“The Mintakans are beginning to believe in a god – and the one they’ve chosen is you.”
This Prime Directive morality play and anti-religious fable doesn’t play as strongly as I remember, although the pieces are all here. Picard and the gang accidentally reveal a camouflaged Federation observation post to a group of “proto-Vulcan humanoids at the Bronze age level” and in so doing, set Picard up as a god figure. The pieces are staged nicely enough (and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first location visit to the Vasquez Rocks, used frequently on the original series, is nice) but all the characters come off more annoying than I recalled. The generally excellent Ray Wise, particularly, seems a downright lunatic as the Picard-obsessed Liko, though Karthryn Leigh Scott’s turn as village leader Nuria is more nuanced. It was a bit of a pleasant shock to realize that Liko’s daughter Oji, quite the Renfaire hottie in her Mintakan dress, is played by Pamela Adlon – Marcie fucking Runkle!
Vasquez Rocks notwithstanding, “Who Watches” also reminds me that I’m not a huge fan of the physical look of Star Trek: The Next Generation from Season Three onward. Marvin V. Rush has taken over as director of photography, and scrubbed the last of the shadows out of the visual style he inherited from Seasons One and Two. Everything is now very high-key, with brightly rendered colours and transparent, to the point of flat, lighting. The new uniforms on the command crew (the extras still wear the skin-tight spandex) might have been a concession to the actors’ comforts, but the vivid photographic style makes them look even more like jammies than Star Trek uniforms normally do. It’ll be a long time (till Star Trek: First Contact) before sartorial matters return to items that look like something people might actually wear, and the result is an inevitable deadening of the credibility of the performers. A real shame, especially in an episode like this, where the guest stars get costumes that are far more credible.
“Who Watches the Watchers” gives a name to Dr. Crusher’s grave assistant, Dr. Martinez, who pops up all over Season Three and beyond and never says a word; “Who Watches” also features the only reference to Dr. Pulaski after her departure. Ron Jones delivers one of his better scores, developing three complete thematic sets to play under different throughlines of the episode. But as a concept piece, “Who Watches” is didactic. Prime Directive-based storytelling pretty much never works as much as the Star Trek writers think it does, and if the goal of the episode was nothing more than to beat organized religion to further death in purebred Roddenberry style, it’s done fine, but it’s been done better elsewhere. I’ve always chuckled at the silliness of the final scene – Picard having just been “fatally” shot by Liko to prove that he isn’t a god, but beaming back down to the surface to say goodbye anyway. Uh, what?
It doesn’t help that we’re at the nadir of Picard at his least fun. Over the course of the second season and into the third, both the writers and Patrick Stewart migrated Picard away from the passionate adventurer of the earlier episodes and towards a kind of humourless ambassadorial straight-man, who was serious to the point of pompousity and dangerously within reach of becoming unlikeable. Not to worry, of course – it all gets turned around fairly directly with my actual favourite Picard beat of all time, in “The High Ground,” which is only half a dozen episodes away. But “Who Watches the Watchers” is a great reminder of how closely the Picard characterization can oscillate towards something less than the sum of its parts – and how terrific, therefore, it is when it’s working.
Three Enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through every episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Three is available now.