“I have a few things to do between now and then.”
Let’s settle one thing up front: everybody understands that the Captain is in love with Beverly Crusher. This was revealed at the beginning of Season 1, paid off at the end of Season 7; and in the meantime, we waited. That makes episodes like “Lessons” galling on general principle, and this one slightly more so because one can certainly imagine that there was a point in its creative life cycle where it was going to be a Picard/Beverly episode. It’s the workplace romance show, where the Captain learns how difficult it is to date someone from the office – and in this case, someone under his command. It could just as easily have been Beverly.
Adding insult to injury, Nella Daren is another stubborn, sassy, redheaded Commander in a slim blue uniform. The sequence where she chatters blithely with Dr. Crusher about her new relationship with the Captain, while Beverly looks on in pain and ignominy, is difficult to watch largely because it’s hard to tell the two women apart with one’s glasses off. Even Picard seems to know something’s off-kilter about what he’s doing, and he tiptoes around the issue with Beverly at one of their breakfasts together, saying that he got Commander Daren’s herbal tea blend by stumbling across it in the replicator, rather from the new female crewmember that he has a crush on.
These qualms aside, the first twenty minutes or so of “Lessons” are really marvelous. The episode makes itself distinct, stylistically and formally, by leaning on wordless glances – and, more importantly, performed music – to build the emotional connection between Picard and Daren, which promptly explodes in one of Star Trek: The Next Generation’s few romantic highlights as the two officers play a duet of Picard’s Kataanian music, in a Jefferies tube which forms a perfect echo chamber at the heart of the ship. It’s a lovely collision of several wonderful ideas, and as lush and florid an image set as this (generally speaking, quite dry) series has attempted, at least since “The Host.” The episode’s emotional throughline, connecting Picard’s still-painful memories of life on Kataan (from “The Inner Light”) to his willingness to open up emotionally with Daren, by way of their shared performance of music, is quite deft.
Of course, there’s nowhere to go after that point, besides to spend an act or two spitballing all the ways dating a subordinate is generally considered a bad idea. (For one thing: she doesn’t get along with Riker.) The crisis in the fifth act – in which Daren’s stellar cartography team (a group we’ve never seen before, and never will again) are sent to a fiery planet, nearly to their doom – feels manufactured and slight, and as much as we care about Picard and about his happiness, it’s hard to hang too many emotional stakes on the resolution of this single-episode romance. Besides, it should have been Beverly.
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 in stores. Season Seven will conclude the blog in early 2015 – you can pre-order the final season now.