“Red alert.”
This period of the third season of Star Trek: The Next Generation is quite likely its longest (nearly) unbroken string of best-in-class episodes. The run stretches from “The Defector” to “Sins of the Father,” fully a third of the season as a whole, and with only a couple of exceptions is a ceaseless barrage of the best episodes Next Gen ever produced. So here’s “Deja Q,” the third season’s Q episode, and it, too, is one of the best episodes of the season, and one of the best episodes featuring Q.
In many ways, in fact, it’s the quintessential Q episode, a lively hour in which the omnipotent alien is rendered human by the Continuum and tries, and fails, to cope. “Deja Q” is somehow not quite as appealing to me as many of the other, lesser Q shows, though. I recognize that all the pieces are here, and that line for line it is quite likely the funniest episode of Star Trek ever writtten, but there’s a piece missing in the audience’s sympathetic connection to Q’s emotional dilemma.
John De Lancie (perhaps wisely) never claws back the inherent unlikeability of the character, and in fact gears up on it quite a bit as Q becomes more and more desperate with each passing moment. Condemned to a mortal life, Q begins the episode by enumerating all the indignities of his human form from aging to having a pimple, and thirty minutes later is attempting suicide. This certainly pushes the character into a space he never occupies elsewhere, but it isn’t as entertaining (or intriguing) as the proper Q persona.
No matter. As I said, “Deja Q” is probably the most quotable episode of Star Trek of all time; its rat-a-tat dialogue (not just for Q, but the entire principal cast) is an endless outpouring of one-liners and cleverly staged jokes, which only makes me wish the Next Gen writers had tackled this sort of thing more often. (They go back to the comedy well, though much more broadly, with the next Q episode, “Qpid.”) There’s also a vivid cleverness to some of the wordsmithing – Q muttering “It is a joke, a joke on me, the joker of the universe; the king who would be man,” or metatextually teasing Riker about the cooling of his playboy persona since acquiring the beard.
The episode’s masterstroke is pairing Q with Data, the latter serving as Q’s “professor of the humanities.” Again, without being a proper Data episode, this is one of Brent Spiner’s finest performances; he plays Data as wisely neutral as the character has ever been, which brings fascinating results. It plays brilliantly against the simpering egomania of Q – “you have achieved in disgrace what I have always aspired to be,” Data guilelessly tells Q, who cannot (yet) feel shame – and also highlights a perverse level of all-around prejudice from the human crewmembers. The gang’s dislike of Q might be perfectly justifiable, but Data’s true objectivity towards the superbeing is natural, unadorned, and does something otherwise unthinkable in Star Trek history – makes the crew of the Enterprise look like a bunch of bigots!
There was a great Star Trek: The Next Generation novel called Metamorphosis which, ironically, dealt with a lot of the same beats as “Deja Q,” only transposing Data (who is made human in the book, and struggles to adapt) for Q. “Deja Q” can’t take the android that far, but Q’s final gift to Data – for saving Q’s life, and teaching him a bit about the human condition – brings the feels nonetheless. It doesn’t hurt that Spiner performs the holy shit out of Data’s first real laugh, delivering one of Next Gen’s signature moments.
Four Enterprises out of five.
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.