After discovering a long-lost Federation freighter, Picard and his crew determine that a single shuttle did escape the freigher. The only possible world any survivors might have reached is Angel One - an Earth-like planet ruled over by a council of women, led by the Mistress Beata (Karen Montgomery).
Though the Enterprise crew is received with suspicion, Mistress Beata seems only too happy at the prospect of getting rid of the four survivors. The survivors have become fugitives on this world, and have eluded the women's attempts to find and punish them. The Enterprise's sensors quickly detect the group. But when Data, Troi, and Tasha beam over to that location, they discover that the group would rather stay on Angel One as fugitives than return.
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: Gets the sniffles, then spends most of the rest of the episode in his bed. Effectively, Patrick Stewart got the week off.
Riker: Riker's squarely in Kirk territory in this episode. He leads the Away Team down to the planet, catches the eye of the pretty blonde ruler of the planet, beds her, and then gives an impassioned speech that causes her to change her mind about executing a bunch of people. Jonathan Frakes does a solid job, but unfortunately lacks any convincing chemistry with Karen Montgomery.
He's also not nearly as good at William Shater at delivery heavy-handed speeches. Shatner is hammy when delivering his end-of-episode speeches, but he's impassioned. There's something. About. His DelivERy! That makes you believe that he's truly bludgeoning the other side into submission. Frakes' final speech is delivered too much like a lecture by a sociology professor. I didn't believe that he'd made the ruling council change their minds. I half-expected Beata to roll her eyes, wonder why she was attracted to this dull lecturer to begin with, and then order the execution to go ahead. In fact, I'd have added a full point to the episode's score if such had happened.
Data: Uses the library on Angel One to determine a way to track the fugitive survivors. Later, finds a way to go against the intent of Riker's orders while still following the letter of them in order to allow Dr. Crusher to find a cure while still remaining on-hand to help the Away Team.
Troi: Initially acts as spokesperson for the Away Team on the female-dominated world. Then Riker gains Beata's eye, rendering Troi just as useless as she normally is. She does get to "sense fear" within the council chambers... but since both Riker and Tasha already picked up on that, it's about as useful as Troi's "senses" usually are.
Hot Alien Space Babe of the Week: Karen Montgomery is Beata, the ruler of Angel One. This position of high responsibility apparantly entails... ah, very little. She snaps at the token male (who carries himself like an underdressed maitre'd), lounges around in either the council chamber or her bedroom, and apparently has no issues to tackle beyond the fugitives. Montgomery gives an adequate performance, and I appreciated that Beata is not shown as either a bad leader or a bad person. But there's no sense that this a person who has a lot to deal with at any given time. She does look quite nice in the bedroom scene, though.
SHUT UP, WESLEY!
Has a skiing lesson in the Holodeck, which somehow leads to an outbreak of the sniffles on the Enterprise. How it does so is a complete mystery. Computer-generated holo-snow really shouldn't carry any bacteria (contrary to popular belief, a cold temperature in and of itself does not make one sick). In any case, the virus puts him out of action for the rest of the episode, making this a refreshingly Wesley-light installment.
THOUGHTS
After a string of fairly enjoyable episodes, there is something almost reassuring about viewing one as hackneyed and predictable as this. It's like the series is validating my initial opinion of it. Angel One put us squarely back into the qualitative realms of such masterful Ed Wood-like entertainment as Justice, Code of Honor, and The Last Outpost.
One can sense Gene Roddenberry's influence in the "world dominated by women" scenario. Clearly, we are meant to find the very idea of such a scenario unnatural, and the gender reversal is played to comically broad extremes. Given that the major female characters on the planet - Beata in particular - don't carry themselves as particularly dominant (Beata is downright coquettish with Riker, which should be outright deviant behavior by the rules of the world laid down for us), the scenario never convinces as presented, and we never see anything to truly demonstrate what is going on in the world at large.
There doesn't even appear to be a world at large on Angel One. Other than the council chamber and the redressed Enterprise transporter room passed off as the execution chamber, we don't see any of the planet or its citizens. When Riker says in his ending speech that Beata is facing dissent from her citizens, it's news to me. We haven't seen or heard anything of widespread dissent on Angel One. It would have made the episode a lot more interesting if we had. A male suffrage movement would have been sledgehammer-obvious, but it would at least have granted the episode more conviction than it carries.
Meanwhile, the subplot with the sniffles comes out of nowhere (a computer-generated biological virus? Really?), and accomplishes nothing in terms of the main plot. Dr. Crusher resolves the virus by means neither shown nor explained, she just suddenly has the cure at the end. Meanwhile, Data's staying in orbit sways Riker into attempting to stop the execution. But given that Riker's impassioned speech is all that's needed to achieve that, it makes Riker look either sulky or like a coward that he wasn't even going to try until he knew that the ship would be ready to beam him up if he failed.
The "C" story, with the Romulans making menacing moves along the neutral zone, presumably is there to set up the season finale. Within the context of this episode, it seems clumsily inserted to provide a ticking clock in a vain attempt to generate some tension. None is generated, leaving this episode with a fairly low:
Rating: 3/10.
Previous Episode: Datalore
Next Episode: 11001001
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