“To know him is to love him is to know him?”
I respect the fact that “The Schizoid Man” is a marginally better episode than I’m going to grade it; I just don’t like this one very much. For any of Season Two’s strengths – and I do believe it’s a pretty good year – there is a canyon of episodes around this point that is a pretty tough slog. “The Schizoid Man” belongs to a genre of Star Trek that is older than the hills: the “Evil Twin” storyline, although in this case, there’s only one Data; he’s just been possessed by the consciousness of a supergenius cyberneticist who saw death coming and freaked out. It’s always a delight to me to see W. Morgan Shepherd, one of my favourite TV character actors, who plays the dying Ira Graves as a cross between Earnest Hemingway and a chimpanzee. (Shepherd pops up elsewhere in the Trekverse a few years later in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, per the image above. No, not my autograph – but I sorta wish it were.) At the end of the day, though, Evil Twin storylines just bore the living crap out of me. There are a few worthwhile exceptions in the Star Trek canon (the Mirror Universe being the best example), but “The Schizoid Man” ain’t one of them.
The trouble with Evil Twin stories is that because the audience is invariably so far ahead of all the other characters on the show, whatever dramatic tension is to be had must be based on the suspension of disbelief that this reversal of personality might become permanent. As it is, “The Schizoid Man” just feels like warmed-over “Datalore,” and “Datalore” wasn’t any great shakes either. In this case, we don’t get to know Graves well enough in the first act of the episode to really sell the effect when Spiner takes over, and are left with Evil Data wandering around the ship being rude and lascivious, the latter element of which is more than passingly disturbing. At the outset, we are given Graves as a septuagenarian genius with an implied crush on a twenty-year-old protégé/surrogate daughter who he raised from childhood; when his mind-transfer into the body of an android gets thrown into the mix, he redoubles his efforts to sexually pursue Corinne – now for robosex! I find the whole thing offputting.
For no reason I can discern, the episode introduces the character of Dr. Selar, who, in spite of only appearing this once, became a somewhat memorable member of the Enterprise crew and gets name-checked a few times over the next several years. As I recall, there was discussion of turning Selar into a love interest for Worf – which would have been a mad, mad, mad idea of the highest order. Yet somehow, I can see it, at least from a writing standpoint; the frosty reserve of the Vulcan matched against the barely-restrained fury of the Klingon. The shipping’s hot, anyway. (Of course, as everyone knows, it sort of happened anyway – Suzie Plakson, who plays Dr. Selar, would go on to play K’Ehleyr later this season.)
The episode might not be much, but I like Patrick Stewart’s performance here quite a bit, even when he has to do the inevitable for storylines like this and confront Evil Data to talk him out of his shenanigans. Once again highlighted by the higher detail provided in the blu-ray, Stewart clobbers his beats throughout the sequence, ably demonstrating that the signature duty of a Star Trek actor is simply to invest.
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.