“I don’t know who that woman was, but she was definitely not his mother.”
This flatly ridiculous episode casts Deanna in a bizarre reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which Deanna herself is the picture. (In case you miss any of the obviousness, the alien race that delivers Ambassador Alcar to the Enterprise is called the Dorians.) “Man of the People” is proof of two things: one, Deanna really, really shouldn’t ever date; and two, perhaps directly related to one, the Next Gen writing staff really can’t write for Deanna.
They seemed to be getting somewhere in season 2 and 3 with a few good Troi episodes and subplots, but any progress on that front has long since deteriorated, and we get episodes like this, where yet another skeezy-ass male alien (sometimes called a “malien”) telepath comes aboard the ship, and a wholly unchemical romance springs up between he and Troi. There’s no actual romance in this one, admittedly – lust seems to be among the “negative” emotions that Alcar telepathically shunts to his “receptacle” women – but there are plenty of creepy, sexual assault-ish undertones nonetheless. (Like, for example, the fact that Alcar refers to his women as “receptacles.”)
So Deanna goes emotionally bonkers, which manifests by turning her into, well, a cougar. When she can’t bed Alcar, she grabs the nearest po-faced ensign, and later takes a swipe at Will that literally leaves him with claw marks across his face. All of which is apparently viewed as business as usual aboard the Enterprise until it’s too late to do anything about it. (Rewardingly, only Beverly cottons to any potential problem with Ambassador Alcar at first; even Data’s only reaction to the early scenes is along the lines of “Wow, Deanna sure dresses slutty now.”)
Plus, Marina Sirtis gets the hyper-aging prosthetic makeup treatment previously afforded Pulaski, Picard, and Data; or all those folks on the Original Series in “The Deadly Years,” which is where I always subconsciously believe the hyper-aging trope, itself, originated – not just for Star Trek, but for all television everywhere.
It’s all very alarming on a number of levels, not least of which is the fact that the show doesn’t normally get to ideas this idiotic until much later in the season, when the proverbial well has run dry. This is the third episode of the year.
One Enterprise 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 Six is finally in stores.