“Don’t confuse style with intent.”
“Peak Performance” is one of the rare episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation that I didn’t see at all in the original run, waiting five years till the series was stripped for second-run syndication during Season Six before I finally caught up with it. It’s a shame – it’s hard to imagine a more perfectly balanced, beautifully executed Season Two episode than this. It’s not trying for anything particularly heavy – even the “make the threat real!” plot twist at the end, where the Ferengi show up during the battle exercise, seems like a perfunctory concession to needless dramatics. But who cares? It’s Picard vs. Riker in a space battle, the matchup of fanboy wet dreams.
Sirma Kolrami, played by Roy Brocksmith, is one of my favourite one-off guest stars of the whole run; his entrance (where he storms across the bridge, throwing wild stink-eyes at every. single. person. in the room) is hysterical, and Kolrami never backs down; he’s an oily, arrogant, deliciously mean-spirited foil for Riker and the captain. But he’s just a component of a bloody well-put-together whole: “Peak Performance” is a good Riker episode, a good Wesley episode, and a good Ferengi episode, AND a good Data episode, AND a good Troi episode, AND a good Pulaski episode. This sucker gets a lot of things right that were (up till now) fairly difficult, especially the matter of balance. “Peak Performance” hustles along at a gallop, but never feels rushed, overstuffed, or cluttered.
I never tire of beaten-up old starships from the “in between” era, be it the Stargazer or the Enterprise-C or the Hathaway here, which is falling apart to such a degree that Worf can yank a length of optical cable out of the ceiling in answer to a request for parts. We get to see Worf’s quarters on the Enterprise for the first time (including the statue of Kahless and Morath, and that weird-ass ball chair) when Riker hires the good lieutenant aboard his crew as first officer, and get terrific iterations of Klingon guile throughout the simulated battle. Wesley and Geordi concoct a warp speed surprise down in engineering using a lump from Wesley’s science fair project, Picard argues with Kolrami about Riker’s value as a commander, and Data suffers a crisis of confidence – and for whatever reason, I never find Troi more badass than when she counsels the supposedly-emotionless android, which could never have been in her job description.
The visuals during the battle simulation are quite good for the year, though one can imagine the Enterprise and Hathaway darting around one another like seagulls, had the episode been granted Deep Space Nine-era starship effects. A lot of the battle takes place with hastily-delivered orders and the audience’s imagination, but it comes together nicely, especially when the Ferengi show up. In their sole appearance in Season Two, the big-eared weirdos even come off as a credible threat – and their threat comes from within the original conceptual bible for the species, i.e. they’re cutthroat space-borne pirates. Armin Shimmerman, who would go on to be Star Trek’s summa cum laude Ferengi, has his second run in the ears here.
As regards the episode’s final scene, wherein Data plays a game of keep-away Stratagema against Kolrami, driving the Zakdorn strategist wild by refusing to play to win: my soccer team tried the same thing a few years back, against a vastly superior team that was slumming its way through a rec league out of an apparent desire to do nothing but pick on underskilled players and post double-digit scores. We concentrated on defence, abandoned opportunities to score, and basically just ran them around the field without any intention to win the game. And for two hours, we held them at 0-0 – and let me tell you, Kolrami’s epic freakout at the end of “Peak Performance” gets it exactly right.
