“I didn’t just kill one Husnock or a hundred or a thousand… I killed them all. All Husnock, everywhere.”
Star Trek: The Next Generation Season Four is coming in hot – released in just ten weeks – so I’ll be double-timing it on Season Three, starting this week…
“The Survivors” is a good example of something that Star Trek: The Next Generation did very well: a simple mystery premise, beautifully enlivened by a pair of solid guest stars. In this case, the guest stars are John Anderson as Kevin Uxbridge, and the delightful Anne Haney as his wife, Rishon. The octogenarian botanists, still deeply in love after fifty years together, are the only survivors of an alien attack on their colony. Picard must get to the bottom of the how and the why, as the Uxbridges grow increasingly evasive, and all while Counselor Troi is tortured into insanity by a music box tune that is playing ceaselessly in her head. Which, if you remember the tune, is plausible.
It’s a credibly assembled five-act play, with each iteration falling into an escalating pattern of the basic core components: an encounter with the Uxbridges; an encounter (or encounter by omission) with the villains; and an attempt to figure out how the pieces fit together. The bad guys are an offscreen alien race called the Husnock, who drive a big, mean ship and are later described as “a species of hideous intelligence,” which makes me want to know more about that.
But again, I bring it all back to Haney and Anderson for their exemplary work in supporting roles, which remind me that on episodic television, especially in this time period, you pretty much live or die by the guest-star casting. This episode revolves completely around Kevin and Rishon, and if they don’t work, none of its beats land; but no worries here. First of all, they’re darling together, and genuinely communicate the depth and length of their connection to one another, lending credence to the initial idea that even alone on a devastated world, they’d choose to stick it out together. And once Rishon is revealed to be an illusion conjured by the omnipotent Kevin – himself a Dowd, masquerading as human – Anderson capitalizes on a surprising badassery about his old-man performance. He has, thus far in the episode, gravely (and with the saddest eyes ever) told us that he is a man of special conscience who will not kill. In the episode’s masterful final monologue, Kevin reveals what really happened to the Husnock – and we come to understand why we’ll never get to further explore that species in any future episode of Star Trek.
Worf’s a hoot in this one, telling Kevin he admires his gall, sipping Rishon’s tea with the neatly legendary “Good tea… nice house” line, and suffering a minor crisis of confidence after staking his reputation on his erroneous determination that the Husnock have left the system. I also love the psychic torture of Troi, just because Marina Sirtis sends it to the freakin’ rafters in a short series of fully committed scenes.
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 Three is available now.