Star Trek Week: Top Five TNG

When you’re limiting yourself to five choices and you’re dealing with an embarrassment of riches like “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” things can get kind of tough. There are so many great episodes – how do you choose just five? At various points while composing this list, I had several other episodes in various slots: “The Inner Light” (which I do like an awful lot, in spite of my feeling that it’s overrated by most fans who claim it as the best episode of the series), “Chain of Command Part II,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Sarek,” “The Measure of a Man” and “Hollow Pursuits” were all on the list at one time, and many more were near misses.

Anyway, those are all fine episodes, great episodes, even. But here, in my opinion, are…

The Top Five Next Generation Episodes:

"Okay, try to fashion a rudimentary lathe..."

5. Darmok: There’s a fun little mystery here, as Picard and the crew (independently) try to figure out how to communicate with the Tamarians. In a universe where the universal translator facilitates easy communications between basically every intelligent species, a plot revolving around failure to communicate is both clever and refereshing. The moment when Picard realizes what’s going on – that the Tamarians communicate primarily through metaphor – is well-crafted, as Picard and the audience are figuring things out at just about the same time. But, as is so often the case with TNG, it’s the quiet moments that really sing, especially on an episode like this one that is somewhat more action-oriented than your typical outing. Dathon, the Tamarian captain, is mortally wounded, and as he lays dying, Picard asks him to tell more about Darmok and Jalad. Dathon tells the story, and Picard responds in kind with the story of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. It’s a supremely well-acted moment by both Patrick Stewart and Paul Winfield as Dathon. The two come to understand one another better as Picard realizes that the reason that Dathon put himself and Picard in the situation was the hope of achieving, as he would say, “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” And we get some of that “Picard quotes classic literature to himself” action that we all love.

"Hey, guess what? I'm not really a complete tool!"

4. The First Duty: A lot of people like this episode just because it features Wesley screwing up and not saving the day for once. A lot of them also wish that Wesley had been killed in the accident rather than Josh Albert. I’m not one of them. Actually, I think it shows how badly the writers used Wesley up until this episode, how much they completely failed to understand his potential as a character. If they had let him be a boy genius, but a bit of a troublemaker rather than Mr. “I’m with Starfleet, we don’t lie” Goody Two-Shoes, I don’t think the fans would have disliked him. The fact that it took Wil Wheaton leaving the show and returning for a guest appearance to finally get a good Wesley episode is kind of sad. Anyway, there’s a lot to like here. Wheaton shows that, when given more to do than say, “Aye, sir,” and “Course laid in, sir,” or describe Worf’s penis to a group of scantily-clad teenagers,  he’s a pretty darn good actor. Of course, there’s more than just Wesley going on here – Patrick Stewart does his usual fine job, hitting the right beats in his ongoing surrogate-father relationship with Wesley. There’s also a great scene between Stewart and Ray Walston as Boothby, the gardener, whom Picard told Wesley to look up when he got to the academy back in “Final Mission,” Wheaton’s last episode as a regular cast member. Geordi and Data do their usual “figure out what really happened” thing. Robert Duncan McNeill is delightfully slimy as Nick, the proto-Tom Paris and leader of Alpha Squadron. But in the end, it really comes down to the redemption of Wesley Crusher, something few fans thought was possible.

"Sheesh...anybody else getting tired of Data's goddamn magic tricks?"

3. Cause and Effect: One of my favorite running bits on TNG was the officers’ poker game. It was always a great way to throw in a little surreptitious exposition, and a great way to develop character. I loved the fact that Picard finally joined the game at the very end of “All Good Things…” Here, the poker game becomes an essential part of the plot, too. The Enterprise is caught in a technobabble loop temporal causality loop, repeating the same sequence of events over and over. We come in in medias res at the end of one cycle – and hey, beginning an episode with a teaser where the ship is blown the hell up is a pretty bold start. We see four more cycles through the loop, each one slightly different from the last, as the crew experiences a growing sense of déjà vu. The actors play the moments beautifully – beginning with Beverly’s strange feeling that Riker is going to bluff in the first iteration of the poker game. The next time around, Riker realizes beforehand that Crusher will know that he’s bluffing, and folds. With the third iteration, they don’t even get that far – instead, Crusher, Worf and Riker are all able to predict exactly which cards Data will deal. Finally, having been able to transmit a message into the next iteration of the loop, Data stacks the deck as he shuffles (casting Worf and Riker’s repeated speculation as to whether Data is actually randomizing the cards in the previous iterations in a new light), and though Crusher believes she’ll be able to predict the cards, they’re all threes. Much as with “The Visitor” (as discussed in yesterday’s DS9 post), there’s a bit of technobabble, but it’s all in the service of an interesting story. Ultimately the real resolution of the plot depends not on “if we release an interphasic tachyon pulse, we should be able to invert the polarity of the chronoton emissions,” but rather the characters being genuinely smart and figuring out the right course of action. And the coda, in which we discover that the Enterprise wasn’t the only ship trapped in the loop, is brilliant in showing us just what the consequences of repeated failure might have been.

"Thank you sir, may I have another?"

2. Tapestry: “Tapestry” is a great study of what makes Picard tick, of course. But it’s also a great study, in its way, of just what it is about Picard that fascinates Q so much. It isn’t just that he wants to test Picard. It isn’t just that he enjoys playing tricks on Picard. Because Picard refuses to be cowed or intimidated by Q, Q wants to take the opportunity to demonstrate his own superiority. He’s taunting Picard, saying, “Look, Jean-Luc, I know you better than you know yourself. What do you think of that?” But at the same time, it is a joke, and it is a test. Q is utterly fascinated by Picard – as his chosen examplar of humanity – and wants to see what Picard will do in each new situation Q puts him in. This is the best Q episode because it has that narrow focus – just on Q and Picard. There’s no extraneous weirdness with the Borg or Robin Hood or Q stripped of his powers. It’s the most simple and direct clash between the adversaries who are a wild mismatch in power but perfectly matched in temperament. I also love the callback all the way back to season 2’s “Samaritan Snare,” in which Picard first told Wesley the story related here, and noted that he found his laughter in response to the stabbing to be a strange thing to do. In the end, as Picard puts history right, he’s laughing not just because he knows the future will proceed in his desired direction, but because he finally, after so many years, has an answer as to why he was laughing about being stabbed through the chest in the first place.

"Hmm...well, it's more than I wanted to spend...but I'll take him!"

1. The Best of Both Worlds, Part I and II (plus Family): Okay, this is a bit of a cheat, as it’s three episodes. But obviously, you can’t really separate the two parts of “The Best of Both Worlds,” and “Family” is the absolutely necessary epilogue. I can remember anxiously looking at the clock as Part I aired, watching as it hit 6:30, then 6:45 and 6:55, slowly realizing that there was no way they were going to resolve this thing in one episode. “Mr. Worf…fire!” echoed in my ears all summer long, as my friends and I endlessly debated what was going to happen and whether Picard would actually die. They’d killed off Yar, after all…so there was no particular reason to expect that Picard was going to survive the experience. Okay, I’ll readily admit that Part II was a bit of a letdown, but how could it not be after that buildup? It was still pretty great. If Part II didn’t quite live up to the hype, that was more than made up for by its follow-up, “Family.” So often on sci-fi shows, the characters go through incredible, horrific, traumatic experiences, and then are running around next week like nothing’s happened. “Family” gives us, and Picard, a bit of a rest after the intensity of “The Best of Both Worlds,” and gives Picard a chance to heal from the trauma he’s suffered. His nephew René reminds Picard of his own youthful energy and optimism, reinforcing why he wanted to go into Starfleet in the first place. And his brother Robert is able to clear Jean-Luc’s head and make him see the clarity of his choices about the future in a way that only family can do for each of us. And they really grasp, brilliantly, the way that brothers, even adult brothers who ought to have grown out of it, can be rolling in the mud, at each other’s throats one moment, and then merrily and drunkenly singing together the next. As good as TNG ever got.