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. 

80. The Wounded

The Wounded, The Next Generation, Season 4, Episode 12

'The Wounded' marks the first appearance of the Cardassians, a race that would become a huge part of the Trek mythology. I think back on how far the Klingons have come since their first appearance in 'Errand of Mercy' and look at the depiction of the Cardassians from their introduction to their final appearance, and am surprised how fully formed they were from 'The Wounded.' Aside from the aesthetics of their uniforms, they're pretty much the same here as they are when Ben Sisko takes command of Deep Space Nine a few years later. It doesn't hurt that Marc Alaimo is playing the lead Cardassian here, as he would go on to play one of the most prominent villains in Trek's history.*

Though this was the first and last appearance of these bitchin' Cardassian helmet-things.

The Cardassians are presented as an empire with enough military might to threaten Starfleet. A smaller empire than the Klingons and Romulans, perhaps, but they're the best and worst of those two races. As smart as Romulans, as merciless as Klingons, but without the honor that keeps the latter in check. They are reptilian in appearance, calculating, cruel, and brutal. They will enslave an entire planet and justify their actions because they need to preserve their Empire. In short, they are everything the Federation to are not. But the Federation isn't what it used to be.

With their fleet decimated by the Borg attack, what we have is a Federation about to enter into a conflict they may not win. The war with the Cardassians had raged long enough for Picard to tell a war story from his time aboard his previous command, the Stargazer.**

Picard is ordered to keep the peace at all costs, and has to make some hard choices. He has to hunt down one of Starfleet's own, as Captain Ben Maxwell has gone rogue and attacked Cardassian targets. This could lead the Federation back into war with a ruthless enemy. As a show of good faith, Picard takes on a Cardassian delegation, who are constantly trying to get Picard to compromise Maxwell and let them blow him and his ship to smithereens.

If nothing else, this episode has a lot of sitting and talking. 

To do that, he enlists the help of one of his crew who served with Maxwell during the war, Miles Edward O'Brien. And it turns out this petty officer is far more interesting than a guy that pushes buttons in the transporter room. O'Brien was Maxwell's tactical officer during the Cardassian War, which make this 'simple enlisted man' more complex than he'd been so far. He turns our to be clever, and resourceful.

As O'Brien is not an officer, so I can only infer that his time as a Tactical Officer aboard the Rutledge was a war-time field-commission. It also makes his position on the Enterprise a bit strange. Transporter Chief seems like a demotion from Tactical. Perhaps O'Brien sought the honor of serving on the flagship. Perhaps he needed an assignment that was less intense than Tactical, even if that assignment was on a ship in constant danger. Miles is not shy about his feelings about the Cardassians. He's not a fan. He's seen the horrors of war, and he holds the Cardassians responsible for the man he had to become to survive it. We also see the consequences of families aboard the Enterprise as O'Brien tries to process his experiences with his new wife, Keiko.

But Miles knows Maxwell, and he uses every trick up his sleeve to help Picard bring a peaceful end to Maxwell's one-man war against the Cardassians. As Picard and crew attempt to figure it out, the Cardassian representative, Gul Macet, is constantly angling for the means to end Maxwell. Assuring Picard that the only way to attain peace is through Maxwell's end.

And to do that? Endless, endless meetings. 

Maxwell is presented as a contemporary of Picard's, perhaps his equal. Maxwell is smart, determined, and pulls off some tactical maneuvers that sets him up as a formidable opponent. He commands the USS Rutledge, a ship as advanced as the Enterprise. More importantly, Maxwell is a believer. He's a man on a self-appointed mission to expose the Cardassians as the duplicitous snakes they are. He suspects that the Cardassians are using the ceasefire as an excuse to rebuild their navy for a new assault. Maxwell blows up a science station because he believes the Cardassians are using it to spy on the Federation. He assaults a Cardassian civilian freighter because he thinks the Cardassians are secretly using them to resupply their war efforts.

Picard has to stop Maxwell, and there appears to be no easy way out of it. What makes Picard's job that much harder is that Maxwell is right. Maxwell is a man who has suffered loss. Perhaps he's one a mission to avenge the death of his wife during the war. Perhaps he's attempting suicide via death-by-cop. Perhaps he is doing exactly what he says he is, exposing the Cardassians. The truth turns out to be a mix of all of these things, and it makes Maxwell a fascinating antagonist.

Picard has to choose between doing what's right, and serving the greater good and keeping the peace. He can't even entertain Maxwell's suggestions to investigate the Cardassians supply ships because if Picard has proof, he'll have no option but to drag the Federation back into a costly war.  It's a hard choice, and arguable if he made the right one.

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Next up, it's Kirk vs. Robots and dudes with handlebar mustaches I, Mudd.



*Note, I haaaaate Marc Alaimo's Gul Dukat with a fiery passion, but not in the way that the creators of Deep Space Nine intended. For more on why he's terrible, please check out my review of #88 on the countdown.

**If I have complaints about the episode they're mostly inconsequential. The timeline suggests that the Federation and the Cardassians have been at war up until a year ago, but it's never mentioned in the first two seasons. As Picard tells his Stargazer story, it implies the war has been going on for quite quite a while. Other than the forehead makeup, the Cardassians themselves look terrible, and went through a much needed uniform upgrade before their next appearance. 

#82, Conundrum, The Next Generation, Season Five, Episode 14

"Wait. What's happening? I have zero idea." — Jean-Luc Picard

I'm of two minds of this episode.

On the one hand, hot damn, 'Conundrum' is just great. I mentioned in the previous post about taking the familiar and putting them in an unfamiliar surrounding, and in this episode we get an inversion of that motif. We take the familiar setting and put new characters in it. Well, not really new, per se. We still have Worf, Riker, Picard and Data, but their memories have been erased. They have no idea who they are, or what their purpose was. Just a bunch of people on a giant space ship, wearing snazzy uniforms, and wondering whiskey tango foxtrot is going on.

Too often we've seen mystery set up on Star Trek where we the viewing audience is a step or twelve ahead of the crew (for example, 'Parallels'), but here, we're just as clueless as the crew themselves. As the crew realizes none of them know who they are, there's an unfamiliar face on the bridge of the Enterprise. Commander MacDuff, the ship's First Officer. Whuuuuuuuuuut? And it's on like Ferengi Kong.  We know that something is horribly wrong, but the characters do not. MacDuff is a metaphorical bomb and we're just waiting to for him to go off. As he manipulates the crew, thwarting their attempts to get to truth, we're just waiting for the payoff.

The clues are well paced as the crew pieces together what's going on, with bread crumbs of information doled out in tiny chunks. The Enterprise is supposedly on a secret mission to take out an enemy base to end a bloody war. The enemy has a new secret weapon, which explains the memory loss. The Enterprise burns through the enemy lines, they grossly overpower their supposed mortal enemy.

There are some great character moments as the crew figure out who they are. What we have here are the characters stripped down to their cores. Riker is pure swagger. Ro is impulsive, looking to make her own rules. Deanna states the obvious. Beverly is there, I guess. Data tries to figure out who and what he is. Worf is pure warrior. Picard is wisdom incarnate. The Captain has some great verbal explorations of the moral dilemma of his mission. When they encounter their enemy, they discover  they're no match to them, he doubts the moral certainty of the conflict.

The episode is not without fun. Data and Geordie wonder if Data is unique or part of a ship's standard equipment, which is a fascinating concept. Ro and Riker put aside their usual animosity and replace it with amorousness.* And Worf thinks he's captain for a good chunk of the first act and no one bothers to stop him.

When everyone realizes that no one has their memories, Worf decides he's captain, because why not. With no one with any information to contradict him, he takes charge. His instincts tell him that they've been attacked and he starts ordering the rest of the crew to get the ship battle-ready. Picard shows patience and diplomacy as the young Klingon takes over his ship, and immediately slides into the role of the experienced advisor. It's great to see the contrast between the characters. Worf's single-mindedness and Picard's big picture view. It's the difference between inexperience and experience.  Worf's mea culpa to Picard is great when he discovers that he's the junior-most bridge officer.

"One day, I'll be Captain of my own ship, I swear. Computer, activate crowdfunding." — 'Captain' Worf. 

As they make it to their destination, the mystery is revealed, the MacDuff has been manipulating the Enterprise into destroying the base of his species' enemies, ending their war using the Enterprise's vastly superior firepower. Picard can't reconcile what he's been ordered to do and decides to talk to their 'enemy' rather than blow the shit out of their space station. When MacDuff forces his the issue, the crew stops him from murdering thousands using the Enterprise as his weapon. MacDuff shows his true colors, and those colors are alien and gross.

Apparently MacDuff belonged to the same species of  aliens as the ones from 'They Live.'

On the other hand, holy crap, the alien plot is just damned nonsensical. If they can take down the crew of the Enterprise in one shot, why not replace all of them with their own people? Why just the one guy? Why put your agent as the first officer and not the captain? The aliens that take over the ship, the Satarrans, are supposedly a hundred years behind the Enterprise in technology, but can reprogram Data and the ship's computer? The structure of the mystery is well done, but the reveal is a huge let down. and the episode begins with Troi beating Data a chess, a thing that no one ever would find plausible. However, I'm willing to give it a lot of latitude because the rest of the episode is so strong.

What's the verdict? In my opinion — and it's the official opinion of this blog — the strengths of 'Conundrum' far outweigh its weaknesses. So, in the end, 'Conundrum' is great. Flawed, but great.

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Next up, we get two Kirks for the price of one within 'The Enemy Within.'

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*They get it on, is what I'm saying. 

#84, Parallels, The Next Generation, Season 7, Episode 11

"Ahead full! Maximum Worf!" — Worf

I'm not going to lie. I was worried about this episode. Worried because when I announced that 'Little Green Men' was on the docket, I also announced how much I liked it. But when I revisited that episode, I realized that it didn't hold up to my memory. Part of this is the nature of comedy. Much of comedy relies on surprise. A set-up followed by misdirection. A classic structure of expectation and reversal. A third phrasing of that thing. A big part of my reaction to that episode was that it just wasn't all that funny. I've always found Trek better at being 'amusing' than 'funny.' 'Little Green Men' was just a little too-not-at-all-that-funny for my tastes.

That being said, I really, really remembered liking 'Parallels' and I was worried it would fall short of my expectations. After watching, I'm pleased to say it's still a great deal of fun, as Worf bounces from parallel reality to parallel reality, drifting further and further from the Enterprise he knows. As he shifts, the changes in his surroundings go from subtle (the cake is a different color!) to drastic (Riker is Captain!). It's one of those episodes that takes our familiar characters and puts them outside their comfort zones. What is at first contributed to a concussion from a bat'leth tournament messing with Worf's memories quickly escalates into him realizing that he's no longer in his home reality. Worf is lost, unsure of where he is or what's happening thanks to some shuttle accident and Geordi's visor, or something. The technobabble and technobabble solution aren't not really the problems here. Worf's motivations as a character are.

Worf rolls with the changes fairly well at first, assuming his memory is suspect thanks to the aforementioned blow to the head. But, history keeps changed around him. And not little things.  Deanna Troi is his suddenly his wife. Picard is dead at the hands of the Borg. Data has blue eyes. Dr. Crusher is no longer the Chief Medical Officer. Their combadges are slightly different. It's madness.

"Come, sit down, embace this new me-filled reality." — Deanna Troi

What I find interesting is that the reality in which Worf finally finds himself is a fairly sweet one. He's gotten a promotion to first officer of the Enterprise and is happily married to Deanna Troi with two supposedly beautiful children (we never see them). It's not until he realizes that in this reality, his son, Alexander, was never born, that Worf's drive to return home kicks in. Sirtis does a great job of handling Deanna's complex emotional roller coaster as she realizes that Worf not only has no memory of their relationship, the man she knew and loved is gone. Replaced with a man from another world. It's a completely weird thing to ask of an actor, but I think it's handled well.

If I have one major complaint about the episode (I have second but it isn't critical, and is super-nerdy) it's that the episode spends a great deal of time establishing what is essentially a non-mystery. The audience is so far ahead of the characters in this episode on what's going on, it's painful to watch the them catch up. They spend way too much time with the setup and explaining to the audience what a parallel reality is. It's a fairly well-known science-fiction trope and I feel we could skip a fair amount of this and get straight to the emotional conflict in the episode. I say a non-mystery because the reveal of what's going on is in the damned title. Doesn't take a warp-engine specialist to put two and two here.

The episode is very character heavy, where a man who is normally sure of himself, questions everything around him. There's not much driving the story forward, past the mystery we already know the answer to. So, the episode lumbers a bit. We have new, shiny things to look at, but it does drag. There are a few red herrings. Cardassians tamper with a space telescope, and aggressive Bajorans strike against intruders to their territory, but neither pay off in a satisfactory way. It's not until the barriers of reality start to break down that we have an actual threat to deal with, and Worf has any kind of decision to make.

My second complaint about the episode is far more nit-picky and about the Son of Mogh himself. In this episode, Worf comes across as the Klingoniest-Klingon-to-ever-Klingon-a-Klingon. And it bugs me. The episode starts off with Worf returning from a bat'leth tournament, which sounded an awful lot like an Olympics where competitors get impaled. Or, I imagine something akin to MMA, but with giant knives. But not only did he compete, he won with Grand Champion standing. I call shenanigans.*

Worf going off to a bat'leth tournament as a spectator I totally buy. He wasn't raised by Klingons and Worf has always struggled to connect to his heritage in a meaningful way. Worf running off to learn what it means to be a Klingon is a reoccurring character theme. But for him to go to this tournament and win, I just don't buy it. Having competed in martial arts tournaments (I have, don't laugh), I can tell you the people that win those trophies on that level are preternaturally gifted, train non-stop or both.

Worf is a capable officer and warrior, but for him to be competitive amongst natively-raised Klingon warriors, living in a society where competition pushes each of them to the extremes is not credible. I get that we need a mcguffin for him to recognize what reality he's in, and what's changed. As a symbol of the changing realities, his grand master trophy changing from 3rd place to 9th to a participatory ribbon certainly works. It just stands out as being a little too Klingoniest-Klingon to me.

As he swapped realities, it would have been great to have seen Worf in a wind up in a place where Klingons ruled the Federation, which may have been a real emotional challenge for Worf. Here we'd have a character who's struggled with connecting with his heritage, and then have to choose to give it up in order to save reality.

While it's fun to subtly change things around Worf, things never drift too far from the Enterprise-D we know and love. The changes aren't really that drastic. Worf pops into a reality where Wesley Crusher is the tactical officer (one once again questions the wisdom of Starfleet HR). And it would have been great to have Dr. Kate Pulaski show up as medical chief in a cameo. I love that there's something meta here. It's like we're looking at the series in alternate timelines. It's almost as if they're embracing the fan rumors/theories that Stewart wasn't going to return for season three after 'Best of Both Worlds.' Or looking at what if Wil Wheaton had stayed on with the series to become Lt. Crusher?

"Ugh. Pressing space buttons is so beneath my preternatural genius." — Tactical Officer, Lt. Wesley Crusher 

The mind, it boggles.

If anything, I wish they'd gone wilder with it. And weirder with it. We get hints of it with a reality where the Borg have conquered the Federation. When Worf's shuttle takes off to seal the anomaly, it's threatened by a panicked and mountain-man-bearded Riker. He's so desperate to do anything to keep from returning to his nightmare that he'd rather face the breakdown of all existence than the Borg. There's a surreal moment, when New-Reality-Riker is forced to kill Mountain-Bearded-Riker, but it's soon passed. If we had gotten to the answer to the mystery sooner, we might have had a chance to explore some of the more extreme tangents in Enterprise reality. As it is, it's a slow start and a rushed ending.

"The Borg are everywhere! There's no shaving cream or hair gel left in our reality! We won't go back!" — Riker

It's still a fun adventure, but I find myself pondering what might have been. I can't decide if that's appropriate or ironic considering the nature of story.

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Next up, a 'Timeless' adventure with the Voyager crew. So, the Voyager crew and time travel? Again?

We'll see.

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*I wanted to use the Klingon word for 'shenanigans' here, but, sadly there isn't one.