“Indeed, you have found him, Captain Picard!”
Ah, this whole thing. Yes, it was a really big deal that someone as central to the original Star Trek franchise as Leonard Nimoy / Spock was finally going to bridge the gap from TOS to TNG; and yes, as an (ultimately, entirely trivial) teaser for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which was due to be released to celebrate Star Trek’s 25th anniversary just a month later, “Unification” was kinda candylicious. But as an actual episode of this series, “Unification” is bland and overcooked, not earning its two-part running time and scarcely having enough fun with bringing Spock and Picard together (and underground on Romulus, to boot!). In terms of the bridge between Star Trek and The Next Generation, it worked a lot better in the other direction: Worf and the other Next Gen references in Star Trek VI were way more fun.
In terms of franchise history-making, “Unification I” also bears the unfortunate responsibility of carrying the pre-episode card commemorating the death of Gene Roddenberry, who passed away just a month or so after Star Trek’s 25th anniversary, and two weeks before this episode aired. I was probably as into Star Trek as I ever was in September-December of 1991, so it was a weirdly heady experience to mark the passing of the franchise’s creator right in the middle of the enormous anniversary celebrations. 1991 serves as a hinge point between two kinds of Star Trek, and as such, “Unification” is a weirdly appropriate marker – in all the best and worst ways.
Of the two episodes, “Unification I” is the deeply shitty one. There simply isn’t enough plot here for 42 minutes; arguably, in any regular episode of this show, there wouldn’t be enough plot here for 12. We dive into the minutiae of Picard’s mission to Romulus because the episode doesn’t have anything better to do: there’s stuff with the Klingons, stuff with the Zakdorns, ephemera about Picard’s plastic surgery, and a MacGuffin about space debris. There’s even a scene about Picard and Data’s sleeping arrangements aboard the Klingon ship. It is profoundly uninteresting, and represents a kind of… well, beige storytelling that would overtake most of Star Trek from here to the end of Star Trek: Enterprise. (Deep Space Nine, for the most part, is the exception.) Star Trek became increasingly lazy about the mechanics of episodes like this: the procedural elements around plot, storytelling, and suspense. There’s no sharpness or colour to any of it. Most of “Unification I” is like watching (beige) paint dry.
The episode’s wisest conceit is Picard’s connection to Spock through Sarek. The notion of the mind meld having left a permanent emotional connection between Picard and Sarek is a nice addition to the mind meld mythology, and sets up the episode’s best scene, as Picard visits the dying ambassador to talk to him about Spock. Mark Lenard, who passed away a few years after this, cranks it out of the park as the Alzheimer’s-addled Vulcan, a howling windstorm of anger, frustration, and regret writ large.
Trivia note: the wonderful Stephen Root is in the episode, playing the Klingon captain. You’d never be able to tell, of course, because this episode sucks.
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.