{"id":2941,"date":"2022-05-10T13:00:26","date_gmt":"2022-05-10T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2941"},"modified":"2023-03-06T11:09:54","modified_gmt":"2023-03-06T11:09:54","slug":"trekaday-023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2022\/05\/10\/trekaday-023\/","title":{"rendered":"Trekaday 023: Coming of Age, Heart of Glory, The Arsenal of Freedom, Symbiosis, Skin of Evil, We’ll Always Have Paris, Conspiracy, The Neutral Zone"},"content":{"rendered":"

TNG S01E19 Coming of Age <\/strong>(\"2). Yay, it\u2019s a Wesley episode. Nice of them to pair him with one of the worst young actors I\u2019ve ever seen on American television to make him look good. Acting Ensign Crusher doesn\u2019t have a com badge and so has to respond to his mom\u2019s shipwide call by touching a panel on the wall, like Kirk and Spock. Admiral Gregory Quinn sports yet another bizarre admiral\u2019s uniform, which always look to me like swatches of black and red material and gold trim stitched together in the dark. He and sidekick Remmick get introduced to Tasha Yar, but she doesn\u2019t get a line in response, natch. Remmick spends his time onboard pointing out plot holes in previous episodes to every member of the regular cast (except Tasha Yar, natch). Remmick would be excellent at #trekaday. He\u2019s such an obvious bad guy it\u2019s almost comical. Debut of the Riker Maneuvre, and other seeds are sown here for a future arc which will get killed off during the turmoil of Season 2, so this all feels like bits and pieces of a bigger story, rather than a coherent hour of television in its own right. There\u2019s a nice Worf scene on the Holodeck though. Speaking of which\u2026<\/p>\n

TNG S01E20 Heart of Glory<\/strong> (\"3.5). RIKER: I\u2019ll prepare an away team. PICARD: Lt Yar, you stay at your post. YAR: Aye sir. And fuck you. TNG<\/strong>\u2019s delve into Klingon mythology starts here, which will persuade Michael Dorn to stick around and give rise to many fan-favorite episodes. I\u2019m not so interested in Klingons and generally find their posturing and honour codes furiously uninteresting, but that\u2019s on me. Arguably, it\u2019s this episode, more than any other in this season (save the pilot), which points the way forward for the show. That said, I do have further quibbles besides my personal lack of interest in the Klingons. The 24th century hasn\u2019t come up with helmet cams yet. As soon as you recognise this, it’s infuriating that the captain has to keep asking the away team what they can see. Great emphasis is placed on the fact that Geordi can detect androids at a glance. This useful trait is never referred to again in any subsequent episode or movie (in a later episode he reveals he can detect liars too, but this also never comes up again). Apparently the Klingon here is gibberish as the script was thrown together in two days and there wasn\u2019t time to get it translated by Marc Okrand who had developed the official Klingon language during production of Star Trek III<\/em>. Pacing issues here too, it takes forever to find the Klingon survivors on the wrecked freighter and start the actual plot.<\/p>\n

TNG S01E21 The Arsenal of Freedom<\/strong> (\"3.5). As well as doing much to establish the Picard\/Crusher will-they-won\u2019t they, there\u2019s another character thread here \u2013 Riker rejecting a ship of his own \u2013 but delivered with the standard Season 1 lack of grace and subtlety. Here\u2019s Vincent Schiavelli classing up the joint, but stuck delivering heavy-handed satire such as \u201cPeace Through Superior Firepower\u201d. It\u2019s a bit of a soggy teaser too, smashing into the opening titles off the back of a conversation about away team logistics. Before long, we\u2019re on a particularly unconvincing Planet Sound Stage, with a chromakey blue sky and plenty of hopeful dry ice. In fact, this feels a lot like TOS<\/strong>, with the captain beaming down to a planet where a previous ship has vanished and Riker finding an AI imposter. \u201cMy ship is the Lollipop. It\u2019s a good ship.\u201d Ha! At the bottom of that pit, with Beverly and Jean-Luc, there’s a grace and feeling for character which is frankly astonishing, but when we\u2019re not with Picard, this often feels disjointed and uncertain. Another new chief engineer shows up, who looks about 12, but Geordi puts him in his place. Virtually Troi\u2019s entire contribution is concerned looks at Geordi, but there\u2019s a sense of family and teamwork here that was talked about in Coming of Age<\/em> but wasn\u2019t felt. Picard’s last line to Geordi is just great.<\/p>\n

TNG S01E22 Symbiosis <\/strong>(\"2). Hey look, it\u2019s Khan\u2019s second in command and Kirk\u2019s son as a feckless junkie freighter captain and one of his passengers. There’s almost nothing that Star Trek<\/strong> hates more than hippy druggies \u2013 see The Way to Eden<\/em> for more of this \u2013 but I\u2019m rarely diverted by the Enterprise<\/em> playing cr\u00e8che to squabbling aliens and it\u2019s another opportunity for the implacable moral superiority of the Federation to be on full display, as well as another demonstration of the ship\u2019s lazy attitude towards pathogen screening for unexpected visitors. Denise Crosby\u2019s last filmed episode, so presumably she DGAF about that ghastly Just Say No Speech to Wesley. Watch for her waving goodbye to the audience in the back of one shot. In HD, the much-vaunted felicium is clearly red lentils.<\/p>\n

TNG S01E23 Skin of Evil<\/strong> (\"1.5). Denise Crosby wanted out. She could see that the bridge was top-heavy. She was turning down other work to say \u201cHailing frequencies open Captain,\u201d once every other episode. Roddenberry and Paramount could have held her to her contract, but they had no wish to keep her at her post against her will. That created an incredible opportunity. Among all the things that pop culture mocked TOS <\/strong>for, the one that was hardest to fix was bumping off red-shirts. If you don\u2019t bump off anyone, that lowers the stakes. But you can\u2019t have a member of the regular cast beam down and get bumped off without resetting it later (which also lowers the stakes). Until now. Evidently, the temptation was irresistible \u2013 she gets just 11 lines of dialogue before she bites the sound stage dust. It doesn\u2019t sound like much, but it\u2019s about as much as she\u2019s had in the last half-dozen episodes put together. But as clever and daring as this device looks on paper, on TV it\u2019s a sour moment in a clumsy and borderline-ridiculous, episode which doesn\u2019t earn any of its hoped-for tragedy at the end as the crew gather at the Windows 95 Desktop of Perpetual Remembrance. Even in death, Tasha Yar gets sidelined, and the effects work is cheap-looking and lousy too. Denise Crosby will be back \u2013 all too briefly \u2013 in far better episodes of what will have become a far better show. A new chief engineer is in place \u2013 who would have failed Wesley\u2019s Star Fleet Academy exam as he sets a matter-antimatter ratio of 25:1.<\/p>\n

TNG S01E24 We\u2019ll Always Have Paris <\/strong>(\"1). Time eddies. A distress call. An old friend of the captain\u2019s. Once again, TNG <\/strong>is playing the hits \u2013 and there\u2019s no mention of Tasha Yar, natch. On Troi\u2019s orders, Picard relives some backstory on the Holodeck in a tediously sentimental episode which wallows in secondhand nostalgia as Picard leers over a barely legal blonde in a top which isn\u2019t so much low-cut as hardly there. \u201cEnough of this self-indulgence,\u201d growls Patrick Stewart. Quite. The science-fiction time loop stuff is more interesting, but only just. Data uses a brilliant piece of deduction to work out which of the three versions of him needs to take the required action. Alas, we are never told what this piece of thinking might have been. Denise Crosby\u2019s name is the opening credits for this and the remaining episodes of Season 1. Dammit.<\/p>\n

TNG S01E25 Conspiracy <\/strong>(\"3). Here we pick up the crumbs scattered in Coming of Age<\/em> but over just two episodes, this doesn\u2019t feel real or earned \u2013 another example of the show at this stage either not knowing what to do with good ideas, or not yet having the confidence to execute them with any real force. This would love to be Invasion of the Bodysnatchers<\/em> or The Parallax View<\/em> (or David Cronenberg) but the world doesn\u2019t feel lived in. The climax should be a shockingly transgressive end to the season, calling back numerous details from past episodes. Actually, it\u2019s a little too hasty and a lot too ridiculous to feel like it really matters. It\u2019s not at all clear how Riker\u2019s deception fooled the other slug creatures, there\u2019s no sense of a bigger organization behind all this (Federation or alien slugs) and Picard and Riker phasering an intelligent adversary to gory death is just about as wrong as can be. Still, it\u2019s a step up from soggy oil monsters and mooning over lost loves, it is at least exciting, and we haven\u2019t seen much from Wesley for ages. Geordi tries to teach Data about jokes which is pretty ghastly.<\/p>\n

TNG S01E26 The Neutral Zone <\/strong>(\"3.5) Oh, wait, that wasn\u2019t the season finale? Okay, I guess. In what feels like a do-over of Space Seed<\/em>, the Enterprise<\/em> happens across an ancient craft onboard which there are people in suspended animation. Talking about the fad for cryonics in the late twentieth century, Beverly Crusher marvels that \u201cPeople used fear death \u2013 it terrified them.\u201d Uh-huh. Luckily, she\u2019s found a cure not just for their terminal conditions but for death itself. They wake up and see Worf and promptly faint, and a music cue tells us how funny this is. Actually this strand does a decent job of using the 24th century to satirise the 1980s. Meanwhile, no-one has seen the Romulans in years and the Enterprise<\/em> is flogging across space for a reunion, which is the subject of endless speculation about what they might do, say and want. Actually, despite all my snark, both plots have something to recommend them but \u2013 not for the first time \u2013 the cross-cutting is unhelpful. \u201cYou\u2019re feeling profoundly sad,\u201d intuits Troi, staring into the face of a woman with tears running down her face.<\/p>\n

Stray thoughts (Season One)<\/strong><\/p>\n