“Oh, I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony, I say with conviction: what a piece of work is man.”
It seems I’m not the only one who’s become interested in Riker – Q returns to the Enterprise for his sophomore bout of pestering, and dangles the omnipotent abilities of the Q Continuum in Riker’s boyish face. This is likely the episode where 11-year-old me was first introduced to the aphorism, “all power corrupts – and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” as Riker first resists, then goes hog-wild for, the ability to make things go flash! with his mind. As an episode, “Hide and Q” is nearly successful, developing strongly for the first few acts before rushing its way through Riker’s fall to the dark side and losing its sense of dramatic perspective as a result. It’s too bad. There’s good stuff in here.
We get the first major dollop of Shakespeare for RSC vet Patrick Stewart to deliver, in a brisk one-on-one with Q in the Captain’s ready room that remains a perennial part of the Next Gen highlight reel. Q, Picard, and Data all recite various Shakespearean passages over the course of the episode, and the series producers become quickly aware of the mileage they can get out of it, making Shakespeare quotage a running sideline throughout the series.
There’s the weird business of the Penalty Box: while the rest of the team are down on Q’s Napoleonic / green sky alien world, Tasha gets sent back to the Bridge (which, till now, has been solely inhabited by a very lonely Captain Picard) where she promptly explodes into tears. The good Captain comforts her, and then Tasha says something that is just really, really weird – “Captain! …Oh, if you weren’t the Captain.” What is Tasha implying here?! That because of a single, comforting joke, the twentysomething security chief would, under different circumstances, pounce on Captain Picard like a kitten on Pounce?
Rushed, and awkward as a result, is the final sequence, in which Riker confers upon the Bridge crew his notions of their heart’s desires. There’s a good foundational idea here: that each member of the crew knows him or herself well enough (well actually, just himself well enough, as Riker never bothers to offer Tasha or Beverly a gift) that they would resist the fantasy fulfillment that Riker offers them – most pointedly with Data, who stops Riker at the door with a nicely delivered monologue. After a few wobbly dry runs, Brent Spiner has certainly “found” Data by this point in both voice and delivery, and the results are splendid here; the series writing will begin taking greater and greater advantage of him shortly.
But in the meantime, we have the weird visual of Wesley rapidly aged ten years into a gigantic, Winklevoss-ish man (who looks nothing like modern day Wil Wheaton, of course), along with the first time in which Geordi’s natural eyesight is returned, revealing LeVar Burton’s rather incredible brown eyes. (I once heard a woman at a convention go on at length about the scope of the crime inherent to keeping Burton’s peepers out of reach, under the VISOR, for the majority of the series.) The piece of the episode that fans most remember, though, is Riker’s provision of a Klingon whore for Worf, who smacks the lady (the first Klingon female, ever, I think? Star Trek fans may correct me) around the Bridge for a few minutes before barking “This is sex! But she is from a world now alien to me!” It’s one of those indelible Trek lines that gets quoted back to me with unerring regularity, year after year.
Update: I’m giving “Hide and Q” three and a half Enterprises out of five.
