“I can’t compete with a ghost from his past.”
I was twelve years old, and I had seen Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and, perhaps, a couple of episodes of The Original Series with my mom, who would not have suggested Star Trek to me at all if she’d had any notion of what the next ten years were going to be like. I was at Camp Kandalore for a couple of weeks in July of 1988, and Spencer, a boy in my cabin who had a pathological need to shower as frequently as possible, told me that I should watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, the strange spinoff series that had been on the air for a year at that point, and whose only familiarity to me was a series of stickers found at the bottom of a box of cereal at my grandfather’s cottage, a few weeks earlier, which had me and Mark in paroxysms of laughter at imagining how Lt. Worf came to have that hapless turtle permanently affixed to his head. “Ol’ Turtlesmack,” we called him.
And when I got home from Kandalore, “We’ll Always Have Paris” was the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation I watched on TV. I came in on a very lucky moment. “11001001” is still certainly the best episode of TNG’s first season, but “Paris” will always be my favourite, an opinion based in sentimentality but upheld by the quality of the final product. “We’ll Always Have Paris” maybe has a few too many things going on all at once, but it’s a dead terrific episode of Star Trek in every regard, and its precise intermix of adventure, imagination, and romance was a speedball of crack to my 12-year-old self.
Obviously inspired by Casablanca but drifting very far from that source in its final form, “We’ll Always Have Paris” revolves around Picard re-encountering his great lost love, Jenice, played by the Mama (of the Papas fame) Michele Phillips in a sideless onesie and gigantic ‘80s boots. It’s an uncommonly heartfelt arc for Picard, which Stewart plays with note-perfect restraint – suggesting enormous emotion behind the good Captain’s unwavering moral propriety, and the grace of age and wisdom of a man looking back at a lifetime-defining decision (and importantly, act of emotional cowardice) of decades before. Importantly, then, “We’ll Always Have Paris” is a time travel episode in not one, not even two, but three distinct ways – of which Picard’s nostalgic promenade with Jenice is only the first.
Secondly, then, “Paris” is a proper “temporal problem” episode, as the experiments of Jenice’s husband, Dr. Manheim, cause temporal ripples that emanate outward from his laboratory on an asteroid orbiting a binary star. This results in one of the season’s great visuals, as Data goes to seal the temporal crack in Mannheim’s laboratory and finds himself intriplicate – past Data, present Data, and future Data, separated by seconds, and each carrying a bottle of antimatter which must be applied to the crack at precisely the right moment. The temporal crack – a shimmering curtain of fragments of time which shimmers solemnly like some great Chinese gong – is thought-provoking. The ideas behind the episode are extraordinary – tying the solidity of time to experimentation with gravity in a concept I don’t think I’ve seen in any other science fiction story. Through the ripples, we also have a truly unique take on time travel, as moments seem to loop themselves or “hiccup” as one character (inaccurately, as Data points out) describes it. So, Picard, Data and Riker can board a turbolift on deck 9 headed towards the bridge, only to find that when the doors open, they are still on deck 9 – and Picard, Data and Riker are waiting outside, ready to board. In an extraordinary beat that doesn’t make any narrative sense whatsoever, we shift camera perspective from the trio within the turbolift to the trio outside… at which point the doors close (making one wonder exactly where the other three officers headed off to?) and the duplicate trio becomes the main trio, but – and this is the weird part – apparently retaining memory of their trip on the turbolift. It can’t be explained, but I don’t care; it’s a deliriously inventive slip of narrative form to match the time-traveling mechanics contained therein.
And thirdly, we travel through time yet another way via an intriguing, if highly improbable, use of the holodeck. Confronted with the possibility of meeting Jenice again for the first time since standing her up for a date in a café in Paris 22 years ago, Picard uses the holodeck to conjure up that café, on that day, to reminisce and sort out why he did what he did. The presentation in the episode is tricky. It presumes that the Enterprise computer would have detailed information about the appearance and surroundings of every place on earth on every day in its history, which is a bit much; but we are pushed further into a sort of seeming time travel by the appearance, in the holographic fantasy, of a young lady at the next table to Picard’s, who has been stood up for a date by a man afraid of commitment. In looking at the episode again, it’s clearly just a cheap writers’ trick, but it shimmers the temporal curtain nonetheless – as Picard seems to, to some extent, travel into his own past, and muse upon his decisions.
It’s all grand stuff, and if all of the above weren’t enough, it also directly addresses Dr. Crusher’s unrequited romantic feelings for Picard, who is otherwise busy circling his feelings for Jenice like a wary tomcat. In high definition, “Paris” is doubly splendid, detailing the performances brilliantly in a clarity impossible till now. And a poignant coincidence, given that “We’ll Always Have Paris” was my first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: this is the only episode on the blu-ray of Season One that contains a moment of standard-definition footage, in a single shot of Riker, two seconds long, which could not be located on its original film. It’s not much, but those two seconds of Riker are the last surviving piece of my original experience with this lifelong love affair of mine, which started a bit more than 22 years ago. Call it sentimentality, call it whatever you want, but there’s no way “We’ll Always Have Paris” will ever get less than five Enterprises out of five from 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.
