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| Dr. Crusher is seduced by the mysterious Ronin (Duncan Regehr) |
Dr. Crusher visits Caldos II, a colony world modeled after the Scottish highlands. She is there to deliver the eulogy at her grandmother's funeral, but is about to get swept up in the plot of a bad romance novel. Before you can say,Ghost of the Highlander, she sees the striking young Ronin (Duncan Regehr) pass by her grandmother's coffin to throw a camellia, her grandmother's favorite flower, onto it.
While reading her grandmother's diaries, Beverly learns that Ronin was the dead woman's lover. She goes to the house to start closing things up, only to find the house full of flowers. She hears noises, but sees no one there. Until she looks into a mirror and sees Ronin, who announces that he is a spirit who has been the lover of the women of her family for generations. Now he has come for her - and rather than be appalled by this, as you might expect, Beverly seems perfectly happy at the idea.
And then things start to go a bit wrong with the planet's weather...
CHARACTERS
Capt. Picard: There are two kinds of episodes that make you really mindful of Patrick Stewart's contribution toTNG. First are the heavy-hitting episodes, such as Best of Both Worlds, Family, The Drumhead, and Chain of Command - episodes that showcase his full range by giving him material that demands an actor of ability and stature. Then there are episodes like this one. In a show in which almost nothing works, Patrick Stewart still manages to salvage a moment or two of dignity. Picard refuses to simply allow Beverly to throw away her career and insists on confronting Ronin face-to-face. He gets his wish, resulting in the only good scene in the episode... a scene sadly cut short when Ronin, realizing he's outclassed, resorts to simply zapping the better man.
Dr. Crusher: Poor Gates McFadden. Her big spotlight episode of Season Seven, and it's one whose prime demand on her is to make an orgasm face every 5 - 10 minutes. Dr. Crusher's characterization is wildly inconsistent from one scene to the next. At first, it plays out as if her free will is drained by Ronin at about the 15-minute mark, leaving her effectively possessed. But at the end, she says she was seduced - which indicates that she acted according to her own will for the run of the episode, which makes most of her actions unfathomable. McFadden struggles gamely, but with no consistent throughline she's just playing it scene-by-scene. The results are unfortunate.
Troi: Is made to look like an idiot. She can sense something is wrong with Beverly's sudden romantic obsession (with her grandmother's lover, no less), but for the first time in the series' history, she refuses to intrude on someone else's privacy. If you see your friend acting bizarrely and might suspect she's under an outside influence, wouldn't you intrude just a little? Or at least ask the colony's governor about the man Beverly is obsessing over, to make sure he is who he says he is? Not if you're Troi, I guess. Marina Sirtis does what she can, but with writing this poor, there's really nothing for her to do except recite the lines.
Guest Star of the Week: As Ronin, actor Duncan Regehr makes his Star Trek debut. With a debut like this, one wonders exactly why DS9's producers would offer him a recurring role later. In fairness, Regehr isn't actively bad as Ronin. But he isn't particularly good, even given the limits of his material. He certainly doesn't come across as irresistibly seductive, and his screen presence is actually weaker here than as Shakaar on DS9. In the verbal sparring match against Picard at the end, against heavyweight Patrick Stewart, Regehr barely even registers on screen!
THOUGHTS
Brannon Braga's scripts don't always work, even in his TNG days. Despite this, I generally regard his name on the credits as good news. Even his misfires are usually cockeyed enough to be entertaining. If nothing else, a Braga script is rarely dull.
Sub Rosa is dull. Extremely dull. It also doesn't feel like a Brannon Braga script. It's more like a particularly bad Jeri Taylor effort - hardly surprising, given that the story is credited to her. Why Braga ended up writing the teleplay is anybody's guess, but the result is that the worst tendencies of both writers are combined to produce an hour of utter sludge.
Braga's work, both the good and the bad, can be characterized as concept over character. That works terrifically well when the episode is Cause and Effect or Parallels. His writing style is ill-suited to a would-be romantic ghost story, however. Any chance of this episode being successful hinges on it working as a strong character episode for Beverly, to watch this capable character be seduced by a being who shouldn't even exist.
In Braga's hands, what we get is an episode in which Beverly is replaced by a hormone-driven pod person at the 15 minute mark. After one scene of (very weakly) fighting Ronin, she becomes all but a slave to him for the bulk of the episode. He's killing people? Well, he can touch her in just the right way, so she'll go along with his every command anyway. Not that there's much contrast with the early scenes. After all, the first stretch still shows her talking entirely too freely in a public place about a sex dream. A sex dream involving her grandmother's lover. Right after her grandmother's death. However creepy that may read, the scene just plays out as ludicrous and boring. My favorite detail? Being regailed with all this, Troi seems neither appalled nor embarrassed. Instead, she claims to be envious and seems to find it funny.
No bad Trek episode can be complete without a heap of Technobabble thrown into the mix, and ghost stories don't leave much room for such jargon. But fear not! The subplot comes to the rescue. There are malfunctions in the planet's weather control system. This calls for massive amounts of Technobabble by Data and Geordi. Needless to say, the malfunctions are the work of Ronin, who is generating storms threatening the planet for... no apparent reason. If his goal is to delay the Enterprise's departure, that mission is accomplished by causing minor malfunctions. Making the weather problems genuinely life-threatening simply draws attention to his interference. None of this causes any sense of tension either. The subplot creates all the interest of watching characters discuss the weather. Which, come to think of it, is exactly what they're doing.
Ultimately, the episode is too bad and the temptation too great for me not to make an obvious and groan-worthy play on the title. So I'll conclude by saying that Sub Rosa is strictly substandard.
Overall Rating: 1/10. If I gave zeroes, then this episode would get one.
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Next Episode: Lower Decks
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