I’m glad for rare opportunities like these: the episodes I don’t really remember. It took me a while to suss out that “Conundrum” was the one where Riker sleeps with Ensign Ro, and then backtrack that to its status as Star Trek: The Next Generation’s amnesia story – so maybe I could remember it, but I just couldn’t remember that I could remember it? Anyway, the amnesia show is a trope which I suppose most science fiction/fantasy series attempt at least once. (Buffy did it better, in “Tabula Rasa.”) “Conundrum” is pretty solid, and plays like a sort of companion piece to last season’s “Clues,” which also dealt with nefarious memory-wiping in relation to obscure alien species. This time, when the entire crew of the Enterprise gets their personal histories removed by a green laser beam, the odd detail is the new fellow on the bridge: the unassuming command officer named Kieran MacDuff.
The plot doesn’t really matter. (And really, the sorts of things MacDuff would have to have done to achieve this scenario – not just selectively removing memory from every species on the Enterprise including Data, but custom-altering the computer and embedding himself in the Enterprise community, all with a green laser beam – strain credulity. It also bugs me that the Lysian Central Command is just the god of the Edo from “Justice,” rendered opaque.)
The fun of “Conundrum” is simply in watching our heroes reassert their core personalities without the help of any actual knowledge of who they are. So, for example, Worf just takes over the bridge and starts firing phaser potshots into deep space – but even there, Picard’s true skill as a leader remains in evidence. “It seems to me that determining leadership is not crucial right now,” he says, effortlessly proving that a real leader doesn’t need his status validated by arbitrary indicators of authority. He just leads.
Meanwhile, Ro and Riker bump uglies, suggesting that underneath their normal loggerheads, there lies a deep reservoir of sexual tension. More importantly, if a bit tragically, “Conundrum” suggests that Ro – leavened of the guilt and social anxiety that causes her to isolate herself among the Enterprise crew under normal circumstances – has a healthy sex drive, a dynamic personality, and an easy confidence that might let her live a perfectly wonderful adult life if she weren’t so busy being defensively pissed off all the time. I appreciate the fact that “Conundrum” treats their liaison less as a notch on Riker’s very notchy bedpost than as a notch on hers, which continues through the coda, where even with their memories restored, Ro retains her power in the sexual dynamic with Will, while he cowers in embarrassment at his actions.
And of course, the power of Imzadi love is the only thing that seems to completely overrule the Sutteran memory wipe, as Deanna slowly figures out that she and Riker are in fact WILL+DEANNA4EVER. That’s cheesy and somewhat demeaning to the character. What isn’t demeaning to Deanna, however, is how “Conundrum” suggests that in her way, she’s the soul of the Enterprise. Reviewing the ship’s armaments, Worf and the others come to the determination that the Enterprise is a battleship, which fits in with MacDuff’s cover story; but the one element that just doesn’t fit is the existence of Deanna Troi, ship’s counselor. Deanna being Deanna, she immediately begins to argue (from instinct) against the notion of the Enterprise as a warship, or its mission as a military one. This leads to the episode’s quiet emotional climax, when (after a whole episode of characters speculating on who they might be in real life), Captain Picard makes the episode’s first declarative statement: “I do not fire on defenceless people.” Nature wins over nurture once again.
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.