Datalore (TNG)

            I said before (I think) that one of TNG’s failings was its inability to give Picard a strong arch-nemesis, a recurring antagonist we could really hate – Sisko had Dukat, Janeway had Seska, even Captain Kirk had Khan and to a lesser extent Harry Mudd. Picard has Q, but he quickly becomes more absurd than sinister, and then there’s a whole host of ineffective attempts at menacing –Sela, Tomilek, and Daimon Bok all come to mind, but we’ll get to all of them in good time. The point I want to make now is that TNG does have good recurring villains – just not for Picard himself. Lore is a great foil for Data, and when he shows up it means a well-paced action plot with enough depth to make us remember we’ve watching Science Fiction.

            Lore is Data’s evil twin – a prototype built by his creator, Dr. Soong. We still don’t know the whole truth of why Soong decided to start over with a “less perfect” creation. If we believe Lore’s story, then his emotions were too real, and he made the colonists uncomfortable. But its also possible that his murderous, psychopathic tendencies had already begun to display themselves and Soong shut him down out of fear. If we believe this version of events, then its likely he left out the emotions when he built Data because it was the only way he could be sure of leaving out the Machiaviellian level of ambition or the sense of superiority.

            It’s interesting that while he has emotion, what Lore lacks is empathy. He sees himself as an

Alas, Poor Data.

“upgrade” of humanity, and he doesn’t see any reason to keep the earlier version around. Lore is all of our fears about artificial intelligence personified. Brent Spiner isn’t afraid to ham in up in his dual role, but in spite of all the scenery chewing he still brings a believability to Lore that makes him all the creepier. Or perhaps the creepiness comes from seeing what Data, who we’ve already come to see as the most incorruptible member of the crew, could be capable of with just a slightly different outlook. Data and Lore are both detached, but in completely different ways.

            The structure of the episode is excellent. The teaser reminds us of Data, who he is and what he might want badly enough to betray his comrades. The scene on the planet sets up a mystery and a creepy tone. We meet Lore, gradually realize he’s untrustworthy, and once he replaced Data the plot steamrollers on to a climax. The philosophical discussions between the two are just enough substance, but they don’t bog down the episode enough to break the tension. It all flows so organically that even the over hashed “no one trusts Wesley but he’s actually right” plotline doesn’t feel as contrived as it usually does.

Ah, Motherhood.

            Wesley is fine in this episode. He’s annoying, but just in a kind of generalized way, and the fact that he saves the ship by realizing something that’s obvious to the audience rather than coming up with some techno-miracle makes his self-righteousness a little more palatable. Dr. Crusher doesn’t do a whole lot in this episode, but her interactions with Data are cute and she’s trying to be good mom and a good officer and that’s awkward given what’s going on. On the whole, I like how the ensemble is used effectively here without taking the focus off of Data and his struggle.

            I don’t know if the writers beamed Lore into space because they wanted to use him again, but it’s a great way to kill off a villain without actually killing him off. And the great thing about Lore is they didn’t have to wonder if they’d be able to get the actor back or not.

Random Observations:

There is a lot of unintentional innuendo here, but my favorite is Riker’s “Does he have all your parts?”

Troi does not appear, again. This time no excuse is given.

It’s interesting to think that Data’s “flaws” might actually be measures intentionally implemented to keep him from being evil.

 

And now I want to play Starfox.

The Crystaline entity looks great, given the constraints of 1988 CGI. It does kind of make me think I’m playing an old video game or watching Babylon 5, though.

Minor Character Watch: Chief Engineer Argyle is back. I totally didn’t remember that he was in more than one episode.

The Andorian Incident (ENT)

Once upon a time, there was a cheesy 60s sci-fi show. It was a remarkable cheesy 60s scifi show that captured an uncommon number of hearts and somehow, miraculously and often by the skin of its teeth, outlived it's 1960s roots and became one of the longest running single franchises in television history, probably. But before that, it was a 60s sci-fi show. It employed the tropes of the genre -- swashbuckling white male heroes, sexy alien babes, "in space" versions of things that shouldn't have been in space.

Then, 20ish years later, the maker of that cheesy show got a chance to make a new, modern, savvy late 80s version of that show, and he made some changes. He made the ship bigger, the social issues more sweeping. The hero aged like the creator had, from a brainier Buck Rogers to a bald, British, older man who traded in raw testosterone for tempered wisdom and cultural sensitivity.

This new show was going to be something else. It was going to be a shinier, more polished future. It was not going to be so silly. And so, although all of the other people working on the show were excited about bringing back their favorite aliens, planets, and plots, the man made some decrees. He said that certain aliens were too cheesy, too silly, too 60s to return, no matter how much the fans might have liked them.

And that's why Tellarites, Orion Slave Girls, Tholians, and, especially, Andorians were never on TNG, DS9, or Voyager. (Yes, super geeks, I know there are technically exceptions like the holographic Andorians that appear in "The Offspring (TNG)".)

Many years later, when that man had died and his followers were dreaming up the fifth incarnation of the show, they felt they had gone as far forward as they could. The Federation of the 1990s had become small. There were no quadrants left to explore (except the Beta Quadrant, and let's face it, nobody knows what's going on with that).  But there was a tempting stretch of unexplored time. No, not the time between TOS and TNG, the movies had covered the highlights there and the uniforms of that era were exceptionally silly looking anyway. It was the time between now and then. If James T. Kirk was the pioneer Picard revered, who was the pioneer Kirk looked to as a mentor?

And so, Enterprise was made. And the creators, looking through the 40 years of loose threads and once-explored planets, realized that this new show was the chance they'd been waiting for to finally defy Gene's ban on "the silly races."

Enterprise is defined, for me, by a number of threads. Overuse of time travel plots. Misguided attempts to be cool and/or sexy. Showing the lost firsts of all our favorite stock Trek threads. But my favorite one, and the one that's frankly the most interesting in the context of my own rediscovery of The Original Series as I write this blog, is the reclamation of the silly parts of TOS, and the attempts to remake them in the image of the 00s version of cool.

Enter the Andorians, led by Shran, played by Jeffrey Combs, one of the most versatile Star Trek guest actors there is. Their introduction here, crashing the peaceful meditation of a Vulcan monastery, is inspired. It instantly sets them up as the anti-Vulcans, totally driven by passion and emotion. Weren't the Klingons already the anti-Vulcans? Maybe, but Klingons on Enterprise are big, dumb brutes. Anyway, why should galactic politics stay the same for two centuries? It's nice to see a shiny new (old) bad guy on Enterprise.

The problem is, of course, that the Andorians are not very intimidating in this first appearance. Their sheer brutality could be scary, but they feel too much like petulant children -- the condescending way the Vulcans treat them (even while imprisoned by them), combined with, for instance, Shran's violent destruction of the communicators. They're cool-looking aliens, but the most intriguing thing about them is not the race themselves, but the political triangle they set up with the Vulcans and Earth. (Ok, credit where credit is due, "pinkskins" as an epithet is pretty hilarious, too.)

As for the episode itself, it's a throwback to TOS in more ways than one, putting more or less the whole plot in the hands of Enterprise's version of Kirk, Spock and Bones: Archer, T'Pol, and Trip. A runner about Vulcans finding humans smelly totally fails to land, mainly on account of not being funny. The big reveal at the end of the episode is so painfully obvious that it barely counts as a twist. I knew exactly what they were going to find and where they were going to find it, although, to be fair, Archer did surprise me with his "stick it to our allies" reaction to finding a secret listening post under the monastery.

I'm sure this is going to come back to bite him in the butt, but I also imagine his kindness to the Andorians is going to come back in a good way. So I'm eager to see the ramifications of the obvious serial threads the episode set up. I'm eager to see T'Pol torn between her people and her new family (whom she is way too slowly warming to, in my opinion).

This episode, though? Kind of an uninspiring prison break episode filled with Vulcans. Ever wonder why the vast majority of time when we see Vulcans on the show they're fish out of water in an environment full of humans? It's because the more Vulcans you have together, the more boring they are. Characters without visible emotions are by definition boring -- it's not their fault. It takes a heck of an actor to make a fullblooded Vulcan both a consistent character and a compelling one, in particular when they have mostly Vulcans to play against. And that goes double for Vulcan monks, I should think.

And the plotholes, oh the plotholes! Does Enterprise's transporter do only "beam down" and not "beam up"? Because that's a really easy solution. Or, why, exactly, when they suspect something to be amiss at the monastery, do they all decide to act like insensitive oafs and then tackle a wall, rather than like, beaming back up and making a plan? What about the Vulcans in the listening center? They can't send, like a distress signal to help out the poor monks? They don't ever need to leave to go on supply runs or anything? Is the only entrance or exit through the monastery? For that matter, which came first? Are the Vulcans so irreverent toward their own religion that they built a listening post under their sacred monastery? Or is the monastery just a front for the listening post, a total religious sham?

As for the rest of the ensemble, left behind on the ship, they don't do a whole lot. I did like how Linda Park let a subtle annoyance at Reed's being in command slip into some of her line deliveries.

This has been a bit of a ramble so I'll sum up: This episode sets up stuff I'm excited about and introduces a race I like a lot, although at this point I'm honestly not sure why. The episode itself is ok, but it's really predictable and it has way too many Vulcans.

Random Observations:

- This entire review belongs in Random Observations. Sorry about that.

- I worry that I'm too hard on Enterprise sometimes. It definitely has to earn my love more than the other shows do. If there are Enterprise fans reading who want to tell me how wrong I am, you are welcome in the comments. We'll be civil together.

- How many episodes is the plot going to be driven by Archer deciding something would be cool and then refusing to give it up no matter how many objections T'Pol raises?

- Trip tries a little too hard with the wise cracks a lot of the time.

- Jeffrey Combs', by the way, famous roles are Weyoun and Brunt on Deep Space Nine, neither of whom has shown up yet on the blog.

Heroes and Demons (VOY)

            It’s actually incredibly cool that immediately on the heels of TNG’s first foray into the “Holodeck episode” we get to see what Voyager has learned from seven years of trial and error. “Heroes and Demons” isn’t a great episode, but it’s more than watchable – great humor and character acting from Robert Picardo help sell one of our cheesiest plots to date. It helps that the Doctor actually learns something about himself from his time on the holodeck.

            The plot, in brief – B’Elanna and Janeway take a sample of some weird “photonic matter” from a nebula, because apparently it will “boost power converter efficiency.” Captain Janeway wants Harry to help B’Elanna harvest the stuff, but he’s in the holodeck, and won’t answer his calls. Then it turns out he’s not on the ship. And the Holodeck won’t turn off. So Chakotay and Tuvok go to investigate, and soon find themselves also vanished. Not wanting to risk any more crew members, Janeway sends the Doctor, who should be immune to being converted into energy since he’s already mostly energy, on his first away mission.

            Our destination this week is a holonovel based on the epic poem “Beowulf.” Unlike Dixon Hill, this is a real (if conveniently public domain) story, and the writers have some fun with that in the script. Unferth, for example, who in the original story challenges Beowulf to a duel to prove he is man enough to face Grendel, does the same to our heroes. The script also plays with the idea of the Holonovel as an interactive story that would actually be programmed, able to improvise but with obvious limitations. The characters greet each new “player” in much the same way, as if anyone entering the holodeck is essentially Beowulf. It feels much more like an interactive character screen in a video game, where it says “What is your name?” and the default is Beowulf, but you can enter something else if you want to.

            The cheesy fantasy-movie costumes and speech patterns, as well as the shoe-horned-in romance, all add to the feeling that we’re getting the 24^th-century Hollywood version of Beowulf. If all this episode was was Tuvok and Chakotay or Janeway wandering through this low budget sword-and-sorcery flick trying to find Harry, it would be a funny, if unmemorable episode. But adding in the photonic alien as the source of the malfunction (as opposed to “The Big Goodbye” and its totally unexplained malfunction) helps a lot. And what helps even more is that this plotline is used to force the doctor to recognize how far he has evolved beyond a simple program.

            The thing is, it’s not just his indestructibility that makes the Doctor ideally suited for this mission. While Chakotay and Tuvok talk past the Holodeck characters and treat them like they’re not real, the Doctor, himself a hologram, interacts with them as people and treats them with respect. This draws into focus how many of the crew still treat the Doctor, as a tool rather than a comrade. And ultimately, the Doctor rescues Kim, Chakotay, and Tuvok not by slaying “Grendel” but by communicating with him, which helps tie everything together thematically.

            “The crew accidentally captures a lifeform” isn’t an original plot, but it works well enough as a macguffin to drive the rest of the episode. I really admire the writing staff’s ability so far to know when something needs to be an ensemble piece and when it can put all the heavy-lifting on one actor, and while this is really The Doctor’s show, almost everyone is used effectively. Janeway, B’Elanna and Tom work well as his mission control team, and Kes, as always, is his moral support. Chakotay and Tuvok, in the one scene before they get captured, continue to have a really nice, developing relationship. Neelix doesn’t show up, which is fine as he’s really not needed.

Random Observations:

Vulcans apparently have no monsters or demons in their mythology. I find this hard to believe.

Janeway’s version of how holodecks work conflicts with Wesley’s brief explanation in “Encounter at Farpoint”, but I think its more consistent with Deep Space Nine and later TNG, especially “Ship in a Bottle.”

Again we see the effect of Janeway having moved into command from Engineering. She knows her ship better than Jean-Luc knows his, at least from a tech standpoint.

I’ll say it once more, Holodeck safeties should really be hardwired.

The effects in the Grendel scenes look really spectacular, and not cheesy at all. Well, aside from the Doc’s arm getting vaporized.

The Doctor chooses a name (Albert Schweitzer), but then decides it’s not for him.

Harry Kim Death Count: 2

The Nagus (DS9)

The Nagus is a good episode that portends great things to come. It's the first real Ferengi episode, episodes where the A-plot centers around Quark, Rom, sometimes Nog and a range of recurring Ferengi guest stars. None of them more high-profile than Wallace Shawn's Grand Nagus Zek, notable for just how much Wallace Shawn-ness shines through his layers of makeup.

The Nagus paints the Ferengi in their usual heartless, conniving light, although with a little less nuance than the show will land on. The Ferengi here are almost Klingon in their willingness to assassinate whomever's in charge, and that bloodthirstiness doesn't quite play well with the narrative mission the writers have set aside for them.

Ferengi episodes (this one included) are farces, broad comic pieces with cartoonish characters, physical comedy, and often outright zaniness. Sometimes this makes for a jarring disconnect with the rest of the station crew, who tend to infringe only tangentially on the plot. Other times the rest of the crew is relegated to an unrelated B-plot. (The exception being Odo, who has a way of finding his way into Ferengi stories via the tabs he perpetually keeps on Quark.)

I've come to think of these comic episodes (which tend to be more successful than attempts to go broadly comic with the whole crew, like "Fascination") play an important role, especially as the rest of the series finds its way to a darker tone. This isn't to denigrate the actors behind the Ferengi at all, by the way. They all have serious chops and the comedy often stems from how seriously they take inherently silly situations (one is reminded of Frasier, even.)

This time, Quark gets made ruler of the Ferengi people, with plenty of Godfather references to go around. On Ferenginar, corruption is built right into the system, so the Nagus is no public figure. He's the CEO of the Ferengi, or more accurately the Gilded Age boss of their town. He has his hands in every deal and rules with an iron fist -- but he's constantly watching his back for assassination attempts. It's a job not for the faint of heart. The initially disarmingly goofy Zek turns out to be every bit as shrewd as any other Ferengi.

The specific twists and turns of who's killing who and who's not really dead aren't really as important to note here as the general appeal of the episode. About halfway through it I had this realization "Wow, I feel like I'm watching Deep Space Nine." I think the worst of season one is behind us.

And that's even more apparent in the B-plot, which spins off of the main plot when the visiting Ferengi higher-ups pooh-pooh Nog's attendance at Keiko's school (which is being substitute-taught by O'Brien, I assume because the show hit its guest star budget with all those Ferengi). This is a minor qualm of mine, actually: Ferengi society should at least value literacy, a pretty important skill for a shrewd businessman.

Anyway, Sisko continues to be annoyed by Jake's friendship with Nog, and suspicious when Jake misses dinner repeatedly. After some advice from Dax in a very sweet scene, he goes to find him (thank you creepy Big Brother computer technology) and discovers his elicit extra-curricular has been tutoring Nog all along. It's a very simple, even predictable story, but it grows the characters well and presents a sweet counterpoint to the tale of backstabbing and betrayal (goofy though it may be) that constitutes the main plot.

Random Observations:

-- Suddenly Rom is a character. The sharp curve of his season one evolution is crazy.

-- The season continues to slyly lay the groundwork for the Dominion War and the direction the wormhole is going to take the rest of the show (more on that next week!) Here, we see a smart decision to set up the Ferengi as an interested party because of the propensity of business opportunities a new quadrant represents. This ties Quark into the larger scene of galactic politics in a way that will allow the writers to fit him into many stories to come where he otherwise wouldn't have had any reason to be around.

-- I know I promised a double post, but life is crazy right now! Hopefully the week after next I'll be able to get to it.

The Big Goodbye (TNG)

            This is a landmark episode for the Star Trek franchise. Though the holodeck was introduced in “Encounter at Farpoint”, so far we’ve only seen it used to create landscapes and sparring partners with intelligence roughly on par with current AIs. The magical, reality-warping, plot-hole ridden holodecks that will come to haunt future Treks begin with this episode. Because the holodeck is so new, the characters do spend a little more time than usual exploring its implications, but the episode is clearly scared of this philosophical territory. It will be explored in more detail in “Elementary, Dear Data” and “Ship in a Bottle” but that’s years down the road, and in the mean time the holodeck will become an excuses for gimmicky pseudo-time-travel episodes and period dress.

E... A... 5... 7....G?

            “The Big Goodbye” doesn’t really understand its own conceit. In order to create added tension while the crew is trapped in the holodeck, the writers came up with a diplomatic emergency – an insectoid race who will probably declare war on the Federation if Picard doesn’t master a greeting in their incredibly difficult language. About the only good thing that can be said for this plotline is that it makes Troi slightly less useless than usual. It’s too silly a concept to be the concept that’s supposed to be balancing out the silliness of the holodeck plotline, which is itself not deep enough to be compelling. And the episode didn’t even have the budget to put the aliens on the viewscreen, so we’re teased with this cool hive-mind, insectoid race, which we never see or hear from again.

            The Harada, that’s the aliens, are of course a MacGuffin. The Holodeck is the focus of the episode, but unfortunately it feels like a lot of padding and not much plot. Geordi and Wesley kind of generically try to fix the Holodeck while Picard, Data, Dr. Crusher and a redshirt try to stay alive by fast-talking gangsters out of killing them. Humor comes from the fish-out-of-water situation both for Picard, who has read the novels that the Holoprogram is based on, but doesn’t know much about the time period, and Data, who has all the knowledge but just doesn’t fit in. Beverly is extremely underused, and doesn’t really do anything except get held hostage. The “don’t throw me in the briar patch” gambit that ultimately lets the crew escape is funny, if a bit predictable.

            All in all, the episode is thin, but watchable. One thing that might have helped is if the Dixon Hill story itself had had a more interesting plot – an actual story we, the audience could get involved with. As it all the trappings of the Film Noir/ Gangster novel were there, but there was no sense of how Picard was “supposed” to play out the story. That definitely contributed to the sense that there was a lot of filler dialogue and not a clear plot arc.

Melting, Melting - Oh what a world, oh what a world!

What really bothers me about the episode, though, is what it sets up and doesn’t ever follow through on. It goes out of its way to ask the philosophical questions about the Holodeck but not answer them. Just before Picard turns off the program, one of Dixon Hill’s allies asks “what happens when you go away? Do my wife and family still exist?” It adds massive creepiness to the whole proceeding. Future holodeck episodes steer away from the characters being self-aware I think for precisely this reason – the writer’s decided the conceit worked best for light, escapist episodes rather than contemplations about the nature of artificial intelligence and our responsibility to it. 

Fortunately, Voyager will pick up that mantle some day. Speaking of which, in a weird bit of synergy, next week is Voyager’s first holodeck malfunction episode. It will be interesting to see the contrast.

Random Observations:

Data can sometimes experience an enthusiasm for learning new things which borders on emotion.

The concept of turning the Holodeck safeties off is ridiculous. Why would you not hard-wire those things?

It still bothers me the extent to which Holodecks are new and exciting on TNG but completely commonplace by Voyager.

I do like the scene where Wesley pulls out the wrong wire and suddenly everyone is in an arctic storm for a few seconds. I wish more holodeck episodes had those kinds of moments.