllister nebula and Jellico guesses that they have a fleet hidden there. Told by LaForge that Riker is the best pilot on board, Jellico reluctantly makes peace with Riker and asks him to take a shuttle and plant mines amidst the fleet. Then he warns the Cardassians that he will destroy their ships if they do not retreat. Lemec agrees to stand down, but Madred tells Picard that the Enterprise has been destroyed, Picard has been listed among the casualties, and the torture will continue indefinitely unless Picard agrees that there are five lights in the room. Before Picard can answer, Lemec comes in to tell Picard that he will be released. Picard shouts that there are four lights, but once he is returned to the Enterprise, he asks Troi to come to his ready room and tells her that not only was he willing to tell Madred what he wanted to hear to avoid further torture, but he actually believed that he could see five lights.

Analysis: “Chain of Command” aired as two separate episodes, but when I watched it with my family to review, we all agreed at the end of the first part that we couldn’t wait to see the resolution and put Part II on immediately after Part I ended. Several Star Trek two-parters suffer from a significant decline in the second half – the sixth season’s premiere, “Time’s Arrow, Part Two,” is one of those – but “Chain of Command,” like “The Best of Both Worlds,” lives up to its promise. There’s nothing extraneous in this double episode, nothing that feels tacked on to fill time; the pacing is perfect, with storylines that mesh and feed off one another, and the acting is some of the series’ finest, particularly from Patrick Stewart and guest star David Warner. Usually most of the praise heaped on the two-parter is reserved for the 1984-style torture sequences (done better here than in any film version I’ve seen of Orwell’s novel, though Michael Radford’s 1984 film of the same name seems an obvious point of reference, as does the novel itself in which the protagonist is forced to agree that two plus two equals five. Yet the military storyline, in which Jellico’s command style causes friction with Riker and Troi in particular, is also engrossing and actually leads to one visible change for the remainder of the series, for although Troi may not appreciate his lack of sensitivity to the crew’s feelings, she takes his order to dress professionally on the bridge to heart and wears a Starfleet uniform on duty thereafter.

We learned after the fact that “Chain of Command” was written to establish the Cardassians as adversaries to be reckoned with, since Deep Space Nine was in the works and the Cardassians were envisioned as the major villains. It’s entirely effective; while their first appearance in the fourth season episode “The Wounded” revealed that they could be duplicitous and brutal, it didn’t give any sense of the size of their empire or the danger they posed to outlying Federation worlds. Here they hatch an extremely complicated plot just to get Picard out of the picture, indicating that their intelligence as well as their resources make them far better prepared for a war than Starfleet. Picard seems to have been a pet project of Madred, whose interest in him is creepily personal. Madred wants to break Picard long after he realizes that Picard doesn’t have any Federation secrets he can use; even after he learns that the fleet has been discovered and Picard is scheduled to be released, he continues his torture, telling Picard lies that he knows will be revealed as such in a matter of minutes and demanding obedience just because he still can.

Why Picard? We never really get a clear answer, nor are we made to understand how Starfleet could commit a blunder of such magnitude, sending their flagship’s captain straight into a tailor-made trap with two of his own officers. I realize that Section 31 hadn’t been devised yet by the franchise’s writers, but surely Starfleet much have had some sort of internal intelligence operatives with specialized training for such an infiltration? I’d trust Worf as well as any security officer to defend my life, but Crusher is asked to go along to confirm the presence of a metagenic bio-weapon that would kill everything alive on a planet yet leave its technology intact – something that a qualified tech with a tricorder ought to be able to do as easily as a medical doctor. Why did Starfleet risk leaving the Enterprise hobbled by taking away not one but three senior officers on such a mission just as it was headed into negotiations to stop a war, bringing Cardassians on board? The decisions seem as hasty as Jellico’s seemingly arbitrary changes in the ship’s rotation schedule, the first of many points on which he and Riker clash.

That Jellico doesn’t mesh well with the bridge crew is obvious, yet he has a point when he tells both Riker and Troi in essence to stop whining and do their jobs. The two of them are concerned with keeping the crew’s routine undisturbed in the absence of Picard, as if the crewmembers are children facing a loss in the family, while Jellico sees a war brewing and doesn’t have any patience with Starfleet officers who need coddling. Jellico often comes in for a lot of criticism by fans, who echo Riker’s accusations that the temporary captain is a rigid, arrogant, closed-minded control freak, but I’m not sure any of those are fair. He’s had command of the flagship dropped upon him by an admiral who seems to expect that military force will be necessary, he wants to make sure the ship and crew are ready; if that means putting everyone on a different duty rotation, expecting that his orders will be obeyed without a discussion of people’s feelings, that seems quite reasonable. Riker has commanded the Enterprise himself on so many occasions that it’s not surprising he’d bristle at being pushed around instead of treated as an equal, which I think is the real cause of conflict here. It’s not that any of Jellico’s decisions are bad ones, it’s that he feels the need to assert his authority over Riker and Troi, whom Picard has treated as equals for years. In fact, Jellico makes all the right calls, stalling for time, figuring out what the Cardassians have been up to, swallowing his pride and putting Riker back on duty for the critical mission.

As for Picard, his greatest strengths include his ability to remain calm, to keep his temper, and to work logically through situations that are frustrating everyone around him. But none of those strengths are any use with Madred, who figures out after the truth serum that Picard can’t provide the intelligence information the Cardassian Union needs to take over the border worlds they claim. Madred is absolutely gloating that they set a successful trap for Picard – whether he learns anything of use from him seems almost beside the point. By the time he starts the torture, Picard knows that Crusher and Worf aren’t coming to his rescue any time soon – Crusher has, in fact, already made the decision to let Riker recover herself and Worf, leaving Picard’s fate in the hands of Jellico and the negotiators – with the implication that the pain could be endless. The scene in which the Gul lets his young daughter see a battered Picard is horrifying, though no more so than Madred’s claim that he’s already had Worf killed and will torture Crusher since Picard isn’t cooperating.

Knowing that the Gul is pitiable – that he is a terrified six-year-old inside – doesn’t make the pain any more bearable. Though the Gul will never know it, he has broken Picard by the time rescue arrives. But Picard knows it. In a way it’s more terrible than what the Borg did to him, which was an invasion of his biology, with no question about whether his strength of will could have held them off. He isn’t so disturbed by the knowledge that he would have told Madred anything to make the pain stop as by the fact that, in the end, he actually saw the five lights he had been ordered to say were there. I’m not sure his command style would be any less rigid than Jellico’s, now, faced with a new Cardassian threat.

Plot Summary: LaForge is called away from a card game with crewmembers to assist at a new mining station. He arrives just before Dr. Farallon solves a dangerous power issue using an exocomp, a small robotic device she created to assist with engineering problems in the station’s core. He beams aboard the Enterprise with her so Farallon can report on the station’s progress, showing LaForge and Data that the exocomps were designed to create new pathways in their own memory – in essence, to learn. When one of the devices refuses to obey commands and burns out its own circuits to avoid being sent into a plasma conduit just before the plasma explodes, Data concludes that the exocomp has developed an instinct for self-preservation, which leads him to conclude that the exocomps are alive. This announcement is ridiculed by Farallon and apparently disproven by a subsequent test putting an exocomp in simulated danger from which it fails to extricate itself. But Data and Crusher realize that the device has determined that there is no real threat, which further suggests to data that the exocomps have developed reasoning. Picard and LaForge visit the station core, then become trapped due to a radiation leak. After Riker orders Farallon to transport the exocomps to the station to save the captain and engineer, Data takes the transporters offline, insisting that he will not sacrifice the exocomps to save his crewmates. Riker threatens to relieve him of duty but agrees see whether the exocomps will remain active after being reprogrammed, which Data believes would mean that they choose to accept the dangerous mission. The exocomps allow themselves to be transported, and repair the station in a way that none of the crew had known was possible. One of the exocomps sacrifices itself to allow the other two to be recovered. Later, Picard tells Data that he understands why the android felt it necessary to risk two human lives in order to protect the exocomps.

Analysis: Until I rewatched it for this review, “The Quality of Life” was one of very few episodes of Next Gen that I had only seen once. That’s because it’s one of very few episodes that I find not only poorly written but offensive. On a few occasions, Star Trek’s writers have achieved philosophical insights into the nature and meaning of life – one of the installments referenced by this one, “The Measure of a Man,” is an example of such a superlative episode, as is “The Offspring,” both reflections on what it means to be a living being with a soul. Both these stories focus on Data and teach by example; they ask more questions than they answer, and let viewers wrestle with their own beliefs about how spirituality and morality factor in. “The Quality of Life,” on the other hand, feels like a polemical lecture wrapped in an unbelievable, out-of-character storyline.

Unlike its writers, I don’t presume to know better than another when life begins or how sentience is determined. Star Trek is pretty vague to begin with on exactly what the responsibilities of higher life forms should be toward lower ones – we learned from The Voyage Home that we must save the whales not for their own sake but for the good of Earth, yet the majority of human Starfleet officers apparently still eat meat in the 24th century, so there are still distinctions being drawn between sentient and non-sentient beings and how the former are permitted to treat the latter. We’ve witnessed double standards in this franchise about the ethical treatment of helpful, harmless life forms as opposed to scary hive minds or menacing intelligences. Tribbles certainly qualify as life forms and seem about as intelligent as many fuzzy human pets, yet no one talks about protecting their rights as living beings when Scotty decides to dump them on the Klingons. If the exocomps count as sentient life because they will fight to protect themselves, shouldn’t Daystrom’s M-5 computer have counted as well, and Kirk et al have been charged with murder for driving this unique individual to suicide? Couldn’t the exocomps’ decision to sacrifice one individual to save two others reflect not nascent altruism, but the same sort of brutal disregard for individuality exhibited by the Borg?

As theoretical discussions, these are wonderful topics, but this episode isn’t much interested in theory. Data talks to Crusher for all of two minutes before becoming certain that he can define life, an issue with which scientists, philosophers and theologians have struggled for millennia. For all his wanting to be human, Data puts his own moral sense above that of his crewmates, having concluded that his is superior. Structurally, it has a lot in common with horror stories in which the manufactured individual (a la Frankenstein’s monster) inevitably becomes the villain. We see Data make the decision to throw away two fully realized human lives to protect a life form that can probably be rebuilt, since Farallon clearly has the technology – not that anyone seems interested in how she created these things. Certainly I’d understand if Data refused to let the exocomps be destroyed without anything at stake. But the implication is that all potentially sentient beings should be treated as equal at all times. How, then, does Data justify the use of weapons against Romulan battleships or trying to shoot Borg drones before they can shoot him? Since he concludes that new, unknown life must be nurtured even at the expense of existing life, I must assume that if Data were forced to choose between the life of a mother or the life of a fetus, he’d choose the fetus. There’s the additional implication that if Data were forced to choose between machine life and human life – oh, say, Lore – he’d stick with his own.

And he gets praised for this – for sticking with his convictions, which Picard finds very human. Picard doesn’t point out that sticking with one’s own personal convictions, putting one’s own values above those of others, doesn’t always mean a virtuous act like standing up for minorities against bigoted government laws or fighting to protect heretics being attacked by a religious mob. Sometimes, sticking with one’s convictions leads to things like scapegoating homosexuals or shooting gynecologists, in the name of protecting family values or saving the unborn. I’m trying to figure out if there’s a way to discuss my visceral loathing of “The Quality of Life” without noting the ways it touches upon the abortion debate, always a dangerous subject for television – so dangerous, in fact, that it tends to get presented in science fiction buried in metaphors and parallel situations. The words “life” and “choice” get thrown around a lot in this episode, in absolute terms where the “pro-life” position must be protected at all costs and “choice” is ultimately given not to the adults facing death but to the embryonic life forms.

Gender stereotypes get thrown around, too. I don’t think it can possibly be an accident that this particular story follows an extended opening sequence in which four crewmembers talk about how only men grow beards and only women wear makeup. (Really? There’s not one 24th century human male who wears eyeliner or nail polish?) The female scientist who developed the exocomps repeatedly apologizes for being so “touchy” – Data and LaForge make it clear that she’s barely mature enough to handle criticism, let alone to make decisions about the fate of the potential life forms she has conceived. When Daystrom and Soong created life from lifelessness, they celebrated themselves as near-gods, yet Farallon is written not as a would-be goddess nor even a mother, but a petty technician who doesn’t have the imagination to appreciate what she’s made. When she isn’t scoffing at the ridiculousness of the idea that something she built could have taken on a life of its own, she’s sulking that her particle fountain isn’t working (and its failure is epic – it kills one on her own team and nearly kills Picard and LaForge). She appears to have all the drawbacks of male super-geniuses we’ve seen on the show – arrogant, prideful, not a good team player, given to fits of despair over setbacks – without any of the breathtaking insights.

Then again, maybe that’s a good thing. Data’s actions here don’t seem heroic to me but childishly misguided at best, terrifying at worst. Beverly compares his questions to the ones Wesley asked as a child, but we never saw Wesley place his own childish values above the lives of other crewmembers. We’ve often seen Data value his own life less than that of humans, to offer to go into dangerous situations and have to be talked out of it by Picard and the others. This is an opposite extreme that’s hard to swallow. Data doesn’t want to feel unique and alone, so he concludes that the exocomps are like himself, then he concludes that exocomp life is as valuable as if not more valuable than humanoid life. And uses his abilities as the android science officer of the Enterprise to condemn Picard and LaForge to death accordingly. Only later, after his completely out of character speech about the need to protect all life equally, he offers to beam down in place of the exocomps, a solution he knows Riker can’t and won’t permit.

In a better-written episode, we’d have been spared the lecture and Data would simply have beamed himself into the deadly radiation to save Picard and LaForge while sparing the exocomps. Then the exocomps would have demonstrated their sentience by rescuing him, or better yet, the crew would have rescued Data and we’d have been left with unsettling uncertainty about whether or not the exocomps qualify as intelligent beings. We’d have had to come to our own conclusions, and make our own decisions about what sort of ethical behavior should follow from there. But as I said before, this episode isn’t interested in theory. It isn’t interested in asking us to think long and hard about the importance of our own lives versus other lives and about how we make ethical choices. It’s feeding us a message about potential life having absolute value, even more so than the lives of already-living people, and suggesting that there is always one appropriate course of action in a situation where such a conflict arises. That’s a moral that I just can’t swallow, and I really resent having Star Trek – a series created with traditional religion deliberately left out – trying to force it down my throat.

Plot Summary: Picard orders Worf to use his free time to relax, so Worf reluctantly agrees to accompany Alexander to the holodeck to play sheriff and deputy in historic Deadwood, South Dakota. Meanwhile, LaForge and Data carry out an experiment to see whether Data’s neural network can serve as an emergency backup for the ship’s computer. While Worf and Alexander are attempting to arrest the notorious holographic criminal Eli Hollander, Data experiences an energy surge. Soon Crusher finds that her play script has been replaced by Data’s poetry, Riker learns that the replicators will only produce food for Data’s cat Spot, and Data himself is talking in Old West dialect. Within the holodeck program, Alexander is abducted by paternal outlaw Frank Hollander – who resembles Data – and tries to end the program, but the controls are unresponsive. Worf assumes at first that Data, like Counselor Troi, has been invited by Alexander to participate in the scenario, but when Data injures him, Worf too finds that he cannot shut down the program. When he seeks out Troi, he finds that Eli Hollander, too, now looks like Data. Troi guesses that the program will end once Worf plays the scenario to its conclusion, so Worf agrees to free the prisoner Eli in exchange for Alexander’s safe return. But Troi believes as well that no stereotypical gunslinger can be trusted and advises Worf to prepare for a shootout with a man with android abilities. Worf uses his communicator to set up a temporary shield around himself while LaForge works to extract Data’s programming from the ship’s computer. Though Worf finds that he must fight numerous Data lookalikes, he is able to protect Alexander with Troi’s help, and the program ends just before barmaid Annie – yet another Data – manages to kiss him.

Analysis: Once again in “A Fistful of Datas” Worf is not a merry man, which tends to make for a very merry episode even when it’s silly. In this case the storyline is quite ridiculous but also quite entertaining. We get to see what goes on during a slow stretch of space travel: Crusher tries to recruit the entire crew to appear in her play (with Picard insisting that he’s not a very good actor and Riker demonstrating that he’s always over the top), Data and LaForge tinker with engineering experiments, Picard practices the flute he learned to play while under the influence of the probe from Kataan – a lovely bit of continuity – and Worf looks for something, anything, to do other than let his son drag him to the holodeck for some costume play. I’m not sure why Picard doesn’t demand that LaForge take some time off as well, but maybe, after umpteen interruptions in his quarters on his afternoon off, Picard has simply had enough by the time Worf appears. Only a Klingon would scowl so much about being given free time.

So hat and all, Worf lets himself be led to the holodeck, where not even the appearance of a brothel added to the program by Reg Barclay can improve his mood. Neither can Deanna Troi, also invited by Alexander to participate since she likes Westerns – delightfully, she does not take on a traditionally female role in this reenactment full of stereotypes, but has her own weapons and no interest in saddling herself to the new sheriff. Of course it seems perfectly logical that Data might join in as well, given his ongoing project to understand human emotion and behavior. It doesn’t even seem improbable that Data would choose to play a villain. Alexander’s response to being kidnapped is not to become fearful, but to get annoyed that it has happened at this particular point in the scenario and try to fix the programming. Even discovering that the computer won’t obey him doesn’t make him panic, since he doesn’t yet know why Data has turned up in his scenario.

Even though we see the explanation unfolding, it makes little sense, but I doubt anyone really cares unless they have as little sense of humor as Picard appears to have when Data – whose recreational programming has somehow been crossed with that of the holodeck – spits in a planter on his way out of a briefing. It’s hard to say which is funnier: Worf’s scowling refusal to find reasons to smile, or Data’s complete obliviousness to them. Personally, I’m partial to the scene where Data tries to reason with Spot as if she were human, while Spot behaves like a cat, refusing to eat her new nutritional supplement and jumping up onto a keypad while Data is trying to type, resulting in her being lifted and dumped and called a varmint. Worf is entirely cognizant of how silly he may look, whereas Data doesn’t have a clue and wouldn’t be embarrassed if he did. Nor would Data be embarrassed by his appearance as a conniving gunslinger, the gunslinger’s cocky son, a cliched Western Mexican, even the barmaid who tries to lure Worf with her charms. Worf, of course, looks like he’d rather be attacked by Romulans than snuggled by Data in barmaid’s clothes, though he does promise Alexander that should Deadwood face danger again, the sheriff and deputy may return.

Having nothing to say about the science by which Data’s gears cross with the ship’s – only nonessential circuits, fortunately, so that all the results are comic – I can only mention the numerous wonderful character moments. Like the look on Worf’s face when asked whether his father was an armadillo, or Riker giving a melodramatic reading of Data’s poetry about Spot, or Troi leaping in with her big gun and saving Worf from all the villainous Datas. I always wanted Troi and Riker to end up together, yet I find the slow development of Troi and Worf’s romance very satisfying, all the more so since Worf thinks of Riker as his best friend on the ship. A Betazoid and a would-be-traditional Klingon aren’t a great bet to go the distance, and I’m not sure that Worf ever loves Troi the way he will come to love Jadzia (nor that Troi ever loves Worf the way she once loved Riker and will again). Yet their gradual recognition that more than friendship is between them, followed ultimately by their decision that the friendship matters more than the romance, is one of the most adult explorations of a relationship in this franchise where relationships often seem stuck in adolescence.

Plot Summary: A shuttle carrying Picard, Ro, Keiko O’Brien and Guinan back from shore leave is caught in a mysterious energy field. O’Brien is able to transport them back to the Enterprise just as it explodes, but he reads a drop in mass and they rematerialize as children. Crusher can find no signs of mental degeneration, yet she convinces Picard that he should turn over command to Riker until they know whether the condition will worsen. Ro is furious at being relieved of duty. Because Keiko’s plant samples can be restored to maturity, Crusher believes a specific set of molecular codes have been stripped from the crewmembers’ genes and can be replaced using the transporter, but before she and LaForge can attempt the modifications, the ship is attacked by two Klingon warbirds under the command of Ferengi mercenaries. The Enterprise is boarded and Riker is only barely able to lock out the computer before the Ferengi take over the bridge. While the crew is being beamed down to the surface to work in the mines, the children are imprisoned in the classrooms. Picard uses the school computer to bring up ship’s schematics and Ro, Guinan, Keiko, and Alexander Rozhenko to retrieve equipment, pretending they are playing games. Then Picard demands to see his “father” and convinces one of the Ferengi to take him to Riker, whom he tells that the children are bored and need their classroom computer. The Ferengi threaten to kill all the children starting with Riker’s “son” if he does not unlock all the systems, so Riker unlocks the computer begins a very long technical explanation of the workings of the ship’s systems while Picard and the children use the transporter and their stolen equipment to beam the Ferengi one by one to the surface. Once Picard has forced the Ferengi to surrender, Crusher and O’Brien use the transporter to restore Picard, Keiko, and Guinan, though Ro is in no hurry to become an adult again.

Analysis: “Rascals” is one of those ridiculous episodes that’s either a lot of fun or quite painful to watch, depending on how well the viewer shuts off the analytic part of the brain to which science fiction usually appeals. Personally, I find it enjoyable, but that’s on the level of crew interaction in spite of rather than because of the storyline. It’s nice to see that Picard has recovered from his phobia of children so completely that it’s neither mentioned nor displayed a single time during his age regression; he doesn’t really know how to think like a child, but he gets one of his better ideas from observing Alexander, who’s a real boy. The scenes with the O’Briens after Keiko becomes a little girl are both amusing and very uncomfortable to watch, as Keiko only wants to hear her husband say that he’ll love her no matter what she looks like while Miles can barely bring himself to look at a wife who’s only a few years older than their daughter. The young actress playing Keiko is terrific – she says “Miles!” in precisely the same annoyed voice as Rosalind Chao – and the girl playing Ro is terrific as well, capturing Michelle Forbes’ sullen, snarky inflections perfectly. I’m less convinced by young Guinan and young Picard, but they’re fun to watch anyway; as Guinan says, it’s been a long time since she was a child, and Picard seems dedicated to never letting himself regress in any way. When Troi suggests to Picard that he may have been given a rare opportunity to explore the road not taken, to become the archaeologist he never had time to be while working his way through the ranks, Picard seems completely uninterested in trying to be someone other than a Starfleet captain.

The bio-babble that theorizes why the crewmembers were regressed in age, yet kept their memories intact, doesn’t make any attempt to explain how come their uniforms shrunk right along with them, and the mysterious energy field that destroys the shuttle is characterized in equally vague terms. So while I can state that Crusher thinks the crewmembers’ rybo-viroxic nucleic structures were affected by the field, and that LaForge says the tritanium in the shuttle hull plating broke down, I don’t have the faintest idea how these things supposedly happened, nor what sort of energy characterized by sparkly blue lightning might have triggered the reactions. It bothers me when there’s no effort made to make the science sound convincing. Yes, it’s still adorable when Jean-Luc calls Riker “Dad” and gives him a hug, but I’d appreciate it more if there was a solid reason for such a ruse to be necessary. And it’s more creepy than entertaining when Crusher hovers around Picard as if he’s Wesley, talking maternally to him instead of matter-of-factly as the ship’s doctor…at least, I hope it’s supposed to be maternal rather than her frequent private-time “Jean-Luc, I have something to tell you” intimacies, because that would be ten times as creepy. I’ll buy Miles’ parental instincts, warning Keiko that the coffee is hot, because he has a daughter sleeping in the next room, and I’ll buy Worf’s hesitation to take an order from a Picard he doesn’t recognize – he is after all in charge of security – but how can Riker and Crusher, who’ve both seen Picard as Locutus of Borg, be so thrown by mere changes in appearance?

Ro is even angrier than Picard that she has to give up her job because of a physical alteration, and when the kids are thrown together in the classroom, it’s immediately obvious that that’s because she’s very good at it – she’s the first one with practical suggestions, even if they end up not being workable because the main computer is offline. As she keeps pointing out to Guinan, she didn’t have a happy childhood in the first place, raised in an internment camp where she rarely even had a bed; of course she doesn’t want to hear about how cute she looks or how much fun she could be having skipping down corridors. Yet in the end, she seems more tempted by a chance at a redo than any of the others. Picard may loathe the idea of returning to the Academy as Wesley Crusher’s roommate, but Ro might be able to erase her mistakes and start fresh in Starfleet if she chose to do so. Of course, Starfleet is a dangerous place; this episode has a very large body count, including all the scientists forced into the mines by the Ferengi as well as the casualties we hear reported on Decks 38-40, yet the villains are treated as comical, with Riker making up wildly inventive names for computer functions and Picard retaking his bridge by telling the Ferengi who threatened to murder all the children that he wants his chair back. We’ve seen Picard devastated over the loss of a single crewmember, so to hear such flippancy when a science team has been murdered and several crewmembers killed in battle seems completely out of character no matter how old he looks.

Plot Summary: Amanda Rogers arrives aboard the Enterprise after being selected out of many applicants to become an intern. She will be working primarily with Dr. Crusher, though her background in biology and eco-regeneration make her an ideal choice at the moment when the ship is trying to save the ecosystem of Tagra IV, which is so polluted that the planet depends on aging filters to keep its environment safe for its population. Rogers does not mention to her new crewmates that she has latent mental powers, which lately have been granting all her wishes; the crew learns the truth, though, when she stops a warp core explosion while Data and LaForge stare. Soon after, Q appears to tell the crew that Rogers, who was orphaned as a child, is actually the child of two Q who had taken human form to study on Earth. He says that he caused the warp core breach to test her powers, and now he must bring her to the Q Continuum to spare her further corruption by humans. Picard insists that Rogers has the right to choose whether she wants to live among humans or the Continuum, but agrees to allow Q to visit with her. Q helps Rogers to visualize her biological parents. She asks Crusher whether Crusher would bring back her dead husband given the opportunity. Crusher says she can’t really relate to the girl’s extraordinary abilities, but she is displeased when Rogers uses her powers for a shortcut in an experiment whose entire point was to measure different metabolic rates in vaccine samples. Rogers discovers that she can stand on the hull of the Enterprise and whisk Riker away for a romantic encounter, though when she tries to force him to love her, she discovers that it feels as artificial for herself as for him. Meanwhile Picard learns that the tornado in which Rogers’ parents died seems to have been artificial, and Q admits that the Continuum executed them – which they will do to the girl as well if she is not a full Q, which is what he is there to decide. Picard makes a furious speech about morality that Q brushes aside. He says that he has already decided Rogers will live, but she must choose whether to accompany him to the Q Continuum or renounce her powers completely. Rogers chooses to remain among humans, but when the atmosphere of Tagra IV begins to deteriorate, she cleans the deadly atmosphere of all its pollutants. Acknowledging that she can’t help using her powers, she agrees to go with Q to the Continuum once she has said goodbye to the parents who raised her.

Analysis: I think any review of “True Q” must begin by praising Olivia d’Abo, the actress who plays Amanda Rogers. This is because, by all rights, Amanda should be intolerable, yet she comes across instead as charming, sweet, and easy to like. Amanda is what what would be known in fan fiction circles as a Mary Sue – a fantasy-projection who is so perfect, no one can possibly take her seriously. The hallmarks of a Mary Sue are that she serves on the ship (or in the village, in the army, etc., depending on the fictional universe), yet secretly is as out of place there as she always felt in her hometown (school, previous job, etc.); she is immediately loved by everyone who meets her, who can’t help responding to her hidden charms and cleverness; she has the near-magical ability to attract whichever love interest she chooses; and she has some great talent that ends up saving lives. Usually characters who are too good to be true seem at best unbelievable and at worst intolerable – a lot of the hatred directed at Wesley Crusher is because he’s the male equivalent, a Gary Stu, wise beyond his years and saving the ship to grateful praise – so it would be reasonable for anyone to despise Amanda as a matter of principle. After all, how many of us can relate to someone who’s top of her class in three subject areas, can make puppies appear just by wishing for them, and happens to be beautiful and bubbly as well? That d’Abo keeps her grounded, even awkward at times, is a credit to her as well as director Marvin Rush.

Whether or not one enjoys “True Q” probably depends on whether one appreciates d’Abo’s performance and John de Lancie’s always reliable wit, because there’s not a lot here, otherwise – a vague allegory about not polluting, a few seconds of gratuitous ship-in-danger and later planet-in-danger. There’s no drama in the big threats because we know the warp core isn’t going to breach and kill everyone, and it’s pretty unlikely that an entire planet’s population is going to die in the final minutes of an episode, particularly since there are Enterprise crewmembers down there assisting. Plus we’re shown so little about the Tagrans that we don’t have a lot invested in their culture beyond not wanting everyone to die. This story is all about the mysterious Q Continuum and how its members interact with humans – specifically, the Enterprise crew, who are sometimes nearly as super-human as Mary Sues (like Crusher, who wants to heal the sick more than she wants anything for herself). We learn that the Q can be as ruthless to their own as our beloved Q has been to inferior species like us; he may have been suspended once, but he never indicated that execution was a possibility. The fact that a pair of Q conceived a child and got attached to it as humans is spoken of with revulsion by Q (score one for us); the fact that they proved as inadequate as humans as they had been as Q and were therefore executed is spoken of without revulsion by Q (score another one for us). This isn’t one of the wacky, fun Q episodes like playing cupid or giving Riker super-powers; this is serious business, where a girl’s life and the fate of a planet hang in the balance.

Amanda may have super-powers, but she’s been raised as a human, and her values nearly the same as those in Starfleet. When Q tells her that she can do anything, the only thing she really wants is to see her parents. She hasn’t worked her way up to thinking, or admitting, that she might like to bring them back in a way that would allow her to interact with them, though later when she talks to Crusher, she’s apparently considering it. Most of her wishes are relatively harmless; the puppies don’t chew the carpet before she sends them back, her experiment with the vaccines doesn’t ruin any one-of-a-kind samples. She doesn’t even kiss Riker properly before she realizes that it’s wrong to force his affections. In fact, despite being attractive and smart, she seems pretty lonely and typically adolescent even before discovering she’s a Q; she has no peers on the ship, she talks to Crusher about wishing she’d known her real parents, she can’t figure out what she wants to be when she grows up. To his credit, Q doesn’t take advantage of these weaknesses, though he doesn’t particularly try to feed her strengths, either. It’s not clear whether he really intends to sentence her to death if he believes that’s what the Continuum would want, though I can’t help wondering if he had something to do with her winning the internship aboard the Enterprise precisely so Picard will be around when the Voice of the Continuum gets on Q’s case. There’s no doubt that Picard will argue for Amanda’s autonomy even knowing what he knows about the capabilities of the Q.

I like that Amanda bonds with Beverly over scientific experiments, though it’s odd that Troi is so distant and so ineffectual talking to a girl whom I would think might really need a counselor. I suppose that if Harry Potter didn’t grow up stark raving bonkers, then Amanda ought to be fine. I’m a little surprised, too, that Amanda doesn’t ask the other crewmembers about their previous encounters with Q, since she knows they’ve met before and it’s obvious that Picard has misgivings both about the Q in general and about this Q in particular. I love when she sends him flying across the room – Q being Q, of course that makes him respect her rather than making him angry. And of course he pretends to want her to best him so that he can say she’s passing his tests, though there’s never any sense that he wants her destroyed. As always, Q seems determined to impress Picard, even as he’s insulting him and his species. Did he have to plead with the Continuum to be sent as their “expert in humanity” to evaluate Amanda, or did he only become interested when he realized that Amanda was headed toward his favorite starship?

Rewatching this series, I’m less and less comfortable with the writers’ certainty that human values and human morality are so exceptional, but it’s kind of like Winston Churchill’s quote about democracy being the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. I’d rather be human than Q…though it would be nice to be able to make puppies appear out of thin air and have Riker flirt with me.

Plot Summary: While mapping a globular cluster using a modified deflector grid, several crewmembers experience strange afflictions. Riker has trouble staying awake, LaForge’s VISOR fails, Data’s chronometer falls out of sync with the ship’s, Worf believes the ship’s barber is trying to attack him, and an explosion appears to damage a cargo bay though minutes later there is no sign that anything occurred. Since the symptoms seem to affect people who worked in the cargo bay, LaForge investigates and discovers a bulkhead in molecular flux from a subspace field that has somehow penetrated the ship. Troi tells Riker that she has talked to several crewmembers experiencing extreme anxiety and suggests getting them together to talk. When they meet, they realize that they all had identical experiences of being cold and trapped. On the holodeck, they work together to recreate an operating table upon which they all believe they were experimented. Crusher examines them and finds that they have inexplicable injuries – particularly Riker, whose arm appears to have been cut off and reattached. Moreover, Data’s self-diagnostic indicates that he was off the ship for more than an hour. Picard learns that two more crewmembers are missing; when one is returned a short time later, he dies in agony before he can speak. Because Riker has apparently been taken several times, Picard agrees to let him use stimulants to stay conscious and wear a homing device so they can try to track him when it happens again. That night Riker is removed from his room and taken to a dark laboratory. Aliens try to sedate him, but he remains aware of his surroundings, spotting the sedated missing ensign. The aliens try to widen the subspace rift in the cargo bay, but the Enterprise crew is able to close it just after Riker gets himself and the ensign through the rift. Data wonders whether the aliens were explorers like themselves, but Riker recalls the dead crewman and Picard worries that the abductions could happen again.

Analysis: I think of “Schisms” as The X-Files episode of Next Gen, though of course the theme of alien abduction in science fiction is much, much older. Humans get abducted and experimented upon by malevolent aliens! They wake at home, unable to articulate exactly what has happened to them, and people think they’re crazy! Since this is Star Trek and we know these characters, they don’t actually turn out to be crazy, which takes away some of the fun — when it was Fox Mulder, we were never completely sure, even when we were seeing what he was seeing. And being Starfleet officers, none of these characters are given to fury or panic for more than a few seconds at a time. They go looking for answers. At least we really see why Troi is invaluable – while Crusher doesn’t guess that all these random complaints might be related, and while LaForge can’t guess how an engineering anomaly could be affecting people from all over the ship, Troi decides that it would be helpful for everyone having similar experiences to talk to one another and see if they can recreate what’s been troubling them. No sooner does she get them all on the holodeck than one person’s memories and mental images begin to trigger the next. The scene where the crewmembers together design and modify the table upon which they’ve been tortured, in a dark room with grid lines but no other distractions, is as creepy as anything this series ever pulled off.

Sadly, the rest of the episode doesn’t have the same level of intensity, and by the time we actually get to see the evil clicky aliens, there’s almost a comic element to their menace. This is largely because the intense situation is muddled with far too much technobabble. What I think happens, and correct me if I’m wrong, is that the aliens create a subspace field using tetryons, and since LaForge says that shouldn’t even be able to exist in the Enterprise’s space-time continuum, no one notices them using it to abduct crewmembers. So the Enterprise shoots its gravitons, which may or may not be what LaForge is channeling through the deflectors to speed up mapping the globular cluster and thus bringing the ship to the attention of the aliens – this point is really never made clear, since Riker is falling asleep on the job before LaForge implements it. Somehow the gravitons open a rift right where Riker needs one, then close it before the aliens can retaliate further and destroy the Enterprise. It’s hard to take any threat to the ship seriously, since we know that even if it blows up, some temporal reversal will bring it back. It’s also a pretty good bet that Riker, LaForge, Worf, and Data will all survive.

This means that the biggest threat would appear to be to the woman working with the others to recreate the alien torture chamber; everything about her screams red-shirt, even though she’s wearing blue. But after getting us all involved with what happened to her while she’s working with the command team, she’s not even among the missing when the computer finally does a head count. (You mean to tell me the computer doesn’t notice every time a comm badge goes completely AWOL? Not the best security system, Starfleet.) Sure, it’s sad that a crewmember we don’t know has convulsions and dies, and that another crewmember we don’t know looks practically dead when Riker finds her in the alien lab, but since those people aren’t even involved in building the operating table with Worf and LaForge, we have no connection to them, and we aren’t given a reason to care about them as individuals – no one exclaims about how wonderful the missing ensign is at her job. I know the original series comes under criticism for killing off so many ensigns, but at least they usually get a few lines first – we have a reason to like them. These aren’t even characters we’re seeing, they’re just names in uniforms.

There are some wonderful major character moments in the early minutes when Data holds a poetry reading that nearly bores the entire crew – not just the afflicted Riker – to sleep, ending with a delightful nerdy ode in honor of his cat Spot. (“O Spot, the complex levels of behavior you display/connote a fairly well-developed cognitive array.”) It would make sense for some glitch relating to that event to connect to the threat – for the problem with Data’s chronometer to be directly related to the clumsiness of his poetry, for LaForge to mention Data’s stickler-for-detail personality when they disagree about how long he was gone. There’s not really a B storyline, just vignettes, so the dialogue has to be sharp. In the scenes where it is, like Worf complaining to the barber about his last haircut and getting lectured about using hair conditioner, it’s a terrific show…but in the scenes that get bogged down with tetryons and gravitons, it’s hard to work up much concern even for Riker when he’s strapped to the torture table. Plus the special effect that carries him off the ship is cheesy beyond belief. Evil aliens are a risky prospect at best, so on a show that can’t do horror-movie gruesome or kill off a regular, it’s important to make the audience care about the victims and keep the storyline focused. I wish my reaction at the end was more of a shudder at Picard’s concern that the aliens could return for more, rather than an instinctive desire not to have to sit through any more of the same technobabble.

Plot Summary: The Enterprise picks up a distress call from the USS Jenolen, which disappeared 75 years earlier. They track the ship to the surface of a massive Dyson Sphere built to surround a sun and harness its power. The Jenolen has crashed on the surface and an away team discovers Captain Montgomery Scott suspended in the ship’s transporter. LaForge rematerializes him and brings him aboard the Enterprise, where Scotty is awed by the technological developments and eager to work in engineering. But LaForge is impatient with the gaps in Scotty’s knowledge and bored by his stories of life aboard the NCC-1701, leaving Scotty depressed. After a visit to Ten Forward, he takes a bottle of Aldebaran whiskey to the holodeck, where he recreates the bridge of Kirk’s Enterprise. When Picard finds him there, feeling old and useless, the captain is inspired to ask LaForge to take Scotty back aboard the Jenolen to see if they can recover the old ship’s surveys of the Dyson Sphere. While the two engineers work, the Enterprise inadvertently triggers a mechanism that causes a hatch to open, pulling them inside the Dyson Sphere and toward its unstable star. When LaForge loses contact with the Enterprise, Scotty hypothesizes that the ship might be trapped inside the sphere and traces its ion trail to the now-closed hatch. He proposes that he and LaForge use the Jenolen to reopen the hatch and jam its doors to allow the Enterprise to escape. The plan works, but LaForge can’t drop the Jenolen’s shields to fly free. Realizing that he will have to destroy the smaller ship, Picard beams the engineers to safety and orders Worf to blow up the Jenolen so that the Enterprise can fly through the hatch before it can close. To thank him for his help, the crew offers Scotty the use of one of the Enterprise’s shuttlecraft so that he can get to the retirement colony that was his original destination on the Jenolen. Scotty scoffs that retirement is for old men, and he isn’t ready to quit exploring.

Analysis: As happy as I was to see Scotty again, I didn’t love “Relics” when it first aired. I thought it made some of the same mistakes that became frequent on Next Gen during the later seasons – a sense of complacency, an attitude among the crew that they were the best the galaxy could possibly have to offer, and no clue about how a counselor might best be employed – not that I’m complaining that they got Troi away from feeling everyone’s pain, but they don’t seem to know enough to have her spend time with orphaned children, aliens in crisis, and lost crewmembers from a different era. As powerful and touching as I found the scene where Scotty visits the original Enterprise bridge on the holodeck (footage, I believe, from “The Mark of Gideon” when Kirk finds himself alone on his ship), that scene should not be necessary because this crew should be ecstatic to have someone on board who can share so much living history, and Picard should have Troi sitting with Scotty right from the start to help him study the new tech specs and look up what became of his old friends.

This time, I guess the nostalgia factor is stronger for me, because although I think those flaws are still there, they didn’t distract me at all from the storyline. Nor did the continuity errors that have crept in after the fact, like Scotty’s thinking Jim Kirk must have come looking for him – Scotty will be there the day Kirk disappears aboard the Enterprise-B, so Scotty of Picard’s era should believe Kirk is dead, though that flashback won’t occur until Star Trek: Generations. It’s just such a delight to see Scotty and LaForge working together, and Scotty and Picard reflecting together on the starships that were their first loves. James Doohan was rarely called upon to show much range as an actor on the original series – he was either in panic mode about his engines or commanding mode when Kirk left him in charge on the ship, with a few moments of drunken or possessed glee – and he gets as much to do here as in most of those original episodes, giving a lovely, nuanced performance which both makes reference to his classic Trek style and demonstrates how many more layers there are to Montgomery Scott.

Many, many moments make this episode a lovely journey through Star Trek history for long-time viewers. Scotty recalls the bad temper of the Dohlman (“Elaan of Troyius”), the trouble he got into on Argelius (“Wolf in the Fold”), and his feelings about Kirk asking for a cold start to the engines at Psi 2000 (“The Naked Time”) – all minor incidents that were presumably footnotes in the annals of Starfleet, and the details described by Scotty probably didn’t get into the history books at all. Someone should have been following him around with a recording device for whoever in the 24th century is working on an unauthorized biography of Kirk’s crew! Picard’s crew by contrast seems very stuffy and boring – Picard is quick to get back to studying the Dyson Sphere without first asking Scotty whether he learned anything of interest on the Jenolen, Crusher’s quick to dismiss the old flirt from her sickbay, the ensign who shows him his guest quarters is quick to deliver basic information and get back to some other task, LaForge is quick to become annoyed with the gaps in Scotty’s knowledge and demand to be left alone so he can get back to his spectrographic analysis. There’s a delightful moment when Scotty tries to convince LaForge that he should treat his captain like a child – giving him exactly what he needs but not all he wants – and is then horrified to learn that LaForge tells Picard exactly how long he expects his tasks to take rather than doubling the estimates so he can be thought of as a miracle worker. LaForge is downright nasty, telling Scotty that he’s in the way, even though Scotty is deserving of his respect due to his rank as well as basic human decency. Is LaForge threatened by the legendary engineer? But then why doesn’t he seem more aware of Scotty’s achievements? He should not need that lecture from Picard about making Scotty feel useful.

The arbitrariness is one of the things that initially irritated me about the storyline. I could believe that Data would be dismissive to an elderly engineer messing with the dilithium crystals, not out of intentional rudeness but because an android simply wouldn’t know how to make the situation better – although really I’d expect Data to have a tireless interest in Scotty’s stories about life in the 23rd century. And LaForge is usually relatively tuned in to people’s feelings, even when it’s someone as annoying as Barclay; Scotty doesn’t seem any more incompetent than Barclay has on occasion and he’s got a much better excuse. So where is Troi, who should have arrived in sickbay at the same moment as Scotty, to learn how he feels about the time displacement and the deaths of his companions aboard the Jenolen if nothing else? (A scene was written and discarded in which she comes to counsel Scotty, only to have him dismiss her upon learning that she’s a professional psychologist rather than an admiring crewmember; the fact that it wasn’t included seems typical to me of how the show’s writers frequently discount Troi and her profession.) I accept that Picard and Riker have so much on their plates that they can’t take the time to get to know Scotty right away, but everyone else is missing a golden opportunity for a personal glimpse into the past of several Starfleet legends. Having met and melded with Spock and Sarek, isn’t Picard at least curious to know the insights of someone who served with him for so long?

What I’m saying, I guess, is that this episode probably should have been a two-parter, though it’s probably too soon after “Unification” and would have required a more substantive plot involving the Dyson Sphere…which would have been easy enough to pull off, since it feels like a tease having it turn out to be abandoned. We only see Scotty’s initial astonishment at the sight of Worf in a Starfleet uniform – imagine if we’d had the opportunity to see them working together! It’s also nice to see a side of Picard we never glimpse among his own crewmembers, when he’s talking captain to captain about how you never forget your first starship. Guinan is mentioned several times, but she never appears, which is a shame because like Scotty she’s a woman out of her era and her element. I’d also have loved to see Scotty looking up his old crewmates – I can understand why the writers might not have wanted to discuss all of them in case they decided to have one or another in a future film, but we’ve all seen McCoy and Spock already in this generation, and I’d think the news that Spock is alive and on a top-secret mission Picard isn’t at liberty to discuss would make Scotty feel both happy and more a part of the current universe.

The fact that so much of the equipment is basically the same after 75 years suggests that maybe the Federation isn’t as evolved as everyone thinks it is, assuming they have nothing to learn from Mark Twain or Scotty; if an engineer from the Navy 75 years ago woke up on a current Naval vessel, can you imagine his first glimpse of the navigational computers and ship-to-shore communication devices? And nobody seems convinced that synthehol is any improvement on grog! The episode’s conclusion, at least, makes up for most of its flaws, even if it’s a bit improbable that Starfleet would let Picard hand a shuttle over to Captain Scott without first having Scotty fill out some paperwork at the nearest starbase. How do they know he won’t slingshot around the nearest star and try to go back in time to his own era? Of course, it has the virtue of leaving Scotty out there for a future encounter, which happens in the Pocket Books novels if not on screen again. I hope he shows this generation a thing or two…I bet Scotty could have turned back the Dominion and gotten Voyager home.

Plot Summary: The U.S.S. Enterprise is summoned when another ship is critically damaged while transporting Lumerian Ambassador Alkar to help end a civil war in a system that’s of crucial importance to a Federation trade route. A Starfleet admiral concludes that Alkar and his party must travel aboard the Enterprise, since any lesser ship would likely come under fire by the combatants. Alkar, an empath, forms an immediate bond with Troi, but his elderly mother expresses loathing of the counselor from the moment she meets her, accusing Troi of having sexual designs on her son. Alkar explains that his mother is ill, and indeed, she dies shortly after her arrival on the ship. Alkar then asks Troi to perform a mourning ritual with him. Afterward, Troi has little patience with her job counseling and completing crew evaluations. Instead she begins to dress provocatively and tries to seduce first Alkar, then Riker, then a crewman she meets in a turbolift. When delegates from the warring planets come aboard, Troi is nasty to both of them, particularly to a female representative named Liva whom Troi accuses of lusting after Alkar. Troi is also showing signs of premature aging, and Alkar tells her that he does not think she should accompany his team to the surface – an announcement that provokes Troi into attacking him with a knife. Crusher and Ogawa realize that Troi’s body is being overwhelmed by neurotransmitters, just as Alkar’s mother was when she died. Though Alkar has stated that his people forbid autopsies, Picard allows Crusher to perform one on the old woman, whom Crusher discovers is neither elderly nor Alkar’s mother, but who apparently died of the condition now afflicting Troi. Picard beams down to confront Alkar, who admits that he uses his empathic abilities to channel his darker emotions into women so that his own mind can remain peaceful when he negotiates. Realizing that Alkar will not willingly free Troi, he permits Crusher to lower Troi’s metabolism to a near-death state. Believing that she has died, Alkar returns to the Enterprise and asks Liva to perform the mourning ritual with him. Picard orders Liva beamed to safety at the same moment Crusher revives Troi and purges her neurotransmitters, forcing all of Alkar’s negative emotions back into his mind. Now it is Alkar who ages prematurely and dies as Troi returns to her previous appearance and personality.

Analysis: “Man of the People” is one of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s worst episodes. If you’ve managed to miss it thus far, do yourself a favor and skip it. About the only thing I can think to praise is the directing, since Winrich Kolbe gets a fairly strong performance out of Marina Sirtis, who has the most thankless acting job since some of her first season “Pain!” moments. And there’s nothing terribly wrong with the special effects, though the aging makeup looks pretty terrible and the process by which Troi de-ages makes no sense at all. Maybe the storyline would play better with the sound off, although I’m inclined to doubt it because it’ll still be pretty obvious what’s going on with Troi.

Know how you can tell when a woman is going bad? That’s right – because she wants to have sex! It isn’t even that she wants indiscriminate sex, or rough sex, or sex with more than one partner at a time, all of which apparently are causes for labeling a human woman a bad girl in the 24th century. Our very first clue that something’s the matter with Troi is that she starts stroking her throat and chest while practicing tai chi, studying herself in the mirror, enjoying her body. Naughty Deanna! Then she goes to the man who has put her into this aroused state, reminding him of all the things he told her they had in common, but he makes faces and rejects her, which really pisses her off. So she grabs the first attractive young crewman she finds, who apparently goes to her quarters very willingly, though he earns a glare from Riker when the first officer arrives to tell the counselor that they’re supposed to be working on crew evaluations. Troi, however, would rather talk about sex, first trying to find out whether Riker is jealous, then sulking when he won’t play along and orders her to think about work. Wicked Deanna! Finally, with her hair already beginning to turn gray, she puts on an exotic dress and goes to Ten Forward, apparently looking for Alkar again, though she becomes incensed when she sees him sitting with Liva and takes out her anger on the woman. Nasty Deanna! When Riker escorts her to her quarters, she grabs him and kisses him, and he only half-resists until she scratches his neck during a kiss, at which point he yells at her and flees. Evil Deanna!

Let me see if I have this right so far: A powerful man decides to make a woman the dumping ground for his nasty dark emotions. When she becomes the victim of this psychic abuse, it is immediately obvious that something is wrong because she stops wanting to nurture everyone around her and starts thinking about erotic satisfaction instead. The most obvious sign of her alteration, though, is that she isn’t pretty any more – she looks like an old woman! This is so embarrassing that Alkar refuses to take her with him to the negotiations, even though leaving her on the ship is a risk because someone else is sure to see what’s going on with her – and they do. They only notice that the abuse has changed her entire personality, though, when she is hideous enough to shock them. Picard barely pays attention to the fact that Troi has stabbed him because he’s so appalled at what has happened to her appearance. He demands to know what Alkar has done, makes a speech about the immorality of using an innocent woman to shoulder the burden of his unpleasant emotions, then is sent back to the ship when Alkar’s adoring female negotiator and next-in-line for his neurotransmitters brings in heavies with guns to threaten Worf. Liva is then dangled as bait to get Alkar’s nasty bits out of Troi, with the assumption, or at least the hope, that the crew can get Liva out of the way before anything irreversible happens to her…even though they’re not yet positive that Troi’s condition is reversible. Fortunately, once Alkar stops sending out uncontrollable sexual impulses and jealous rages, Troi recovers completely! Her hair even turns brown again instantaneously! It’s a scientific miracle!

And Riker is so happy to have his sweet, undemanding Imzadi back again, he doesn’t even apologize for failing to have a real conversation with Troi and see if there’s a reason for her sudden lack of control. Apparently he just assumes it’s PMS or something. If Riker or LaForge or (hahaha) Picard had walked into Ten Forward on the eve of delicate negotiations in front of lots of crewmembers and diplomats wearing tight clothes, flirted with an alien ambassador, had a screeching fit of jealousy aimed at another negotiator, then threw a tantrum when interrupted, he’d be in sickbay as fast as O’Brien could transport him there. What is Riker thinking, writing this off as a bad mood the way he earlier wrote off her preference for boy toys over her duties as ship’s counselor? At least he tells Crusher about his experience – he has to, since Deanna’s fingernails break his skin – but instead of heading down for a casual check-up of the ship’s counselor, Crusher goes back to fretting that Jean-Luc won’t let her perform an invasive autopsy. Why do I have a feeling that if she’d really wanted to, Crusher could have figured out the dead woman’s real age by examining a single skin cell? It isn’t only Troi who acts out of character, but she’s the epicenter of it, and we’re supposed to accept that the rest of the crew would let such extreme behavior by the ship’s counselor slide. No wonder Alkar always picks a woman as the receptacle for his dark side – apparently nobody in the 24th century finds it all that odd when a woman has public hysterics because she can’t get a man.

Wouldn’t it have been awesome if Alkar had put his negative emotions into Troi and she had tried, calmly and lethally, to take over the ship? Or used her empathic gifts to exploit weaker crewmembers so that instead of doing work, she could spend all day in the holodeck plotting a takeover of Vulcan and reintroducing emotion there? Or simply quit being ship’s counselor and demanded to conduct the negotiations herself? What a great story that would have been! Instead of becoming a walking cliche of a bad girl, Troi could have done something out of character, completely unexpected, and really interesting. Or, rather than aging her prematurely, it could have made Troi feel young and strong to have sex on the brain – like her mother, who often seems younger than Troi, not to mention happier with herself and her life. What if Alkar had discovered through her that what he’d been dismissing as “bad” emotions were in fact empowering, giving him insights he’d never had had if he’d kept trying to shunt off all lust, jealousy, hunger and rage? What if he couldn’t negotiate between warring factions precisely because he couldn’t relate to them? So many ways this episode could have been about something…so many ways it fails. And now this review is out of the way, thank the Great Bird, and I never have to watch “Man of the People” again.

Plot Summary: The Enterprise finds the U.S.S. Yosemite trapped in a plasma field and cannot make contact with the ship’s crew. Lieutenant Barclay offers a suggestion that enables LaForge to configure the Enterprise transporters so that the crew can beam through the plasma interference, but when Barclay learns that transport will take longer than usual, he refuses to join the away team, telling Troi that he has always been terrified of being disassembled during the beaming process. The rest of the away team find a dead engineer on the Yosemite but no indication about the whereabouts of the rest of the crew. When Troi calms Barclay sufficiently that he is able to join the team, he beams over in time to learn that the crew has also discovered a shattered plasma container. The crewmembers must beam back one by one, and Barclay encounters a terrifying slug-like creature during transport. He convinces O’Brien and LaForge to test the transporter systems, but neither can find any anomalies. Barclay also discovers that is arm is glowing blue where the creature made contact with it, which he believes must be a hallucination and self-diagnoses as transporter psychosis. Meanwhile, Crusher performs an autopsy on the dead Yosemite engineer and discovers that plasma energy is still animating his body’s systems. LaForge and Data guess that the plasma in the shattered container must have exploded and infected the engineer. Barclay works with them to understand how this could have happened, but he is so distracted that LaForge orders him to rest. When Troi’s meditation techniques fail to soothe him, he wakes O’Brien and asks to beam to the Yosemite again. He sees the creature and wakes the senior staff to tell them that this time he is certain it was no hallucination. Picard orders an investigation and Crusher asks to examine Barclay’s arm. Sure enough, LaForge and Data discover that there are microbes living in the plasma, and Crusher finds some of the same microbes in Barclay’s tissue. She hypothesizes that the life forms, not the explosion, killed the Yosemite engineer. The save Barclay is to suspend him in a transporter beam to remove all the microbes. Though still terrified of the transporter, Barclay agrees, and again is approached by the creature while dematerializing. Determined to face his fear, he grabs the creature. O’Brien discovers that Barclay’s mass has doubled and they beam him back – along with one of the missing crew members from the Yosemite. Barclay reports that several others are trapped in the matter stream, having tried the same technique as the Enterprise to save themselves from the microbes. Worf leads a team to rescue the others. Having saved several lives, Barclay can better face the prospect of using the transporter, but he isn’t happy when O’Brien asks him to watch his pet spider.

Analysis: “Realm of Fear” is my favorite Barclay episode by a long stretch, and that’s including his attempts to rescue Voyager a few years and a couple of Trek shows in the future. Instead of portraying him as a nervous clod in need of hand-holding to perform his duties as in “Hollow Pursuits,” or a self-aggrandizing wannabe hero whose attempts to help the Enterprise and Voyager often led to more problems than solutions, this episode turns what appear to be his weaknesses into strengths; it is only because he refuses to dismiss a very troubling situation that the crew is able to figure out what went wrong on the Yosemite, and only because he stands up to his fears at a critical moment that the Yosemite’s crewmembers’ lives are saved. It’s understandable why the Enterprise crew would be skeptical of listening to Barclay when their initial investigations don’t show anything wrong with him or with the transporter, yet they’re still quick to dismiss his experiences as exaggerated even after Crusher finds proof that something did happen to Barclay during transport. LaForge tells him the gigantic creature he saw in the transporter matter stream was probably a microbe that looked unnaturally large from the effect of the beam. In fact, the opposite is true — what Barclay sees is only a small part of a human being, which is why he doesn’t recognize it as such.

The structure of this episode is very similar to that of The Twilight Zone’s “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” in which a man who has just been released from a mental institution sees – or believes he sees – a gremlin on the wing of the plane committing an act of sabotage, yet no one will listen to his insistence that something is really wrong because of his recent nervous breakdown on a plane. The man in that episode was played by William Shatner, whom Dwight Schultz at times seems to be channeling in “Realm of Fear” to comic effect. Even though the audience sees what Barclay sees, just as the audience saw what Shatner’s Bob Wilson saw, we’re not entirely certain that we’re not sharing a hallucination, even though LaForge assures both Barclay and viewers that there hasn’t been a case of transporter psychosis since they perfected the pattern buffers or something like that. To quote my husband, “Would you really want to trust your atoms to something called a Heisenberg compensator?” Usually on this show, when someone claims something’s wrong but it doesn’t show up on the diagnostics, that just means that the diagnostics are missing something important, which turns out to be the case here. It seems odd to me that Crusher doesn’t pick up on the matter-energy microbes earlier, and I don’t understand the science by which Barclay sees as matter a human being converted into energy, whose mass doesn’t seem to exist as such until he makes contact with another body, but again, in a universe where someone can build something to calculate position and momentum without any error, thus making the transporter possible, this is a quibble.

I don’t love the scenes with Troi, who seems more condescending to Barclay than I’d expect from a counselor; from anyone else, it would be understandable, yet LaForge seems to talk to him more as an equal, despite the differences in rank and temperament. But I do love the scenes with O’Brien, whom Barclay outranks, though the lieutenant only speaks to the transporter chief as such when he doesn’t want to be questioned about his reasons for concern about the transporter. O’Brien is very patient with repeated requests for additional diagnostics, even though the equipment is working within every specification he’s studied, and although he probably knows more about the device than anyone on the ship, he’s sympathetic to Barclay’s irrational terror, sharing his own fear of spiders and how he overcame it by having to work among Talarian hook spiders which have meter-long legs. Though defensive of his machines, O’Brien keeps his frustration largely to himself, even when he gets the unpleasant task of waking the captain so Barclay can explain what he thinks he saw during transport.

If there’s a red herring in the episode, it’s the summons Picard receives from Starfleet, warning him that the Ferengi claimed to have been attacked by a stealth Cardassian vessel and suggesting that perhaps the Yosemite might have been, too. A cloaked Cardassian vessel seems less improbable than a gremlin in the transporter, and LaForge and O’Brien’s arguments – that beaming is the safest way to travel, that shuttle accidents are more common – sound a lot like the things people say to friends who have an irrational fear of flying in airplanes. Though the rest of the crew is distressed to learn that Barclay was exposed to the same plasma that killed the Yosemite’s engineer, Barclay is quite calm once he learns there’s a quantifiable threat, even though it’s much more likely to kill him than any transporter mishap; he doesn’t like the method for the cure, yet he’s relieved to be told that what he thought might be hallucinations are real and truly scary. Perhaps it’s the revenge of William Shatner, whose character was dragged off in a straightjacket at the end of “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” even though that crew, too, later found evidence that his “hallucinations” were real. To quote that story, since the closing narration could apply to Barclay as well, “[he] has that fear no longer…for happily, tangible manifestation is very often left as evidence of trespass, even from so intangible a quarter as the Twilight Zone.”

Plot Summary: The Enterprise bridge crew begins its investigations in 19th century San Francisco, seeking both Data and the disguised Devidians who have apparently been pursuing human plague victims. When visiting the hospital and morgue with Riker, who is disguised as a policeman, Crusher pretends to be a nurse and is able to determine that the deaths were not caused by cholera, but by the Devidians draining the neural energy of human victims. She confronts the male “doctor” and takes his walking stick, which is not really a snake-headed cane but a disguised Ophidian which the Devidians are using to harness triolic waves and manipulate the temporal portals that allow them to travel between their own planet and Earth. A suspicious policeman tries to have the Enterprise crewmembers arrested but they are able to flee when Data arrives in a horse-drawn carriage. Data, meanwhile, has been working with Guinan to evade Samuel Clemens, who believes they have both come from outer space to destroy humanity. Clemens follows the Enterprise crew to the cavern where Data’s head appeared centuries later and confronts them, but before Picard can explain their full intentions, the Devidians arrive to recover the Ophidian and return to their own planet. They struggle with Data, whose head is blasted off in an explosion that also injures Guinan. The male Devidian leaps through the portal opened by the Ophidian, followed by Riker, LaForge, and the others, including the curious Clemens. Picard pauses to help Guinan and is trapped when the portal closes along with Data’s head. Back on the Enterprise, Troi is able to assure Clemens that they are there to protect humanity’s future and LaForge is able to attach the head discovered by the archaeologists to Data’s body. Worf convinces Riker to destroy the site from which the Devidians have been transporting to Earth, but just as he is about to do so, Data accesses a message manually programmed by Picard in the 19th century telling them to wait. Clemens volunteers to go back to his own century so that Picard can be rescued and warn the Enterprise that they must adjust their torpedoes for the temporal flux before attacking the Devidian base. He leaves the Guinan of the 19th century safe with Clemens and returns to visit the one on the Enterprise, who has remembered everything since they met five centuries earlier.

Analysis: Since both Christmas and New Year’s Day fell on Fridays, I pretended the winter holidays were the break between seasons five and six, and didn’t watch part two for two weeks after part one of this episode. I had remembered feeling that the conclusion to “Time’s Arrow” had felt like a big let-down and wanted to see whether that situation repeated itself. I must confess that it did; while “Time’s Arrow, Part Two” has some lovely elements, including the fine acting it’s easy to take for granted, costumes and hair design that won Emmy Awards, and special effects that are a definite improvement over the first part of the story, it doesn’t hold up next to Next Gen’s best, which includes the previous two season finale/premieres, “The Best of Both Worlds” and “Redemption,” plus the recent two-parter “Unification.”

As odious as comparisons may be, it’s easiest to explain one of my disappointments with a glance at an episode from another franchise altogether. When Doctor Who meets Shakespeare, they speak as equals, not only because of the Doctor’s enormous respect for the literary giant but also because Shakespeare (who’s hardly a paragon of virtue in the episode, drinking and flirting with everyone in sight) doesn’t need a lecture by the Doctor on Earth history or human nature. For everything he’s seen in the universe, the Doctor isn’t any more expert on emotion or behavior than the arguably the greatest writer this planet has ever produced. Mark Twain isn’t Shakespeare, but he’s also an unquestioned giant, someone whose insight into the people who shared his world remains widely appreciated and quoted not only in the country where he lived. One would think that the father of American literature would have a bit to teach Picard and his crew, not that he’d need a lecture from Troi about how much nicer people would be if only poverty were eradicated. In fact, I expected a bit of debate from the humorist and sometime cynic – like Shakespeare, Twain lost a child, which sent him into a deep depression and affected his subsequent view of the human condition. The Samuel Clemens we meet in “Time’s Arrow,” like the young, cliche-spouting Jack London, is a caricature rather than a character.

If the science fiction story or the crew character development were spectacular, that wouldn’t matter – Twain is mostly used for comic relief at first, and later as a plot device to get Picard back onto the ship. But the storyline overall just isn’t that enthralling. Sure, it’s exciting to see 19th century San Francisco through the eyes of the Enterprise crew, and there are plenty of funny moments – Riker trying to convince a fellow policeman that he isn’t a fraud, Picard auditioning his landlady to appear in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in order to stall on paying the rent – and I’m always happy to see Troi struggling with a corset while Data struts around in a suit. Underneath the clothes, though, it’s a plot about evil aliens using a cholera epidemic to cover their tracks so they can steal human neural energy for their people to ingest…does that sound as silly to other people as it does to me? These aliens time-travel using some weird form of energy harnessed by a big snake disguised as a walking stick! Which Crusher is able to wrest away from the evil alien in thirty seconds! It’s definitely not the writers’ finest moment.

The first part of “Time’s Arrow” gained pathos because so much of it was about the feelings of Data and his friends upon learning not only that he will someday die, but that his head will be discovered in Earth’s past, little changed in appearance though presumably inert. However, all interest in the existential dilemma vanishes once Data’s head is actually blown off – LaForge sticks it back on his body and gets it working seemingly within the hour, with the only hitch being that Picard input the manual data that will protect Earth and himself as well. I guess now we know the answer to the question of whether Data will ever rust. But the question of whether he will die remains up in the air, since he is reactivated seemingly with no negative effects from his head having been lost under San Francisco for half a millenium. In theory this means that he could be reactivated by some more advanced species who find only some of his parts, many thousands of years in the future when not only the people he has known but even the civilizations he has known may have vanished.

There’s nothing terrible about this episode; as I said in my review of the first part, it isn’t as if Evil Alien Nazis show up and make the whole thing laughable. And there are some elements I really like – the backstory to Picard’s little-explored relationship with Guinan, which is described by both of them as passionate and intense yet very rarely seen onscreen, Clemens thinking Worf is a werewolf, Riker deciding that saving Earth is the only thing more important than saving Picard. Yet I can’t help wondering – if Picard had met Shakespeare, would the Bard’s imagination have been limited to seeing a meddling invasion? Might he have had a few words for Data about the question of whether to be or not to be? Would Picard have spoken to him about his insights or lectured him on the brave new world yet to come? It’s nice to look at, but “Time’s Arrow” could have been so much more.