“It has occurred. It will occur.”
We’ve arrived at the point in modern Trek where a year-end cliffhanger episode is a given, rather than a storytelling flourish arrived at organically. “Time’s Arrow” should be perfectly wired for me – it’s Next Gen’s Back to the Future III episode – but like most of post-Season Four TNG, it’s lackluster and weak-willed, which I’ve described as “beige storytelling” over the course of this year. There’s less charisma and definition to the drama, and the beats play softly and without much impact. “Time’s Arrow” is perfectly serviceable as an idea for a story, but it’s not very exciting as an episode of a space adventure series.
And back to that issue of the rote cliffhanger: “Time’s Arrow” barely even qualifies as an episode, as far as I’m concerned. It’s got about enough story in it for the first act, maybe act and a half, of a standard five-act Next Generation script structure. Pretty much nothing happens here, except the very basic setup. We know that Data’s head gets found in a cave that dates back to 19th century San Francisco; and we see Data – and later, Picard and the gang – travel through time to arrive at that point. There are some aliens doing something nasty, and they have to be stopped. And that’s the sum total of the plot of this show. Nothing develops at all, besides putting all the pieces on the game board in a position where they might, in the next episode, actually do something.
About the only charms in “Time’s Arrow” are in its guest stars: Jerry Hardin is a terrific choice to play Mark Twain, and cuts into his lengthy monologue (of course it’s lengthy; every beat here is lengthy, because they have to pad out the episode to a 42-minute run time) with relish. We get to see Marc Alaimo play a human for the first and only time, and it’s nice to see that he’s as oily here as he is under any amount of Cardassian prosthetic makeup. And Whoopi Goldberg is, as always, a Cheshire cat delight as Guinan, who tinkers with her alcoholic potions while calmly informing Picard that the mystery of their origin story as a platonic couple is about to be cracked open.
My tour through Season Five of Star Trek: The Next Generation for Blogging TNG has been a real eye-opener. When these episodes first aired, I was at the absolute apex of my adoration for Star Trek, and I probably thought the season was fantastic because I thought anything with the words “star” and “trek” in the title were inherently fantastic. Going over the year again now has been a thoroughly depressing experience. It’s a really drab, unsuccessful year, pretty much top to bottom. Season Four, the best season Next Gen ever did, bagged an average of 3.8 Enterprises out of five per episode from me. Season Five falls a full point lower than its predecessor, at 2.8 out of 5.
I committed to this Blogging the Next Generation project a long while ago and I am, of course, going to finish it off. Unfortunately, it will have to wait – after cranking out the blu-ray sets tickety-boo for a couple of years, Paramount has inexplicably lagged in releasing the last two seasons. I’ll pick things back up this summer, with Season Six.
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.