“A monk, a clone, and a Ferengi decided to go bowling together…”
I can never quite decide if “The Outrageous Okona” is fucking awful or amazing. It’s certainly memorable. It’s most directly recalled for being the Joe Piscopo episode, where (in the episode’s B-plot) Data enters the holodeck to try to learn the nature of humour. From Joe Piscopo.
To be fair, Piscopo handles his assignment pretty well. His natural style is so deliciously alien to the straight-laced Next Gen set that he could literally stand on stage telling knock-knock jokes for a half an hour and it would still come off as top-flight standup. Season Two seems to have been the season where the producers decided to just put the pedal to the ground on Data as comic relief (“Take my Worf! Please!”), and the android’s double-act with Piscopo – doing a pair of wildly over-the-top Jerry Lewis impressions, to boot – is one hell of a thing to see. There’s even something bizarrely metatextual in Data going to Whoopi Goldberg for advice about standup comedy, even though, being in character, she must then send him elsewhere – to a “higher power,” she says. Who is, in this case, Joe Piscopo. (Piscopo and Goldberg share a one-liner later in the episode about the viability of standup as a career choice, which is good fun.)
But the majority of the episode is spent on Okona, and I can’t for the life of me work out what the writers were trying to do by conjuring this plot. The Enterprise comes across, for all intents and purposes, Han Solo (though dressed far more flamboyantly than the Corellian smuggler, which is particularly noticeable on blu-ray – and is that a samurai pony tail?). His ship’s name is a favourite of mine – the Erstwhile. Erstwhile indeed, Okona proceeds to sleep his way through the female crew of the Enterprise, including a dalliance with a very young and blank-stared Teri Hatcher, before kicking off an inter-family war between two rival planets, both of whom have beefs with the smuggler. I guess this all sounds like a good idea, and Billy Campbell – the Rocketeer! – does have admitted charm in the role. But he also plays his first three or four scenes so loud that he has nowhere to go with the character, and the Romeo & Juliet subplot involving the two royals secretly in love with each other doesn’t have much to do with anything, even if it does feature a supporting turn by SeaQuest DSV’s beautiful Rosalind Allen.
It all hearkens back to the type of A-plot that used to work somewhat better on the original Star Trek, but never really fit tonally in the world of The Next Generation. Okona has some nice beats with Wesley, but the episode on the whole seems thin, given how little impact – or even interaction – Okona has on/with everyone else. Outrageous? More like a two-and-a-half Enterprises out of five volley of “meh.”
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 2 is available now. I’m double-timing it for the next few weeks, to prepare for Season 3’s launch in April.