The Enterprise is answering an emergency distress call from the remote scientific outpost that is home to Dr. Graves (W. Morgan Sheppard), a man considered to be "the greatest human mind." When they arrive, they receive a second distress call from a MacGuffin... er, transport ship, forcing a rushed beam-down of Data, Troi, Worf, and Dr. Selar, while Pulaski and Enterprise warp away to attend to the second emergency.
Dr. Selar ascertains that Graves is dying of incurable disease. Graves responds to the news by shutting himself away with Data, who intrigues him because he was constructed by his own pupil. Graves reveals to Data that he has come up with a way to cheat death, by transferring his consciousness into a machine. But Data's arrival has allowed him to go one better. By switching Data's consciousness off, Graves is able to take over Data's body!
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: If we're grading on a curve, Picard gets points for being the first member of the Enterprise crew to figure out that not only is something seriously wrong with Data, but that Data has actually taken on Graves' personality. We have to be grading on a very generous curve, though, because it takes far too long for Picard to go from mild concern to annoyance to realizing there's a problem. At least Patrick Stewart brings his "A" game to play. Though I'll be making fun of the confrontation between Picard and Graves-as-Data later in this review, it should be said that both actors do a splendid job with the scene, and Stewart is particularly forceful here.
Data: For the second time in this series, Brent Spiner gets to pull double-duty, playing both Data and Graves-as-Data. Unfortunately, this performance is not as successful as his Lore was. Graves-as-Data is even more annoying than Graves in the first part of the episode. Not because Spiner is bad, but because he's doing all too good a job of channeling W. Morgan Sheppard's irritating performance. There is no amusement value at all in watching Data be jealous and insubordinate, or refer to Wesley as "boy," and it isn't until very late in the episode that Graves-as-Data becomes a genuine threat. I will say that Spiner plays the climactic confrontation with Picard splendidly. It's just a shame there's so much dross to sit through to reach that point.
Troi: Her Betazoid abilities allow her to sense that Data is jealous when Picard gets a bit tactile while showing Kareen around the bridge. Wow - she can diagnose jealousy from a jealous outburst that would make a 13-year-old boy look subtle - I'm impressed! Her abilities do not appear to extend to actually sensing that a key member of the crew, one she personally knows very well, has just had a complete personality transfer - even when she has also met the man whose personality he has assumed! Even within the limited role the show has assigned her, Troi is utterly useless.
Hot Space Babe of the Week: Barbara Alyn Woods is Kareen, Graves' assistant - who is, of course, a pretty young blonde. The episode does at least take pains to tell us that Graves isn't making the kind of use of his assistant that one would expect of such an obvious lech... but then it ruins it again by telling us that Kareen would apparently welcome such a relationship with this gruff, lecherous old man. She does show enough of a spine that, when Graves assumes that he'll just transplant her into an android body, she firmly declines. Otherwise, another fairly weak female guest star who makes me long for some of TOS' guest stars. They may have been mini-skirt clad and painted green, but they usually at least had personalities to go along with that.
Villain of the Week: Television veteran W. Morgan Sheppard is Graves, a man we are told is one of the most brilliant scientists in the Federation. It's a good thing we're told that, because he just comes across as a grumpy old lech. "A woman isn't a person, she's a woman," he booms. I'm not sure whether it speaks badly of the character or the episode that he apparently believes such declamations to be charming.
THE PICARD SLEDGE-HAMMER
The episode's climax sees Picard face down Graves-as-Data. Picard resorts to his deadliest weapon: the power of the sledge-hammer. "Every man has his time," he tells Graves. He talks of Data's rights to live, urgently battering Graves by insisting that no man's right to live is so strong that it can be allowed to "infringe on the rights of another." When Graves has endured all the blows he can take, he naturally lashes out and attempts to silence the source of his pain. But even knocking Picard unconscious does not end the pain, as Graves now begins repeating Picard's hackneyed lines about, "How many accidents?" At last, he bows to the inevitable and is crushed by the might of the Picard Sledge-Hammer.
THOUGHTS
"You are Number Six." Oh sorry, wrong Schizoid Man. The old Prisoner episode The Schizoid Man was terrific stuff. This Schizoid Man, by contrast, sucks.
This is yet another episode that moves painfully slowly. It takes almost twenty minutes for Graves to take over Data's body - twenty minutes that mostly consists of W. Morgan Sheppard chewing the scenery in what turns out to spectacularly unentertaining fashion. Once that's out of the way, there's another 15 minutes or so of "Data behaves strangely," while we wait for the characters to catch up with what we already know.
How about restructuring the episode so that we don't know what Graves has done? That at least would put us in the same place as Picard and the other regulars, and maybe wouldn't make them look so thick. Perhaps Graves could actually try to behave as Data at first, so that the odd behavior only gradually surfaces. Perhaps Graves could pose some direct threat to the ship. The only real threat here is the ticking clock introduced very late in the episode, that if Graves isn't removed from Data, then Data will die... and since we know that isn't going to happen, it doesn't exactly create much tension.
It is better than Loud as a Whisper was, but that isn't exactly saying much. With only two good episodes out of six so far, Season Two is starting to look just as bad as Season One, only with a lot less kitsch value to make up for the sluggish storytelling.
Rating: 3/10.
Previous Episode: Loud as a Whisper
Next Episode: Unnatural Selection
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