Tom Salinsky

TNG S04E09 Final Mission (). Wesley is being packed off to Star Fleet Academy, finally. But this is nothing more than a pretext on which to, once again, stick Picard and The Boy in a shuttlecraft together, as in the rather thin Samaritan Snare. The teaser is unseemly brief, cutting off in mid-scene as the mining ship is beset by space turbulence, while helmed by a Diet Coke Zefram Cochrane named Captain Dirgo. While the actual crash is obscured by a budget-saving screen white-out, the first shots of the planet’s surface are very impressive with some lovely lens flares emphasising the punishing sunlight. I can just imagine a young JJ Abrams watching with eyes like saucers. So, as is traditional, one group of our characters is trapped in a hostile environment and those on the ship have other (less interesting) things to worry about.

As pure character-development episodes go, this is fairly basic. Picard is his usual pragmatic and diplomatic self. Everyone in a Star Fleet uniform is better than anyone not in a Star Fleet uniform. Wesley’s puppy dog devotion to his captain doesn’t achieve much. This is also a variation on a situation we’ve seen before – with Picard and Crusher in The Arsenal of Freedom and Geordi and a Romulan in The Enemy. So, the interest lies in watching Wesley have to step up when Picard is benched by injury. There’s little likelihood that he won’t have the stuff (he basically has to solve a text adventure game kind of puzzle), but Wil Wheaton gives it everything he’s got and so the journey is not without interest. Trouble is, the relationship stuff only really comes into focus once the idiotic Dirgo is out of the way. Imagine how much more interesting this would have been if Picard and Wesley had been alone and getting on each other’s nerves before they faced this crisis, instead of being united in their effortless moral superiority over Captain Selfish.

There are other fumbles, too. PICARD: Mr Crusher, do you have any moisture readings? CRUSHER: (standing next to Dirgo, who has a flask in his pocket) No sir. And usually-dependable director Corey Allen is so concerned to keep the action clear that he depicts Picard standing stock still and staring up at the rockfall which makes him look like a cartoon character. Radiation exposure goes from “no ill-effects whatsoever” to “100% lethal” in an eye-blink, as ever.

TNG S04E10 The Loss (). When not sitting to Picard’s left on the bridge, it turns out Deanna Troi does actually have a counseling practice, and her treatment regimens include a radical “hiding-other-people’s-possessions-and-returning-them-at-moments-of-high-drama” protocol. She also sees some people daily. How does she find the time? Especially as a later conversation with Dr Crusher makes it clear that she doesn’t have a staff. She ends up talking to Guinan, perhaps inevitably. Her spiky, defensive reaction to her sudden disability is quite striking and makes her a fascinating character (she even tells Picard where he can shove his inspirational anecdotes) but she’s also completely unlike with anyone we’ve seen in the nearly 90 prior episodes of the show. Imagine if they’d started with that – the expert counsellor who can deal with everyone’s problems except her own. Wow. So, it’s hard to know what to do with this. As an exploration of grief, disability, anger, and rejection it’s very strong. As the continuing story of Counsellor Troi, it’s a fever dream. Not that surprising for a show which is still figuring out just how much serialised storytelling it is capable of or, or wants, but disappointing nonetheless.

TNG S04E11 Data’s Day (). One of the most vital things a long-running series needs to do is figure out its engine. TNG struggled for almost two years to land on what makes it work, and now in the middle of its fourth year, it needs to learn how to ring the changes. Sure, “one member of the bridge crew goes through a character-forming crisis while everyone else frets over a space anomaly” has become a pretty sure-fire formula, but if we see too many of those in a row, we’ll start to see the scaffolding more clearly than is seemly. Here we follow Data while he is off duty, messing up O’Brien’s love life (this is the first appearance of Rosalind Chao as Keiko), playing with his cat and so on. In a sort of Pulp Fiction mode, another more traditional Star Trek story is happening on the fringes, involving Picard and a Vulcan ambassador and the Neutral Zone. We don’t learn a tremendous amount about Data, but his take on the unpredictable, ironical, emotional humans is fascinating, even after this many episodes. It’s also a great showcase for Colm Meany, who will shortly be headhunted for the spin-off. Plus – Gates McFadden tap dancing! The third act, where the formula re-asserts itself has somewhat less to offer, as the mystery is super-obvious and rapidly solved. Rather sweetly, Data’s log is being compiled for the benefit of Commander Maddox who wanted to disassemble the android in The Measure of a Man. Riker has Phillips Hue lights installed on the bridge to help deal with his SAD.

TNG S04E12 The Wounded (). In scenes that recall the introduction of the Romulans in The Original Series, there is much talk of the recently-ended war with the Cardassians and how little they can be trusted. Meanwhile on Deep Space Enterprise, O’Brien and Keiko are in their quarters, happily swapping food cultures in their downtime. O’Brien is still in uniform. What, did you think the wardrobe department was made of money? As with the Ferengi, one of the first actors we see as a Cardassian will return to that species as a much more significant character. Here Marc Alaimo plays Gul Macet with purring Bond-villain relish. Investigating the destruction of a Cardassian science station, Picard advocates radical openness with Macet’s team. Their quarry is Captain Maxwell played by Bob Gunton, who was all over 90s TV and movies playing slime-balls and ne’er-do-wells (he’s the prison warden in Shawshank for example). In single-handedly re-starting hostilities, he’s essentially General Ripper from Dr Strangelove, and this is darker, nastier stuff than we’ve seen before from this show, showing the cost of war on good people on both sides, and it’s fascinating. Yet again, O’Brien gets a good slice of the action, more than several of the actual regulars, some of whom don’t appear at all, but that also means that he’s centre-stage for one of the sillier climaxes in the series, wherein the war-crazed Star Fleet captain is defeated by the judicious application of a strategic sea-shanty.

TNG S04E13 Devil’s Due (). By now, TNG had firmly established its own style, characters and cannon, and there was no danger of it recycling silly ideas like having the Enterprise meet God. Anyway, in this episode, the Enterprise meets the devil. The crew answers a distress call, can only lock on to one member of the science team who are all screaming for help, beam him up and then consider the matter closed. Over a calm cup of tea, Dr Clarke tells Picard that the inhabitants of Faustus II believe they’ve sold their souls to the devil. This devil is “Ardra” played by Marta DuBois who seems to be auditioning to be a Batman villain as she says things like “Stop cowering, if I want you on your knees, I’ll let you know,” which isn’t quite as clever or as funny as it sounds. It ends up as a court room drama, a setting which has proven to be highly effective in past episodes, but which here turns what is purported to be a thousand year old legend brought to terrifying life into people in silly clothes talking in one room, and having Data be the judge has nothing like the power of making Riker mount the case for the prosecution in The Measure of a Man. This is, for some reason, the other Phase II script (after The Child in Season 2) which turns up in the new series. Quite why this was plucked off the slush pile is anyone’s guess. We haven’t had anything this silly or inconsequential for quite some time.

TNG S04E14 Clues (). Oh dear, Dixon Hill is back. Luckily, the focus of this episode is not on these tiresome gumshoe exploits, which Guinan clearly finds as irritating as I do. Instead, the crew is trying to understand why Data appears to be lying about the amount of time they spent unconscious when they came into contact with a wormhole. The whole thing is something of a red queen’s race – a lot of energy expended in order to go nowhere – and the resolution feels like the solution to a crossword puzzle with not much in the way of emotional catharsis. The question of whether or not Data is to be trusted is not without interest, and as cheap ship-bound episodes with no guest cast (apart from O’Brien) go, this one isn’t bad. But we wouldn’t want too many of these rather arid outings in a row. Data uses a protocol called “zed zed alpha” which is a nice nod to Douglas Adams in an episode which has a certain Red Dwarf flavor to my eyes.