Terra Nova (ENT)

Enterprise is best when it's embracing its premise. Here, the show turns in a solid episode by cashing in on the recentness of Earth's acquisition of warp drive to create a generation-old mystery story that wraps around to another prime directive tale (although of course there isn't yet a prime directive).

The Enterprise travels to the home of Earth's lost deep space colony, to discover it peopled with savage subterranean aliens. In a twist so predictable you can hardly call it that, the aliens turn out to be the colonists, but the show doesn't rest for a beat on that weak reveal. The why of how the colonists came to live underground and lost the knowledge of their race is slowly revealed: in the midst of a growing political conflict with the homeworld, the colony was hit by an asteroid whose radiation killed all but the children, who inherited the mistaken idea it was an attack by humans.

The now-grown Novans are hostile toward humanity, and they kidnap Malcolm Reed. Archer and company have to build a bridge and teach one of the natives to remember the truth so they can rescue Malcolm -- and so they can rescue the colony, whose noncontaminated water supply is running out.

After last week's plot-holey story that didn't seem to know how seriously to take itself, this is a welcome installment. T'Pol's nagging had been toned down, the crew's chemistry is gelling. Amazingly, Enterprise is a much quicker starter than most of the latter shows.

The guest stars do fine here, even if the native dialect (English with keywords swapped out for other word that are related) is a bit of a scifi cliche.  The aboriginal makeup is another thing that arguably doesn't work. But the writing is solid and the story moves at a good clip -- as I said before, even when the revelations aren't earth-shattering, the plot doesn't need them to be, always moving on to another reveal.

There are some questions raised but never quite answered about what constitutes a distinct culture, and whether relocating a small number of humans one generation removed from their society is tantamount to destroying one. But better good questions that hang in the air than no real ideological meat to speak of.

Random Observations

-- It's high time for a Travis Mayweather episode. Also for a Malcolm Reed episode, which, despite appearances, this isn't.

-- This is apparently Brandon Braga's least favorite episode of the show, which shows he and I have different tastes.

-- Sorry I missed last Tuesday, and this week is so short. I'll be playing catch-up with a bonus post some time this week.

Haven (TNG)

            The Enterprise is looking forward to some peaceful shore leave on an idyllic planet, but this is interrupted by two things – a plague ship from an alien world threatens to infect the planet, and an arranged marriage made when Counselor Troi was a little girl catches up with her. Both of these plots have the potential for being interesting, but the resulting episode is uneven, at best.

            Ten episodes in, Deanna Troi is probably the least developed character we have on the show (Geordi is a close second.) This is her first spotlight episode, and we do learn a little about her, but her show-stealing mother and plot that’s more about the guest stars than the cast keep us from actually learning anything significant about who Deanna Troi is.

            The most important of the guest stars being of course Lwaxana Troi, one of those most divisive recurring characters in the franchise. Personally, I find her extremely entertaining, if just a tad overused. In her debut she’s a little more obnoxious than she is in subsequent appearances – just a little too full-of-herself, a little to presumptuous, a little too rude. All of these qualities I think get toned down in subsequent appearances, but that could just be my memory. Either way, her condescending flirtations with Captain Picard are a lot of fun, and Patrick Stewart plays the comedy of this normally quite dignified man trying to hold onto that dignity in the face of Lwaxana being Lwaxana.

            But entertaining as she is, Lwaxana is also not the main character of the episode. Unfortunately, Wyatt Miller is, and while he’s charismatic in kind of a bland way, we don’t care about him anywhere near as much as we care about the crew, and that’s unfortunate, because he’s actually the character who drives the action of the show, and he’s the only one for whom the stake really feel particularly high.

            Let me put it another way. Wyatt has to face a decision about whether to uphold a tradition and a vow he has made or to follow his heart. If Deanna had to make that decision, then this might have been an episode that showed us who Deanna is. But before she has a chance to decide, Wyatt goes over to the plague ship, absolving her of responsibility. It feels like this guest star cheated a main character out of an interesting story.

            And of course, Troi’s failure to act on the fact that she would clearly prefer to stay on the Enterprise makes her look like an incredibly weak character incapable of fighting for what she wants or even making her own decisions. I keep waiting for the Deanna Troi I remember liking to show up on this show, and I haven’t seen her yet. I fear I will have to wait quite a while.

Random Observations:

The story of the Tellarians and their plague is really interesting, and I wish more time had been spent exploring it.

The costuming in this episode is especially 80’s, and the scoring is extremely heavy-handed, neither of which do anything to sell the premise.

Classic Data: “Please continue the petty-bickering. I find it most intriguing.”

It’s odd that Deanna can hear telepathic communication even though she can’t actually read minds, but then I remembered that Troi can talk telepathically to Riker, so I guess sending and receiving messages is a different skill than actually perusing people’s thoughts.

I love the little bits of Betazoid culture we get, like the Thanksgiving gong and the nudity at weddings.

It’s good that Picard points out the ridiculousness of arranged marriage in the context of 24^th-century woman of mixed species heritage, but I wish it was taken farther. I would really have liked to see Troi stand up for her right to retain her career.

Prime Factors (VOY)

            Most of the time, when aliens are really ridiculously friendly and also pretty and only want to help the crew, it is because they are secretly trying to eat us or involved in some kind of mind-control plot. “Prime Factors” subverts that expected twist – the Salcarans genuinely are as nice as they say they are, pretty much. Ultimately, though, Voyager’s crew gets greedy and screws things up, and in the process B’Elanna finds her loyalty tested.

Lunch room gossip.

            The opening of this episode really captures that “family” feeling that made late TNG so watchable. Tom, B’Elanna, and ascended redshirt Lt. Seska are teasing Harry about a disastrous date he had with Jenny Delaney. Seska calls out that “there are no secrets on a ship this small” and we are happy to see a lighter side of life in the Delta Quadrant. Eavesdropping from a nearby table, Janeway and Tuvok are happy to see Starfleet and Maquis crew members finally coming together.

            Which of course cues us in that that bond is about to be challenged. It’s smart to make Harry and B’Elanna the focus of this episode, because their relationship has been a symbol of the integration of the crews thus far. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Voyager receives a personal invitation from the overwhelming hospital but hedonistic (and inexplicably French) Salcarans. The Salcarans offer the crew shore leave, edible plants for their hydroponics bay, new clothes, etc. They even throw a big party for the crew, and it  looks like  both Harry and the Captain are about to get lucky. But then Harry ruins everyone’s sexytimes when he discovers that the Salcarans have the technology to send Voyager halfway home.

Remember the Prime Directive? The one where we don’t interfere with the development of other civilizations? Where we’re not allowed to share technology? Turns out the Salcarans have it too, and as Janeway points out, it’s not so fun to be on the other side. Still, Janeway is not about to get her crew home by violating the laws of another civilization, so she sets about trying to change the Salcarans’ minds.

The person most likely to screw up Harry Kim's love life.

Which brings us back to our two Junior officers, both of whom face temptation. Harry, the young, impressionable rules-follower, is also the one who most desperately wants to get back to his family. Also, his new Salcaran girlfriend happens to have the black market connections that could get him the technology. B’Elanna, who was all for screwing over the Ocampa to get home back in “Caretaker”, is now in a position of leadership and doesn’t want to betray her Captain’s trust. But she, along with Seska and Joe Carey, has the engineering knowledge to use it.

            It’s great to see these characters conflicted on so many axis – desire to get home, duty to their Captain, observance of Starfleet principles – and their decisions are all in-character and believable. The real twist comes when Tuvok discovers the plot and, rather than turning the mutineers in, covers for them. His rationale – that he knew Janeway wouldn’t be able to defy her principles so he was saving her the decision – is rationale. It’s actually very Vulcan, to be willing to bend principle when it makes logical sense to do so, and his final scene with Janeway works because of the relationship that’s built up between the two.

The dressing down.

            Lots of characters barely appear in this episode – Paris, Kes, The EMH, and CHakotay are all mostly absent. But that gave the writers a chance to really let Janeway, Tuvok, B’Elanna and Harry work through this problem in their own ways. And that’s where this episode shines. Voyager is more full of strong personalities than the Enterprise ever was, and it’s at its strongest when those personalities get to clash a little. Janeway is a mother to her crew, but sometimes you disagree with your mother and you act out, and then you have to deal with the fact that you betrayed someone who cares about you. Janeway sees Tuvok as a mentor. She sees Harry as a son. She’s not sure whether to see B’Elanna as both a pupil or an antagonist, but Kate Mulgrew and Roxanne Dawson have great chemistry so I want to see those sparks fly over and over again.

The ending – we steal the technology, but it’s not compatible with ours and doesn’t work – is a bit of a cop-out. It’s the Gilligan’s Island principle, of course, in that if Voyager gets home there’s no show. But I don’t think the episode is undermined. On the contrary, I think it’s the strongest episode yet – it has a compelling conflict, the tension builds effectively, and the characters actually develop.

Random Observations:

Minor Character Watch:

Seska gets a name and a brother back home who’s birthday she’s missing.

Joe Carey has a wife and kids back home himself, and he’s more ethically flexible than we thought. He also seems to be adjusting well to being B’Elanna’s subordinate.

Jenny Delaney gets name-dropped again as the girl Harry will never make it with.

I love the fact that the Salcarans use stories as currency.

The Salcaran ship does not look like a recycled model. The set of their ballroom, on the other hand, is definitely a redress of the Professor’s house from Ex Posto Facto.

Discussion question: Is Harry Kim Wesley Crusher done right?

That climax sure had a lot of technobabble in it.

I’m gonna go ahead and guess that the reason Tom Paris wasn’t involved in the episode after the first scene is that he was out there nailing as many Salcaran chicks as possible.

Move Along Home (DS9)

Usually, bad Star Trek episodes fail on execution. The episode might be really badly written, it might have huge plot holes or inconsistent characterization, but at least the heart of the story is something that makes you say "Yeah, I get why the writing staff accepted this pitch."

 Not so "Move Along Home," at least as far as I can tell. The plot bears more similarity to "Labyrinth" than to Star Trek. But it's labyrinth on a TV budget without David Bowie or Muppets. And considerably less aware of it's absurdity.

Aliens from the Gamma Quadrant, the Wadi, come to Deep Space Nine to establish first contact. Everyone gets dressed up in their finest, but the aliens are more interested in gambling at Quark's than in even meeting the Federation delegation. Despite Sisko's warnings to him about not screwing this up, Quark tries to cheat them after they have an unnaturally lucky run at the Dabo table. He gets caught, of course, and the Wadi challenge him to a new game. And that's where the plot goes from boring to wonky.

 The new game is a board game, but it also automatically captures Dax, Sisko, Bashit, and Kira and transports them to the Wadi ship, where they go through weird trials that match up with what's happening in the game as Quark plays it. Odo mounts an ineffectual rescue attempt, but eventually falls back on glaring at Quark, which more or less seems to solve the problem.

Oh yeah, none of it matters at all because, as Kira puts it "We were never in any real danger!?" The crux of this episode's failings are the impossibly low stakes. The audience knows nobody's going to die, the Wadi know no one's going to die. The characters think they might die, and that's where the episode tries to find tension, but it just doesn't land. The game is too silly to be terrifying, and it doesn't make any sense for the Wadi to come from the Gamma Quadrant and initiate first contact by killing four high ranking officers in a convoluted and random manner. A thinking viewer has no reason to fear that's what's happening, and every reason to include that, in fact, the game is just a game.

 Maybe the problem is that, in a world of holodecks and safety protocols, our first assumption should really be that an elaborate simulation is safe. In the Star Trek universe in general, usually our cue that something is deadly is when they throw a redshirt at it and he dies. It's clumsy, but it works.

And then on top of that, the challenges within the game are totally uninspired, and they don't bring out very much interesting in the characters. They just sort of wander through the game out of a vague, loosely articulated sense that it's what they are supposed to do. It's like the framework of a good adventure story, without a goal of any kind or character agency that makes it worth caring about. 

Sometimes I forget to talk holistically about shows, because I'm quite fixated on writing and plotting. So I will give the show kudos here on sets, props, and makeup. The Wadi have a very consistent aesthetic that connects the game Quark is playing to the labyrinth Sisko and company are trapped in, and even to the colored tattoos the Wadi wear. For a one-shot race with a remarkably flat characterization, the Wadi are at least interesting looking.

 The B-plot is that Jake is interested in girls. It would have been a more interesting B-plot if Jake were interested in boys. But really not that much more interesting. You can hardly call it a B-plot, actually. It's just sort of the writers desperately trying to find things for Jake to do in this show, because he's in the credits. Eventually the writers on this show decide to write for whoever and not care who's in the credits, which I find refreshing. The pattern with Jake in Deep Space Nine is that he gets a handful of his own stories/father-son stories and they're mostly good, and the kid acts them well. He gets a handful of quirky B-plots with Nog, which are hit and miss. He does not really participate in the ensemble shows, with a few exceptions. The show hits its stride when it just embraces it.

Random Observations: 

 - Bashir is not getting less annoying yet.

 - O'Brien isn't in this episode. This is another reason not to like it.

 - Kira makes a really out of character outburst about being an administrator and thus ill-suited to go on adventures, which is just totally at odds with her action hero past. Similarly, this is the second time Dax has espoused an "I've had seven lifetimes, I'm ready to die" attitude as opposed to the "I have an obligation to protect the symbiote" that seems more appropriate.

 - The climax of this episode is supposed to be the moment when Quark breaks down and begs for the other characters' lives. Armin Shimmerman tries his best, but it's a mess, actually. Possibly because of the whole "we know they're not gonna die" thing. But also because, as a character moment, there's no legwork done. He comes off as "petty criminal in over his head" moreso than "bad guy growing a conscience."

 - Lt. Primmin is back! But he doesn't really do anything except be astonishingly negligent re: the disappearance of four senior officers. Someone's got their eye on an ill-gotten promotion!

 - Speaking of which, I'm going to take this opportunity to air a grievance that I have with Star Trek all the time. The computer can tell you at any time where somebody is. It is apparently constantly monitoring everyone's movements and life signs. But when someone is abducted, they never know until they look for someone. How hard would it be to set up an automatic alert when people leave the station in some manner other than the station's transporters or the airlocks? Why don't they do this on any ship or station on the show ever?

Hide and Q (TNG)

            “Hide and Q” is, for the most part, an exceptionally poorly written episode. It does a terrible job of maintaining any sort of dramatic tension and also frequently seems like it was written by someone who had watched a little TNG but wasn’t intimately familiar with the characters. This is odd because one of the writers credited with the teleplay is Gene Roddenberry.

            None of this is earth-shattering. First season TNG has lots of stinkers. But I think this particular one bears further examination, for several reasons. It has some stuff going for it. The premise is vaguely compelling, and Q’s character does start to develop in an interesting direction. But on the whole it fails spectacularly, for a few very easy-to-understand reasons.

           

Or just hold a child and look distraught.

            First, let’s talk about dramatic tension. Any good hour of television, or more generally speaking, any good story, needs to have stakes. Something needs to be on the line, something that will be lost if the characters fail and/or gained if they succeed. “Hide and Q” tries way too hard to raise those stakes, to the point that all it does is draw attention to their flimsiness. The Enterprise is trying to save a colony from a mysterious disaster! If the rest of the away team doesn’t follow Q’s arbitrary rules, Tasha will die! If Riker is tempted by omnipotence…

            What exactly? What exactly is the bad thing that happens if Riker accepts Q’s offer of immortality and omnipotence? The episode is trying to tell this story about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, but it never actually shows us Will being corrupted. It fails to offer any arguments as to why Will allowing Q to make him a Q would be anything but awesome (unless you count “Picard would lose a bet” as an argument.)

            Power does change Will, but not in ways that make any sense. The scene where Riker offers to grant everybody wishes is inconsistent to the point of being disturbing. He makes Wesley a grown-up (or at least strands him in a grown-up body) offers Geordi his sight (seriously, when is Geordi going to get any characterization other than “the blind guy?) and… makes Worf a Klingon girlfriend in fishnets?

            Wait a minute, hold that thought. This is isn’t the Holodeck. When Q makes things, they’re real. So when Riker snaps his fingers and makes Worf a special friend, he’s making an actual flesh-and-blood person. And when he snaps his fingers and she goes away, she just ceases to exist. Now, when Q pulls these shenanigans, it’s skeezy, but Q is basically an amoral being. Riker is one of the good guys.

Oh right. It's still the eighties.

            I will admit that women who exist only to be sex objects or fantasies is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. But this is such an egregious example I can’t wrap my head around it. And of course, it comes in a Roddenberry-written episode. The man is the most misogynistic feminist I’ve ever encountered. I’m sure it’s just a joke, but it’s a cheap joke that in the current age reads incredibly creepy, especially the fact that no one objects to the fact that Riker just made and then unmade a person, or asks him where she came from or what happened to her.

            I mentioned good points earlier. I really like how Q’s character is shaping up. The idea of this race of omnipotent beings who are terrified of stagnation is fascinating, and that angle doesn’t really come back until Voyager. The scene where Picard and Q quote Shakespeare back and forth is awesome, but that’s mostly because 1. Patrick Stewart is quoting Shakespeare and 2. Stewart and DeLancie have some of the best chemistry on the entire show. It’s a blessing that the writers realize this, and from here on out stop trying to pair Q with anyone else.

Random Observations:

Q wears the admiral’s uniform in this episode, and eventually the French Field Marshall, so he can outrank Picard. In later appearances, he will always wear a Captain’s uniform identical to Picard’s. You could read a lot into this.

Picard and Tasha is a terrible ship. Let us never speak of it again.

Troi doesn’t appear in the episode, explained by a throwaway line in the captain’s log. The ship’s productivity suffers not at all.

Q taunts Picard by not letting him record a log. This cracks me up for some reason, possibly because being denied the ability to monologue is a horrible punishment if you’re Patrick Stewart.

Worf is actually competent in this episode. That’s nice. It’s nice to see the warrior being allowed to war.

Really, it’s killing Wesley that makes Riker snap?

Geordi/ Tasha is also a bad ship, and it comes out of nowhere here.

The actor playing grown-up Wesley has 14-year-old Will Wheaton’s speech patterns down cold.