“It may be true that headaches were once quite common. That was in the days before the brain was charted. Before we understood the nature of pain.”
Picard’s got a headache that no one can fix, and it turns out to be his entire backstory showing up at once. The early-episode conceit here, that headaches are just gone in the 24th Century, remains a silly favourite from Next Gen’s wobbly efforts at finding its “how future is the future?” sea-legs. Just watch the Enterprise bridge crew react in turn to the news of Picard’s malady — as though he’d announced he was pregnant with triplets. Naturally, the idea that headaches and the common cold would become not just a thing of the past, but a thing so deeply of the past that their appearance was cause for exclaim, would shortly be retconned out of the show. Of course people still get headaches.
But back to the matter at hand. “The Battle” is a hugely important mythological show, bringing us the Stargazer and the Picard Maneuver, and with them the majority of the information we’ll ever receive about Picard’s prior career as a Starfleet captain. The resonances from this show pulse out in waves for years and years to come, which makes it all the more a shame that this episode is so unrelentingly goofball — between the return of the Ferengi and the remote possession of Captain Picard (creating Evil Captain Picard) for the second time in three episodes. (Evil Captain Picard, we learn, has a crisp snobbishness towards his subordinates, and orders the crew to do inexplicable things. Riker should just carry around a pair of handcuffs at this point.) It beggars belief that any episode could have made the Ferengi look stupider than they did in “The Last Outpost,” but “The Battle” accomplishes it easily, and the race is shuttered for the remainder of the first season out of judicious awareness that they needed a major, major rethink.
In watching this episode again – in fact, all of the early episodes of the season – the character who is standing out for me the most is Riker. Riker is completely devoid of fleshing out at this point in the series, and doesn’t even have his beard yet, but Season One is working overtime to establish him as the Kirk analog of this series – perhaps more dutiful and straight-laced than Kirk, but resourceful, athletic, and a competent leader. I’m responding to Riker greatly here, and the runner in the episode between Riker and the Ferengi first officer, Kazago, plays out nicely, hinting at self-awareness of the Ferengi silliness for the first time. (“As you humans say,” Kazago says confidentially to Riker, “I’m all ears.”)
Other firsts in “The Battle”: Wesley’s dumb Season One ensign’s uniform, with its rainbow weave around the shoulders to suggest that he hasn’t picked a major yet; the first time Picard calls Riker “Will”; and the first time we see Picard’s quarters, though not, unfortunately, the revelation of Picard’s ass-length sleepwear.
The interior production design of the show is garish, reaching its apex with the glowing pink Thoughtmaker ball that Bok uses to control Picard’s mind. The spaceship modelwork in the episode, though, is gorgeous. I’m a big fan of the design of the Ferengi marauder, though it’s one of the elements of the species concept that ultimately fell by the wayside. Thinking about it, one can presume that the Ferengi built space battleships in order to venture into the cosmos for mercantile purposes, which once again analogizes them to us, now – we will not be going much further into space for noble scientific purposes, I think, but we’ll sure as hell get out there if there’s money to be made.
The Ferengi would shortly cease to be a villain whose vessels could theoretically match a starship for firepower. But as a piece of spacecraft design, the marauder is a nicely distinctive profile highlighted by gorgeous detailing – the row of teeth-like windows on the rear curve, or the glowing orange nacelle exhaust on the underside. I built a marauder model when I was a teenager, and wish I still had it. The Stargazer, too, is sweet, even if it’s just a kit-bash of existing Star Trek models, cramming the movie-era Enterprise nacelles onto the ass of a double-thick Reliant saucer. It comes off nicely, even if the scale is all wrong against the Enterprise-D. Picard’s ready room, notably, would shed its cheap Ertl model of the Enterprise-A after this episode, and pick up Picard’s yellow model of the Stargazer, which would remain for the rest of the series.
Update: For unadulterated terribleness, “The Battle” gets one Enterprise out of five.
My first presence on the internet was a Geocities site back in 1997, and having nothing better to do with it, I blogged about the new episodes of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Voyager that aired each week. Blogging The Next Generation is like that – for Star Trek: The Next Generation, every single episode, on blu-ray.