“I’m alive… what the hell happened?!”
A disaster movie set aboard the Enterprise, wheee! Of all the latter-day attempts to revive the ‘70s disaster story structure (groups of unrelated individuals coping in parallel circumstances to an unexpected crisis), “Disaster” knocks the pants off Independence Day, Volcano, or Poseidon. (And Sharknado, obvies.)
And “Disaster” has so. much. fun with its premises. It sticks a crowning Keiko O’Brien in Ten Forward with gynecologically-averse Worf; Riker capering around the Jefferies tubes with Data’s head; a squeamish Picard in a turbolift full of whiz kids; and best of all, Counselor Troi, Chief O’Brien and the new (and highly pissed off) Ensign Ro in command on the bridge – with Troi, of course, as the ranking officer. The episode isn’t trying for anything revolutionary, but rather just allows for the fun of sticking the cast in unusual situations and letting their natural chemistry play. (Beverly and Geordi get locked up in a cargo bay on fire in the least interesting storyline in the episode, but because McFadden and Burton have such an easy charm with one another, it’s still highly watchable.)
The bridge scenes are the first dose of Counselor Troi becoming interested in advancing her skills at command, which eventually leads her to doff the eggplant jumpsuit and start behaving like a high-ranking Starfleet officer. For this I assume we can thank Jeri Taylor, who was supervising the writing staff at this time, and would go on to co-create Captain Janeway a couple of years later. The episode also serves a great showpiece for Ensign Ro in her second appearance, actually getting a cackle of delight from me when the lanky ensign pulls her way out of the broken turbolift. The script pushes the angry Bajoran into conflict with the normally demure Counselor about the risks of hanging onto the ship’s drive section when the antimatter pods may dump at any moment. (Troi actually has to ask Ro what this means – to which Ro replies, with about as much scorn as is humanly possible, “Which means the ship will explode.”)
Picard, meanwhile, gets walled up in a turbolift with three kids, and it’s here that we find another weakness of the series’ presentation on blu-ray, which comes via young Max Supera’s performance. In high-definition, it becomes painfully clear that Supera couldn’t make it through a single line without looking at the camera or his offscreen mother at least twice; this probably passed muster at video resolution but jumps out like crazy here, and one wonders how many z-grade child performances in the ‘80s were saved by the relatively low detail allowed by TVs at the time. And speaking of detail: the blu-ray makes a rather obscene affair of my otherwise favourite character among the kids, 11-year-old Marissa, who becomes Picard’s de facto “first officer” in the turbolift: Marissa is dressed in a head-to-toe pink jumpsuit which, through an unfortunate bit of hemming, has a fold in the crotch that looks exactly like, well, a girl’s crotch. Probably never showed up on my television set in 1991, but yikes, looks super creepy now.
And finally, playing to the cheap seats, we have the astonishingly funny sequence of Worf delivering baby Molly O’Brien – Molly Worf O’Brien, actually, if memory serves. Both Rosalind Chao and Michael Dorn are sublime throughout the delivery sequence, and it’s too bad that neither Next Gen nor DS9 ever saw fit to pair them up again.
Four 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.