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| Lwaxana Troi (Majel Barrett) falls into a catatonic state. |
THE PLOT
The Enterprise is escorting the Cairn, a race of telepaths who are learning to speak under the tutelage of Lwaxana Troi (Majel Barrett). Maques (Norman Large), the lead Cairn, expresses concern to Deanna: When he communicates telepathically with Lwaxana, she hides parts of herself.
Deanna dismisses this as simple "privacy," a concept foreign to the Cairn. But after Maques' daughter Hedril (Kirsten Dunst) falls into some water on the holodeck, Lwaxana collapses into a catatonic state. Now Deanna must use a telepathic bridge, made possible by Maques' plot-specific powers, to travel into her mother's mind!
...Which is as dreary and unimaginative a place as you would expect.
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: Supportive of Deanna's wish to try to help her mother, even if it poses a risk. As an authority figure, he is used by Lwaxana as the first barrier to try to turn Deanna away from her quest.
Troi: Marina Sirtis struggles gamely with some poor dialogue, keeping a straight face through lines such as:"Captain, I have to go back into my mother's mind. It's the only way we're going to get any answers." I once again find myself observing that Sirtis, in the series' earliest days a clear weak link in the cast, has become a very sympathetic presence. The story may be silly, much of the dialogue may be unintentionally funny, but Sirtis anchors it enough to keep it watchable. A big change from the days when I would have been happy to have seen the humanoid oil slick smother her to death.
Lwaxana Troi: Has carried a dark secret all these years, one which we never knew about before because... Well, because it never existed before! This somehow prompts her to attempt Matchmaking Session #372 between Deanna and Maques, then lash out at Riker when that fails. It's actually a relief when she becomes catatonic. Credit where it's due: Majel Barrett tries her best to make something of the episode's dramatic scenes, and she plays well opposite the very young Kirsten Dunst. But there's nothing here for her to work with, and her character is only marginally more tolerable here than at her all-time lowpoint in Season Two's Manhunt.
THOUGHTS
I am very hopeful that Dark Page represents the final Lwaxana episode. She's averaged one appearance per season, after all, and this is TNG's final season. Assuming this is her final bow on this show, that means that this review will allow me to bid the character an unfond but eagerly awaited farewell.
Dark Page is a bad episode - but more than that, it's a poorly-scheduled one. Coming on the heels of Phantasms, which centered around dream imagery, we get... another episode that centers around dream imagery. Did someone slip up here? Or by Season Seven, had it reached the point where nobody really cared anymore?
The scenes inside Lwaxana's mind make me appreciate how well Phantasms executed its dream sequences. There, while everything was a metaphor that eventually made sense when the plot came together, a sense of "strangeness" saturated the proceedings much like the quality of an actual dream. Images stood for things that were obvious once we were given the solution, but which seemed random and bizarre until then.
Here, everything is literal. Lwaxana's catatonic state is precipitated by a little girl falling into water. Sure enough, the solution involves a little girl and water. Deanna sees a dog and her father within Lwaxana's mind. Sure enough, this was all caused by a traumatic event in which both a dog and her father were present. It's not a metaphor if all it stands for is itself!
Director Les Landau does a workmanlike job with the material, which is quite good enough for the "real world" scenes. But despite using some distortion for some of the dream images, he just doesn't bring the level of atmosphere that was seen in Patrick Stewart's helming of Phantasms. With the two episodes coming one right after the other, it's really instructive to see how one show does everything within its dream sequences exactly right while the other does almost everything wrong.
Lest I lay this episode's failure entirely at Landau's feet, I should end by observing how poor the script is. It's slow and talky. It takes almost 20 minutes for the plot to really even start... and that's when it gets worse! We go inside Lwaxana's mind, and yet come out with no real additional insights into her as a character. Meanwhile, Lwaxan's traumatic secret should be a world-shaking revelation for Deanna, as well... But she shrugs off a major piece of information about her own family as if it was meaningless to her.
And why shouldn't it be? After all, this traumatic event will never be mentioned again; and when we next see Lwaxana on Deep Space 9, she'll be panting after Odo like a dog in heat just like she used to do with Picard on this show.
Overall Rating: 2/10.
Previous Episode: Phantasms
Next Episode: Attached
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