“You got that straight, slim. Too real is too right.”
Few episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation have benefited from the blu-ray upgrade as completely as “11001001,” which also happens to arguably be the first season’s best episode; that it is chock-a-block with magnificent visual effects is beside the point, but a nice bonus in high-definition. As a holodeck episode, “11001001” is substantially more satisfying and complete than “The Big Goodbye;” as a Riker episode, it’s one of the best the series ever put forth. The ability to correctly spew the title’s 8-digit sequence of ones and zeroes without dropping one is a point of pride for many young treksperts. The episode also manages a surprisingly effective grace note, as what we can presume to have been the “shakedown” portion of the Enterprise’s ten-year mission comes to a celebratory conclusion. When 1701-D sails into the starbase at the start of the episode, Ron Jones’ score righteously trumpets the achievement. The Next Generation, like the Enterprise herself, is hitting its stride.
Ron Jones remains a noteworthy figure in the history of Next Gen, and his talents are on fine display here. If the “voice” of the series must be credited to the other mainstay composer, Dennis McCarthy (who alternated episodes all the way through the seven years, and scored Generations; Jones, on the other hand, was fired halfway through season four), Ron Jones is the badass alternate. He was never afraid to write complex and specific themes for the episodes themselves, giving signature sounds to characters, species, and planets, even if those themes would only ever be used once. In “11001001,” he creates an appropriately synthetic, and appropriately disconcerting, motif for the Bynars, who are about to steal the Enterprise; and when the Enterprise gets stolen (in a sequence which approximates the parallel scene in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock), Jones fills the orchestra stage with dark, adventurous music. (One of the best soundtrack CD releases of recent years is the whopping 14-disc “Ron Jones Project,” which collects all of his score work for TNG in one box. Beyond geeky towards fetishistic, it’s a defining work from Film Score Monthly.)
At the head of the episode we meet Commander Quinteros, who could be Picard’s bearded older brother, and who announces with some satisfaction that he was part of the team that put the Enterprise together; we also meet the Binars, a race who only appear on Star Trek this once, but leave a lasting impression. Played by slender women in pale purple makeup and acting and operating as pairs who finish one another’s sentences, “11001001” takes 1988-era layman understanding of computer programming and runs with it (quite delightfully). Computer science in TNG is always a dodgy element to look back on, only because no one in the 1980s could really conceive of where computers would be in such short order (the fact that the Enterprise crew work with iPads – here intended to be indescribably advanced 24th-Century technology – demonstrates handily how wildly off-base Star Trek’s model of technological development was capable of being). But “11001001” dances nicely around these handicaps by never getting into specifics about the scale and ability of the Enterprise computer or the Binar’s home world; and in the hip-worn “buffers” which the Binars use to receive cyber-information and store it for later use, the episode is substantially prescient! The Binar concept anticipates a basic fact of 21st century human life – they have shunted much of their knowledge into computer devices for random access when necessary, rather than storing it in their own brains; and so have we.
“11001001” is a great Riker episode, as I said, and let’s face it: “after hours” episodes are just cool. I get a lot of fun out of watching him prowl around the nearly empty Enterprise looking for something to do, once the ship is in dock and the crew has disembarked. We’re introduced to Parrises Squares, and get to watch a blind man teach an android how to paint – which, as Riker notes, has gotta be worth a few pages in somebody’s book. (In fact, the episode is chock-a-block with quotable lines, a relative rarity for Next Gen.) But it is in watching Riker get snared in the Binar’s holodeck trap that “11001001” becomes so interesting, and not least because contrary to the usual, the holodeck trap is so sanguine. We watch Riker design, mingle with, and ultimately perhaps develop feelings for, a computer-generated fantasy woman – who, of course, turns out to be working at a level of A.I. higher than he’d intended, but no matter about that. “What’s a knockout like you doing in a computer-generated gin-joint like this?” is the start of a defiantly weird, science-fiction-thoughtful conversation between Riker and Minuet (and shortly, Riker and Minuet and Picard, where she chides the Captain for his French romantic nihilism! “Oh Jean-Luc, spoken like a true Frenchman.”). Minuet is at least somewhat aware of her status as an illusion, and doesn’t seem to mind references as such; if Picard quips that all romances begin with the illusion of the woman being more real than the woman, then the entire notion of what male (and female) crew members might be doing in the holodeck begins to develop some powerfully fascinating subtext.
Notably, when Picard enters the holodeck and comes upon Riker making out with a hologram, he doesn’t react at all; are we to intuit, then, that in the 24th century, this extremely advanced form of cybersex (or if you like, first-person shooting) is just normal? I suppose it would be, given the context, and given Roddenberry’s other thoughts and philosophies on the development of human sexual mores. But there’s a dark side to all this, too, as exemplified when Riker and Picard discuss Minuet’s programming – and the fact that Riker could fall for her, if, well, y’know – with Minuet looking on. It highlights nicely the fact that the Enterprise crewmen are aware that Minuet does not, ultimately, have any feelings – that everything she says and does is a simulation of feeling – and thereby announces their ability and willingness to respond to the simulated feelings that they like (affection, interest, sexual attraction), and ignore the simulated feelings (hurt, embarrassment) that they don’t. The perfect woman, through the darkest of lenses?
As the run-and-jump component of the episode gets started, and Picard and Riker emerge from the holodeck to take their stolen ship back, director Paul Lynch manages some spectacular directorial touches, underscoring Picard and Riker’s natural “binaryness” by having them stride in perfect step with one another, or operate parallel computer stations in precisely mirrored sequence. But as the adventure wraps up, there’s something weirdly poignant about Riker, a successful, girl-in-every-port lothario, being stymied by the ultimate unreality of his computer-generated playmate. Or, more to the point: if he’d gone back into the holodeck and Minuet had been there, where would we be now?
The best episode of the first season, “11001001″ is worth five Enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation is like my first Geocities site back in 1997. With nothing better to do with it, I wrote miscellaneously about Star Trek – now I’m doing that for every single episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
This series runs every Tuesday and will do so for the entire release of TNG on blu-ray. Season 2 has been announced for December 4, 2012.