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| Jev (Ben Lemon), looking completely trustworthy. |
THE PLOT
The Enterprise is hosting a group of Ullians, historians whose telepathic abilities allow them to access people's most buried memories. After a dinner between the command staff and the Ullians, Counselor Troi falls into a coma. Dr. Crusher can find no cause, but does report unusual electrical activity in the part of the brain that controls memory.
Riker investigates, focusing heavily on Jev (Ben Lemon), the young Ullian man who was the last person to speak with Troi. Shortly after Riker makes his suspicions clear, he falls into a similar coma. While Dr. Crusher, Data, and Geordi check every possible medical or chemical explanation for the comas, Picard is faced with a difficult decision: Confine the Ullians to quarters with no evidence, or risk more of his officers being incapacitated?
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: Refuses to jump to conclusions about a link between the Ullians and the comas. When all other possibilities have been eliminated, however, he does talk to them and makes his case for them to voluntarily confine themselves to quarters. He is diplomatic and makes his case quite well, but he can't deny them the chance to try to prove their own innocence.
Riker: When Troi is in a coma, Riker goes to talk to her in sick bay, allowing Jonathan Frakes to try his hand at doing some "acting." I don't think it's the writing at fault, as the monologue - Riker attempting to talk to her and struggling to find very routine things to say - is actually rather well written. But Frakes' delivery just doesn't work, with the actor trying too hard to show Riker's emotions when Riker's inclination should be to do everything he can to hold those emotions back. Frakes does much better with the more action-driven material, as when he confronts Jev to try to get answers about Troi's condition.
Troi: Before being thrust into the "victim" box, she gets a rather charming scene opposite Jev, commiserating with him about his overbearing father by talking about her own overbearing mother. In her own "nightmare," we also discover that Troi and Riker came close to rekindling their relationship sometime around Season Three, in a moment of giddiness after a poker game. The implication is that, in reality, Troi stopped it because she knew that it was a bad idea for them to be involved while serving on the same ship. The attacker shifts the memory, however, which means that a pleasant memory for Troi is now poisoned forever.
THOUGHTS
In a Very Special Episode of Star Trek, Counselor Troi is raped, and must find the inner (and outer) strength to fight back against her attacker by kicking him repeatedly in a hilariously choreographed climax. This being Star Trek, it is of course a science fiction mind rape, but any doubts about this being "The Rape Episode" are washed away when one of the Ullians actually uses the word "rape" in the tag.
I always have a significant problem with these types of episodes in older shows where interepisode continuity is minimal. Here, we see Troi get raped inside her mind. Then, at the climax, her attacker attempts to repeat the crime. We are even told by a Picard voice over that the healing process will be a slow one. Which it would be - This sort of attack leaves emotional scars, which should be visible for some time. This being TNG, however, it is very unlikely it will ever be mentioned again. Given this, it just comes across as being in bad taste. "Rape is bad... Now let us show you an attractive young woman getting pawed. There will be consequences... But you'll never see them, because that would be inconvenient."
Where the episode does have some value is in the non rape-like material. The scenes in which Geordi and Dr. Crusher try to find specific causes, only to have every possibility eliminated, are genuinely interesting and well performed by the actors. The visions for Riker and Crusher are revealing about their characters, with Riker paralyzed at having to make the difficult choice to leave a crew member to die in order to save the ship, and with Dr. Crusher re-living the moment at which she saw her husband's corpse. Director Robert Wiemer also gets a nice, genuinely nightmarish atmosphere out of these scenes.
These virtues make the episode watchable, but can't overcome the laughable climax in which the villain, believing himself to be safe from further suspicion, returns to Troi's quarters to assault her again - a genuinely inexplicable plot turn that serves only to allow one of the worst-choreographed action scenes of the series. That is followed in turn by a preachy tag scene that emphasizes that rape is bad and that violence lurks within us all. And we all know what color the sky is and what bears do in the woods too, right?
THE PICARD SLEDGE-HAMMER
"No one can deny that the seed of violence remains within each of us," Picard intones at the episode's end. He goes on to talk about how "that violence is capable of consuming each of us." You'd only need to add a few more lines to turn this into a Leslie Nielsen Naked Gun routine, with Picard describing the seed being watered and coming to flower. After a long time of either getting away from Picard Sledge-Hammer scenes or, at the very least, integrating them into the episode so that they really work, Season Five is showing a regrettable tendency to have Picard once again Tell Us The Moral of the Story. Maybe the writers were feeling nostalgic for the kitsch value of Season One. Whatever the case, I hope this tendency goes away again. Soon.
Overall Rating: 4/10. Some effective bits in the middle keep this above a "3." Just.
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