“LaForge remained below…!”
I’m writing this on November 25th, two days after the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, so it’s perhaps inevitable that the Doctor Who parallels that passed by completely unnoticed when I saw “A Matter of Perspective” back in ’91 now ring clear as a cloister bell. Not that “Perspective” is much of a gloss on Who beyond its basic premise – a goofy time travelling professor in a goofy time travelling pod, visiting the Enterprise – but hey, if the Eighth Doctor were going to be American back when they rebooted in ’96, Matt Frewer would have had my vote.
“Perspective” is another one of the rare instances in which Rick Berman sits down at the typerwriter to knock out a script. It’s nowhere near as solid as his previous effort, “Brothers,” but still fairly sharp. Here we have Frewer as Professor Berlinghof Rasmussen (one of those Star Trek names that has been resolutely stuck in my head since the first time I heard it), who shows up on the ship in an apparent counter-argument to one of the current theories on how we know that time travel is impossible: wouldn’t there be visitors from the future, if it were ever going to be invented?
The episode doesn’t hang together in the final analysis, unfortunately. First of all there’s the matter of the Penthara mission itself, which we are meant to believe is significant enough to have drawn a future historian to observe it, instead of any of the Enterprise missions that came before. But the Penthara mission seems, at every turn, like a thoroughly run-of-the-mill adventure for the Enterprise. (They faced a similar problem back in “Deja Q,” and for historical significance, at least that one had Q!) It is eventually revealed that Rasmussen is a con artist from the 22nd Century who is in the 24th to cherry-pick some devices he can bring back and “invent;” but this never proceeds to explain how he knows so much about the Enterprise, her crew, and the mission itself. Circular logic strangles this episode like a noose.
The whole thing ultimately seems to be about driving us towards that scene, where Picard and Rasmussen debate what would become the Temporal Prime Directive, after Picard asks the time traveler to reveal the outcome of the Penthara mission so that Picard can make the right decision. Patrick Stewart is given many fine elocution points in the scene to wrap his Shakespearean lips around, and Frewer expertly skews his logic with rhetorical nonchalance. It’s a good scene, but Rasmussen’s behaviour doesn’t credibly hang together at all once you know the outcome of the story – which is ironic, under the circumstances.
Three Enterprises out of five.
Blogging The Next Generation runs every Tuesday as I work my way through the episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation on blu-ray. Season Five is in stores now.