“Tell them of us, my darling.”
Here’s another canonized episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation about which I am highly conflicted. Even now, having watched the episode again for the first time in ten years or more, I can’t quite figure out where to land on it. It’s unarguably well-made and is as unique a story as Next Gen ever told, but it also feels dauntingly incomplete and underscaled for the scope of its idea. Which translates to: I don’t like it as much as everyone else seems to.
Let’s begin at the end, with what I would think would be the insanity-inducing moment when Picard wakes up from his communion with the Kataanian mind-beam. Just like I don’t accept hundred-year-old vampires acting like twentysomethings in love, I find it very difficult to conceptualize how Picard would be able to return to normal after this episode. Either his mental experience on Kataan – a multiple-decades, fully-realized down to the nanosecond, hallucination – would have to have disappeared like a dream upon waking, or the man who stands up from the floor of the bridge at the end of “The Inner Light” would be a completely different person from the man who fell down at the beginning. How much does one’s personality change in fifty years? And how could one, in a matter of minutes, adjust to the fact all of those fifty years, and one’s beloved wife and family (for I truly believe that Picard loved them completely), were in fact millennium-dead projections from a space probe?
On the intentions of that space probe, “The Inner Light” is essentially a clever reworking of the last years of the planet Krypton, where the scientists of the planet Kataan send memories into the cosmos rather than a baby. Older now than I was when I first saw it, and living in a world quite literally disintegrating from a planet-scale overcooking that we have ourselves engineered in our stupidity, the environmental cataclysm that slowly, subtly destroys Kataan over the course of the episode hit me a lot harder this time than it ever has before. This is clever writing: rather than dealing with an apocalypse-of-the-week (as has been the Enterprise’s mission in a disturbingly large number of B-plots this season), “The Inner Light” correctly intuits that worlds end over centuries, not minutes. The slow accretion of evidence that Kataan’s sun is dying, and the manner in which director Peter Lauritson and cinematographer Marvin V. Rush alter the visual palette of the Kataan scenes by modulating the colour temperature of the sunlight, is quite striking.
Regarding Picard and love, though: this is where the episode becomes very interesting, and equally (frustratingly) hard to get a handle on. At some point, Picard must, I assume, make the mental decision to accept his own presence on Kataan, and leave the Enterprise behind. By dint of who we know Picard to be, that decision is thunderous. It seems to me less of a pragmatic “well, this is the way things are” decision than an instance of the captain quietly opening his heart to that which he really wants, and has therefore probably wanted all along: a home and a family. (His first order of business upon making this choice: impregnate Eline.)
This is a lovely beat to mentally explore for the character, but unfortunately, exploring it mentally is pretty much all I can do, because it’s here that the episodic nature of “The Inner Light” starts working against it. “The Inner Light” is entirely about vast swaths of time passing, and the total survey of a life, even if that life is (in this case) a hallucination. Again, being older now than I was when I first saw it – more in the “middle” of Picard’s story, and therefore viscerally aware of the approach of the “end” – some of the beats of Picard’s passing Kataanian life drilled down deeper into me than they have before. But because “The Inner Light” must still only be 42 minutes long, the episode format begins to work against the content; the scenes feel like sketches only, impressive enough within their limits, but lacking depth and gravity.
I can’t sort out any other way it could have been done, but it makes “The Inner Light” feel slight to me, in spite of its ambitions. Nonetheless, I like it a lot more than I used to.
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.