Trekaday 048: Frame of Mind, Progress, Suspicions, If Wishes Were Horses, Rightful Heir, The Forsaken
Posted on September 28th, 2022 in Culture | No Comments »
TNG S06E21 Frame of Mind (). On board the Enterprise country club / retirement village / community centre, Riker is rehearsing for a play in which he portrays a disturbed man who has evidently suffered from serious delusions. Suddenly it seems as if the world of the play is the real world and his life on the Enterprise which is the fiction. This is another one of those high concept episodes I like so much, and here we have the added meta-textual layer of actors in a fictional TV show playing out a story in which they believe they might be only actors in a fictional reality. That could all be incredibly tedious and self-regarding but the constant rug-pulling and literal fourth-wall breaking (Riker’s psychotic episodes are signaled by the “glass” of the “TV screen” seeming to shatter) keeps us on our toes and Frakes is as good as he’s ever been, making the fun-and-games increasingly disturbing. Of course, it isn’t real, it can’t be real, but the explanation of what’s really going on when it comes is satisfyingly brief and ticks all the necessary boxes. This is top-drawer stuff from all concerned.
DS9 S01E15 Progress (). Well, that’s at least an aspirational title, and we start with a card game, which has generally been a good omen. We also start with Jake and Nog, probably the most generic and least interesting characters in the series. And yet, as Nog tells Jake he’s got a lot to learn about opportunity, there’s a glimmer of something with a little more depth and texture. Kira meanwhile is dealing with that hoary old Trek cliché, the stubborn evacuees who won’t leave as ordered. And, because this is nineties Trek, the chief evacuee (and the only one to speak) is a sexist old dinosaur who calls Kira “girlie” and “dear” – and after a while, Kira gets to like it. This Federation vs the natives stuff is pretty routine, with only Nana Visitor’s megawatt charisma keeping me watching. And it’s that committed playing that makes that shocking ending work, but it’s a bit of a slog getting there. Entirely to my surprise, I was actually rather caught up in Jake and Nog cos-playing as Del Boy and Rodney. It’s not deep, it’s not high stakes, it’s not even particularly new. But it is fun, and that counts for something. This gets tantalizingly close to a four but doesn’t quite make the grade. It is promising though. Now even Morn is sharking after Dax. Jeebus.
TNG S06E22 Suspicions (). This one is just weird, in all sorts of ways. There’s a not-particularly necessary framing device in which Crusher is telling the episode’s story to Guinan. This kind of thing is usually a promise to the audience – stick with us through the dull stuff because the good stuff is coming. But this is all equally dull and it’s bizarre that medical Dr Crusher is suddenly fascinated by the kind of engineering problem which you would expect to be exercising someone like Geordi, although the handwringing about ethics is far more Crusher-ish than LaForgean. Was a last-minute substitution made but they didn’t have time to change all the space jargon to medical jargon? And it’s cool to see a bunch of our headlining aliens together again (although with a less starry cast than last time) and the choice of Ferengi to be the scientific innovator feels fresh – just what is all this nonsense about Ferengi death rituals? Where’s the profit in forbidding an autopsy? All of this feels like it’s been assembled from unrelated parts and hastily bolted together in the hope that no-one sees the joins. Gates McFadden shows once again what a skilled actor she is, given the chance, but she’s trying to navigate her way through a script rife with contradictions and contrivances which doesn’t convince for a second.
DS9 S01E16 If Wishes Were Horses (). As usual, rather than a tense, attention-grabbing teaser, we just check in with various characters until O’Brien’s storybooks start coming to life. This is scarcely a new idea – in Trek it goes back to Season 1’s Shore Leave and I’m certain it has a far longer pedigree than that – but Discovery recently showed how to do it with flair. Here it’s just dull, when it isn’t being skeezy. It strikes me that, as diverse as the DS9 regular cast is (it’s the first Trek show with no white human American men in its main characters, and that’s still quite rare) it’s a very male environment, and while Kira ain’t taking none of your shit, it’s depressing that Dax is so often portrayed as little more than an object of male lust. What is refreshing, and does feel a) 24th century and b) in keeping with Dax’s personal history, is that she’s actually very sympathetic when confronted with Bashir’s nympho sex doll version of her, telling him that she feels it’s his privacy that has been invaded, rather than hers. Perhaps now these two can start to build a relationship as colleagues, rather than the Confessions of a Star Fleet Doctor stuff we’ve been subjected to so far. There’s a glimmer of interest in seeing the situation from the point of view of the fantasies, but the explanation at the end is pure nonsense and there’s no resonance or depth to any of this silliness.
TNG S06E23 Rightful Heir (). More Klingon mythology, but I can feel my knee-jerk antipathy towards these stories waning, drawn in as I am by Michael Dorn’s magnetic performance. The sight of him, hair in disarray, learning the easy way that there are no smoke-detectors in crew quarters, is very striking, and his telling-off at the hands of the captain is a beautiful piece of writing and acting. Off he goes on a peyote retreat in search of visions of Klingon Jesus. After a couple of weeks of sitting around the fire and hoping, Worf is ready to pack it in, but eventually the ’shrooms start working and Kahless appears to him. It doesn’t take much wisdom to deduce that the physical manifestation of a long-dead prophet is some sort of imposter but nonetheless there’s a lot of soul-searching and tricorder testing to be done before we get to that conclusion. Robert O’Reilly makes a welcome appearance as Gowron, but this doesn’t add much to the corpus of fake-deity stories and without Dorn this would be an empty shell of a story. The ending is particularly limp. Kahless is revealed as a clone and then everybody just goes home. Whuh?
DS9 S01E17 The Forsaken (). A trio of Federation ambassadors is touring the station and their low-level squabbling is not nearly as diverting as we’re supposed to think. Wait, it’s a quartet, the fourth being Lwaxana, livening the place up considerably. As usual, she’s shopping for a husband (because this-is-the-story-we-tell-with-this-character) but the choice of Odo as her latest intended is marvellous and Barrett and Auberjonois find a sparky chemistry very quickly. Sadly, the show can’t think of anything more inventive to do with them than trap them in a (turbo) lift together. Meanwhile, O’Brien is fighting a losing battle with the fussy Cardassian computer controlling the station, in a throwback to some of the anti-technology sentiment we used to see on the sixties show. All of this is pretty low-stakes but when Lwaxana takes her wig off to reassure Odo, it is rather touching. Weirdly, a similar bonding apparently takes place with Bashir and the other delegates, but this one happens entirely off-screen.