78. Remember Me

'I know what I'm saying is crazy. You have to believe me, Jean-Luc; this is my 'very-serious' face." — Dr. Crusher

 Remember Me, The Next Generation, Season 4, Episode 5

I kind of feel like the Top 100 List is punishing me. Last episode, I plowed through 'I, Mudd' with great difficulty. This time, we get an episode of TNG that just didn't work for me. It's not terrible, but for me it falls in the category, of 'why is this in the list, again?' It's a Beverly-Crusher-centric episode, and that's not always a good thing. In 'Remember Me,' Dr. Crusher is trapped in a reality that's collapsing in on her, eliminating everything and everyone around her.

It starts off with a strange occurrence. Dr. Crusher starts to notice that members of the crew go missing. First, it's just an old friend of Dr. Crusher, seemingly wiped from existence. All record of his presence on the Enterprise is gone. Everyone's memory has been altered and Dr. Crusher has trouble convincing everyone that something is wrong. Others start to go missing, until the Enterprise is staffed with a skeleton crew. And Dr. Crusher fights to convince everyone that what they're experiencing is incorrect. That she's not crazy. That something is very, very wrong on the Enterprise-D.  

Space-Calgon is a very dangerous, and should not be tampered with. 

Let's talk about about Dr. Beverly Crusher. Chief Medical Officer of the Enterprise. Commander in rank. Former head of Starfleet Medical. Widow. Mother. Friend and potential love interest of Jean-Luc Picard. She's supposed to be a strong female character, but more often than not she's relegated to exposition and caretaker. Which means, more often than not, Dr. Crusher doesn't have that much to do other than wave her tricorder and speak nonsense. Unlike McCoy in the Original Series, she's not integral to the show, as demonstrated by her replacement, Dr. Pulaski, in season two. Pulaski, though her service aboard the Enterprise was brief, shook things up, constantly challenged the status quo, and showed more character development in one season than Crusher did in six.

Earlier in the series, Crusher had a will-they-won't-they thing happening with Picard, but other than that, she didn't have that well-developed of a character. She didn't really have a hook, so to speak, like the other doctors in the series. McCoy was the country doctor. Bashir was naive, inexperienced and a bit arrogant. Voyager's EMH was an artificial intelligence looking to expand his existence beyond his original programming. Phlox was an alien outsider and constant optimist. Crusher was Wesley's mom, and not much else going on. Everything about her was seemingly defined by someone else. I can't really put that on the actor, Gates McFadden. She does the best she can with the cards she's dealt.

For Dr. Crusher to carry the episode, she needed to have been a more substantial as a character, and, sadly, she's not. And we're midway through in the series, and she's still defined by her relationships with her captain and her son. We need a reason to care for her more than she's part of the ensemble.

Then there's a shift in this episode when it changes focus from Dr. Crusher to her son Wesley. In that moment, it changes from being about character to being about technobabble. And that's pretty much when 'Remember Me' loses me.

'Wait a minute! Geordie look at this! According to my calculations —which I can totally do in my head — if we can reconfigure the antimatter in the warp-matrix, and re-route auxiliary power to the starboard nacelle, we can bypass main power, and re-channel it through the main defector dish. Then once we use inverted tachyons to generate a stable graviton field, we should be able to have just enough power to do a site-to-site transport and get everyone into the final act of this episode and get my mom back. Also, EPS conduits, and jefferies tubes, or something. I can do this by speaking excitedly and pushing about three buttons on this panel. It probably won't blow up the ship at all." — Wesley Crusher

Wesley is super-duper-special with warp technology and science stuff, or so they tell us. When, it's revealed that Dr. Crusher was caught in an accident from Wesley's warp experiment, my reaction was a hearty 'whatever.' Her passing thoughts at the time of the accident create a reality around her that starts to fall apart as time goes on. I bet she's glad wasn't thinking of giant, killer, mutant spiders when the accident happened. I bet it would have made a much more exciting episode, but what the heck do I know.

The last act is chockfull of warp-speak and metaphysical pseudoscience about thought affecting reality. We even get callback to Season One with an alien who proclaimed Wesley's super-specialness. The problem is that the purpose of Wesley's experiment is vague, and the accidental disappearance of Dr. Crusher is never explained in a way that really connects.* The solution to the mystery presented feels like a cheat. Because it's not one that the audience can solve by piecing together the clues presented, the resolution felt to me like a big, fat 'uh-if-you-say-so.'

When reunited, Wesley falls asleep mid-hug.

Over the course of the series, Dr. Crusher does branch out a bit. When Wil Wheaton left the show, and Dr. Crusher was without Wesley to worry about, we learn that she's interested in command, a playwright and director, a capable leader, and one hell of a tap dancer. Dr. Crusher moves from being a protective mother and eventually evolves into the stalwart moral compass of the Enterprise.

But in this instance, she's still just Wesley's mom.

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Next up, another doctor steps into the holosuite role of a suave, sixties, super-spy in 'Our Man Bashir.' 

* Okay, it tracks logically, I guess — if you want to get technical about the technobabble — but it comes from a place of plot not emotion, and therefore no one really cares.