“They all do. They deserve so much more.”
The best Beverly episode and therefore one of my five or six favourite episodes of all time, “Remember Me” is spooky and unsettling in turns, and genuinely thrilling as it races to its climax. It has a strange, Twilight Zone-ish premise that is credibly executed thanks almost entirely to the commitment of the cast. The episode has a fiendishly complicated scenario to describe, yet Gates McFadden plays it as adeptly as if people get stuck in static warp bubbles every time they go to the grocery store. Which, on reflection, they just might.
(The image above, by the way, is from McFadden’s Tumblr – which is astonishingly great, so much so that I think my crush on her is re-developing.)
The static warp bubble in question is an experiment of Wesley’s gone wrong, which envelops the doctor (unbeknownst to her) and generates a pocket universe based on her frame of mind at the point of entry. (Everybody got that?) In this case, she was thinking wistfully of losing the people closest to her; so the pocket universe is one in which the people around her slowly disappear. For fully the first thirty minutes of the episode, Dr. Crusher experiences a creepy waking nightmare of the crew of the Enterprise disappearing from around her, one by one – along with any memory of them by those remaining – until Beverly is all alone, and on the edge of her sanity. Only then does the episode let us in on the trick, in a bold sequence which jumps us back to the real Enterprise and the efforts to save the doctor.
There are plenty of scenes in “Remember Me” that would seem patently absurd if they weren’t so confidently delivered. Chief among them, a third-act scene finds Beverly sharing the Enterprise solely with a bemused Captain Picard, who seems to think that the two of them flying around the cosmos together is a perfectly natural state of affairs. This leads to another iteration of the series’ perennial “Jean-Luc, there are some things I’ve been meaning to tell you” gag, this time interrupted because Jean-Luc flat out ceases to exist. In the annals of the silly contrivances that forever prevented Bev from finishing that sentence, you’ve gotta admit, this one’s pretty good.
Once Picard is gone, we’re given a full-on two-hander between Beverly and the ship’s computer, who is now the only “being” left in the universe that Beverly can bounce ideas off. Which Beverly proceeds to do, applying diagnostic methodology to try to root out the source of the problem – the “disease,” in her terms – and find the solution/cure. Throughout, Gates McFadden acquits herself perfectly, neither overamping into hysterics nor failing to capably demonstrate that Beverly is really, really scared.
Not for nothing: it’s a frightening concept, all the more so as more and more members of the waning crew start treating Crusher as though she’s gone stark raving bonkers, becoming increasingly resistant to her concerns until she might as well be a crazy person standing outside a nice restaurant shouting at the diners. And the episode is nicely exemplary of what Star Trek does really well, in that it presents a problem for our heroine to solve, and then lets her use her brain to solve it. (Paging J.J. Abrams: no fistfights, no phasers; just a clever woman on her own, keeping her fear at bay to logically work through the problem.)
We’re thus treated to one of the all-time great leaps of logic, when Beverly pronounces “If there’s nothing wrong with me, maybe there’s something wrong with the universe!,” finally deducing that, as improbable as it may seem, everything but her is symptomatic of the overarching problem. I love it, and I love that she’s right, and I love how a line of thinking that would be mad hubris in any other scenario is, here, a world-flipping super-concept par excellence. And yes, when I’m just about at the end of my rope on any given problem, I am more often than not whispering the same solution to myself, as unlikely a solution as it may always be. It never hurts to think outside the box, or the universe itself.
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 Four is in stores now.