“Annie, with the golden hair.”
One can admire “Too Short a Season” for its ambition, certainly, being a story about a nonogenarian admiral who ages backwards, Benjamin Button-style, to respond to an old threat. One can admire Clayton Rohner’s performance, too, as the actor strips away layer after layer of arthritic body language with surprising commitment and precision for a one-off TV guest star. (He is less successful at consistently de-aging the voice.) But the episode’s buck inevitably stops at the unbelievably bad old-age makeup – a craft Star Trek: The Next Generation was never able to master, up to and including its final episode – and if on some conscious or subconscious level you got really pissed off at Guy Pearce’s age makeup in Prometheus, it might have been because it reminded you of this.
Whenever I watch “Too Short a Season,” I inevitably wonder what filming the episode was like for Marsha Hunt, who survived the Hollywood blacklist and here plays Admiral Jamieson’s wife; she was seventy at the time, and had to convincingly play against Rohner, who was thirty and looked like his head had been wrapped in an orange plastic bag. She does quite well under the circumstances – there certainly aren’t performance issues in the episode, for the most part – but it all comes off looking so strange and foolish, and any ideas or philosophical implications of Jamieson’s decision are sloughed off in favour of a lukewarm hostage crisis storyline. There is a nice beat in the fourth act, at least, where a fresh-faced and babyish Jamieson, dying, manages to convey some notion of what he might have been like at the roguish beginnings of his Starfleet career, distorted now through a poignant lens.
Rob Bowman makes maximum use of underlit scenes to really tease out, and then punch up, the dramatic visualization of Jamieson’s scene-by-scene de-aging, and the “reveal” beats are surprisingly successful, even given the makeup deficits, and the fact that there are around five of them in all – that we’re consistently surprised to see a further iteration of Jamieson’s backward aging is a credit to the direction and editing.
Three side-notes for this episode:
- We are treated to version 3 or 4 of the dozen-odd attempts at designing a Starfleet admiral’s uniform in this episode; this is one of the better ones;
- It is never not thrilling to see Captain Picard assert his proxy and join an away mission, in spite of regulations;
- I cannot watch Jamieson wheel around in his wheelchair at the start of the episode without thinking of my favourite wheelchair of all time, Captain Christopher Pike’s in the original series episode “The Menagerie.” In some matchup Star Trek video game, Pike and Jamieson should be set against each other for a wheelchair fight. (Pike would win.)
“Too Short a Season” gets two and a half Enterprises out of five out of me.
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.