“You’re a dead man, Apgar! A dead man!”
Sooner or later, everyone does their Rashomon – and so we have “A Matter of Perspective,” a fucking terrible episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s third season, in which Picard programs the holodeck to help recreate three different personal recollections of the events leading up to a murder. The alleged murderer in question: Commander Riker!
There is something appealing about the notion of Riker’s lothario side getting him in serious trouble, I suppose, but this being Star Trek, we never for a second believe that he’s guilty – and neither do Troi or Picard, who even bicker about it a bit towards the end of the episode. The scenario – in which an alien scientist dies in an exploding space station, the night after something untoward happened, or didn’t happen, between Riker and the scientist’s wife – is marginally delicious for the fact that the optics of the situation are working against Riker at every turn. But this mostly just translates out to the crew of the Enterprise refusing to make eye contact with him, as though acknowledging, “Well yeah, Will – your sex addiction was gonna get someone killed sooner or later.”
The perspective-varied sequences in the holodeck are boring as hell, which basically sinks the episode. There’s no subtlety at all to the plotting, and so (in Riker’s version of events) we get a cougar version of Manua, who even makes a casual reference to her husband’s penis being too small; and (in Manua’s version of events) we get the Dimitri the Lover version of Riker, who sizes Manua up like a juicy steak and proceeds to try to date-rape her. It’s all so astronomically silly, which makes it (given the subject matter) all the more astronomically distasteful.
And of course, you don’t fuck with Dixon Hill on stuff like this, anyway; Picard solves the puzzle easily enough and the pieces fall into place as they’re meant to, but with very little thought given to any of the emotion arc for, say, Riker. He’s a cipher in this one, a walking plot point, and no effort is made to dig into what it might be like for a career military officer to be accused of this sort of thing, and the consequential need he might feel to link it back to other behaviours.* See? That whole sentence I just wrote is more interested in this story than this story is.
*Quantum Leap, incidentally, did it better in “A Leap for Lisa.” Riker and Al should hang out sometime.
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.